Landover, Maryland, August 1–Today over 170 Metro Access transit workers hit the bricks, striking against Transdev, a contractor for the Metro transit system in the Washington, D.C. region (see CHALLENGE, July 6, for an earlier rally). Transdev is a notorious multinational private transit company famous for screwing workers around the world. The mainly Black transit workers drive “on call” for people with disabilities or medical challenges. They are paid $17/hour, far less than their Metro counterparts. They are demanding a starting rate of $22.50/hour, rising to a top rate of $32, as well as a decent health and pension plan. Transdev has arrogantly dismissed their very modest demands. But Transdev is being hit with a fine of $1,000 per missed run, or over $100,000 a day, so they have an incentive to come up with a better contract offer. We’ll squeeze these bosses until they cry uncle!
     Several Progressive Labor Party members joined the bold militant picket line, distributing over 75 CHALLENGEs to the striking workers, and discussing how only a communist revolution that fights racism can get rid of the capitalist bosses and create a worker-run society. When communist ideas, combined with angry worker militancy, grip the working class, we will succeed in overthrowing the entire capitalist system of exploiters and imperialists!

NEW YORK CITY, July 17— “We are still going through the same madness about homelessness…I don’t know. Something’s gotta change…this is not working.” That’s what a formerly homeless worker said at a demonstration at Gracie Mansion, racist kkkop Mayor Eric Adams’ home. The rally called for an end to the City’s racist displacement and immediate permanent housing. He is exactly right, and demonstrating with him were 40 workers and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members. The rally was,) sponsored by the Open Hearts Initiative.
     Mayor Eric Adams is leading the bosses’ efforts to clear New York’s streets of homeless workers by employing racist, fascist sweeps that try to force the homeless into shelters by destroying their street encampments. Yet many of these workers return to the streets because of the unsafe conditions in the shelters. Imagine that—homeless workers prefer the streets to the shelters! The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is fighting to organize the entire international working class to smash racism, sexism and imperialism and build a communist world. That means a world run by and for the working class, where things like healthcare and housing are provided on the basis of need, not on racist profits.

Capitalism creates racist homelessness
Racist profits, sharpening fascist attacks, and U.S. imperialism’s preparation for wider world wars are at the heart of the homeless crisis in cities, including the financial capital of the world’s top imperialist power. As inflation skyrockets hand in hand with capitalist profits (PBS, 4/12), more U.S. workers than ever are paying most of their income for necessities like food, housing, transportation, and heating.
     Nationwide, average apartment rents have increased 14.1 percent, and at least one in ten workers pay 55 percent of their monthly income on rent (Newsweek, 8/2). As “hot” real estate markets line the pockets of real estate capitalists, a 2020 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that for every average $100 increase in the average rent, homelessness increases an estimated nine percent (Washington Post, 7/3). Meanwhile in the past year, average rents have increased almost $300.
In New York City, May 2022 saw a near-record breaking 18,863 homeless adults and 15,432 children in the shelter system; 93 percent of these workers and youth are Black, Latin or immigrant (“Basic Facts”, coalitionforthehomeless.org). The bosses’ politicians’ response to homelessness is the same —whether liberal Big Fascist Democrat mayors like De Blasio and Adams, or the openly gutter Small Fascists running cities in states like Florida: they all rely on racist police terror to violently clear out encampments.
     With homelessness at the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s, PL’ers have been fighting shoulder to shoulder with homeless workers at the Lucerne Hotel from the beginning of the struggle and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic (see CHALLENGE, 7/21/20).

Lucerne workers expose Big Fascists
Homeless workers at Lucerne have been on the front lines exposing the Big Fascists’ politicians and their liberal misleaders for two years, and this was not their first march on a fascist mayors’ home (see CHALLENGE, 10/22/20). PLP salutes these workers’ militant leadership and experience, and we will continue fighting and struggling alongside them to earn their leadership into our ranks! At the same time, we are active in sharing and struggling over communist ideas.
     For example, one problem with today’s demonstration was that the primary goal of the organization sponsoring the march was to get coverage from the capitalist media. We are organizing and struggling with homeless workers on the grass roots level rather than relying on getting attention from the bosses’ media. Only in this way can workers build confidence in themselves and each other in working class leadership, not politicians or boss-led reform groups. Only in this way can our class organize a revolutionary communist PLP and smash racist homelessness once and for all. To do this, we distributed CHALLENGE at the protest, and talked with our friends and many of the participants.

Fight for workers’ housing, fight to tear down capitalism!
Winning workers to the fight against homelessness helps to tear down the wall of racism that separates us today. The only reason Adams is doing the sweeps is because the developers, landlords, and Wall Street are concerned about the “appearance” of New York City. Seeing homelessness is bad for business. Capitalism is incapable of solving this issue!
     As their economy sinks into another recession, the bosses would rather spend $54.6 billion on weapons manufacturers sending weapons to imperialist war in Ukraine, rebuilding Madison Square Garden, and building more luxury housing.  
     The Progressive Labor Party puts all confidence in the international working class. We fight in the struggle for workers’ housing against the bosses’ politicians and their racist police terror, and for a mass PLP that will lead international communist revolution. Racism and homelessness will only be ended by millions of workers united to fight for communism. JOIN US!

