By Hannah Stone
On March 24th an explosion of a natural gas pipeline at the R.M. Palmer Candy Factory killed 7 workers and injured 10 more. At least half an hour before the explosion the workers had raised complaints about the smell of gas; instead of evacuating the building to assure the safety of the workers the capitalists continued production as usual, resulting in the deaths and injuries.
A woman worker caught fire and fell into a vat of chocolate before climbing out on her own as the vat began to fill with water. Having escaped the vat, the worker found herself chest deep in water. With broken bones and hypothermia she was finally rescued and remains hospitalized at the time of this writing. This ordeal would not have taken place if her complaints about the unsafe conditions had been heeded.
In their public statement, R.M. Palmer claims to have been “devastated by the tragic events,” going so far as to say that they have “lost friends and colleagues,” and of course gave their “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families. Thoughts and prayers do not prevent explosions, proper safety precautions and better working conditions do. R.M. Palmer is a smaller-scale operation that finds itself struggling to compete against the large monopolies that dominate the industry. In times of economic crisis the smaller capitalists must cut every corner in order to maximize the profits gained from exploitation. Such factories often pay less, hire undocumented workers and avoid updates to infrastructure, compounding already unsafe working conditions. They would rather risk the lives of workers than slow down production, seeing working people as expendable.
The current economic crisis is characterized by the overproduction of the means of production, that is to say, the capitalists have more machines than workers to run them in most cases. Workers they do have are expected to produce more than normal to keep up with the falling rate of profit. Any machine which goes out of use, even temporarily, spells the loss of profit. What is produced is then subject to inflation, meaning that if wages go up in a formal attempt to get more workers, the worth of those wages goes down as the cost of necessary goods goes up. Large monopolies can afford to take losses during such crises and buy out smaller competitors. This is the process in which great wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands and great misery is forced upon the masses of working people.
As the crisis of imperialism deepens more small capitalists will impose more dangerous conditions on workers, and the big monopolies will grab the spoils. In every case it is the working men and women that lose and suffer. The West Reading Candy explosion is not a tragic accident, it is a fact of capitalism, an example of what will continue taking place more frequently until the workers are organized on a mass scale to fight for their daily demands, generate their own Party, the Communist Party of the USA, which must lead the fight for the conquest of political power for the working class. For this, workers must rely on revolutionary theory and practical activity, carrying out a protracted fight. They must not be taken in by “thoughts and prayers.”
