NEW YORK CITY, June 15—In a march yesterday meant to disrupt Governor Cuomo’s “Master Builder” award ceremony, 1,000 working class-tenants and youth—Black, Latin, Asian and white—marched against high rents and homelessness.  They chanted, “What do we want? Housing! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it, shut it down” and “This is class war. Tax the rich and house the poor.”
As capitalism continues to decay, housing for the working class is getting more and more scarce.
Cuomo continues Moses’s racist legacy
As the marchers turned onto super exclusive Park Avenue in Manhattan, militant youth led us into the street. We took over the entire uptown side of the street, stopping traffic.
Finally we moved onto the sidewalk as the police threatened to arrest us using their high decibel system. We later again poured into the street as we reached our destination, a luxury building where Governor Andrew Cuomo was receiving the Building Trades Employers Association first ever Robert Moses Master Builder award. It may be fitting since both Moses, the shamelessly racist architect of NYC segregation, and Cuomo are displacing the Black, Latin, and Asian working class by the thousands. Because of Moses and the City politicians, more than 250,000 people were displaced in the construction of New York City’s highways in the 1930s and ’40s.
Under Cuomo, who is up for reelection this year, there has been a “36 percent increase in homelessness, up to nearly 90,000 people statewide since his Cuomo 2010 campaign” (Patch, 6/15). The housing court has churned out thousands of evictions. “About 232,000 cases were filed last year against tenants, roughly one for every 10 city rentals. Most tenants were accused of owing back rent. But in many cases, tenants were sued for rent they did not owe” (NYT, 5/20).
Cuomo was the target of the community groups who sponsored the event, saying it was “Cuomo’s housing crisis.” A member of Progressive Labor Party carried a sign that said, “It’s not just Cuomo, it’s capitalism.” Another comrade distributed 120 Challenge newspapers.
Of course, opportunists like actor-turned-politician Cynthia Nixon criticized Cuomo for taking sides of the real estate bosses. Nixon is a challenger of Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for governor. She said she was proud to stand “renters not developers, with people not with wealthy corporate donors” (Patch, 6/14). Workers know a politician “cannot keep profits out of politics” and in the event that Nixon does become governor, she too will be reigned in by the billionaires.  
Rent is killing us
Anger is growing as the housing crisis worsens in NYC (see page 8).
89,000 people are in shelters and thousands more live in the streets, including families with children.
100,000 rent stabilized apartments have been lost, especially as racist real estate developers and financiers rapidly gentrify neighborhoods.
As one tenant said, “The rents are killing us!”
Another said “The politicians? The landlords have bought them.”
Real estate developers move in like vampires and finance high-rent housing. Government officials claim the new housing is “affordable.” But this is based on NYC’s “median income,” approximately $55,000 a year for a family of four. In working-class neighborhoods where many tenants are Black, Latin, or seniors, it is common for almost half of the tenants to have incomes of about $28,000 a year.
Bushwick tenants fight racist displacement
In the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn (which is 65 percent Latin and 20 percent Black), tenants are fighting the Camber Property Group developers’ plans to build two nine-story buildings with 122 apartments. Only 27 would be “affordable,” for families whose income is at least $51,000 a year. This development would kick out existing tenants, a boxing club, a restaurant, a laundromat and a parking lot used by workers at a nearby hospital.
On June 11 several members of PLP participated with others at a local hearing for people regarding the development. The misleaders of Local 32 BJ, the largest union of property service workers, spoke in favor because the new owners had promised maintenance jobs for mere a 12 union members. Everyone was shocked that a union “ally” would support a project that would eliminate 50 jobs in the community.
PLP says that the working class must never allow ourselves to be divided and pitted against each other by capitalist opportunists and sellouts. We need to fight for more jobs for our class.
The fight goes on. PLP is gradually building in the community organizations we’re participating in. While the leadership of these groups calls for reforms, in lock step with the Democratic Party, PL’ers call for communist revolution as the way to free our class from the chains of capitalism.

LOS ANGELES, June 23—All over Los Angeles this week, communities have protested the family separations, jails for babies and children, and Immigration Customs and Enforcements (ICE) raids. Some held vigils and started an occupation in front of the downtown Los Angeles immigrant detention center. Others held rallies in their local neighborhoods. Progressive Labor Party participated in a rally that revealed the need for multiracial unity against the bosses.
