Burned by bosses’ gas scam

Cooking is a daily anxiety,” Karo told me. She was referring to M-Gas, a pre-paid cooking gas service operated by Safaricom — Kenya’s dominant telecommunications and digital payments company. Like most residents of Kibera, the largest informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi, Karo had previously relied on full gas cylinders and buckets of charcoal. Then Safaricom launched an aggressive marketing campaign in the area, advertising M-Gas as “affordable” — “pay as little as one shilling” — rather than purchasing a full cylinder upfront, which typically costs around 1,000 shillings.

Karo assumed M-Gas worked like Safaricom’s Lipa Mdogo Mdogo (“pay little by little”) scheme, a consumer loan program she already knew well. Her smartphone had been financed through it: 50 shillings a day for two years, ultimately costing her the equivalent of two phones had she paid in cash. When she once fell behind on payments, her phone was remotely locked. “It was a piece of iron,” she said. “So I thought I’d better finish the loan.”

With M-Gas, she quickly discovered the logic was the same — but the stakes were higher. A 50-shilling micropayment only covered enough gas for a single meal. A device attached to the cylinder would emit a beep when she was running low, a small alarm that had come to fill her with dread. “Sometimes I can’t even find 20 shillings in the house. My kids have to eat half-cooked meals.” Eventually, her oldest son ran the numbers: a full cylinder’s worth of M-Gas cost them 1,600 shillings — far more than a conventional cylinder. Karo went back to charcoal.

Two weeks later, she received a call from M-Gas. They told her they would repossess the cylinder and stove if she stopped using the service. The devices installed in her kitchen had been monitoring her cooking habits all along.

Karo’s situation is not an isolated one. The financialization of daily life — a process that accelerated across Western economies from the 1970s onward — has amounted to what Marxist theorists describe as the real subsumption of labor to finance capital: workers increasingly depend on mortgages, credit, and loans to meet basic needs, while banks and financial institutions steadily siphon income through rent and interest. What was once considered technically inapplicable to Africa’s poor — given that most lack a regular paycheck — is now being carried out anyway, adapted to extract value from even the most precarious livelihoods.

Kenya illustrates this dynamic sharply. Over 83 percent of the active workforce operates in the informal sector, and roughly 67 percent of young people between 18 and 34 are unemployed. This is the product of a particular trajectory of dispossession: as rural land was enclosed for capital accumulation, masses of workers left the countryside — only to find that urban industry had no place for them either. Stripped from the land but not absorbed into manufacturing, they became a surplus population, rendered structurally redundant by industrial capital yet increasingly legible as a market for financial capital. This is precisely why a communist revolution — one that strips the capitalist class of power and places the working class in control of the economy — is so critical in Africa and elsewhere.

It is in this context that Kenya’s celebrated identity as Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” takes on a more troubling character. Policymakers across the continent have enthusiastically embraced emerging technologies as engines of development and inclusion. But in practice, it is predatory financial technology — fintech — that has prospered most. Digital platforms and surveillance tools are deployed not to lift people out of poverty, but to manage and monetize it. The Lipa Mdogo Mdogo scheme is a case in point: unsecured loans extended to people who cannot offer wage collateral, in exchange for sweeping digital surveillance of their behavior and finances.

According to Oxfam Kenya’s 2025/2026 reports, 46 percent of Kenyans live in extreme poverty. Within that figure, consumer loans have become a routine mechanism for affording basic necessities — food, communication, cooking fuel — purchased in small, fragmented increments that ultimately cost far more in aggregate. The question this raises is not simply one of exploitative pricing, but of structural logic: how do laborers discarded as surplus by industrial capital become a profitable source of accumulation for financial capital? The answer, visible in Karo’s kitchen and millions like it, is through the digitization of debt — turning everyday survival into a metered, monitored, and monetized transaction. These schemes are making ordinary Kenyans poorer while concentrating wealth among a financial and political elite. Technological innovation, in this context, has not delivered inclusive prosperity — it has delivered a more efficient architecture of extraction. In Africa and elsewhere, the only solution to the rising poverty of the workers is communist revolution.
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Capitalism divides us

During our afterschool program, the students have many discussions. One student was discussing that her brother had just had a conversation during his program where another student was discussing how much racism she had encountered being Mexican and Chinese.

