NEW YORK CITY, May 25—Almost three years into a pandemic where the city’s bosses left workers for dead, cutting services and jobs, their solutions to working class desperation are racist crackdowns targeting the homeless and lower income workers, largely Black and Latin.
The bosses know they are responsible for increases in workers attacking workers. It's the bosses who create the conditions leaving workers with mental illness, drug addictions, and homelessness by putting profit before their lives, the real crime. But rather than fix the underlying issues, they know blaming certain workers, sowing divisions among all, is best to protect their profits.
Under communism no worker would be abandoned. We build a society around workers’ needs: food, clothes, shelter and medical care without a profit motive. That is the only way out of this crisis.
Liberal mayor further displaces workers
Since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has worked to please his cryptocurrency overlords (NY1, 12/3/21) and real estate developers who financed his election campaign (The City, 4/18/21), announcing plans to evict homeless encampments around the city. Adams enlisted his paid thugs in the New York Police Department and the Department of Sanitation to not only destroy these campsites, but arrest those who refused to comply with his racist displacement agenda. These attacks have even included the police department’s Strategic Response Group, a counterterrorism unit!
Racist shelter plans
Paying lip service to critics, the mayor has sent representatives from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) with the cops, to try convincing the homeless workers to accept placement in dangerous shelters and supposedly safe haven spaces.
During one recent eviction in the East Village, homeless workers denounced both options. (Vice News, 4/6).
But though there are more than enough vacant apartments to house every worker, the ruling class’s bureaucratic incompetence means most sit unoccupied (New York Daily News, 4/11).
Bosses strike underground
Many displaced workers will find themselves riding the subways for shelter. Even there, they aren’t safe from the city’s fascist and racist removals. In February, Adams announced his plans to rout displaced people from the trains, calling them a “cancer” (Independent, 2/18).
These attacks on workers have already backfired dangerously. Frank James, the suspect in April’s mass shooting at a Brooklyn subway station, was in and out of shelters; he also had online videos attacking Adams for his homeless plan, saying it was “doomed to fail,” and describing his own bad experiences with city outreach workers in previous decades (ABC 7 News, 4/13).
Crackdown ensnares immigrants in racist hold
The crackdown’s fervor has predictably included others as well. Recent viral video showed the kkkops arresting an immigrant Latin woman worker for selling mangoes on a subway platform. This racist, sexist attack further shows that the crackdown isn't about “public safety,” but rather making things more palatable for the finance capital and real estate development bosses Adams answers to.
Adams’ response to the outrage over this incident? Claiming that if the pigs didn't arrest this woman, then “next day, it’s propane tanks being on the subway system. The next day, it’s barbecuing” (amNew York, 5/9).
‘Farebeaters’ included
In January, after an MTA board member claimed, without any evidence, that 99 percent of people commiting subway crimes evade paying the fare (Fox 5, 1/18,)  the ruling class mobilized to include “farebeaters” in their racist crosshairs. Adams has deployed even more useless cops to terrorize workers during this initative (Curbed, 4/11).
MTA bosses are now telling bus operators to keep their rear doors closed to prevent free rides (Curbed, 5/9). In April, MTA Chairman Janno Lieber announced a plan to save New York’s “spirit” by creating new ways to stop fare evasion, claiming it costs the agency $500 million annually (Gothamist, 4/26). Racist Lieber neglected to mention that figure is nothing compared to the billions the agency owes Wall Street.
Adams’ racist attacks on workers shows that no matter who is in office, be it a fascist Republican or wolf in sheep’s clothing liberal Democrat, we know they will never have our interests at heart. For a world where nobody will be homeless, or deal with the brutal conditions that cause it, we will continue our fight for a world run by workers.