- Information
NYC housing history - Stuytown: communists led antiracist fight
- Information
- 02 February 2023 210 hits
This involved demolishing 18 square blocks of the “gas house” section of lower Manhattan’s East Side, displacing 11,000 low-income workers and their families. No more than 3 percent of them would be able to afford even the modest rents in the new development.
Bosses’ stooges back racist exclusion
MetLife “developed Stuyvesant Town with the understanding that better living conditions would improve the company’s mortality numbers and therefore annual earnings”(nycurbanism.com). “Both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune argued passionately for the right of Met Life to bar Blacks from the complex” (Horne, page 126).
Communist councilman Benjamin Davis and allies got a City Council bill passed fining corporations that discriminated. But Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Port Authority Chairman Robert Moses, and MetLife chairman Frederick Ecker made sure MetLife was exempted. MetLife agreed to build the Riverton Houses in Harlem for Black residents – but these were much smaller and substandard. Of course, this in no way excused MetLife’s refusal to rent to Black workers at Stuytown.
Davis and a few others insisted that “Stuytown” be integrated. Frederick Eckert, president of racist MetLife, refused, saying:
"Negroes and whites don’t mix … If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property."
Reds lead fightback
In a 1947 lawsuit filed by three Black veterans, the court sided with MetLife. No Black families were allowed to rent. Davis kept up the pressure on MetLife even after he was defeated in an anticommunist campaign in 1949. He called MetLife chair Ecker “the white supremacy architect of Stuyvesant Town [and] head of the biggest Jim Crow oligarchy in the world.”
Lee Lorch, a Communist Party member and a leader of the antiracist struggle, said it was well known that Stuyvesant Town:
"was going to be an all-white project… going there carried an obligation to fight discrimination. That’s the way a lot of people felt."
In a 2010 interview, Lorch added:
"When you got into Stuyvesant Town, there was a serious moral dilemma … In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people had seen the end results of racism."
Committee formed to combat racist attacks
In 1948, with communists in the lead, residents formed the Town and Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town. The poll they took proved that 62 percent of Stuytown residents supported integration.
The Committee published a pamphlet titled A Landlord vs the People … The cover photo shows all the Committee’s leadership.
Liberal courts defend racists
When the court denied the lawsuit, the Committee swung into action. First, they arranged for the Hendrixes, a Black working-class family, to stay in the apartment of the Kessler family while they were away. Jesse Kessler, an organizer for the union District 65, CIO, was a communist too. When he returned, the Lorch family invited the Hendrix family to live in their apartment.
Led by communists and union activists, the Tenants Committee put out flyers and pamphlets attacking MetLife’s racism.
Leo Miller, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where “the courage and sharp shooting of a Negro machine-gunner saved my life with a dozen other white GIs,” asked, “Can anyone of us who live in Stuyvesant Town say he may not be my neighbor? I can’t.” Another veteran and his wife said: “We don’t want our children growing up as part of a privileged group and believing from their experiences that Negroes are a people apart.” (Biondi, page 128)
MetLife refused to renew the leases of the Committee organizers and scheduled their forcible evictions. Lorch recalled:
"We had decided -- and this was the general feeling on the committee -- we weren't going to go quietly, that we would resist, they'd have to throw us out by force."
The Committee and activists from pro-communist unions guarded the apartments and prevented the evictions.
MetLife finally gave in – but only a little. It permitted 15 Black families to move in. However, it insisted that “in return” the Committee organizers move out! The Lorch family and others did so, so that Stuytown would no longer be “Jim Crow.”
Red-baiting of an antiracist fighter
City College fired Lorch because of his antiracist work in the Stuytown committee. He then moved to Penn State, where the president told him:
.. to explain this stuff about Stuyvesant Town they'd been getting phone calls from wealthy alumni essentially wanting to know why I had been hired and how quickly I could be fired.
Lorch lasted only a year at Penn State. A college official told him that his decision to permit a Black family to live in his New York apartment was “extreme, illegal and immoral and damaging to the public relations of the college.”
