Newark, NJ, October 17— The global housing crisis under capitalism remains relentless but opposition and fightback is growing. The spirit of workers around the world cannot be bought, evicted or defeated. A multiracial and multi-generational group of neighbors and comrades connected to the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are sharpening our confidence in building a fighting Tenant’s Union in one of New Jersey’s largest private housing complexes. Our recent pumpkin carving social empowered us as workers with the discussion of the (1970-1974) Newark Stella Wright Homes Rent strike.
No temporary reforms, all power to workers
Discussing our working class ancestors’ wins and losses in striking against the profits of their racist landlords back then drew us closer, and made it clear, as a mother and son exclaimed, that we can do it again and fight for a lot more! We left the social with five of us committed to attending a tenant’s organizing conference. At the conference we learned valuable lessons about organizing tenants into fighting leaders. The conference also pushed us to struggle over PLP’s communist ideas such as multiracial unity and internationalism vs white guilt as a response to racism within the working class mass movement. We also discussed the contradiction between building tenants’ leverage to negotiate with landlords vs building workers’ power to challenge the existence of the rotten housing profit system itself.
The highlight of the pumpkin social was our viewing and discussion of a social media video on the Stella Wright Rent Strike. We learned that the United States’ longest public housing rent strike took place right here in our city of Newark. Neighbors were inspired by how all 1,206 tenants at Stella-Wright went on strike to protest the broken elevators, the lack of maintenance, and the disgusting condition of the homes built with cheap materials, withholding $2 million in rent. The defiant workers of Stella-Wright were joined by tenants city-wide to hold a rent strike in Newark 11,000 workers strong, denying landlords $6.5 million.
We also discussed how the tenants, after the National Housing Authority threatened to evict all 11,000 of them (25 percent of Newark’s public housing population!) managed to win their strike in 1974, winning the right to operate Stella-Wright Homes under “tenant management.” While at first this seemed like an amazing idea, we also noted how by the end of the 1990s Stella-Wright was designated a slum and demolished. Our neighbors sharply pointed out that the tenants were only given $1.3 million to fix the decrepit Stella Wright towers and so were basically sold out by the city government, and “tenant management” at Stella-Wright was doomed to failure.
This helps us communists demonstrate to workers that no reform under capitalism will ever give workers what they truly need. As long as the bosses hold state power and steal workers labor in the form of profit, workers will remain enslaved. The workers of Stella-Wright were given phony “control” over their homes, but the bosses will never give us the profits our labor produces. We knew that our tenant union was heading in the right direction when two neighbors, when asked if the outcome meant workers should have never united like they did, shouted “No!!!! They absolutely should have.”
Over the conversations about our lives and the state of the world today, neighbors had a good time carving pumpkins like a jack-o-lantern barfing up its pulp and seeds, silly faces and more artistic colorful pumpkins. As we organize these gatherings we are increasingly becoming aware we are living in a time when bosses’ global wars and terror against the international working class is worsening. That is why it generated so much revolutionary optimism to see neighbors in this space both committed to and learning about communism (the fight to unify the international working class to defeat all horrors of capitalism) while they created jack-o-lanterns with symbols of workers’ fight for power: a hammer and sickle, workers raising their fists to a red star.
One young neighbor organically painted a PLP pumpkin. Witnessing this was important because seeing how much PLP means already to this young neighbor who has only known about this fighting organization for four months has put those of us who have shared those strong feelings far longer on notice. If we push ourselves to be more direct about how PLP aims to empower the working class, more neighbors will understand why we are wielding its communist ideas to strengthen our struggle building a tenants union and will embrace its ideas beyond it.
The idea for holding a pumpkin-carving social came from our desire to continue friendships and a commitment to our neighbors. Over the past year neighbors and PLers have embraced each other while running an International Food & Culture Festival, hosting game nights, holding a picnic in the park, and going hiking. We have found that workers are suspicious of each other. This is understandable as housing under capitalism doesn’t encourage community. Workers suspect unexpected knocks at their door to be salespeople, electoral politricks, advocates for some church, or even possibly ICE terrorists looking to kidnap them and their loved ones. Rallying around holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Halloween has helped lower neighbors’ fear, and we always find that workers we speak to are eager for the opportunity to bond with their neighbors.
Learning to fight like a red, fighting to lead like a red
Two days after the pumpkin social, the group of us, including the young student-worker who has only recently been coming around both the budding tenant union and PLP, attended the Rutgers Tenant organizing conference. One workshop featured a charismatic, veteran tenant organizer leading a simulation where the conference’s attendees were asked to organize themselves as fictional tenants while the host played a vicious landlord. We all saw how landlords would try to divide tenants and punish workers who want to win tenants to organize under radical ideologies like communism. Yet, we also saw the strength of radical ideas as one of us led a chant “fix or strike!” that was taken up by nearly all attendees.
Unfortunately, while he gave us a powerful organizing manual we urgently need to bring back to our neighbors, the host was still playing the role of misleader and selling a message of anti-communism. He pushed the pacifying idea that even his own radical politics will only get in the way of organizing tenants, and that following the laws made by and for the landlords to rent-strikes is the most we can hope for.
We can see from the Stella-Wright Rent Strike to the tenant conference workshop that winning reforms alone will never be enough. Our fight is to position tenants in our building complex over a very long period of time to read about these lessons through this CHALLENGE newspaper, experience conflicts with our landlords over anti-racist demands, and run rent strikes. Through this process more worker-tenants will conclude that we need a world without profit hungry landlords and capitalists - communism—to truly achieve the housing that we all deserve.
