Washington, DC, August 4—As the moratorium on evictions in the U.S. was drawing to a close, tenants and organizers including members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rallied with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-affiliated Stomp Out Slumlords (SOS) to protest the evictions of our brothers and sisters that landlords and their political flunkeys are eagerly seeking. Hundreds marched to the White House demanding a halt to evictions. Some camped out overnight in a vigil to protest this attack on the working class.
Stomp out bosses, build red leadership
Class struggle against the bloodsucking landlords—including blocking evictions directly and turning to militant action and support from the rest of the working class—is the way forward. A PLP member also attended the feebly symbolic anti-eviction protest by Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) at the Capitol, but as expected heard nothing about how capitalism plus a pandemic means disaster for workers trying to stay in their homes. These liberal politicians are the main danger for our class because they serve to pacify us, blunt the class struggle, and put our trust into this system.
Class struggle and direct action must stomp out slumlords along with their capitalist brethren through communist revolution. Many participants in this protest, march, and vigil happily received copies of CHALLENGE and pledged to look into the need for a long-term struggle for communism to defeat the racist anti-worker attacks of the bosses.
Protests help organizers and tenants practice their organizing and leadership abilities. Organizers put together graphics, secured food and resources, and spread the word to other organizers and the media. Tenant committees tapped their social networks to activate their neighbors for political actions. For some tenants, these are their first ever political actions. These political actions energized everyone. The main question is under whose leadership is the working class being energized under? PLP affirms the need for communist leadership against evictions, racist housing policies, and this entire profit-system.  
Racist eviction crisis
For organizers, tenants, and onlookers, being surrounded by neighbors with a shared purpose can be radicalizing—people begin to imagine the immense power they could have if they continue to organize and fight. We know the eviction crisis is hitting hard, and we cannot sit idly by while our neighbors are at risk of joining the homeless.
According to a 2020 report by the Aspen Institute, an estimated 30 to 40 million people in the U.S. are at risk of eviction due to the Covid-19 housing crisis. If past trends hold, the upcoming eviction crisis will lead to higher rates of Covid-19 infection, especially as new variants emerge, and the impact will be felt most strongly in communities of Black workers (Brookings, 8/2). The scale of this problem exposes fundamental problems of racist capitalism’s “profit first, people last” character.
Capitalism endlessly erodes communities and will continue to do so until it is gone and replaced by communist revolution, where we workers run society for ourselves.
Community potlucks, BBQs, and parties along with political protests can bolster revolutionary potential by building a sense of community and solidarity. Joining and building a revolutionary organization, the PLP, will ensure a future for the growth of such working class solidarity as we proceed together on the road to communist revolution.

“We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country, a move which will lead—who knows where!'' editorialized Anna Louise Strong on February 4, 1917, the eve of the Seattle general strike.
These words were as much a reflection of her own enthusiasm and confusion as they were an analysis of the brave but naive Seattle working class. She found her way 15  months later to revolutionary Russia. Anna Louise Strong’s autobiography I Change Worlds (1937) is the chronicle of this journey to communism.
Drawn to the Soviet Union like so many progressives of her generation, her first assignment was famine relief on the Russian river Volga. Fresh from the Seattle general strike, Anna Louise thought she was hot stuff until she met the young Russian communist Sonia. Sonia was donating her month's vacation to help the relief efforts. Drought, civil war and imperialist invasion had left the area devastated. The world capitalists hoped to starve the new socialist state into submission with an embargo.
“It is utterly impossible,” lamented Strong upon seeing the starving thousands.
“There is nothing impossible” responded Sonia in clear firm tones.
“But millions will die!” said Anna Louise.
“Millions have already died” answered Sonia, with the steady hand of communist determination.
The NEP and U.S. aid
The New Economic Policy (NEP), instituted a year later, allowed some capitalist exploitation. In return, the U.S. sent a little food to the famine areas. Strong’s misgivings about the U.S. relief and the NEP were reflected in her reports about Puriayeff, chairman of relief in a small village near Samara. Puriayeff, near starvation because he refused to eat more than the famine-stricken villagers he organized, had to meet with a U.S. representative from Washington. Strong reported:
Full-fed and aggressively content, he (the American relief man) sat in the best rooms Samara afforded, consuming a copious meal of borsch, chicken and wine. On the floor beside him were great baskets of hams, canned goods, wines and stronger drinks with foreign labels.
Puriayeff looked not at the food; he looked at the man’s uniform - an officer’s uniform of fine cloth with shining buttons and epaulets, well brushed as if for a parade ... He had seen such uniforms before ... He had seen them on the Tsar’s officers and on the officers of the intervention. He had overthrown the men who wore them.
