The Worker, Vol. 40, Number 6

Contents: 

I. A Chronology of Resistance: Uniting the Currents of Struggle Against the Root Cause in the Imperialist System

II. The "Commonwealth" Fiction: Legislation Super Exploitation and Forced Migration 

III. 7% at the Opening Bell: The Real Time Speculation on the Tranche 3 Missile Contract​​

The spontaneous mass struggles erupting across Puerto Rico today are not isolated, local disputes over administrative mismanagement as we so often hear from the official opposition. They are explosive fronts in a continuous, increasingly cohesive and unified struggle against U.S. military-colonial occupation and repression.

The monopoly-controlled media constantly attempts to fragment our struggles to keep the working class disorganized. Yet, by casting our eyes back along the chain of events we can arrive at a true picture of our own movement. This chronology reveals the systemic nature of our oppression and demonstrates that only a conscious political movement can lead us forward.

June 2026: The Fight Against Austerity and Blackouts - Presently, the masses are battling the neo-colonial austerity dictated by the U.S. Congress’s Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). Using its sweeping authority, the FOMB forced the privatization of the island's public utility operations in June 2021, handing monopolistic control over to LUMA Energy—a for-profit consortium jointly owned by Houston-based Quanta Services and Canadian utility ATCO—without requiring them to invest their own capital.

Despite a lucrative 15-year contract, this corporate management has resulted in steep rate hikes and chronic infrastructure failures. This systemic robbery culminated in a catastrophic blackout in mid-June 2026, when a failed transformer collapsed the power supply for hundreds of thousands of residents during a severe heatwave.

As this privatized grid failure cascaded into a complete collapse of essential public services, including parallel water outages and widespread civil unrest, the state was forced to deploy the National Guard to manage the fallout. Concurrently, the United Auto Workers union and student groups continue to mobilize outside the Capitolio to combat a corporate-backed minimum wage freeze.

April & May 2026: The National Strikes - This summer’s resistance is a direct continuation of the May 1st national strike, where labor unions and students paralyzed San Juan’s financial district to demand the absolute expulsion of the federal oversight board. This mass action followed sweeping strikes across all 11 University of Puerto Rico campuses, wherein students occupied buildings to fight the budget freezes threatening public education.

April 2026: Vieques Ferry Blockades - Simultaneously, protesters blockaded ferry terminals in Vieques to resist illegal fare hikes and a disastrous privatized transit system. Residents correctly identified this systemic neglect as "disaster colonialism," directly linking their daily economic hardships to the toxic waste legacy of U.S. military occupation.

September 2025: Rejecting the Imperialist Trampoline - When the Pentagon rapidly deployed F-35 stealth fighters to the island to prepare for military aggression against Cuba and Venezuela, anti-war coalitions forcefully mobilized at the Muñiz Air Base. Activists denounced the military's ongoing use of their homeland as a "trampoline" for foreign aggression, actively rejecting the archipelago's subjugation as a military-colonial outpost.

April 2025 & September 2022: Fighting Displacement and State Repression - In April 2025, youth activists occupied a Manhattan hotel lobby to combat the $2 billion "Esencia" mega-resort planned for Cabo Rojo, placing barriers in the way of the displacement of the local community. 75¢ Earlier, in September 2022, a Cuba Solidarity Committee protested outside the San Juan Federal Building, exposing the Federal Bureau of Investigation as an instrument of colonialism weaponizing colonial legalisms to criminalize international solidarity.

June 2021 & July 2022: The Roots of the Energy Struggle - The current energy crisis was actively fought from the moment of privatization in June 2021, when unions established encampments at plant gates. By July 2022, hundreds marched on the governor's mansion, explicitly denouncing the privatization as an act of American imperialism.

Our tasks are clear: From fighting the Federal Bureau of Investigation and privatized energy monopolies to blockading military bases, our daily battles are interconnected. We must elevate our spontaneous outrage into a conscious, unified movement to secure our immediate democratic demands: the expulsion of the federal oversight board, an end to forced austerity, the withdrawal of the U.S. military, and the genuine right to national self-determination. Winning these vital, immediate democratic battles and consolidating our independent working class organizations is the absolutely necessary foundation for our ultimate, historic mission—the complete overthrow of the capitalist-imperialist system itself.