While she was discussing her experience, another student brought up how she was discriminated against for being a lesbian. However, this student was a white young woman. She was told her experience was different. 

A Progressive Labor Party member  brought up that racism causes half the profits business makes! It justifies paying one group of workers less than another. The white young woman would experience oppression for being a woman and for being gay.

The PLP member pointed out why it is important to not take an intersectional approach where each struggle is seen as an individual struggle, but to instead see all the struggles as related to capitalism. By focusing on the effects of an exploitative system, the young people can learn that the struggle against sexism and racism is the struggle against capitalism. Conversations like this sharpen our struggle and help us see that individualizing struggles into tidy intersections only helps the bosses to keep us divided.
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Why are you and your fellow workers miserable? Profits!

Wall Street Journal, 5/28–To understand why people are so miserable about the economy, look no further than Thursday’s report on gross domestic product. Not how much GDP grew, but how it was divvied up. Worker compensation—wages and benefits—grew 0.8% in the first quarter from the fourth, while domestic corporate profits jumped 2.7%. As a result, labor’s share of gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP) sank to 51%, the lowest since records began in 1947. Profits’ share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950…Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages are up 3% since the end of 2019 while profits are up 50%...

Oil supplies are crashing, but optimism is high among traders

Oilprice.com, 6/10–In yet another sign that the paper oil market may be too complacent about the magnitude of the supply disruption in the Middle East, traders have been boosting their short positions in oil futures for most of the past two months. The paper market plays on hopes, expectations, sentiments, and fears, and the sum of all these right now appears to be that the hedge fund and portfolio manager community is reluctant to bet on a summer of actual physical supply shortages. But the paper market may soon face the reality of crumbling global inventories, including in the United States, where stocks at Cushing, the delivery point for WTI Crude, are just a few weeks away from dropping to minimum operational levels…

Wars, wars, and more wars as imperialist powers fight for control

Peace Research Institute Oslo, 6/8– …eight interstate conflicts in 2025 – twice as many as the previous year and the highest number recorded since 1946…a staggering 245,000 people were killed in battle-related violence in 2025, making it the third deadliest year since 1989. The number of battle deaths increased from 188,000 in 2024. The sharp increase was driven primarily by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza and escalating violence in Sudan, including the siege and massacre of El-Fasher City. In total, 65 state-based conflicts were recorded across 35 countries in 2025 – also the highest number since records began in 1946. 

NYC Police Commissioner shows City Council who’s in charge — it’s not Mamdani

HellgateNYC, 6/1–Mamdani’s initial budget had held the NYPD’s headcount roughly flat. Tisch said Monday he’s actually hiring 580 new officers this year. And on Mamdani’s signature criminal justice reform initiative—the Office of Community Safety that he created earlier this year—Tisch basically said she hasn’t had any discussions about how the new office will affect the NYPD’s responsibilities—and that to her knowledge, it won’t. 

Iran seems stronger so far, coming out of war

New York Times, 6/13–The United States and Israel went to war in Iran seeking regime change. Nearly four months later, there has been regime change, but not the kind they wanted. The Islamic Republic 3.0, as some call it, is now less a theocracy and more a military junta dominated by the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Washington and Jerusalem also went to war to eradicate Iran’s nuclear program and end the threat it poses. So far, this conflict has only produced a wounded Iran more willing to take risks and more likely to persist in its goal of advancing its nuclear program…Iran is now led by “a younger, more brazen generation in power” …

Antiracists show up in force to counter anti-immigrant rioters

Al Jazeera, 6/13–Thousands of people in Northern Ireland have rallied against anti-immigrant violence provoked by a stabbing in the capital Belfast. Protesters on Saturday gathered outside Belfast City Hall with placards sporting slogans such as “Hate is the only threat to our streets” and “Belfast stands against racism.” An anti-racism rally was also held at Londonderry – widely known as Derry – city hall, reported the Belfast Telegraph…“Everybody’s here just to show that those people [anti-immigrant rioters] … causing all the problems aren’t speaking for us,”… Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn said on Thursday that the rioting had created a sense of fear with some being “intimidated” and “burned out of their houses by masked thugs on the basis of the colour of their skin”. 

