Picket vs. rent hikes
I, a Progressive Labor Party member, have recently joined a tenant organization in my neighborhood. In the process of participating and getting to know tenants and staff, I proposed a walk in our area against evictions and high rents. The group has been active in the rent freeze movement, but the fact is even before recent rent increases, low income and fixed income tenants face not being able to pay rent. Four weeks ago the entire staff went on strike for a new contract. So far the bosses have refused to talk to the workers. They confiscated the workers’ work phones, notebooks and other communications. More of us tenants need to join the picket line. I joined the picket line, hugs all around. I gave a CHALLENGE to a worker who said he’d show it to others. At the break I taught the workers the PLP chant, este puño si se ve, los obreros al poder! (See this fist, workers to power!) The workers erupted in cheers. The struggle continues, opening opportunities to fight back and build PLP!
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Ruralworkers push back on Trump’s cuts & crisis
Some people in this town are sick of the ruling-class surge to the right with the neo-fascist Trump Administration (40 percent voted against Trump). What can a PLP organizer who spends time here do to “serve the people” in this setting? For example, people here dread the immediate effects of the Trump cuts to Medicaid, which will force rural workers off the Medicaid rolls through burdensome paperwork and requirements for more worktime in a zone of heavy unemployment. Thirty percent of the income of the local private hospital comes from Medicaid receipts. It has the only small emergency room now for forty miles around, after the closing of another ER nearby. There is also revulsion against masked ICE stormtroopers snatching immigrants, and starvation warfare against Gaza, and abandonment of any environmental mitigation or adaptation for the rural U.S.
Seven of us met in a café to plan a local action next month, to coincide with a national day of protest focused on the climate catastrophe. Breathing in smoke from wildfires, we went over the recent Hands Off! and No Kings! rallies here for clues on how to proceed. Looking around the table, I was moved to see my neighbors at work, so varied in politics, from radicals in DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) to Democratic Party liberals - the Vietnam-era vet, who fears the loss of the local VA clinic they use, will talk to clinic staff about joining the action,the liberal Democrat: as passionately enraged at genocide in Gaza as any urban youth, the community college prof who said “Our world is exploding! We have to stand up and do something!”, a DSA family with two generations of militants at the table, retired teacher still excited about the 800 people who marched down Main Street chanting Hands Off!
The communist input? (1) I started a DSA political study group to go into the real reasons why “our world is exploding”--we have six regular attendees; (2) I suggested a focus on saving our healthcare through a worker-patient alliance--this was understood right away and adopted; (3) following this strategy, I took responsibility for contacting union locals of nurses, teachers and government workers; (4) I urged that healthcare for inmates in the racist prisons be included as a demand, which at least one person applauded.
These were my first steps. They aimed at bringing communist analysis to the struggle, at uniting workers whether providers or users of healthcare services, and at uniting white rural residents with Black urban prisoners. They allow me to open up about the Party as people get to know me. In the study group, I can argue that healthcare should not be a commodity at all, but rather a human right, to be provided for all from the surplus created by workers’ labor (DSA might agree)--and how could we win that without taking state power away from the capitalist class? DSA would not go that far.
Other key points did not come from me and focused more on how to salvage something from the wreckage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. My neighbors have a lot of experience in electoral politics and wanted to discuss what our target should be, like the state governor as well as the congressperson who voted for the Trump bill, and what a winnable demand should be, like the state picking up the shortfall in federal Medicaid funds. Someone with union experience led this discussion of how to intervene practically in state politics, which was very useful for our short-term goal. A DSA person led with the idea of taxing the rich to make up in state funds for the shortfall in federal Medicaid.
There was also keen discussion, not just of our mass action, but of who to run for a statewide office in a special election. Their current horizon stops at using the existing state machinery by electing good people and punishing bad. Even if they are mostly disgusted at the national and state Democrats as well as Trumpism, they are not really thinking outside the lines of electoral politics. Mass action they see as a way of putting pressure on the electeds, a supplement to elections.
How does communism intervene in this situation, in which bosses organize workers to play by the bosses’ electoral rules ? The study group, mostly DSA members for now, can discuss this as a problem. Marx drew the lesson from the Paris Commune of 1871 that workers in power cannot just lay hold of the existing state machinery and use it for our purposes. We have to invent a new kind of state that works for us as a class, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means that every struggle has to push on beyond its immediate demand to the communist horizon, workers taking power from the capitalist bosses. We have to be in this for a lifetime, to end the whole capitalist system whose breakdown we are paying for today in unemployment, preventable illness and death, endless imperialist wars, racist police brutality and mass incarceration, and spectacular climate collapse.
The truth is that the working class, the 99 percent, live in the country as much as the city. Communists have always argued for overcoming the contradiction between the city and the country in the drive for an egalitarian world run by workers. As PLP chants all the time in every struggle on the street: “The only solution is revolution, and power to the working class.” The country, no less than the city, both gasping for a clean breath, need communists everywhere. A mass base of millions for our communist party will guarantee that when workers win state power again, this time we will keep it.
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Heat up fight vs. climate change
Summer is upon us and with it the ever-accelerating evidence of climate change because of human use of fossil fuels for powering our vehicles, generating the electricity in a power hungry world economy, and for our needs to manufacture and produce more products for profit in this capitalist economy.
Of recent note are forest fires in Canada sending toxic smoke into the Midwest of the United States, fires in the Northwest Pacific and fires in the state of Arizona along the heights of the Grand Canyon. Along with fires there have been devastating floods in Central Texas and failures of all kinds in warning people of the waves of water coursing through their towns and along their creeks and rivers. In July, 135 people were killed during sudden rain downpours.
Heat waves in agricultural areas throughout the world have led to shortfalls in crop production and distribution, increasing the price of food nearly everywhere. As I write, a heat dome weather system has settled on the central portion of the United States raising heat index temperatures to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. These are conditions that are dangerous to people working or playing outdoors.
It’s important for communists and our Party to start considering what we would do if we held state power to slow down the changes in the climate.
How would we ameliorate long term the need for energy produced for fossil fuel. While some environmentalists think that the use of wind, solar and geothermal energy is the solution, other people are looking towards an expansion of nuclear power and the hoped for solution of fusion power as an answer.
One thing is clear to this writer. If capital holds state power, the ability of humanity to slow climate change or develop the means to stop it will be hampered by the profit and wealth capitalism generates through our current economy and society, even though most people are endangered by climate change and do not benefit from it.
With this in mind, I propose we have an article on climate change with each issue of CHALLENGE. Each article should publicize the harm to the worldwide environment caused by the combination of wealth and political power in the hands of capitalists, with reference to the latest climate disasters and what the environmental movement and the Party needs to fight for.
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