the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Sep 16, 2024
Driving across a long bridge, you will see places where there are interlocking steel fingers with air gaps between. These are expansion joints. When the steel bridge girders heat up, the girders expand and lengthen. The joints allow the girders to heat and lengthen, then cool and shorten, safely, while we drive over.
But the size of the gaps between the teeth are designed for normal regional heating and cooling patterns. Temperatures are rising beyond normal! When gaps are too small to accommodate the extra-hot steel expansion, the teeth meet and jam together, and steel has to expand someplace else. The bridge girders bend, twist, and warp.
The forces drive into the concrete bridge foundations and crack the concrete. Rain and river water get inside the cracks and the internal steel structure rusts out. The bridge weakens and can’t support its normal loads. “These bridges can fall apart like Tinkertoys,” says one civil engineer.
Another engineer studying Colorado bridges found a 29-year-old bridge, and an 18-year-old bridge, and even a 10-year-old bridge already showing this kind of damage.
Workers use bridges all the time to get to and from work or driving on the job. We will be the first hurt in any bridge failure.
We may be killed like the six road workers in the Baltimore bridge collapse. Or we may be like the thousands of workers who had to spend many unpaid hours daily, detouring to get back and forth to work.
But we don’t have the means to get these hazards inspected, upgraded, and fixed.
Who has the money? The companies we work for, and the wealthy class that reaps the corporate profits. All the companies depend on all these bridges for their just-in-time supply chains, and their constant movement of goods from factory to warehouse to consumer.
These companies and their owners, combined, have trillions of dollars available to put to use, to make sure bridges are safe. But their eyes are only on the monthly profit margins!
They also have a government system at their beck and call, to make sure that their trillions are not tapped for something as unprofitable as public safety and welfare.
Their philosophy in their factories is “run it ‘til it breaks.” And as thousands of bridges head for the breaking point, overheating, jamming, and crumbling, they stand as symbols of capitalism’s global system.