One thousand students signed a petition saying that his dismissal was “unacceptable.” The world-famous scientist, Albert Einstein, also weighed in on his behalf. (Bagli)
Lorch and his family then moved to Fisk, a histroically Black university in Nashville, TN.
At Fisk, Mr. Lorch taught three of the first Blacks ever to receive doctorates in mathematics. But there, too, his activism, like his attempt to enroll his daughter in an all-Black school and refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist ties, got him in trouble.
Fired from Fisk in 1955, he moved to Philander Smith, a small Black college in Arkansas. There Grace Lorch, who had organized teachers in Boston, organized help for Black students who were integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, walked with the Black students and tutored them. She and Lorch enrolled their daughter in an all-Black school and became active in the NAACP.
Lorch was fired here too because he refused to cooperate with the anticommunist Congressional committee. The field secretary of the NAACP wrote him:
The best contribution you could make to the cause of full citizenship for Negroes in Arkansas at this time would be to terminate, in writing, your affiliation with the Little Rock Branch, N.A.A.C.P.
Meanwhile, Lorch said, “Thurgood Marshall has been busy poisoning as many people as he can against us.” Marshall later became a Supreme Court justice.
Ethel Payne, of the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender wrote:
Because he believed in the principles of decency and justice, and the equality of men under God, Lee Lorch and his family have been hounded through four states from the North to the South like refugees in displaced camps … And in the process of punishing Lee Lorch for his views, three proud institutions of learning have been made to grovel in the dust and bow the knee to bigotry.
Communist Black poet Langston Hughes had written about the promotion of anti-Black racism by these and other Black colleges in the essay Cowards From the Colleges.
Unable because of racism and anticommunism to get a job anywhere in the U.S., the Lorches moved to Canada, where Lorch taught and did research for the next 60 years. He does not regret the decision he made at Stuyvesant Town six decades ago.
I would have paid a higher price living with my conscience if I hadn’t done it … I thought then, and still do, that it was an important struggle worth any sacrifice in pursuing it. I have no regret over what we did, or what it cost us …
“Stuytown” remained open to Black residents until it was “privatized” 20 years ago.J
Sources: Martha Biondi. To Stand and Fight (Harvard, 2003); Liz Fox, “Desegregating the ‘Walled Town’ (online); Amy Fox, “Battle in Black and White;” Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects (Oxford, 2010); Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money (Dutton, 2013); Bagli, New York Times 11.21.2010; Obituary of Lee Lorch, L’Humanité March 5, 2014 (in French); Lee Lorch obituary, New York Times March 3, 2014; Gerald Horne, Black Liberation, Red Scare (Newark, DE 1994). “Lee Lorch”, “Grace Lorch”, Wikipedia; CHALLENGE January 30, 2002.
- Information
80th Anniversary of Battle of Stalingrad: Red Army’s victory vs Nazi scum
- Information
- 02 February 2023 146 hits
The Russian Revolution of November 7, 1917, is the most important event in the history of class struggle. The multi-national Russian working class seized state power and held it for decades. The Bolsheviks (the Russian Communist Party) led the workers to defeat Russian and foreign armies that tried to overthrow them in a hard-fought four-year civil war from 1917 to 1921.
From 1929 to 1941 the Bolsheviks, now under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, ended the remnants of capitalism and collectivized agriculture to stop the endless series of devastating famines. They created the Five-Year Plans to industrialize the enormous country.
They outlawed racism! The Bolsheviks led the American Communist Party to make the fight against racism primary in all its struggles. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continues to be the only leftist party to make the fight against racism and nationalism primary in our struggle to build a revolutionary party.
The Bolsheviks also organized the Soviet working class to build a mighty Red Army for the wars that they knew would come. The ruling class celebrates D-Day as the end of World War II (WWII) but it was really the defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad that dealt the death blow to the fascist armies. The ruling class pushes WWII as a victory for so-called democracy and uses it to rally the working class to support future imperialist wars. Instead, we celebrate the communist discipline and heroism of the working class in the Battle of Stalingrad!
