Newark, NJ, July 4—Fifty Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends collectively kicked off this year’s Summer Project by sharing food, speeches and international solidarity. The goal was to sharpen the fight against racism, sexism and nationalism as we organize for communist revolution - working class power. One participant commented that as communists, “we make a commitment to free ourselves from capital and invest our lives into the international working class.”
At each summer project like this one, workers from around the world put communism into action in one central location of struggle. With an ongoing pandemic, we are raising working class consciousness about how fascism, or excessive state control and police terror is rampant in Newark. To smash this, we need to build an internationalist communist party with Black, white, Latin, Asian and Arab workers leading the way toward a world where the needs of all workers are put first.
History of Newark
Three newer and two veteran comrades gave speeches about the history of Newark and how the education, housing and court system is impacted by racism. The first speech discussed the importance of recognizing Newark as a laboratory for Big Fascists (see Glossary, p. 6) to operate on a local scale under Mayor Ras Baraka. Praised as a “progressive” and “revolutionary” the Mayor has promoted reforms like Universal Basic Income, a worker-led review board of the police and temporarily fixed lead-poisoned water pipes.But in fact, he’s in line with what the Big Fascists are pushing worldwide. They want to throw a few crumbs or fake reforms to the working class to win us to support the finance capitalists’ plans for imperialist war against China and Russia. As we fight against racist police killings and for better housing conditions, PLP wants workers to see through the lies of the Big Fascists in Newark and worldwide to fight for a communist world.
In the United States, particularly during the 60s, the U.S. bosses were faced with hundreds of rebellions led by Black workers fighting against their racist conditions. As a result the bosses began to experiment with using Black politicians to control the masses. Ken Gibson was elected Newark’s first Black mayor in 1970. The speaker went on to say that the “Main legacy of the civil rights movement and those riots, where Black workers rose up against police brutality, is that Black politicians came into office and betrayed the workers.” Big Fascist politicians like Baraka ultimately steer workers away from fightback and into the ballot box, while smashing any revolutionary potential amongst the working class.
Another speaker talked about the history of the education struggle in Newark. Schools here “continue the legacy of molding children into compliant workers.” At the same time segregation in Newark contributes to the racist conditions in the schools. However, this does not mean there was no fightback. The Newark Teachers’ strike in 1970-1971, the student-led fightbacks for better curriculum and school conditions of the 80s and 90s, and the fightback in 2015 to get rid of Superintendent Cami Anderson and State control of Newark schools all provided valuable lessons for our Party.
The final speech addressed public housing in Newark. Like many cities, Newark saw a rise of public housing during the 1930s New Deal era. Then a decline in funding started in the 1960s. The speaker talked about the courageous tenants of the Stella Wright Housing Project who conducted a four year rent strike (1970-1974) against racist housing conditions that persisted for over a decade. But what was most powerful was her own experience of living in public housing and committing to fight for communism because of the strike. She had moved to a number of different housing projects throughout the city as one shut down after another. On top of the inhumane living conditions, many of those in public housing during Covid-19 had to deal with constant police surveillance, day and night. Despite these conditions, many residents who are on disability and rely on this housing are afraid to speak out. This even with the city's possible gentrification plans for this housing project. She then stated, “And Ras [Baraka] is on this trip that if you want to get rid of gentrification, then buy a house - but that’s not possible for us.” But PLP is continuing to organize and talk to residents so that they have the confidence through collective action to fight for what we all deserve.
As the cookout was wrapping up the Rodwell/Spivey family and a local organizer arrived. The lawyer for the family spoke about the case and how these young men were racially profiled and attacked by the cops. Then another local organizer, who has been leading the fight back in this struggle, spoke about his attempts to organize support around the family and how PLP was the only organization to respond. “After I saw the video and news headlines I visited the family myself. When I heard the real story I called every organization in the city. Nobody called me back except for PLP. And the next day at the rally they came out.” That’s what we do. In this period it is important for us to take a patient long term approach when organizing workers and students, but it is also necessary to act with urgency when situations like these arise. The mother of the young men also spoke about how the cops have been harassing the family by parking a mobile precinct on the street and checking Is of those coming in and out of the neighborhood. After she spoke we passed around a hat to raise funds for the family’s legal defense fund.
Just as Big Facist liberal bosses like Ras Baraka build a base for capitalism, PLP is building a base for communism. It was evident when one woman who attended and was alive in the 60s commented that when she was growing up in Jersey City, she never would have seen a multiracial, intergenerational group. Communist organizing was also clear in the way that members collectively produced the speeches.
As essential as it is for the 20 percent of non-english speakers at the opening event to listen to Black and white workers in the fight against racism and leading communism, as we move forward with our activities it’s equally as important for us to struggle with mainly English-speaking workers to experience live translation as a form of anti-racist internationalism. Practices like these smash the uneven divisions bosses flame to keep the most useful ideas for our class scattered.
What’s ahead
Over the next few weeks this PLP Summer Project will continue to build upon the barbeque through CHALLENGE distributions around the city, and study groups on topics like political economy, displacement, nationalism, and racism. We will end our project with a rally and a motorcade connecting the various struggles that the working class in this part of the world is currently involved in. We plan to maintain the common feeling of strong solidarity and joy felt throughout, as a way to strengthen the bonds among members and friends of PLP. Contact PLP if you would like to join us during this Summer Project.