The corporate push to pass House Bill 1115 (PC 1115)—a legislative measure designed to dismantle Puerto Rico's independent Minimum Wage Evaluation Commission and effectively freeze workers' wages— cannot be separated from Puerto Rico's specific structural status as a colony of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. deliberately utilizes this colonial architecture to guarantee the super-exploitation of the island.

1. The "Commonwealth" Legal Fiction and Subservient Governance To obscure its colonial grip, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 600 in 1952, which created the title of a "Commonwealth" for Puerto Rico. However, this is a legal fiction that merely continues the island's colonial status; under this law, the U.S. Congress retains "absolute and unlimited power to determine everything" regarding Puerto Rico, including the right to veto any local laws approved by Puerto Rican institutions. Because the local Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly—to which HB 1115 grants sole authority over the minimum wage— is ultimately a subservient extension of U.S. colonial rule, transferring wage-setting power to this body ensures that wage policies will remain permanently aligned with the strategic and economic demands of U.S. imperialism rather than the needs of the Puerto Rican people.

2. Enforcing a Structural Zone of Super-Exploitation. Historically, U.S. imperialism invaded and occupied Puerto Rico in 1898 to secure a strategic military base for launching attacks throughout the Caribbean and Central America, and to plunder the island's resources and labor. To facilitate this plunder, the island has been structured as a tax-free haven; for example, through mechanisms like Law 936, U.S. multinational corporations are exempted from paying income taxes. Consequently, foreign monopolies such as pharmaceutical and manufacturing giants can extract profits ten times greater than they could on the U.S. mainland through the extreme super-exploitation of Puerto Rican workers. Freezing the minimum wage is structurally necessary for these foreign monopolies; keeping the price of labor artificially low is the primary magnet for U.S. capital penetration and the extraction of windfall super-profits.

3. Economic Strangulation as a Mechanism for Depopulation. Labor activists warn that a wage freeze will accelerate the mass migration of young professionals off the island, which exposes a dark structural reality of U.S. colonialism. The U.S. government has historically engaged in repression campaigns explicitly designed to "de-nationalize and depopulate Puerto Rico" in order to eliminate the island's independence movement. For example, the infamous "2020 Plan" sought to drastically reduce the island's population from 4 million down to 1.5 million by the year 2020. This depopulation effort also included a massive, U.S. funded sterilization campaign wherein 39% of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized by 1981—the highest rate in the world at the time. By enforcing a frozen, unlivable minimum wage today, the colonial and corporate structure utilizes economic strangulation as a modern, "soft" mechanism for displacement. Forcing the youth and professionals to migrate to the mainland systematically weakens the island's internal capacity to resist, thereby neutralizing the movement for national independence while securing the territory for permanent U.S. military and corporate domination.

The following article is reprinted from the June 2 issue of the Anti-Imperialist Forum anti-imperialist.org

Listen to the opening bell of the stock exchange, and you will hear the heartbeat of the modern war machine. Recenetly, shares of aerospace corporation Rocket Lab surged over 7 percent in premarket trading after clearing a government technical review. The review granted permission under the Space Development Agency's (SDA) Tracking Layer Tranche 3 program to build a space-based missile defense satellite constellation.

This speculative event exposes the parasitic essence of the capitalist-imperialist system. The recent $816 million SDA contract awarded to Rocket Lab represents a new technological outer shell of U.S. military expansion, guided by the pre-emptive doctrine of ensuring the Pentagon can launch first strikes against any missile which might be launched against U.S. assets, anytime, anywhere and any place. The moment the contract was secured, big monopoly speculators, driven by guaranteed public money, cheered for the stock to hit $200 a share, betting entirely on momentum and new contracts.

We must strip away the demagogy about "national defense." This overnight surge reveals that the machinery of mass destruction is now the primary object of speculation. The economic essence is the instantaneous transfer of wealth from the public treasury into private hands. Investors explicitly flock to these governmentbacked military contracts to shield their portfolios from commercial risks, treating the U.S. instigation of global war as a lucrative speculative bubble.

The system capitalizes on war at the speed of the stock ticker. While the working class is forced to subsidize its own destruction through taxes, speculators instantly price in the militarization of space. To stop the drive toward war, we must struggle for the complete overthrow of the system that gambles on human extermination for a 7 percent premarket payoff.