Fascists invade
On June 22, 1941, the fascist German, Italian, and Finnish armies invaded the Soviet Union, with hundreds of thousands of troops from other fascist and German occupied countries. The German Blitzkrieg tactic was to punch through defense lines and cut off and capture huge pockets of encircled enemy troops. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the first few months. But many continued to fight on, breaking out of encirclement, and forming partisan bands behind the fascist lines.
The Germans had never met fighters like the Soviet troops. “The Russian troops... [act] in striking contrast to the Poles and the Western Allies,” wrote the German commanding general. “Even when encircled, the Russians stood their ground and fought.” Then there turned out to be more Soviet soldiers, better equipped, than the Germans thought possible. As summer 1942 approached, the Nazis again seized the initiative. Now they tried an indirect approach.
Stalingrad
They aimed an offensive south at Stalingrad, center of critical war production and the southern oil fields. Without oil and production capacity the Soviets would be defeated. In August, the Nazi 6th Army launched massive air, artillery and tank attacks.
The Red Army fought to the death for literally every building in the city. Their orders from Supreme Headquarters were “Not one step back.” (https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/the-nazi-tide-stops/no-one-steps-back/) Their mission was to pin down the enemy to buy time for a counterattack to be launched.
The Nazis captured 80 percent of the city. Finally, the Soviets controlled only a narrow strip of land. At their backs was the Volga River. On the far bank was their artillery support.
Next the Soviet soldiers were sent to factory strongpoints. They were organized in small groups of six to eight men, trained in hand-to-hand combat. The heroic workers continued production at the tank factory. They drove each newly built tank directly from the assembly line into battle.
“Here [in Stalingrad], heavily outnumbered and outgunned, Soviet defenders fought battles house-to-house. It was in that city that workers, men and women, were won to the necessity of defending their new workers' society. They voluntarily remained at their machines making tanks for the battlefield just outside their factory while bombs fell all around them. If ever an example is needed of the Communist spirit, it is Stalingrad. These defenders had courage, sacrifice, determination and camaraderie--what a boundless sea of what's best in humanity!” (CHALLENGE SUPPLEMENT, 05/17/1995)
By January 1943, preparations were complete. Shocking the German command, the Soviets counterattacked with over a million fresh, well-armed reserves. Outflanking and outfighting the Nazis; they encircled the fascist armies. On February 2, 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended, marking the turning point of WWII and the beginning of the end of the Nazis.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Today, as the imperialists prepare for more wars for oil profits, PLP is fighting to rebuild the international communist movement to turn imperialist wars into communist revolution. We struggle alongside our working class brothers and sisters in fights on the job, during strikes, and in our neighborhoods against police terror. We fight for revolutionary discipline and against the racism, nationalism, sexism, and individualism that capitalism uses to divide us. We fight for the Red Army of the future, Join us!
Down with slumlords and kkkops, up up with community ties
PLers continue to base build with the Rodwell Spivey family as they grapple with another capitalist-borne crisis —an electrical fire to their home. The Rodwell Spivey brothers were harassed, stopped, and frisked by undercover Newark police officers in June 2021 and faced continued harassment for up to two years. Inspired by their ferocious fightback against police terror, PL stood with the brothers and family and continues to stand by their side. As their family felt like they were just starting to get their lives back on track, ready to celebrate Christmas together, a vicious slumlord left the family in their home without heat for days.
Like many workers, they thought a quick and harmless fix would be plugging in a space heater. Unbeknownst to them, the slumlord left them in a trap of a home with improper electrical wiring that led to a fire to a floor of their home, setting new furniture ablaze and leaving a six-month-old and teenage girl without many of their clothes. After the fire, members of PLP visited and called the family as soon as we heard the news. We also crowdfunded donations amongst our group, and a stylish friend of the Party donated clothes to the teenage girl, Justin Rodwell’s daughter, who’s interested in fashion.
The Rodwell Spivey brothers are still awaiting a court date for municipal court after local bosses detained Justin for over a year in Essex County Jail. Although the charges have been lowered, workers have to face the brunt of this system in a number of ways daily, and it sometimes feels like we can never catch a break. The slumlord, who manipulates workers for profit, fixed some of the electrical in their home but is hardly doing anything to fix the extensive damage to the property.
