The following is part six of a seven-part series reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold. The series was titled, “Negro Reds of Chicago.”
 
Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist principles as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle.
 
Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions. In the early 1930s, amid Jim Crow segregation, a Great Depression with  record unemployment levels that sank the working class—particularly Black workers living in the urban industrial core—into deeper poverty and despair, the Communist Party in the U.S. (CPUSA) was fighting for revolution inside U.S. borders. This period was a golden age of class-conscious fightback when  communist ideas were popular and gripped the imaginations of the working class. Under the leadership of the CPUSA, workers organized militant housing councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of profit gluttonous landlords.

Today our class is in a different period marked by increasing volatility. We are choked by record high inflation, rent hikes, food price gouging compounded by stagnant wages, high unemployment, and an eviction crisis worsened by a still-raging global pandemic. Though the CPUSA is a shell of its former self, decaying into a toothless, reformist party, its history provides valuable lessons for us today.

This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

Visiting comrade Squire in his home
Another ex-soldier and South Side communist is that remarkable person, Brown Squire. I shall never forget the afternoon I spent in his home.

It’s a bit tricky for whites to visit the south side. The police roam these streets ceaselessly in their squad cars. They pick up all whites who don’t look like landlords, installment agents or other exploiters. Then a visit to the police station, a few hours of questions, clubs, fists, etc. It has happened often.

One of these squad cars filled with beefy brutes rounded the corner just as we ducked into Brown Squire’s home.

Manly and attractive, one of those calm, smiling giants, it was good to see Comrade Squire. He was dressed in a khaki shirt, one of his seven kids on his powerful arm. Behind him, on a battered dresser stood a bust of Lenin. In the bookcase one saw Daily Workers, pamphlets, books.

All this in a typical Chicago slum, in a ruined shanty facing out on a backyard piled with a hill of the most amazing garbage. Signs of the new age: Lenin in the steel mills, Lenin in the stockyards, Lenin hovering over workers’ children playing on a garbage dump in Chicago.

Brown Squire fought in France for two years and eight months. He was a good soldier, a born leader, and rose from the ranks to return as a second lieutenant.

Yes, I was a good instrument for the capitalists,” he smiled, “a first-class soldier. You can still blindfold me, throw all the parts of a machine gun on the floor, and I will reassemble it by touch.

Lieutenant Squire came back from the war in 1919, believing he’d won his freedom. A month later, the race riots broke out.

“I’m a communist now”
I can understand them, now that I’m a Communist. They were part of the capitalist strategy, by which  they tried to separate the white and [Black] soldiers and workers. But then I was bitter. I fought in the riots; some of us captured guns from the lynchers and barricaded this street. No lyncher could enter it; many tried, but failed.

Then he shared, with most of his race in America, the years of the Garvey mirage. When he came out of that, he didn’t know where to turn. One day he saw a parade with banners against lynching. He was still bitter, couldn’t believe that whites would fight for such a cause. So he began to study this thing, “to see whether the Communists really meant it.” After two years he decided that they meant it, and joined the party.

I was one of the first [Black workers] in the party then. We were isolated, the cops singled us out. I can remember my first arrest. They almost tore off one ear, and shut my left eye. They stomped on my bare feet with their boots, and almost broke my bones. They burned my body with cigar butts. Yes, they like to kill me. They wanted me to say I’d go to no more Communist meetings. But I would not say it. It was pretty bad, comrades. I lay in bed for a week afterward, coughing up blood.

"But it made a solid red out of me."
That was on March 6, 1929. Since then Squire has been arrested at least a hundred times for his speeches and other activities. He is a leader in the fight against evictions, and in the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League. This day of our visit was typical of all his busy days. He had just come from a meeting of vets. The bonus marchers needed food and tobacco, and he had been collecting nickels and dimes.

This afternoon he was collecting signatures for the Communist election campaign. He had already signed up eight blocks in his house-to-house canvass. At 5 o’clock he was due to speak in Ellis Park, at a demonstration against the Republican Presidential convention, at which the [Black] delegates were jim-crowed. In the evening he was booked to speak in a [Black] church on communism.

New York City—For the first time in over 40 years, over 1,100 New York Times journalists and staff walked off the job in a one-day strike for a major labor dispute. more than 1,100 unionized Times  employees walked off the job today in a 24-hour strike. The NYT Guild represents journalists, editors,  advertising sales, business staff and security guards who have been without a new contract since March 2021 (NYT, 12/7). The workers struck against the biggest liberal mouthpiece for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. As long as capitalism rules, media workers won’t control the narrative. For workers to own our labor, we need to smash this profit-based system. This capitalist rag is unfit for workers.

