LENNOX, CA, November 13—Working class solidarity and  fightback around housing is  growing in this area of Los Angeles County. With the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the federal eviction moratorium, and state and local moratoriums already expired, or soon to, millions of workers nationwide are behind on rent or face imminent homelessness. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are actively  organizing within  the local battle for the needs of our class. We are bringing communist ideas to this sharpening class struggle, such as the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist property relations.

CHALLENGE readers will remember that PLP has been actively involved in the Lennox-Inglewood Tenants’ Union (LITU). LITU has spent the last year organizing and responding to tenants who contact the organization. Tenant complaints frequently involve threats of eviction, illegal rent increases, or slumlords who refuse to do even the most basic maintenance on the apartments they rent for exorbitant amounts of money.

As part of LITU’s campaign to demand repairs in one apartment complex in Inglewood, we asked local skilled workers to volunteer their time to inspect several of the apartments affected to determine what repairs each needed. It turned out that two workers who have experience doing repairs live in an apartment complex in Lennox, a predominantly immigrant and solidly working-class city right next to Inglewood.

Workers living in the Lennox building have long had problems with their slumlord, Nic Murillo, including illegal rent increases and demands that workers pay for repairs that are the landlord’s legal responsibility. With LITU’s encouragement and help, one worker experienced in home repairs launched a door to door canvassing of his complex. The purpose of this grassroots effort is to get to know our friend’s neighbors, find out more about the rotten living conditions they are enduring, and see what they want to do about them. These are communist principles in action - workers supporting one another - from each according to commitment and ability to each according to need.

Housing problems can’t be solved under capitalism
Given how, under capitalism, property laws put landlord profits first and tenant needs last, the results were not surprising. Workers  living in the building  had a myriad of problems. One worker  that LITU spoke to had just found out that her three-year-old son had lead in his blood. Many workers’ apartments had bed bugs and roaches. Some had carpets infested with them and showed us their children’s bite marks. Several apartments had pervasive mold. Two tenants had just received court eviction papers even though slumlord Murillo refused rent money for them from a government agency, and even though he had adamantly refused to make any necessary repairs to their apartments.

But LITU members found something else - a burning desire to strike back against these abuses, and an understanding that tenants are only as powerful as the collective working class unity that underlies their actions. Many workers signed a letter to their slumlord demanding a meeting about the lousy conditions. They promised support to the tenant families who face eviction. They came together for several meetings, involving almost half of the tenants in the complex, where grievances were aired and a plan for action made. This action revolved around the building manager’s stubborn refusal to give tenants receipts for their monthly rent payments.

After scummy Murillo learned of the tenant meetings, he began slithering around the complex promising some, but not all, needed repairs. But tenants are not fooled! This tactic was exposed at one of the meetings as an attempt by the landlord to divide and conquer.

Fired up workers confront landlord’s agent
On the evening of November 1 about 15 workers organized and gathered beforehand, before making  a beeline as a group to the manager’s apartment. The manager was presented with a statement to the landlord signed by the tenants demanding that, starting in December, if receipts were not given to all tenants who paid rent, then rent payments would be stopped and held until that policy is changed. The manager at first refused to take the letter, but then gave in to the tenants demand that he do so.

No less than eight tenants spoke up, including several who spoke for the group and made sure the manager understood the anger and determination of this group of organized workers.With support from other tenants, one tenant whose family had no hot water, pinned the manager down and made him promise immediate repairs. The manager kept blathering that he had to do what his boss, Murillo, told him to do. He told the tenants they should be meeting with the landlord directly (of course, the tenants had already demanded such a meeting and been blown off by the scumlord). The next day all of the tenants who paid rent got receipts!

Working class tenants need communist ideas and leadership
Though small, this action demonstrates the potential power of a conscious and united working class. PLP’s tasks going forward will be to continue our involvement with these tenants and help sharpen the level of struggle against the slumlord. In this battle, we will show how the capitalist legal and political system protects the owners of private property. Decent housing for the entire working class, and the abolition of evictions and homelessness can and will only be achieved under communism.

NEW YORK CITY, NY, November 12—Planning for the annual Progressive Labor Party (PLP) College Conference began a couple months ago and we decided that the theme would be “Big Fascism on Campus.” We wanted to study and discuss how the Big Fascists, finance and oil bosses represented by liberal Democratic politicians, are using our colleges and universities to advance their agenda: to use liberal ideas like identity politics and “representation” to mask the naked brutality and racism of their system as an attempt to win broad political support for taking on China and/or Russia in World War III. PLP has its eye turned toward looming World War, as we see fascism world-wide rise in response to capitalism in crisis and an undisciplined ruling class.

