NEW YORK CITY, September 13—The power of the recent antiracist rebellions has spread to the mostly white, Upper West Side (UWS) of Manhattan, emerging in a fight over homelessness, racism and inequality. Antiracists are fighting against the displacement of homeless workers from overcrowded shelters into empty hotels so they can physically distance during the Covid-19 crisis, which has emptied the hotels in the first place.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends on the UWS have been involved in this fight from the beginning, involving our co-workers, union members and friends from other organizations, while making new friends.
Homelessness is an integral part of the racist, capitalist, profit system. Hospitals and schools are understaffed, but homeless workers can’t find jobs. There is no profit to be made.
Roads, bridges and mass transit need massive upgrades, but there is no money, as the billionaire capitalists are getting richer. And many homeless workers are working, but can’t make enough to pay the exorbitant rents.
 We are struggling with our friends and neighbors to see it’s not just Donald Trump to blame for this racist system; we need a communist revolution to get rid of this racist capitalist nightmare  once and for all.
Racists organize against the homeless
At the end of July, the NYC Department of Human Services (DHS) moved 270 homeless men into the Lucerne Hotel on Amsterdam Ave. There are about 700 homeless workers in four UWS hotels, and thousands more in 60 hotels around the city.
Following this decision, a racist movement, spearheaded by former Mayor and Trump-lackey Rudy Ghouliani and his former deputy Randy Mastro, organized UWS for Safer Streets (SS) to have the men evicted from the Lucerne.

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Racist homelessness by the numbers

• Approximately 57 percent of heads of household in shelters are Black, 32 percent are Latin.
• In May 2020, there were 13,523 homeless families with 20,044 homeless children in the New York City shelter system. Families make up more than two-thirds of the homeless shelter population.
• During the 2019 fiscal year, 132,660 different homeless people slept in the City shelter system, including over 44,300 children.
• The number of homeless people sleeping in shelters is now 61 percent higher than it was 10  years ago. The number of homeless single adults is 133 percent higher than it was 10  years ago.
• The primary cause of homelessness, especially among families, is lack of affordable housing. That’s a symptom of capitalism.  
• Every night, thousands of unsheltered,         unhoused people sleep on the streets, in the subway and in other public spaces.
• Studies show that the large majority of homeless people are living with mental illness or other severe health problems. (coalitionforthehomeless.org).

The “debate” over the Social Security’s (SS) “crisis” is a cover for a trillion-dollar looting of the SS Trust Fund, pulled off for over 52 years by every Democratic and Republican president who has occupied the White House — Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, Nixon, Reagan, the two Bushes, and now Trump. It’s a crisis, not of SS but one of U.S. capitalism, mired in a multi-trillion debt resulting from illegally spending the workers’ SS surpluses to finance U.S. imperialism’s wars against Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It mirrors a general law of the profit system: shift the bosses’ financial burdens onto the backs of the working class.
Back in 1968, when the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was in high gear, the Johnson administration’s war expenditures were spinning the Federal budget into bottomless debt. Since the SS Trust Fund was running a surplus — its income from payroll taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks was exceeding the pensions paid out to retirees — the Johnson gang used a shrewd maneuver to “balance the budget”: “fold” this SS surplus into a newly labeled “Unified Federal Budget.” This violated the bosses’ law banning use of SS Trust Fund money for purposes other than SS.
By this sleight-of-hand, Johnson could announce a federal government “surplus,” masking the deficit in federal spending generated by the enormous expenses of the Vietnam War. To avoid the appearance of stealing the SS Trust Fund’s surplus, the government gave the SS Trust Fund U.S. Treasury notes equal to it’s “loan” from the Fund, promising to pay back the loan with interest. This meant that the SS surpluses — now part of this Unified Federal Budget — could be used to pay for all federal government costs, “for everything from jet fighters to thumb tacks” (NY Times, 1/21/90), especially for the proliferating “forever” wars. These wars resulted in mounting federal deficits, laying the basis for an enormous debt to pay back the trillions “loaned” from the SS Fund: “Over the second and third decades of the 21st century, Congress will have to appropriate a total of $5 trillion for Social Security,” NY Times, 1/31/95), a crisis indeed, composed of SS surpluses paid into the SS Fund by — and stolen from — the working class.
This U.S. bosses’ deficit crisis is part of the general crisis of capitalism. They will always try to solve that crisis on the backs of workers, who produce all the value in society. Such “solutions” will continue until the working class, led by its revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, rises up to destroy the ruling class’s state power and establishes a society in which retired workers will be provided for by the social value produced by our entire class. Bosses, profits and imperialist wars will be buried forever.
In the 1980s, the Reagan gang executed a neat maneuver to shift still more of the tax burden onto the working class. It raised the payroll taxes into Social Security 23 percent while lowering the top income tax rate benefiting the rich from 70 percent down to 28 percent, and lowering corporate income taxes by 23 percent. Presumably workers and bosses each pay 7.65 percent of their payrolls into the Social Security Trust Fund. However, the bosses’ share comes out of their profit from the workers’ labors, so actually workers are really saddled with the entire 15.3 percent. The combination of these increases on workers and decreases on the bosses meant, “The burden of taxation was shifted from the income tax to the Social Security tax….[so 75 percent] of all Americans now pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes….[Therefore] the expenses of government are financed more by a tax on the poor and the middle class and less by a tax on the wealthy” (NY Times, 1/21/90). Thus, the Social Security surpluses stolen by the bosses in the Unified Federal Budget [see main article] wreaked still further havoc on the working class.