Good on paper? Trash in reality
NYT workers were joined by a delegation of striking UAW workers from HarperCollins who have been on strike against the publisher for three weeks, striking Guild members from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who have been on strike for a month, as well as members of the National Writers Union, CWA, and Teamster truck drivers who refused to cross the picket lines. One of the main issues is the company’s racist performance rating system and the demand for a more integrated newsroom. In a study released last August, the union found that, “white Guild members were more likely to get the top ratings, while Black and Latin members were more likely to get the lowest two ratings” (NYT, 12/7). Another issue is a safe post-pandemic return-to-work policy.

After decades of cutting back on wages, pensions, and healthcare, the NYT is making bank in a media market that has been facing massive cutbacks. The Times made over $300 million in operating profits this year, offered shareholders a big stock buyback and gave big raises to their executives. Yet, Times Chief Executive Meredith Kopit Levien cries that it’s not “what it used to be” (AP News, 12/8). The company hired scabs and international workers to deliver its content.

As capitalism continues to devolve into crisis after crisis, more and more workers may gain class consciousness. The NYT institution is the epitome of liberal democratic ideals, promoting themselves as a beacon of truth in the chaos. Yet, it can't provide basic conditions for its workers? The company touts worker-friendly ideas, but the strike exposes the hollowness and hypocrisy of this capitalist institution. In essence, as long as media is owned by the profit-making class, media workers are just as expendable as every other worker.

Media, an industry of class struggle
The media industry has become a hotbed of class struggle, the result of massive consolidation and cutbacks. About 25 percent of all newsroom jobs were lost during the pandemic and about 2,000 local media outlets have closed, being replaced by huge conglomerates and even Artificial Intelligence producing some sports articles. These vast “news deserts” have added to the sea of misinformation
and have aided groups like QAnon and various fascist militias. The News Guild (TNG) and other unions have organized tens of thousands of media workers in the past few years and the number of strikes and job actions are increasing. Staff at Reuters and several Gannett papers are also preparing for strikes.

Can these mostly young “white-collar” workers, along with striking part-time faculty at the New School in NY and 48,000 graduate student workers in California, represent the beginning of sharpening class war? From railroad workers to Amazon and Starbucks workers, there is a stirring among the masses. In NYC,  contracts are expiring among CUNY faculty, which is two-thirds adjuncts, and transit workers.

As the class struggle sharpens, Progressive Labor Party has the responsibility to turn class struggle into  grounds for revolutionary communist ideas. PLP will have to be embedded in these workplaces and among these workers, to move workers past the Democratic Party treadmill of reform, and onto the path of communist revolution. Slowly but surely, this is taking place.

Racism in medicine has long history
New England Journal of Medicine, 9/8/22–On May 23, 1968, Howard Goldman, director of the New York Bureau of X-Ray Technology, acknowledged that x-ray technicians routinely exposed Black patients to doses of radiation that were higher than those [w]hite patients received…as x-ray technology developed in the early 20th century, false beliefs about biologic differences between Black and [w]hite people affected how doctors used this technology.

Ideas about racial differences in bone and skin thickness appeared in the 19th century and remained widespread throughout the 20th. Theodor Waitz’s 1863 Introduction to Anthropology asserted, for instance, that “The skeleton of the Negro is heavier, the bones thicker.” Such claims reflected both beliefs about behaviors attributed to Black people (e.g., violence) and the interests of White scientists and slave owners who justified slavery.

The belief that Black people have denser bones, more muscle, or thicker skin led radiologists and technicians to use higher radiation exposure during x-ray procedures. A physician in 1896 asserted that “black being perfectly opaque,” black skin would “offer some resistance to cathode rays.”...In the 1950s and 1960s, x-ray technologists were told to use higher radiation doses to penetrate Black bodies.

Palestinians look for leadership
Times of Israel, 12/15/22– 72 percent of Palestinians support the creation of additional armed groups in the West Bank akin to the Lion’s Den terror group that operates against Israel, according to a new poll…The Palestinian Authority (PA) Health Ministry has reported 167 Palestinian deaths as a result of Israeli gunfire in the West Bank this year. The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] operation has mostly focused on the northern West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is seen to have lost control amid the sprouting of armed groups such as the Nablus-based Lion’s Den.