When I suggested that the family report this slumlord to code enforcement, they shared that they knew a woman who reported a slumlord and was forced to vacate her property with nowhere else to live. This was a reminder that workers cannot count on reforms. Even reforms that seem to work for some, most typically stable workers, leave mostly others out in the cold once the verdict is done.
The Rodwell Spivey family is now making do with what they can, just as workers do and always have and just as communists do and always have, we are standing by their side and practicing ways we can not just make this system easier to deal with but be smashed for good. As capitalism crumbles, more workers will be left with piecemeal reforms and our own crises to solve. We must keep pushing and showing how communism is the only solution.
*****
DSA fights for piece-meal reforms
The North Jersey Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) recently held a forum in Jersey City concerning the right for counsel for tenants. The event started with a panel of tenants, many transplants from New York City that moved to Jersey City for more space and cheaper rent and were met with decaying housing conditions in a new building.
When their landlords refused to fix water leaking into their homes and shoddy elevators, the workers in the building banded together. They said one of the best things about the housing horror is that they were able to build community with their neighbors. They ended off the tenants’ panel by encouraging other workers to build tenants’ associations in their homes and shared they’d even help show people how to do it.
After seeing what the world would be like if workers fought for and built better housing conditions, DSA followed the discussion with a panel about their right-to-counsel reform idea. Basically, what right to counsel means is if you are threatened with eviction by your landlord, DSA is touting that you should get a free lawyer at the bare minimum.
One comrade pointed out the contradiction in DSA’s plan: they want workers to get behind protesting for community developers to fund this program. Not only that but DSA leaders imagine that this right to counsel could be central in City Hall of Jersey City. A comrade, a nonprofit worker, pointed out on the open mic that public and private dollars seldom coexist and that the plan doesn’t seem tangible.
DSA leaders’ response was that developers would fund it if we made them fund it! Besides, this plan is a stretch of the imagination, it continues to allow evictions and illegal rent increases to be maintained. If profit motives exist, profit will always be put over people.
The only way every worker will have a place to live is if we destroy profit, exploitation, and the whole capitalist system! Sell-out groups like DSA deter us from making this world possible.
*****
Need to explain material basis for racism
The January 4th issue has a lead article: John Hopkins Police Terror is Essential to Capitalism. It is a well written article documenting the history of racism on the John Hopkins campus and the role of campus security in fueling racism and attacking legitimate uprisings by students and workers at John Hopkins in fighting racism and injustice on the campus.
What I found lacking in the article was the material basis for racism in capitalist society. That is the underlying foundation for racism in the workplace and in communities in which we live. We as communists have a duty to educate and organize our class by developing communist consciousness. The material basis of racism which we have documented in Racism, A Fighter's Manual and other Progressive Labor Party (PLP) documents is the super-exploitation of Black and immigrant labor that allows Wall Street to steal trillions of extra profit through underpaying Black, Latin, and immigrant workers in excess of the exploitation of the rest of the working class.
A system of racist job classifications which channel workers of color into lower paying jobs, unsafe working conditions still predominate throughout the labor force. This super-exploitation transcends national boundaries and can be found in Europe, the Global South, Asia, the U.S., and wherever capitalism shows its face. This is the foundation of racism that generates its own racist culture globally to justify systemic exploitation. Racist police terror is not merely built on prejudice but the systemic racism of the profit system.Smash racist capitalism. Build PLP.
*****
KKKops doing what they’re hired to do: attack workers
The Guardian, 1/6 –U.S. law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence...Police across the country killed an average of more than three people a day, or nearly 100 people every month last year according to Mapping Police Violence. The racial disparities have also persisted: Black people were 24% of those killed last year, while making up only 13% of the population. From 2013 to 2022, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by U.S. police than white people. The inequality is particularly severe in some cities, including Minneapolis where police have killed Black residents at a rate 28 times higher than white residents, and Chicago, where the rate was 25 times higher.