Just as the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were distorted so that their advocacy of violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ignored by social democrats who advocated a peaceful transition to socialism through a combination of reform demands and elections, so too have bourgeois educational theorists around the world ignored and sidestepped the communist message contained in Paolo Freire’s book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  
The word pedagogy means the theory and practice of education. It literally means to walk around teaching people, and it comes from the practice of the Greek philosopher Socrates who walked around the city of Athens gathering students around him and questioning the legitimacy of the government by use of the dialectical method of questioning. Socrates was forced by the Athenian ruling class to commit suicide, which he did rather than renounce the truths that he and his students had discovered.
Marx famously proclaimed that the purpose of philosophy is not merely to understand the world but to change it. It logically follows that the purpose of education is not merely to understand the world but to change the world by means of revealing the oppressive nature of capitalism, then taking action by mass revolutionary violence led by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to establish the dictatorship of the working class.
This is the program which is also supported by Paolo Freire, but which has been ignored by his bourgeois academic “interpreters.” To gain a further understanding of Freire’s educational theories, which were first proposed a little over 50  years ago, let us first examine Paolo Freire’s life and the historical times in which he lived and practiced education of workers and peasants.
Dialectical and historical
materialism in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paolo Freire was born into a “middle-class” family in Brazil in the 1930’s but his family lost everything during the great crisis of capitalism that enveloped the world at that time, and which led to the rise of fascism. His family moved into the most neglected and working-class neighborhood  in Recife, Brazil, where Freire experienced the extremes of poverty, hunger and oppression first-hand. His playmates were other working-class children.  He managed to obtain an education in the bourgeois sense, but he never forgot the lessons that experience taught him about  the violence of capitalism against workers.  Coming of intellectual age in the 1950’s Freire was influenced by the writings of Marx, Engels and Vladimir Lenin. He was also influenced by the writings of the existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Simone De Beauvoir and Erich Fromm who were capitalist critics acceptable to the bosses. In 1964 Freire was imprisoned by the fascist government of Brazil, and ultimately went into exile in the U.S.
Freire’s writings can be used in a reformist way, or in a revolutionary way, and a reading of his book shows that his main intent was revolutionary, communist, and in support of a mass movement to overthrow capitalist oppression, as we shall now discuss.
The revolutionary aspect of Freire’s theory of education
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed does not explicitly call for the organization of a vanguard revolutionary communist party to violently overthrow capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the working class. But the book, over the course of four chapters does, in fact, advocate these Marxist-Leninist precepts. Further, Freire cites by name, usually in footnotes, the revolutionaries from whom he derives these educational theories. He quotes from Marx, Engles, Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse Tung whenever he makes a critical main point in a theory. He endorses base building, the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the workers, and the need for what he describes as “revolutionary leaders.”
Freire advocates a dialogue, a dialectical conversation, between revolutionary leaders and the masses. This must be a discussion among comrades, where there is a dual aspect involved. The teacher is a student of the people, and the people are students of the teacher. Teachers/Revolutionary Leaders and students reciprocally learn and teach. Freire is critical of the bourgeois “banking” concept of education in which students passively memorize and repeat back to the teacher what the teacher authority tells them. Naturally, it is somewhat clear that in the public and private schools of any capitalist country that information is conveyed laden with a poisonous dose of ruling class ideology. Thus, Freire warned teachers, at that time many of whom were volunteers in literacy programs in Latin America, that teaching workers  to read was not enough.
The students had to be taught to think for themselves by means of mastering critical thinking which Freire expressly states is to master the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The combination of learning to read with dialectical materialism, then putting this combination into practice to overthrow the oppressor is the core of Freire’s educational philosophy.  Further, by emphasizing that revolutionary leaders and workers are comrades, Freire offers a method to avoid revisionism by empowering millions to understand and apply dialectical materialism to the experience of class oppression. This jibes with the Progressive Labor Party’s theory of the need for a mass party of millions of workers internationally to make revolution.
Bourgeois academicians, anarchists, and phony liberals talk about how great the book is and how it influenced them, but, in the end, they are all opportunists and apologists for capitalism. Not one calls for communist revolution, which is the real intent of the book.
When Jean Paul Sartre renounced existentialism, the philosophy he had developed over 40  years (and advocated communism), the bosses stopped teaching it. New ruling-class theories such as structuralism, semiotics, identity politics, and so forth came into vogue. Freire’s theories are far to the left of these, but the fact that Freire’s advocacy of communism is subtle means that he can easily be misinterpreted and used by the intellectual lackeys of the bosses in fake attacks on the status quo. Nevertheless, because Freire has a class analysis and advocates dialectical materialism, he can still be useful in ideological struggles in a university setting by PLP members in discussions with students and teachers who are seeking the truth in good faith.