A clear majority of respondents told PCPSR [Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research] that they support the formation of armed groups that don’t take orders from the PA and that are not part of the PA security forces, but numbers were higher in Gaza, where 84 percent of respondents backed the concept than in the West Bank, where 65 percent supported the idea. Israel has sought to work with the PA security forces to quash Lion’s Den and the PA has worked to convince members of the armed group to turn themselves in, rather than be hunted down and killed by the IDF.

Nobel Peace Prize winners vetted by CIA
Monthly Review, 12/27/22–The Nobel Prize Committee has five judges, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, who are tasked with choosing Nobel Prize winners. But people are starting to wonder if there is a 6th Nobel Prize judge, not appointed by the Norwegian parliament, but by the CIA, who is tasked with making sure that winners of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize advance the agenda of U.S. policymakers. Although the idea may seem far-fetched, this year’s winners all have connections to a CIA offshoot, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED was founded in the 1980s to promote propaganda and regime-change operations in the service of U.S. imperial interests. Allen Weinstein, the director of the research study that led to creation of the NED remarked in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In class struggle: Unpacking "Violence"
I teach social studies to high school students and I have learned that before we teach historical content it is important to have a conversation with students about violence.

The very first unit that I taught covered the French Revolution, and when we discussed the Reign of Terror I asked my students whether or not they believed that these policies were justified. The majority of the class responded “no” emphatically citing the violence of the Jacobin government.

I realized then that school and media tend to give us a specific perception of violence that highlights interpersonal violence and neglects structural violence. Even property damage may be constituted as “violent” in our popular conception, but poverty, surveillance, policing, and austerity rarely are.

I asked my students what violence is and they gave me lots of examples. Fighting someone, hitting, punching, and shooting is violent. Even words can be violent, they pointed out. I tried to get them to come up with a definition of violence and they agreed that violence is the act of hurting people, but disagreed on whether violence has to be intentional or not. Can policies be violent? Yes, they agreed, they can. What about the existence of homelessness or deny- ing medical care to those without health insurance?

The questions led to lively debate and the class had mixed responses. Students do not need to agree with each other or me, but we should challenge them to think beyond liberal conceptions of violence that erase the state as an actor.

Oftentimes “violence” is ascribed to the reaction to poor conditions, but not to the people and policies that created poor conditions themselves. The police are not violent, but rioters are. The monarchy isn’t violent per se, but revolution aries definitely are. It is important to point out these hypocrisies to students and make sure that topics surrounding resistance and revolution are properly contextualized within the material conditions they occurred in.

I am about to teach about the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union (USSR), a topic that students are likely to have a lot of preconceptions about. I will need to return to this lesson on violence before I teach this topic, and I urge other teachers to broach this idea in class too!

★★★★★

Red Reads: 100-page impression...

With the intention of soon writing a full review I wanted to share first and strong impressions from the first 100 pages of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts.

The new novel, released in 2022, has been met with much mainstream fan fare.

Self-described as a novel about the “…unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear…” Ng’s book takes place in a dystopian U.S. amidst what can only be described as liberal-fascist (see glossary, page 6) late-stage fascism.

The characters exist in a “fictional” version of the U.S. that is ruled by the “fictional” PACT.

PACT is defined as “…more than a law…a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values…” and is responsible for disappearing anyone who revolts, rebels, or challenges the ideals of PACT.

Based on an early impression I suspect this book is written and championed as a warning cry should democracy not be protected, a rationalization for lesser evil politics.

But what the readers and maybe even the author can’t quite see is this is a road map, a foretelling of what’s to come BECAUSE of lesser-evil politics (see editorial, page 2).

Progressive Labor Party has warned that this is where the road to voting leads.

Is Our Missing Hearts actually the world Big Fascists have dreamed up?

Stay tuned as this red reads on.

★★★★★

New Year, more communism

New Year’s Day, New York and New Jersey Progressive Labor Party members and friends gathered to share uplifting experiences. Reflecting on the year and hopeful for the future, conversations on what it means to be committed to communism, politics and the Party challenged me to think of how I am embodying the politics and struggles beyond events to a more holistic practice in every aspect of my life. Games, music, laughter, and the spirit of hope and the wholesomeness of children’s joy filled the afternoon and night.

Thank you PLP for providing a space for such radical joy and community.

★★★★★