New York City, June 30—Over 200  angry retired New York City workers demonstrated in over 95 degree heat in the continuing effort to stop the privatization of their Medicare health insurance (see CHALLENGE, 6/23). Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been actively building this fight for decades. It was heartening to see marchers whose average age was certainly over 70 fighting back. We may be retired but we haven’t expired!
Under capitalism, decent health care is not guaranteed to all workers. The health benefits which current and former workers in this city have fought for are being eroded and the costs for these benefits are being borne more and more by us retirees. This means higher copays for medical appointments and prescription drugs and more narrow health care choices. The cuts we face today are part of a slippery slope of cutbacks faced by workers around the world that have everything to do with the intensifying rivalry between the world’s top capitalist powers. Chinese and Russian imperialists are challenging the U.S. empire everywhere. There’s the Chinese space station and the Russian cyber attacks. There’s growing Russian influence in the Middle East and Chinese economic expansion all over Africa and Latin America. As the U.S. capitalists gear up for war, the governments that they control have less and less money for worker’s needs such as health care.
Capitalist inequality and racism has been highlighted through the  many struggles around racist police murders and the inequalities pushed front and center by the  Covid-19 crisis. Lower paid New York City workers who are disproportionately Black and Latin will be the hardest hit by the health care changes. The $1,500 maximum annual copays per person will certainly be more difficult to afford for a retired school crossing guard whose pension plus social security may be less than $10,000 than a retired city manager whose income is likely at least 10 times as much.
Starting in the financial district of New York, we marched to several union headquarters and the city’s office of labor relations on our way to city hall. This route underlined the partnership of union misleaders and city bosses in orchestrating this attack on our health care. Their partnership is based on shared support of the capitalist system. Union sellouts use their clout to steer working-class anger away from direct struggles like strikes and into the arms of politicians who are mere puppets of the capitalist state. The capitalist bosses and their politician puppets have all got to go. Workers have to go from protesting to actually running society. That means working class power - communism.
Today’s demonstration, confrontations of misleaders at union meetings, and an online petition which over 23,000 workers have signed point to the anger and struggle that are alive and kicking. Capitalism, however, which needs inequality and racism to exist, will never provide a decent life for all workers. That is why Progressive Labor Party is organizing to end capitalism and create a communist society that will serve the needs of all workers.

It is widely if not explicitly acknowledged that profit motive lies behind the evolving horror of the Miami condo collapse (see editorial, page 2). The evidence is incontrovertible: cost-cutting in both building materials and building maintenance are to blame. The apparently inescapable reach of profit-driven tragedy leaves any decent person feeling sickened and perhaps even defeated.
Readers of CHALLENGE deserve to know—what would housing be like under communism?
Building from ashes
For starters, we must be real: Following the devastation of world war and armed revolution, housing would be scarce. Revolutionary workers will inherit the wreckage that is housing under capitalism, where even in peacetime, a great portion of the population is left poorly housed or unhoused. Revolution emerging from the ashes of war will compound that  challenge.
In socialist Cuba the Urban Reform Law of 1960 abolished the collection of rent by landlords.
During Joseph Stalin's time, the main form of Soviet housing in cities was the communal apartment, known as Kommunalkas. Every unit—single, couple, or family—had a room, size varied by family, with  shared kitchens and bathrooms (see diagram). This was due to a great housing shortage at the time of the Revolution and thereafter.
But this was also a society where EVERYONE had access to a roof over their head, a kitchen and a bathroom. Abolition of homelessness was the core principle, not profit maximization. This interview captures how Soviet workers experienced communal living conditions.