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Existentialism: a dead-end
capitalist ideology
Many of the existentialists that influenced Freire had been part of the anti-fascist, underground movement, especially in France. However, primarily due to their own individualism they did not join the communist parties of their countries, but rather viewed themselves as friendly critics of communism. The existentialists, who influenced Freire, were viewed by the bosses as dangerous on one level because of their critique of bourgeois ideology, but ultimately as a “safer” third route  between communism and capitalism, because the alienated middle class intellectuals to whom they appealed would not necessarily join an organized communist party because of their individualist response to capitalist culture and its lies.
However, just as many of the Bohemian students in 1848 and 1871 in France became ardent revolutionaries and joined left wing parties and groups, so too by the revolutionary year of 1968, many Bohemian students around the world, decided to join communist parties, such as the PLP, and to participate in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the U.S., and in the French Worker Student Revolt of 1968.
Jean Paul Sartre, the primary philosopher of SDS, went from being a university teacher in the 1930’s, to an underground activist in the 1940’s, to a pro-communist critic in the 1950’s, to a street vendor of a Maoist newspaper in 1968. At the end of his life Sartre pronounced that existentialism was ultimately a dead end, and that only communist revolution could liberate society. Interestingly, Sartre sent a letter of support for the PLP during the Harlem rebellion. Yet, it is not believed that Sartre ever joined a communist party. And it is not known whether or not Freire ever joined a communist party.

INDIANA, August 31 – The ongoing kkkop terrorism that is essential to capitalism has been met around the country with intense antiracist, multiracial fightback. Even when faced with armed gutter racist militias in league with killer cops, workers in areas like Kenosha, Portland and Minnesota stood strong in solidarity.
Unfortunately, some workers have paid with their lives. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and four other local social justice organizations joined to host this protest rally and march today in support of growing anti-racist and anti-fascist fights.
Building the fight for communism means showing workers what we fight for. It's necessary that we stand with workers in mass organizations who want to fight against capitalist inequality. We also must build genuine, personal relationships with other workers, share our politics as the alternative to voting and pacifism, and win dedicated fighters to our Party.  
Making fightback primary
Approximately 85 workers gathered on the rally day with very short notice, proving that antiracism and antifascism are more present among our class than the capitalist media would have us believe. Despite the most recent murders and attacks by cops across the country, multiracial groups of workers have continued to press forward in the face of politically-sanctioned state terror. The organizers are no strangers to standing up and fighting back in the face of growing oppression.
A point of unity in all comments by speakers was the urge to continue to fight back against the bosses' attacks and the gains made from fighting racism and sexism in unity with each other.  A speaker from an anti-racist group tied Black workers’ fight to the long-term fight of all against injustice in this country. She encouraged workers to continue in this struggle and expressed hope that it will be won.
These views were shared by the family of Jamal Williams, as they spoke about their unwavering fight for justice. Jamal was killed by former cops who were security guards at Community Hospital in Indiana, where he admitted himself due to a mental health crisis. Jamal's parents recounted that the guards attacked him, and responded to his self-defense with fatal gunshots. Even in our times of most need, in places where we're supposed to get treatment, our class is met with bullets. As a Party, we stress that these abuses are not exceptions; they are standard operating procedures under this capitalist system. Jamal’s family, with support of the Party and many other workers in the area, has been leading consistent actions in front of the hospital, demanding justice and policy changes.
From the front lines of Kenosha
A PL’er who traveled twice to Kenosha with other Party members to join workers in militant struggles spoke about how PLP's role has always been to join with workers fighting back, wherever they are.
He gave this message of empowerment that comrades got from their experiences: "I think Kenosha, like Chicago, like Northwest Indiana, Baltimore, like Watts in the 1960s, all these different things are showing us what we need to do when this system attacks us and that is we have to fight back. We can't rely on politicians; we know whose side they're on. We know how many people Obama deported. We know how he was silent when Black folks were getting killed under his administration. So we gotta understand that these politicians, no matter how many promises they give us or what they say, they will never fight for us, they will never stand up for us.
Only we can do that." The PL’er  noted that a key similarity between protests in Kenosha, Minneapolis, and various other places is multiracial working class solidarity. A unity among workers of different identities, areas and nationalities fighting back against this brutal system.
 Workers not relying on politicians to save them, but each other, and realizing that no amount of voting or praying will stop these attacks; only smashing this capitalist system will free us.
Building our Party to smash the bosses
After these action-inspiring speakers, the Party rallied workers to take the fight directly to cops in the area. Those who were able joined us in a march to the local cop department, chanting loudly, “The workers fight, the workers win!” announcing our united presence.  Throughout the event, PL’ers spoke about why it is necessary for revolution to be the goal of the activism we're seeing now.
We pressed that the ongoing cycle of the liberal reform will never win freedom for our class from this capitalist hell. Only an international communist Party, led by masses of workers and guided by revolutionary politics, can do that.
Our Party pushes to build lasting relationships with workers who are willing to fight. Being involved with mass movements is an important part of that, as is building lasting relationships, and being upfront about PLP, our line, and our desire to have these brave fighters join us in the fight for revolution.