KCC fightback inspires working class brothers and sisters
The conference was enlivened by an amazing group of students from Kingsborough Community College (KCC) in New York City, who are in the middle of a sharp struggle (see details on Page 1) against the exact kind of racist attack that is, and will always be, a part of capitalism. Racist police terror is part of capitalism and all bosses and politicians, whether they are liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican, are committed to maintaining it. The Big Fascist playbook, however, is to use identity and representation to soften working-class anger and militancy. In this case, the president of Kingsborough Claudia V. Schrader, a Black woman, met with the students after a Black student was assaulted and detained by KCC cops, while the racist troll that he was trying to move away from the antiracist Common Grounds\ student group was left untouched. In response to the troll yelling the n-word and not facing any punitive measures, the President told students , “everyone’s racist, there’s nothing we can do about it, just be a good person…” The Kingsborough administrators offered to meet with the students on committees and have sent out emails to the campus stressing their commitment to “respect” and “understanding.”

This strategy might have worked in other situations, but the conference attendees heard first-hand how communist ideas, combined with the amazing bravery and leadership of young Black and Latin students, can transform these struggles. Friends and PLP members were active in the fight from the start, arguing for the need for multiracial unity and warning against the danger of the Big Fascist Kingsborough administration. The students eagerly took on these ideas as their own, facing up to the President, various deans and vice-presidents and public safety, and proving that liberal defenders of racist policing would not sway them.

The presence of these brave students energized the conference immensely and helped us to see clearly the dynamics of Big Fascism on our various campuses.

The power of class struggle, communist ideas and our potential to grow and to lead the working class is clear from one important example: one student, who admitted to previously being distrustful of white people, took part in the multiracial fightback on campus, then sat in an integrated conference for 4 hours and joined the Party (along with others) at the conclusion! The revolution and the creation of a communist society is that much closer!

The following is part three 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.

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, their history is just as valuable as they were in 1932. This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

In this article, the popularity of communist ideas and struggles among Black workers is described by Gold, emphasizing an important aspect of our line that Black workers play a key role in organizing for communist revolution. Another important political aspect highlighted by Gold’s piece is the role of churches in misleading Black workers, winning them away from communist ideas.  . During this time, Black workers were won over to the idea that they had much more in common with fellow workers than with the bosses and their corrupt misleaders. A generation of Black workers gave militant leadership to the movement.

There was the funeral of an old Black woman. She had died of hunger; the doctor’s certificate called it “malnutrition.” The councils arranged a mass funeral; they rented a large lot for such services. The great procession marched through the streets, carrying hundreds of banners and slogans telling the story. Ah, from all the sidewalks and tenement windows, what groans, wails, sobs, what shrieks of pity and anger! This mourning was real; these workers knew what the funeral said: they knew they might be next to die of – “Malnutrition.”

All the revolutionary slogans that well-fed liberals sneer at as clichés, the South Side takes to its heart. They are life. “Fight Against Hunger” is a literal command; it has helped to many victories.

On the south side, the old slavish spirituals are being rewritten. The deep yearning that once turned to a mythical heaven for freedom, now fights for a real and wonderful future on this earth.

“That New Communist Spirit”
“Gimme That Old Time Religion, it’s good enough for me,” they used to sing at their prayer meetings. Now I heard them sing it fervently:
      Gimme that new Communist spirit
     Gimme that new Communist spirit
     Gimme that new Communist spirit
     That’s good enough for me.
     “It was good for Comrade Lenin,
     And it’s good enough for me.
     “It’s against the labor fakers.
     And it’s good enough for me.
     “It has built the Soviet Union,
     And it’s good enough for me,
     “It’ll free the world of sorrow,
     And it’s good enough for me …”
     (and so on, dozens of verses)

Many such new songs and singers. At mass meetings, their religious past becomes transmuted into a Communist present. They follow every word of the speaker with real emotion; they encourage him, as at a prayer meeting with cries, “Yes, yes, comrade” and often there is an involuntary and heartfelt “Amen!”

The Chicago politicians are alarmed by this local revolution. Pork-jowled pimps and bootleggers sometimes come to the forums and begin their harangues with the salutation, “Comrades!” The workers laugh at them. They hooted and laughed down Big Bill Thompson, ex-gangster mayor of Chicago when he came to Washington Park and pulled this new “Comrade” gag.

It’s hard to fool them any more. They read, study, think. They have built up the best unemployment movement in America, a model to the white comrades, in the seat of their own minds and bodies. They have developed their own leaders.

