This weekend, a cyclone ravaged Mayotte. 8,000 km away from Paris, Mayotte is France's poorest department. The shantytowns and tin-roofed shacks that housed a third of the population were blown away. Thousands are feared dead, as many undocumented migrants were afraid to go to the shelters offered by the authorities... for fear of being deported! The French government, failing to combat poverty, is waging a real war against the poor from the neighboring islands of the Comoros.

Despite emergency aid, the population is plunged into tragedy. All their daily problems have been multiplied tenfold: poverty, shortages, epidemics. The authorities are worried about what they call “looting”. But if they bring food, water, and the means to clear away the rubble and rebuild housing, solidly this time, there will be no looting!

Some journalists write that “fate has turned against Mayotte”. But the disaster was not only caused by the violence of the cyclone, amplified by global warming. It was caused by poverty, underdevelopment and a lack of state investment in infrastructure. The island already lacked everything: drinking water, electricity, schools, sanitation and decent housing. This year, it was even hit by cholera.

Mayotte was separated from the Comoros by French imperialism so that it could keep a foot in the Indian Ocean. Successive governments, whatever their political stripe, have taken pride in this legacy of colonialism while maintaining the island in appalling underdevelopment.

This way of treating Mayotte and the poorest of the poor is not surprising. The whole capitalist system is like that: it plunders, exploits and accumulates fortunes in the hands of the privileged few, while making a mockery of the men and women who make it prosper. And the same is true of the working population here.

Obviously, working and living conditions in Mayotte and here are not comparable. But one thing is similar: the reign of profit and the law of the capitalists who maintain power over workers’ lives.

Workers here are not threatened by a devastating cyclone but by a wave of job cuts and company closures that will also be devastating. Hundreds of thousands of workers will be condemned to unemployment and poverty. For towns and small businesses that are already struggling, it means a slow death sentence.

In the meantime, however, the media has been focusing on all the fuss over the government crisis even though everyone can see that it's going round in circles and that the politicians don't give a damn about us.

Today, the government claims to care about Mayotte, but their one and only concern is to reassure the financial markets. The reality is that they don't care about the future of Mayotte's poor, just like they don’t care about the future of workers here!

The hundreds of thousands of job cuts are not even an issue for the politicians who have been putting on the same act for the last six months. Really, we have no reason to feel the slightest interest in Bayrou’s pantomime nor any of these politicians’ antics.

For the working classes, nothing good will come from above, especially not in this period of capitalist crisis. It's up to the workers, up to all those who are revolted by how unjust this society is to fight to change their lot. Nothing has ever been given to the oppressed and exploited. Everything we ever got was won through our struggles.

Like Barnier, Bayrou is looking for a majority in Parliament to better deceive us. But we workers make up the majority of the population. A majority that is useful and indispensable to the functioning of society. A majority capable of making the employers afraid and of forcing them to back down, as the great strikes of 1936 and 1968 showed, because their profits depend on all of us.

In such moments of struggle, it’s no longer the clowns in Parliament or the government who dictate the political agenda, but the workers.

In such moments, we can counter corporate greed and force shareholders to hand out a portion of their dividends to improve working and living conditions for the whole population. Only in the struggle to overthrow this insane capitalist system can we truly work for the common good. Here, in Mayotte and in the rest of the world!

Nathalie Arthaud