Then Puriayeff looked down at the hampers of food and wine; in his eyes was not the look of hunger, but of worried contempt. Was the old world he had helped overthrow coming back to rule the Volga?
The NEP ended in the late 20s. Under Joseph Stalin the Soviet five-year plans replaced NEP. The U.S. relief bureaucrats were sent packing, but not before they were caught smuggling thousands of dollars’ worth of Tsarist jewels, now the property of the Russian working class, out of the country. Pravda (the daily newspaper of the then Communist Party of the Soviet Union) publicized the scandal to Strong’s immense satisfaction.
Strong met many workers ready to work themselves to death (in fact a small number did) to build socialism during the first five-year plan. The Molvitino peasants stand out as an example. Molvitino was a small, back-water village, 50  miles from the railroad. Under the Tsar, it was plagued by pestilence and superstition. The Molvitinians, determined to become 20th  century socialists, sent a delegation to the regional center for the Party’s agricultural meeting. Sleepless, this delegation hiked and hitched, bluffed and bullied their way on horse carts, “commandeered” trucks and freight trains throughout the night to make the meeting on time at noon the next day. At the meeting they debated and decided, then fought their way home to carry out the Party’s line on agricultural production. We could learn a lot from these “backward peasants.”
Anna Louise Strong also met with Joseph Stalin to solve problems in her newspaper, The Moscow News. She described the comrades present: one was witty; the other was handsome; some were just trying to cover their asses. Stalin, the chairperson of the  Communist Party of Russia, was the least imposing. Hours later, she realized that Stalin had guided the collective to find its own will with his constant probing and questions. He was the best communist of his time, she concluded.
The “comrade-creators,” Strong’s affectionate name for Party members, shook the foundations of her liberal progressive illusions. She saw that the Roosevelt New Deal in the U.S. was “making the poor support the starving to save the rich.” She also saw how Germany could fall to fascism. “The pacifists had talked and talked and never acted. They had explained all their strengths and weaknesses, yet remained passive — just worried the capitalists into action.”
Strong’s ideas on love matured
“... I chose my husband, not from any of those emotional flurries which American romanticists call love but from a need far deeper - the deep, instinctive need of my own future. American youth, which wastes so much of life in bewildering emotion, needs to be told what I took years to know. To fall in love is very easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be. This I have found and hold.
What is this thing, I thought, that I call ‘truth and frankness,’ when in Washington they tell you personal details while in Moscow they discuss a nation’s plan.” — Her very idea of truth had changed.
She was becoming a communist; she saw the value of communist theory. It had taken her 14  years of experience of revolution in three countries (Russia, China and Mexico) to know that the California co-op movement was getting nowhere. The  communists in the United States knew it just from California and a book by Marx; she observed. She saw the value of a party and party discipline. Joining the party was “not to be chosen but to choose with others'. Freedom and comradeship can always grow wider. Increasing organization does not squeeze out freedom, but multiplies its vast variety of choices.”
I Change Worlds is much more than the story of a remarkable journalist’s travels from the U.S. to Russia. Anna Louise Strong also changed sides on the barricades. She chose the working class and communism. Her autobiography is useful for those of us who also desire to change worlds.J
For a digital copy of this book, click here or go to https://tinyurl.com/ichangeworlds

In July of 1877, workers in the United States, led by railroad strikers in Pittsburgh, showed the power of a militant, armed working class. That year, the U.S. was shaken by massive rebellions sparked when the railroad bosses cut the rail workers’ wages by 10 percent for the fourth time since 1873. The Panic of 1873 had started a depression that was devastating workers all across the country. That’s capitalism at work. It’s a constant stream of depressions, recessions, wars, climate disasters, and now a worldwide pandemic. Truly we have to get rid of this system that only benefits the capitalists.
With the fourth cut in their wages, workers in major rail centers in 16 of the then 38 states went on strike, first in West Virginia, then spreading through the country like wildfire. In Pittsburgh, the fightback took a new turn. The workers took up arms against the bosses’ troops. The local militia refused to fire upon the workers and even the local cops refused. Many other workers joined the striking and protesting railroad workers. Men from the local militia and even some cops joined the protests.
When the workers in Pittsburgh first struck, they took possession of all the main rail switches leading in and out of Pittsburgh. Rail traffic, except for passenger and mail service, was shut tight. When the Pennsylvania Railroad bosses realized that the Pittsburgh police could not do anything to stop this, and that the militia would not do anything, they decided to bring in “crack” troops from Philadelphia, at the other end of the state of Pennsylvania.