The latest Ebola outbreak is the result of centuries of racist neglect and imperialist plunder of Africa. The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola is spreading like wildfire in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and has made its way into neighboring Uganda. This is the 17th outbreak of Ebola over the last 50 years! With no vaccine yet available for this new strain, the crisis exposes the deadly consequences of a capitalist system that treats the lives of the working class as disposable. 

The outbreak is unfolding amid intensifying imperialist competition for the DRC's gold, cobalt, and copper—all critical for electric vehicles, AI, and military technology. Over the last two decades, a rising imperialist China has gained control over an increasing share of these minerals amid reports of child labor, horrific working conditions, and wholesale evictions of residents from mining concessions (Africa Defense Forum, 10/23/25). 

Now a declining U.S. empire is scrambling to claw its way back. None of these capitalist bosses cares one bit about our class beyond how much profit can be squeezed from our labor. 

The old colonial powers’ racist contempt for Black workers persists today. One result is a complete neglect of healthcare infrastructure that’s needed to confront crises like Ebola. Capitalism has created a world where gold and cobalt can move from mines to markets, but lifesaving healthcare cannot reach the mineworkers. 

A system that puts profits over workers’ lives does not deserve to exist. We must organize to smash capitalism and all of its racist and sexist inequities. Join Progressive Labor Party and our commitment to fight for a communist future worldwide, a future organized not around profit, but around workers’ health and well being. 

A racist disgrace

Over 1,100 suspected Ebola cases and more than 250 deaths have already been reported in northeastern Congo, but the true scale of the outbreak is much larger. Though it wasn’t officially detected until mid-May, the virus has been spreading for up to three months (The Daily, 6/3). The Bundibugyo strain has a mortality rate of up to 50 percent (New York Times, 5/18). 

The outbreak’s epicenter lies roughly 50 miles north of the provincial capital of Bunia, a region made difficult to access by seasonal rains, muddy roads, and armed militias (NY Times, 5/18). But decades of exploitation and neglect left healthcare systems fragile long before this latest strain of the virus came on the scene.

The conditions facing patients and healthcare workers are a capitalist disgrace. Patients’ families are forced to provide food and water because hospitals cannot, yet they receive no equipment to protect them from infection. Bodies in treatment wards lie covered only by sheets, with relatives and other patients nearby. Health workers are courageously showing up for their patients without the most basic resources to do their jobs or keep themselves safe (The Daily, 6/3).

Money for mines, not healthcare

The Congo’s response has been crippled by decades of global neglect. There is little testing capacity, no rapid diagnostic tests, and next to no contact tracing. The response has also been hampered by workers’ justified distrust of government authorities. For years scientists warned that better tools were urgently needed to fight new Ebola strains. But private companies have little incentive to invest in low-profit diagnostics, vaccines, or treatments in the world's poorest countries (NY Times, 6/2). Capitalism delivers what it is designed for: profits for corporations and abandonment of Black workers.

Most cases to date are linked to Mongbwalu, a gold mining hub for labor migration. Billions of dollars are extracted from the Congo's mines, yet basic healthcare infrastructure remains woefully inadequate. What little response that does exist has been weakened by recent U.S. cuts to global health programs (NY Times, 5/18). The result is a preventable catastrophe for the working class.. 

U.S. bosses have blood on their hands

The Ebola crisis exposes a capitalist contradiction. Never has the world had more scientific knowledge or technological capacity, and yet our class remains vulnerable to mass sickness, suffering, and premature death. We have the abundant capability to map viruses, develop and distribute lifesaving tests, build hospitals, and train masses of healthcare workers. But capitalist science is driven by competition and profit, not workers’ needs. 

Before Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, the U.S. funded a bare minimum of frontline workers, disease surveillance, medical supply chains, and emergency response systems in Africa (Rescue, 5/19). Don’t get it twisted—these programs were never acts of generosity. They were part of an imperialist strategy to expand influence via programs like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization, both created during the Cold War to counter the Soviet Union and the old communist movement. 

Today, without a socialist state or an international working-class movement to pressure the U.S. capitalist bosses,  they are free to cut back on aid and reserve their resources for the wider wars to come.Trump took a chainsaw to global public health by slashing tens of billions. Last year, health experts warned that these cuts would “likely result in more than 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola…each year" (NY Times, 3/7/25) and lead to “14 million deaths” (NPR, 7/1/25). With cuts to USAID and other public health programs delaying detection and treatment of the spreading Ebola, workers in the Congo have paid with their lives  (NY Times, 5/20). At the same time, Trump has barred U.S. travelers testing positive from returning home for decent care and ordered them dumped in Kenya instead. Clearly, the health of miners in Mongbwalu, nurses in Uganda, and workers from the U.S. are all tied together. 