Capitalist healthcare = exploiting workers
Medscape, 1/10–Most of the 30 volunteers who work at the 130-bed, for-profit East Cooper Medical Center spend their days assisting surgical patients — the scope of their duties extending far beyond those of candy stripers, baby cuddlers, and gift shop clerks. In fact, one-third of the volunteers at the Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital are retired nurses who check people in for surgery or escort patients to a preoperative room, said Jan Ledbetter, president of the hospital’s nonprofit Volunteer Services Organization...“They’re kept extremely busy,” Ledbetter said. “We need to have four of those volunteers a day.”
The U.S. health system benefits from potentially more than $5 billion in free volunteer labor annually, a KHN analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Independent Sector found. Yet some labor experts argue that using hospital volunteers, particularly at for-profit institutions, provides an opportunity for facilities to run afoul of federal rules, create exploitative arrangements, and deprive employees of paid work amid a larger fight for fair wages. “The rules are pretty clear, and yet it happens all the time,” said Marcia McCormick, a lawyer who co-directs the Wefel Center for Employment Law at Saint Louis University.
Imperialists fight over Taiwan
CNN, 1/9–A Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 would result in thousands of casualties among Chinese, United States, Taiwanese and Japanese forces, and it would be unlikely to result in a victory for Beijing, according to a prominent independent Washington think tank, which conducted war game simulations of a possible conflict that is preoccupying military and political leaders in Asia and Washington. A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious U.S. military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated. At the end of the conflict, at least two U.S. aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles.”
“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years…China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war,” it said.
Egyptian workers cut back on meat, medicine and clothing to meet IMF demands
Wall Street Journal, 1/12–Egypt plans to cut spending after the International Monetary Fund extended hundreds of millions of dollars in an economic bailout package, as the country struggles to pay off debts accumulated from a decades long building boom. It will need to sell off $2 billion in public sector assets and borrow more than $1 billion each from the World Bank and China Development Bank to help close the gap, according to the IMF.
Across the country, families have been cutting back on meat, medicine and clothing. Bread, rice and cooking oil have been among the items missing from store shelves, after demand for cheap items soared. Authorities have been reluctant to announce any formal cutbacks to a food subsidy program that helps tens of millions of Egyptians access cheap rice, oil and sugar, although the government has become more stringent on who can receive ration cards.
- Information
Führers Biden & Adams: Workers face liberal fascism, need communist revolution
- Information
- 05 January 2023 140 hits
The recent wave of racist attacks on immigrant and homeless workers is exposing the U.S. bosses’ drive toward liberal fascism. As the world economy shrinks (imf.org, 7/22), the international crisis of capitalism is nearing a breaking point. As the U.S. loses ground to imperialist arch-rival China, and the war in Ukraine brings tensions with Russia to a boil, U.S. rulers will be forced to ditch their mask of liberal democracy and its charade of “human rights.” They will have no choice. To protect their profits and prepare for World War III, the liberal finance capital bosses must crush their capitalist competition—the openly racist, “America First” isolationists fronted by the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. At the same time, these liberal fascists know they need to build a mass patriotic movement, even as tens of millions are denied the most basic human needs: healthcare, housing, adequate nutrition. To stop workers from rebelling as capitalist society falls down around our ears, the liberal bosses are taking a page from the Nazi playbook. They are working to divide the working class by scapegoating groups they deem expendable.
On the Texas border, liberal President Joe Biden is breaking the bosses’ own rules for asylum and leaving migrating workers and children in the cold. In New York City, liberal Mayor Eric Adams has declared that homeless people can be detained and forced into hospitals that lack enough beds or staffing, even if they pose no threat to themselves or others (npr.org, 11/30/22). Trusting the Democratic Party liberal fascists as “lesser evils” will continue to devastate the international working class. We must see these murderous misleaders for what they are, an even greater danger than Trump and the Republicans. The liberals are more deceiving and, at least for now, more powerful in wielding state terror.
Our class is in a life-and-death struggle, and we cannot be fooled: There are no good capitalists! Our only future lies in communist revolution, in a society run to meet workers’ needs.
