Rotting capitalism is to blame

On 8 January 2026, a mountain of garbage collapsed in Barangay Binaliw, Cebu City, in the Philippines, crushing lives beneath tons of capitalist waste. At least 13 people were killed. Dozens remain missing. But the true culprit is not gravity, nor nature - it is a social system that piles waste on the poor and calls it ‘development’.

This was not a tragedy. It was a crime. And the fingerprints are all over the machinery of capitalism.

Profits before life: the calculated neglect of Binaliw

The Binaliw landfill was never safe. It was a festering monument to capitalist indifference, operated by Prime Integrated Waste Solutions under the guise of a “public-private partnership.” In reality, it was a ticking time bomb - an open dumpsite masquerading as a landfill, carved into a mountain and stacked high with garbage, in defiance of basic engineering and human decency.

Warnings were issued. Residents protested. Councilor Joel Garganera himself condemned the site as a disaster waiting to happen. But the city government and its corporate partners pressed on. Why? Because in capitalism, waste is not a problem to solve - it is a business to exploit. And the lives of workers and the urban poor are expendable in the balance sheets of profit.

Green lies and the theater of reform

Now, as the dead are pulled from the rubble, the state performs its familiar ritual: crocodile tears, promises of ‘investigation’, and vague talk of ‘improvement’. But as the ICC makes clear in its “Manifesto on ecology”, these gestures are nothing but theater. Reform is a lie. Regulation is a smokescreen. The system cannot be fixed because it is functioning exactly as designed.

Capitalism’s greenwashing - its climate summits, its ‘net zero’ pledges, its technocratic tinkering - only deepens the crisis. It is not malfunctioning. It is decaying. And in its decay, it poisons the air, the water, the soil - and the very possibility of a future.

The disposable working class: sacrificed to the god of garbage

Who died in Binaliw? Not the executives. Not the politicians. It was the workers. The scavengers. The families living in the shadow of a garbage mountain. They were sacrificed on the altar of capitalist ‘efficiency’, buried not just by trash, but by the contempt of a system that sees them as trash.

This is not unique to Cebu. From Payatas to Delhi, from Lagos to Jakarta, the poor are forced to live and die in the margins of waste. Capitalism creates zones of sacrifice - geographic and human - and calls it progress.

Revolution or extinction: the ICC’s unflinching verdict

The ICC does not mince words: capitalism is ecocidal. It cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown. The working class is the only force with the power and interest to reorganize society on a rational, ecological, and human basis.

This means rejecting every illusion: electoral politics, nationalist ‘solutions’, NGO band-aids, and bourgeois climate activism. It means building an international, revolutionary movement rooted in class struggle and historical memory - especially the lessons of the workers’ councils of 1917–1919.

No more graves beneath the garbage!

The Binaliw collapse is not an isolated event. It is a symptom of a dying system that will drag us all down with it unless we act. The choice is not between better waste management and worse - it is between a world organized for human need, or a world buried in its own filth.

We owe the dead more than mourning. We owe them justice. And justice will not come from the state, the market, or the ballot box. It will come from the streets, the factories, the assemblies of workers who refuse to be buried alive.

Let the stench of Binaliw be the smell of capitalism’s rotting corpse. Let us bury the system before it buries us.

 Internasyonalismo (Philippines) 22 January 2026