A: How many years would you say you have spent in kommunalkas?
B : All my life. All my life. I was born in a kommunalka. Of course there we had a three-family apartment, and then I lived on Petr Lavrov Street, there were nine tenants, and here there are 11. So, my whole life.
A: And every time a bigger one.
B : Yes, yes, my whole life.
A: I see. And where is it better to live, in a new district in your own little apartment or despite everything?
B : Yes, I like living here very much.
A: Since the film won’t have my question, you should answer in a full sentence. Is it better to live in a kommunalka in the center of the city than in a private apartment in a new district?
B : It’s better to live in a communal apartment, a large one, in this kind of, in a historic district, a historic Petersburg district, than in a housing complex.
A: Why?
B.: There’s some kind of disconnection; life is more boring. I don’t know, it seems to me that people there are completely different. Everybody is on their own. And here we’re like one big family. If someone is in trouble, it gets shared. Or a joy, you share that too.

 Today one person will be in a bad mood, and tomorrow it will be a different person. We somehow neutralize each other, and it works out very well.
A: I see.
B : I like it. I love this apartment. I do. The bathroom has its problems, but we put up with everything. Of course, your own apartment is a good thing, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, then this is better.
- Barker and Grant, eds. The Russia Reader (Duke UP, 2010), pp. 617-618.

The interviewee describes the benefits of thinking of, living with, and working with the masses. These communal apartments engendered a sense of collectivity. We can see communist ideas taking shape.
Compromises with capitalism lead to demise
The accelerating compromises with capitalism of the post-Stalin era spelled the death of communism in the USSR. Nikita Krushchev was a Soviet revisionist misleader that ushered this in. This passage from the Wikipedia article "Communal Living in Russia” shows this development:

After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's regime embarked upon a mass housing campaign, to eliminate the persistent housing shortages, and create private apartments for urban residents. This campaign was a response to popular demand for “better living conditions, single-family housing, and greater privacy;” Khrushchev believed that granting the people private apartments would give them greater enthusiasm for the communist system in place and that improving people's attitudes and living conditions would lead to a healthier and more productive workforce. However, the new apartments were built quickly, with an emphasis on quantity over quality, and in underdeveloped neighborhoods, with poor systems of public transportation, making daily life harder for workers. These apartment blocks quickly became called ‘khrushchyovka,’ a cross between Khrushchev's name and the Russian term for slums.

The lesson here is profound—even the defeat of shortage does not guarantee the victory of communism. Building private apartments instead of collective ones was a step backward for the working class. It promoted individualism and isolation. This led to dealing with problems by yourself (or letting them fester) instead of solving problems collectively. When it comes to building a communist society, we can’t cut corners.
Only the most determined and protracted battle to expand the scope of each worker’s concern so that shortage must be endured wherever workers hold power until profit-induced homelessness (or hunger or oppression) of any worker anywhere has been defeated.

PLP’s more complete analysis of how and why communists fell short of this task in the USSR, China, and Cuba are at www.plp.org

