Editor’s Note: The following remarks were delivered by ROC DSA’s Internal Organizer Skye, at the March to End Fossil Fuels, held Friday, September 27 and organized by Metro Justice and other ROC DSA allies.
Poverty. Global warming. The ongoing genocide in Palestine. These are just some of the threats of our time, and to win against them we must recognize they are all the same struggle: The struggle against capitalism. It is the capitalist’s endless quest for profit that keeps workers deciding between whether to buy groceries or to pay their ever increasing rent. It is the war profiteers who benefit when they sell a bomb that is used to wipe out a Palestinian family. It is the owner class putting their own interests over those of the working class that is killing our planet! Let’s tackle these one by one.
Every megayacht and private jet polluting our atmosphere represents the unpaid wages of the workers who put in the labor that allowed the capitalist to purchase their fancy toys in the first place. Wages that could have provided their family financial stability, put food on the table, bought a house, put a kid through college. It is the workers who do the work, it is the workers who should reap the reward!
Locally, there’s a company you might have heard of, RG&E. They extract 100 million dollars in profit from their rate payers Every. Single. Year. That $100 million in profit goes to their shareholders, including those of their parent company Iberdrola, which isn’t even based here! It’s all the way in Spain!
Imagine what we could do with that money if we, the ratepayers, owned RG&E: We could lower rates, keep more local union jobs, and build more publicly owned renewable energy. A future that is not dominated by the insatiable profit motive means a future that is bright, clean, and democratic.
Lastly, how does Palestine fit into all this? Since October 7th, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, with US supplied bombs. Bombs you and I paid for. The official count is close to 40,000 dead, but we all know it’s higher than that, with uncounted bodies trapped under the rubble throughout occupied Palestine.
It is in the best interests of the shareholders of Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, and right here in Rochester—L3HARRIS—to continue the genocide and keep the sale of weaponry flowing.
This genocide is directly impacting the climate. The climate impact of the first 60 days after October 7th was equivalent to burning 150,000 tons of coal; almost half of this from US cargo aircraft flying weaponry and equipment from the US to Israel. That was just the first 60 days—we’re on day 356. To save lives and the planet, this genocide must end.
These struggles stem from the same cause: capitalism, and that demands a united response. A movement bound together in common cause, a movement united in solidarity, a working class movement to advance the cause of socialism!