Homeless workers: a scapegoat for a system in crisis
The most liberal city in the U.S. is also a world leader for inequality. In New York, out-of-control housing prices combined with starvation wages and a gutted public health system have driven the number of homeless people to the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s (npr.org, 5/13/22). There are 65,000 people in the city’s overcrowded, chaotic shelter system, and thousands more living on the streets (NYC Coalition for the Homeless). Racism is a core component of the homeless crisis; 89 percent of this population is Black or Latin.
Meanwhile, thousands of offices in New York sit empty. Instead of converting these spaces into homes for those without them, the bosses provoke fear of the homeless by screaming about crime and erratic behavior by people with mental illness (nyclu.org, 12/30/22). Adams is siccing his mad dog kkkops to sweep people off the streets and forcibly take them into custody. This is a “solution” driven by the needs of the real estate and tourism bosses.
There is no homeless crime wave in New York — no crime wave at all, in fact. The city’s murder rate is roughly the same as it was in 2009, a small fraction of the numbers in the 1980s (Bloomberg.com, 7/29/22). But you would never know that from listening to ex-cop Adams, or to the bosses’ media.
Migrant workers punished for capitalism’s crimes
Liberal darling Joe Biden entered the White House vowing a “fair and humane” approach to immigration that would “reassert America’s commitment to asylum seekers and refugees.” Two years later, Biden’s “decision to continue–and even expand–some of Trump’s harshest policies has left many migration and human rights advocates disappointed” (The New Humanitarian, 1/22/22). Atrocities on the U.S.-Mexican border mount by the day. In 2021, Biden’s horse-mounted Border Patrol Gestapo beat back Haitian migrants by whipping them with their reins. More recently, in border cities in Texas and Mexico, thousands of migrants have no option but to live on the streets (npr.org, 12/23/22). Biden administration officials have privately pushed to keep enforcing Title 42, an old public health law that Trump cynically used to expel workers seeking asylum without granting them a hearing (New York Times, 12/20/22).
Fascism is the liberals’ final solution
The Nazi death camps, the German fascists’ “final solution,” followed the brutal logic of capitalism in crisis. When the bosses’ profit system starts breaking down, they become desperate to keep it afloat — at any and all costs. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s driving the rise in homelessness and the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s the crisis of capitalism that’s forcing millions around the world to flee their homes in the face of war and deadly poverty. The liberal rulers can’t reform their way out of these disasters; it’s the necessities of their system that create them in the first place.
Biden and Adams are reformist stooges on the payroll of the finance capitalists, the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class. These liberal politicians use the fear of Trump to scare the working class into looking the other way as migrant workers and the homeless are terrorized. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fake-left Squad railed against Trump for ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages in Texas. Now these great progressives sit on their hands as their liberal fascist masters do the same as Trump and worse. If we let them get away with these outrages today, tomorrow they’ll be targeting the rest of our class.
Only communist revolution can defeat the bosses
The revolutions led by communists in Russia and China proved that society can be led by and for the working class. The capitalist bosses can stay in power only if the working class allows it. Of late we’ve seen promising sparks of rebellion. Tens of millions marched after the murder of George Floyd. Black and white miners in Alabama broke through the bosses’ racism to go on strike together. In Colombia, thousands rose up in a general strike against a tax reform to impoverish the working class and prop up the rulers’ failing system.
These inspirational battles and many more show the power of our class. They also reveal our main weakness. In each case, workers stopped fighting and retreated into lesser evilism. When workers stay wedded to the bosses’ rotten ideas, when they lack confidence that our clas s can run society, they are sunk by their own defeatism. When workers swallow the liberal bosses’ soft words and crocodile tears, they become complicit in genocide.
Some say that capitalism is always bad. They say that people are always being bombed or jailed or put on the streets to die, and that the world is essentially no different than it was twenty or fifty years ago. But that is a defeatist position. It’s built upon the lie that nothing ever really changes—and that, by extension, nothing can ever change. By contrast, a communist analysis of history points to moments when capitalism falls into periods of extreme crisis. When our class faces greater dangers from rising fascism. When we have a greater opportunity to advance the historic struggle for communism. Progressive Labor Party believes we have entered such a moment of reckoning. Will we drift along with the liberal fascist tide, or will we break our chains and fight for communist revolution? There is no in between. Join us!