Len Ragozin, a long-time supporter of the fight for communism, died on May 13 at the age of 92. Len absorbed his working-class consciousness from the women in his family. His mother lived through the Russian Revolution in 1917, immigrated to the U.S., and was renowned in the family for translating for Stalin during a return trip to Russia. His Aunt Rachel was a founding member of the U.S. Communist Party.
Len grew up in an environment where his family argued politics around the dinner table and the communist contingent did more than hold their own.
From an early age, he identified with the interests of the working class. Even as a child, as Len liked to say, he was “against the fat cats.”
After graduating from Harvard, Len got involved in the union organizing movement in Memphis, Tennessee, where he took a factory job.
After getting fired for organizing, he found another factory job and got fired once more. This cycle continued until the Korean War broke out and Len was drafted.In the military, Len kept organizing. He talked with other soldiers about the war and why the U.S. “fat cats” sending them to fight the Chinese communist army cared only about their profits.
He gained a reputation on base as someone who wasn’t scared to tell the truth. The military responded with several threatening letters. But after seeing that Len wasn’t going to shut up, they discharged him and sent Len home.
Upon returning to New York, Len got a job at Newsweek magazine as a researcher. Two FBI agents came to his office and asked him to name names of any communists he knew in college. He refused, even as they threatened to get him fired. Len held firm and sent them packing.
Len met Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in the early days of the Party when our founding chairperson, Milt Rosen, was teaching a class at the Free University of New York. Len had a photographic memory and had read virtually everything written by Marx and Lenin. In the early 1970s, before a large crowd in Greenwich Village, Len debated a fake Marxist who was being promoted by the liberal press. He systematically took apart every argument the revisionist made while referencing Marx and Lenin—citing not just the original documents, but also the page numbers!
Len went on to become a long-time supporter of PLP, volunteering to help with CHALLENGE, writing articles and contributing ideas from his many years of experience in the class struggle. He always took great interest and joy in reports on the Party’s organizing activities on the job, in the schools, and in the neighborhoods. Throughout his life, Len Ragozin was a staunch supporter of the working class.