No child is free under capitalism
In one Black working class neighborhood in South Los Angeles, a rally was called on Friday evening. PLP organized friends and nearby residents to come out and make our voices heard. But the rally was sparsely attended. This neighborhood is in the middle of a fight against gentrification. One ogranizer from Little Africa, a local group in the neighborhood, spoke some truth about the hundreds of years of Black children being separated from their families through poverty and mass incarceration. Then, it got ugly. Another speaker parroted Trump’s hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric in an attempt to scare white liberals out of the neighborhood.
Some people in the crowd were Black nationalists who called for more Black-owned businesses that they believe will employ local, underemployed workers. Nationalism feeds into these false divisions between members of the working class. PLP calls for internationalism, no bosses, no borders—just one working class united. As one sign said: “No Child is Free Until All Are Free.”
Long history of state terror
Imperialist powers have a long history of separating children from their parents (see page 2). In Nazi Germany, Jewish families were forced into concentration camps where children were separated from their parents and gassed to death. Now, under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings, the U.S. government is seizing migrant children (including infants) from their parents and putting them in separate detention centers while their parents are held on misdemeanor charges for trying to enter the U.S.
Corridor of capitalist violence
Most of the migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. from the southern border are from three Central American countries (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), countries where the U.S. spawned military regimes, as well as enacted trade policies such as NAFTA that helped create intolerable living conditions for the working class (see page 5). Migrants are trying to save the lives of their families, and yet U.S. courts have rejected over 75 percent of their asylum requests (NYT, 5/2). Migrants from Haiti are also coming through Mexico but with the end of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) they are settling in Mexicali and Tijuana because they can’t cross the southern border.
Hypocrisy of the Dems
 As communists, we agree that the liberal politicians don’t care about Black people or migrant workers until they need them for the next election or to fight their imperialist wars. Now the Democrat leaders are expressing outrage when in the previous administraion, they turned a blind eye to the Deporter-in-Chief, Obama, who deported over 3 million immigrants and Hillary Clinton, who supported deporting unaccompanied children and called for “jailing black predators.”
Although unauthorized entry into the U.S. is half what it was in the 1990s and unemployment has fallen in recent years, Trump is trying to con white and Black workers into believing that immigrants are stealing their jobs, rather than the owners who send production and jobs abroad or who automate their operations. This has a political purpose: to keep working people from realizing one of their greatest resources—their number and their unity.
Trump and his supporters are building fascist terror and trying to keep the U.S. working class divided against itself. As they prepare for wider war, we must sharpen class struggle. On the job, in the schools, on the campuses, in our churches and community groups we must fight for a communist understanding of the world. Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite!

CHICAGO, June 23—Comrades from Progressive Labor Party here deepened our connections to the working class, taking an active role in two anti-racist events organized through local mass organizations. Current personal ties were strengthened while new ones were made, as we boldly connected the struggles to the need for communist revolution and the dictatorship of the working class.
Reform and revolution
The first action that we participated in took place in the south side neighborhood of Bronzeville, an area where the Party has been working to build a bigger base among workers. Bronzeville has been a Black working-class neighborhood for decades, and has a proud history of anti-racist fight-back and communist organizing. However, like many areas of the city, the neighborhood is gentrifying rapidly as the racist real estate bosses seek to make a land grab through their connections to the city’s liberal politicians.
Bronzeville was also home to Maurice Granton Jr, the 24-year-old Black father who was murdered at the hands of the racist Chicago Police Department (CPD) on June 6 (see CHALLENGE, 6/27). Since the capitalist state-sanctioned murder of Maurice, our Party collective has been pushing to spend even more time near the Green Line train stop where he was killed in order to connect with friends, family, and other workers who are interested in organizing a response.
An organization fighting for a civilian-based police review board for the city had also planned to be in the neighborhood to show support for Maurice and engage community members with their reform petition. Several comrades have been active within this group and make calls for a revolutionary line while building the reform struggle. In turn, members of the reform group, including workers affected by racist mass incarceration and kkkop torture, have spoken at Party events about their struggles against the bosses’ attacks.
Both PLP and the reform group were able to supplement one another and turn up in the neighborhood. We shared the bullhorn to give speeches, and canvassed the block to get workers’ contact information and distribute literature. Many expressed thanks for our openly anti-racist, anti-CPD presence in their are. More workers wanted to organize a march to demand justice for Maurice from CPD and the city bosses.
Conservative and liberal bosses both anti-immigrant
That afternoon, PL’ers travelled north to the Rogers Park neighborhood to participate in a demonstration against the Trump administration’s openly fascist spike in separating immigrant working families at the U.S.-Mexico border (see editorial, page 2).
Although this demonstration was considerably larger than the previous action, the politics were weaker. Many speakers pushed voting in the upcoming midterm elections as a “solution,” suggesting that the way to fight back against racist deportations and fascist state terror is to “build a blue wave” in the state.