Claude Lightfoot
Of the hundreds of leaders let me give one typical biography:

Claude Lightfoot, a brilliant youth of 21 developed as a speaker at a Washington Park forum. He was a Garveyite, an American patriot, and won a large following among the young Black  workers.

Democratic and Republican politicians came to him and offered him hundred dollar a week jobs to campaign for them. But he was honest, the questions fired at him by Communist hecklers made him think.

The work of the unemployment councils interested him. The fact that white workers fought and shed their blood in defense of Black workers, gave Lightfoot a new vision of the race question.

He Is Arrested
He read, studied, argued, he wrestled with his own mind. During this transition period, he happened, by accident, to be arrested in one of the eviction fights.

He was beaten, stripped, thrown into a dark unheated small stone cell on bread and water.

He personally knew the capitalist politicians who were prosecuting him. In the very prison, they came to him, and offered him his release and a good job if he would surrender his new ideas. He told them to go to hell. He was given the maximum sentence in the Bridewell, that ancient hell of stone and hate.

When he came out he joined the Communist Party. He has been an active force ever since. Read the next issue for an episode out of his new life of struggle!

Anti-Jewish racism and attacks are on the rise across the U.S. Most recently Ye (formerly Kanye West) and Kyrie Irving threw fuel on the fire by launching anti-Jewish racist attacks on Twitter. Both Ye and Irving are spewing a particular toxic ideology of the Black Hebrew Israelites that reflects a reactionary, nationalist, and anti-class outlook. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a group of sects that espouse that Black people are the original Hebrews and were supplanted by modern day Jewish people. Many, if not all, of the groups push anti-Jewish racism in a twist on the replacement theory of the Trump racists by claiming they have been replaced from their rightful place by modern Jewish people.

The Black Israelites continue a long history of the bosses’ anti-Jewish racism being used to divide the working class. From Hitler to now, anti-Jewish racism has particularly been used to divert the working class’s anger away from the bosses and point it towards an imaginary Jewish cabal that is blamed for everything. The anti-Jewish racism of Ye and Irving gains a toe hold because of the righteous anger that Black workers share under capitalism. But with celebrities and anti-intellectual media moguls leading the charge, it leads to the pacification of Black workers who are diverted away from the true enemy that is capitalism and plays into the bosses’ hands by dividing and disarming the working class.

Attack racism from all sides
We must take on racism in all its forms. This particular attack by Ye and Irving, which was then amplified by Dave Chapelle on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, is particularly dangerous because it is being used to divert the anger of Black workers away from capitalism and the ruling class, but back toward a general Jewish body. Meanwhile, many Jewish workers have an antiracist history and do not benefit from the racism inflicted by ruling class bosses.

While the Black Israelites pose as a group that is against the system, the racism they espouse is repackaged from the bosses’ ideologies. Henry Ford and Hitler are prominent in their sources. Many are fooled by this anti-Jewish racism posing as being for Black workers. A big reason for the acceptance of anti-Jewish racism from Black superstars is the racist history of Israel. The U.S. and Israeli ruling classes have defended Israeli racist apartheid and attacks on workers in Palestine by calling anyone who opposes the Israeli bosses anti-Jewish.

Workers unite in anti-racist rebellion
The bosses have encouraged the spread of Black nationalist anti-Jewish racism. Young Black workers have rebelled in recent years in Ferguson, Baltimore and across the country after the murder of George Floyd. These antiracist rebellions inspired millions of people in multi-racial fight back to take to the streets. This mass action against the bosses’ cops terrified the ruling class. No wonder the bosses encourage the spread of anti-Jewish racism.

Many people are also taken in by seeing corporations and media who do nothing in the face of massive racist attacks on Black workers come out and attack Ye and Irving. But that doesn’t excuse or justify anti-Jewish attacks. Also, make no mistake: Ye and Irving don’t share the same class politics that Black workers, or any worker, do.

Any potential win that Ye or Irving could receive from Adidas or the NBA would never extend to our class. But this public debacle does intensify racist divisions among workers. As communist leaders, it is our role to use these moments as an opportunity to call out to smash these divisions and build working-class unity.

One thing the U.S., Israel and Black Israelites have in common is a fear of the powerful history of Black and Jewish workers joining together to fight racism. From the movement to free the Scottsboro Boys to the sit-ins across the south and the fight to integrate, Black and Jewish workers have marched together, fought together and been beaten together in the fight against racism. The bosses can try to bury the true antiracist history of the working class but they will never stop us.