The troops from Philadelphia came to Pittsburgh and within a matter of hours they shot down 20 workers, some at the 28th Street crossing, where thousands of men, women, and children were gathered.
With this, the anger of the working class increased. Thousands of workers from all major industries in the city joined the rail workers and together they formed an army of 4,000 armed workers. This army included white workers, Black workers, and workers from dozens of countries. They were young and old, men and women. They trapped the Philadelphia troops in the locomotive roundhouse and held them there all night. Then by setting the building on fire, they smoked them out and ran them 20 miles out of the city.
For four days afterwards, the working class fought the bosses, controlling many parts of the city. They took over the telegraph station and ran passenger and mail trains. They destroyed over 100 locomotives, about 50 passenger cars and over 1,200 freight cars. They ransacked gun shops and a gun factory for weapons. Eventually, the U.S. government sent over 10,000 state and federal troops to regain control of the city.
This strike and insurrection led to more militant strikes that won some reforms for workers. In particular, by the end of the 19th century many workers had won the eight hour day, instead of working 10 to 12 hours six days a week. Yet here we are in 2021 and many workers are again working long hours for little pay. And racism, sexism, wars for profit, gross inequality and now a worldwide pandemic ravage the world. We have to keep fighting.
In Progressive Labor Party (PLP), we say that what the working class needs to rid ourselves of this bosses’ system is revolution. The PLP marched in Pittsburgh on July 23, 1977, the 100th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Commune. We did so not only to commemorate that valiant struggle, but to tell the workers of Pittsburgh that what they did in 1877 must be done again and again and again, until the bosses and their system of death is destroyed, and a system of communism is built.
Next time, we must not stop at taking a few of the bosses’ cities, but we must fight to smash their whole damn system and establish communism—a society run by and for the working class.J
Sources:Challenge-Desafio, May 19, 1977, p. 5; Walter Linder, “The National Railroad Strikes of 1877,’ 3 parts. SOC Newsletter; PLP, The Pittsburgh Insurrection and Railroad Strike of 1877, June 1977. This booklet has a bibliography of 17 entries.

July 13, 2021 was the 10th anniversary of the death of Milt Rosen, founding chairperson of Progressive Labor Party (PLP or PL). He served our organization and the working class in that capacity until 1995. The following is excerpted from the obituary that appeared in CHALLENGE August 3, 2011.

Sparked by Milt early on, PL exposed both counter-revolutionary revisionism and “revolutionary” nationalism as death traps of worker-boss unity. It indicted the state capitalists of the Soviet Union as far back as 1966, and then broke with the ones ruling the People’s Republic of China. Those failed revolutions led PL to advance beyond Marx’s two-stage theory that socialism was a first step toward communism; history had shown that socialism inevitably led back to the exploitation of capitalism. And unlike any other group on the landscape, the Party emphasized the importance of the fight against racism as a basic communist principle, not a mere tactic.
Milt’s first brush with the enormous power of communist ideas came as a 17-year-old soldier (he had lied about his age) in Italy in World War II.
In one of its first mass activities, PLM (Progressive Labor Movement - precursor to PLP) stood behind 500 wildcatting, armed coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky, who were locked in an all-out war with the coal barons to win decent conditions and wages.
On May 2, 1964, under PLM’s leadership, the first major demonstrations against the Vietnam War were staged in cities around the country.
Following the massive Washington anti-war rally in the spring of 1965, Milt saw that Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) had grown into the center of radical student politics. From 1966 to 1968, PL would do its largest-scale political organizing among students.
After stepping down as Party chair and before becoming too ill to function, Milt continued to make vital contributions to PL and the international movement. Among his most significant lessons was the need to understand the character of our historical period. Shortly after the events of 9/11, he spoke of how he’d underestimated the impact of the old communist movement’s demise, and how far it has set back the class struggle. This failing, he pointed out, could lead to one of two devastating errors: false optimism or despair over the formidable difficulties in building a mass communist party. Milt’s self-criticism reminded us that the old movement’s defeat may have left us in a “dark night,” but the working class has lived and fought through dark nights before.
While the end of the old movement was the worst setback we’ve ever suffered, it isn’t the end of history. It’s not the end of class struggle. Our Party exists all over the world, and small though it may be, it is growing. With words and by example, Milt taught the vital importance of a long-term outlook. More clearly than most, he knew there were no shortcuts to revolution. He embraced it as the commitment of a lifetime.
 More than anything, he taught us never to give up.