As communists, we must attack the racist liberal politicians from the left, exposing their role in pushing anti-immigrant, anti-worker violence. Many of the immigrant detention centers that imprison the separated children today were constructed under Obama.
Voting under capitalism will never change the essence of this violence; all that really changes are faces of our oppressors. Communist revolution, led by a mass international PLP that smashes the bosses’ state and replaces it with an egalitarian worker-run society, remains the only way out.
Although given our size, we couldn’t dramatically alter the tone of this rally, we still made an impact. Many marchers complimented our t-shirts linking CPD to the fascist ICE, and were willing to take CHALLENGE and engage in conversation. More plans were made for another rally in an area of the city with a larger immigrant worker presence, in which more comrades plan to participate.
Dig deep to build revolution
The impact that we were able to generate by participating in the actions highlights the importance of continuing to “dig deep” and build a base within working-class communities and the mass movement. There are no real shortcuts in the path to communist revolution; just constant struggle and evaluation.
Killer cops gunning down Black youth in the streets of Chicago and thousands of Central American children and their parents detained in concentration camps are all connected. They are all part of the daily violence of capitalism. Our duty remains to keep connecting these fights into the broader revolutionary struggle against the profit system and the building of workers’ power.

On July 14, 1789, poor workers took over the Bastille, a medieval prison in Paris and symbol of feudal, aristocratic power. The great French Revolution had began! The capitalist class (bourgeosie) would replace the monarchy (king and nobles). But some advanced revolutionaries were advocating an egalitarian, communist society. This was the birth of the modern working-class communist movement!
France was then an agricultural society ruled by noble landowners and a powerful Catholic church, with the king at the top. The urban bourgeoisie wanted a constitutional monarchy giving them more political power. They needed the urban workers, called “sans-culottes,” to fight for them against the monarchy. But for a few years the sans-culottes fought for their own interests.
The sudden, violent overthrow of the French monarchy and landed aristocracy proved that the status quo was not “God-given,” not inevitable, not the product of “human nature.” It proved that the political structure could be changed for the better. Not only was a society with more equality and less exploitation possible, but the French Revolution also gave birth to future revolutionary communist movements.
The French Revolution was inspired by the Enlightenment, a bourgeois movement that attacked monarchies and feudalism. The Enlightenment popularized talk of human rights—anti-racism, political rule by the people, the rights of women, and equality for all. It argued that the power of kings and aristocrats was illegitimate.
In 1789 the French King had called a nationwide meeting (Estates-General) of nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie, to vote him new taxes. When the bourgeoisie refused the King tried to shut them down. But the sans-culottes rebelled and stormed the Bastille. The revolution began. Here are some lessons, especially from the most radical and democratic period of 1789 to 1795.
* The sans-culottes of the cities—workers, journeymen, apprentices, working women—always pushed the Revolution ahead, towards more equality, more rights and power for working people.
* The sans-culottes had no political party. The party of petty-bourgeois revolutionaries and sincere idealists who worked most closely with them was called the Jacobins. But the working class needs its own party. It is the job of the Progressive Labor Party to fulfill that historic task today.
* It was the mass actions of the sans-culottes, sometimes supported by the most radical Jacobins, who pushed the Revolution to adopt the most democratic reforms.
The bourgeoisie, intellectuals, and sans-culottes all united to get rid of the king and aristocracy and to take land from the Church. After that, their interests no longer coincided. The radical bourgeoisie needed the sans-culottes only as long as foreign armies threatened to destroy the Revolution.
Seizing the lands of aristocrats and the Church gave peasants their own land. They wanted higher prices for the food they grew. But the urban sans-culottes needed low prices. So the peasants’ economic interests were more aligned with the bourgeois merchants, traders, and landlords than with those of the sans-culottes.
Once foreign armies were driven back, the bourgeois representatives—some of whom had been executed as counter revolutionaries—turned against the Jacobins and the sans-culottes and established a more repressive state. After 1795 the propertied bourgeoisie was in firm control. They organized a bourgeois dictatorship, and then an authoritarian empire under Napoleon Bonaparte.
Gracchus Babeuf, a poor, self-taught worker, headed the last and most radical, movement of the Revolution. His “Conspiracy for Equality” was crushed and Babeuf executed. But one of his followers, Buonarroti, survived to influence the working-class and student militants of the 1840s, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And the working class of Europe learned from the experience of the sans-culottes of France. The Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, were the first revolutions by the industrial working class, the proletariat. They grew from the lessons of the great French Revolution.