New York City, June 26—There is an opportunity for growing class consciousness in the fight against anti-gay and anti-trans sexism. The Pride events this year had slogans against “Rainbow Capitalism.” We need to take it one more step further. Yes, the Republican Party is racist and sexist, but it’s the Democratic Party that's doubled down on winning LGBTQ+ workers to support its imperialist agenda through promises of legislation.
Unless we get rid of this capitalist profit system, built off of exploitation and division, no worker can achieve liberation. Only by building an international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) dedicated to fighting for armed revolution, can we make working-class liberation a reality!
For the third year in a row, thousands of people here took to the streets with the Queer Liberation March, many in opposition of the larger Pride Parade’s embrace of corporations, politicians, and racist and sexist police. PLP members joined other workers and students to support this struggle and share our communist ideas.
We distributed over 100 leaflets and dozens of CHALLENGEs. PLP members led chants that called on all workers to “flush the system down the drain!” and spell out the racist nature of the police. In school-based Gender and Sexuality Alliances (GSAs) where we have provided leadership, we worked to ensure that such spaces are not simply supportive of students but also critical of the capitalist system that is racist and sexist to the core.
The fight in this movement is the same as all others—reject identity politics, expose the liberal racists and their imperialist agenda, and recruit fighters to the international battle for communist revolution via PLP.
Fighting racism and sexism in the movement is key
The LGBTQ+ movement is infested with racism and anti-worker ideology. However, the roots of Pride originate in rebellion against the cops. The cops who murder Black and Latin workers are the same cops that terrorize gay and trans workers. Black and Latin transgender workers still face more police harassment, terror and incarceration than other LGBTQ+ workers. Blood remains on the hands of the state for the death of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco who died while in custody at Rikers Island as corrections officers stood by laughing.
In 1969, rebellions erupted against the police who raided the Stone wall Inn Bar and terrorized the Black and Latin transgender, gay, and lesbian patrons. This was the origin of June Pride actions. Stonewall came at a time when a huge part of the population was already out protesting and challenging capitalism. However, with the fall of the old communist movement, there was a political vacuum, which identity politics filled. Out came single-issue, identity-based organizations. We fought in the streets, challenged the cops, but the emphasis on how capitalism oppresses all workers was all gone.
That explains how today’s Pride events have become a capitalist celebration that disregards the fact that exploitation is the foundation of this profit system. All Pride events, including the Brooklyn Liberation Action for Trans Youth, which drew over a thousand protesters, play into the pockets of the liberal bosses. Actions divorced from the class struggle do not challenge capitalism; it negotiates with capitalism.
Under capitalism, the mode of production is based on the exploitative relationship of wage labor. As more people were able to live outside of a reproductive family unit, the possibilities of constructing a life, an identity, a community outside of traditional gender roles and straight sexualities grew. Today, capitalism has accommodated elements of gay, queer, and trans existence. But for any member of the working class to live full free lives, we need to abolish this dictatorship based on exploitation and profit.
Liberals = still main danger
As conservative politicians openly attack
LGBTQ+, Black, and immigrant workers, liberal politicians claim they support equality—equal
oppression, that is. Rainbow capitalism is not only about corporations profiting off LGBTQ+ workers; it is also in effect when opportunist politicians use language of “inclusivity” and “representation” to drum up support for imperialist wars and pro-boss laws (like zoning for luxury condos that helps drive homelessness).
Transgender pilots dropping bombs on workers in Iraq is not liberation!
Openly gay or lesbian politicians—like Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot in Chicago—protecting the police while attacking teachers and students is not liberation!
It is just more
 capitalist exploitation.
PLP fights for communism, a system designed to meet the needs of all workers based upon equality. The fight against racism and sexism, which includes anti-LGBTQ+ oppression, must be at the center of building a communist world. We have a long way to go in overcoming identity politics, nationalism and pro-democracy ideology. The bosses’ ideas are rampant in many Pride activities, all of which keep the working class more divided.
To smash capitalism we need a communist movement that unites workers across
socially-constructed lines of race, gender, and
sexuality. Only a movement that unites all sections of the working-class—under the leadership of those workers most familiar with the rotten nature of the system—can succeed. Read CHALLENGE and join PLP!

*****

BOX

Dividing and super-exploiting the working class
Capitalists and their politicians maximize profits and maintain their power by dividing and super-exploiting workers. Bosses want workers to blame each other for a system that has never met the needs of our class. The failures of the system are especially true for groups of workers the system super-exploits. Bosses pay less to Black, Latin, immigrant, women, gay, transgender, and other groups of workers that are terrorized by the system. Whether the agents of terror are racist cops, ICE officers, or bigoted workers convinced to turn on their class siblings, the capitalists at the top maintain control.
A 2013–15 National Health Interview Survey found that gay male workers earn 10 percent less than their heterosexual counterpart. In more than half the U.S., LGBTQ+ workers can be openly fired because of their sexuality or gender identity. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey reported, that trans people are twice as likely to be unemployed due to discrimination. It’s estimated that about seven percent of youth in the United States are LGBTQ+, while 40 percent of youth experiencing homelessness are LGBTQ+.
LGBTQ+ workers also face attacks in the realm of healthcare. In an online survey, 65 percent of doctors heard negative comments from peers targeting LGBTQ+ patients, while 35 percent witnessed discrimination toward individuals in the workplace. The rate of HIV/AIDS has recently reached staggering numbers, especially in some sections of the LGBTQ+ community. One in two Black gay men or transwomen will contract HIV in their lifetime. This is due to a sexist and racist healthcare system.