Communism is the cure

Profit and health are fundamentally opposed. Under communist leadership, workers have shown the power to organize health care around collective needs instead of competition. When China was led by communists in the 1960s,  mass public health campaigns trained “barefoot doctors” to serve workers in the countryside. For the first time, snail fever was eradicated in a county in Jiangxi province. That's what’s possible when millions of workers are mobilized under a communist outlook. 

That working-class potential still exists today. Capitalism digs its own grave by wrecking healthcare and creating crises it cannot solve. Diseases know no borders and neither should workers’ resistance. If capitalist-spawned Ebola is the disease, communist collectivity is the cure. Fight back!

What is Ebola?

Ebola is a viral disease spread through contaminated body fluids.  The new Bundibugyo strain is distinct from the outbreak that killed 11,000 people between 2014 and 2016. Early symptoms resemble malaria and thyroid disease, which can delay detection and treatment. What begins as fever and muscle pain can quickly escalate into uncontrolled bleeding and organ failure. Scientists are scrambling to find a vaccine,  but capitalism’s profit motive and disarray continues to hinder them.  

The month-long lockout of electric and natural gas utility workers at Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) ended April 28th. Where before, political struggle on the job was minimal, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) leaflets, CHALLENGES, and discussions were fairly strong on the picket line. NIPSCO workers saw the Party in action. It was multiracial, men and women. Contacts were made, tamales shared. People visited. After many years on the job, more people are connecting with communist ideas and the knowledge that the working class can run society for itself!

Workers need the Party

NIPSCO, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., provides natural gas and electricity across six states including Indiana. When they locked us out, they had scabs ready to take our jobs. Their demands included forced overtime and other attacks on our working conditions. Clerical workers at NIPSCO had already written about how their jobs were being eliminated — handed off to AI systems and call centers, their livelihoods wiped out.

NIPSCO is widely hated by the working class for its outrageously high bills. Workers in Northwest Indiana have protested staggering rate increases, much of the company’s profits flowing into the pockets of Blackstone — the notoriously racist private equity giant (Chicago Tribune, 2/28) and one of the largest in the country, largely responsible for the displacement of working-class communities nationwide. Blackstone profits from the enslavement of migrant children forced to labor in slaughterhouse plants (Time, 2/17/2023), as well as being a major investor in the genocide of mostly women and children in Gaza — owning defense technology companies Cobham and Ultra Electronics whose components are embedded in the F-35 fighter jets used by the Israeli military to bomb Gaza (Private Equity Stakeholder Project, 2/5/2024), showing that the hand that raises utility bills and attacks utility workers also displaces, bombs, and enslaves our working-class children.

The Party moved into action quickly, both inside the plant and on the outside. Young Party leadership pushed us forward — making contacts, spreading the word about the bosses’ fascist attacks.

A Party member inside was moved to take the bullhorn and speak before everyone as we filed into the union hall to vote on the contract. We had been out for two weeks, and the sellout union had brought us back with essentially the same contract we had already rejected. We were faced with a choice: vote yes, or risk sitting out for months like our fellow USW (United Steelworkers) members at BP Amoco in nearby Whiting.

A comrade speaks out

The comrade did speak to “VOTE NO” on the contract, to fight back against the company’s attacks on the working class. The comrade himself was a little surprised at the co-workers who complimented him for standing up to the sell-out contract. The vote was 708 to 486 to accept the contract, probably closer than the leaders expected.

One particular moment was especially powerful. A woman comrade from Mexico came to the picket line. After a couple of hours of carrying a sign, she wanted to speak. She spoke in Spanish (and was translated). She told of how her father, in the little town in Mexico where she grew up, was like us workers on the picket line. We were sticking up for others like her dad had done. I am sure we all felt the international solidarity circulating through our lives that night. It won’t be forgotten.

The struggle goes on. Energy has to be maintained. There is a lot to do. Do more to support the BP workers locked out. Keep plugging away to win as many workers as possible to Progressive Labor Party.