Washington, DC July 19—Racist Texas Governor Abbot has spent over $6 million to send over 130 busloads of migrant workers, detained after crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, to Washington, DC as a political stunt. The daily arrivals at Union Station have risen to four to five buses per day (Washington Post, 7/14 and 7/19). This is the reality of a capitalist system built on fake, profit driven borders.The working-class, however, NEEDS a world without borders. To fight back against this racist deportation and rising fascist state, members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined mutual aid networks to help our working-class sisters and brothers survive. As we fight back we also remember that reform struggles won’t stop rising fascism in the U.S. As the bosses struggle to regain control of their system in crisis we are watching the state continue to take more direct control and incite state terror (see page 6, glossary). But it is only with international communist revolution that we will smash our chains.

Migration myths of freedom
Forced to be economic pawns and political fodder at home, it is no surprise that workers from many countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Cuba and Nicaragua continue to gather at northern Mexico’s border with the U.S. Harrowing portrayals of their journeys to reach the border are peppered with inspiring accounts of working-class solidarity throughout North, Central and South America.  
     The response by the U.S. government to this forced migration has been brutal. It falsely claimed that there was a public health risk from Covid-19 and used Title 42 of the Public Health Law to keep workers in Mexico. Democrats won a reversal of the policy at the Supreme Court, but the Congress controlled by Democrats has kept this policy in play by refusing to release domestic funding. And the bosses’ media has gone silent.

The “American Dream” is a capitalist hellscape
Today’s oppression of migrant workers continues a long tradition of racist immigration policy in the U.S., always attuned to the needs of capitalism. If the bosses need cheap labor in agriculture or services, they bring in workers on a temporary basis. Or the bosses terrorize undocumented workers into accepting horrid working conditions and pay, simultaneously undercutting the employment and pay of other workers. When the bosses don’t need them, they beef up deportation. Democrats and Republicans alike dance to the bosses’ tune – remember that Barack Obama was decried at mass demonstrations as the “Deporter in Chief.” Donald Trump and Joe Biden have continued that racist tradition.
     Volunteer mutual aid workers have worked daily from 5:00 am until past midnight to find or secure housing and distribute food, a change of clothes, medicine for a cough, and a bus ticket to a desired destination. They have demanded government assistance for this humanitarian challenge. But Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Black woman politician in D.C. has rebuffed calls to tap into the city’s reserve funds, declaring that it’s a federal problem. Or perhaps she is telling these workers, if there is no bread, let them eat cake. Meanwhile, Covid-19 has sidelined many of the mutual aid workers while the pace of new arrivals increases.

The only solution is a communist revolution
Mutual aid cannot solve the big problems facing migrant workers. As more workers are pushed to destinations where they have at best tenuous ties, they are pushed to survive through spirit breaking, dangerous, and back-breaking means.
     As communists, we struggle over the political limits of mutual aid and other reform struggles even as we strive to support our class brothers and sisters in the here and now. We have shared CHALLENGE, our party’s newspaper, and our flyers with mutual aid workers and migrant workers.
     Capitalism’s immigration policy is not broken, it is operating just as intended to help capitalists maximize profits from the exploited labor of the desperate. It is an extension of capitalism’s institutionalized racism that for centuries has allowed capitalists to profit from super-exploitation and divide the working class to weaken the struggles of all workers for a decent life and ultimately liberation from wage slavery.
     The sinister capitalist system takes the energy of those trying to make change and funnels it into inevitably-limited service to others or drop-in-the-bucket reform that only reinforces the system. It is time to place our energy into the building of a disciplined revolutionary Progressive Labor Party whose members are deeply rooted in day to day workers’ struggles against racist capitalism. At the same time we will lay the foundation for the destruction of the capitalist system and its state and replace it with workers’ power, collectivity, and equality – communism.

This is part 11 of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930’s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini's Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
     In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, which resulted in only fortifying the bosses system and laid the basis for the corruption of the old communist movement.
     In the Progressive Labor Party, we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that's communism.
     If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers’ leadership is essential. That is the only way our class can destroy racism, the lifeblood of capitalism. The following is a story of one such leader, James Yates.

Yates antiracist in the making
James Yates was born in 1906 in Quitman, Mississippi, nourished on stories of how African Americans enjoyed democracy during Reconstruction; was taught by a schoolteacher who insisted that one day America would have a Black president; was touched by the vision of his Garveyite uncle, who eventually moved to the all-Black town of Boley, Oklahoma; and was told over and over again about his other uncle, who had armed himself to defend his family from the Klan, and of the Irish immigrant neighbor who had assisted him by providing ammunition. In the small town of Quitman, Mississippi, the young Yates witnessed not only countless episodes of racism and violence but also stark examples of internationalism, Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and interracial solidarity.
     The building of the KKK in the South by the U.S. ruling class during this period is well known. What is less well known is the history of multiracial unity and fight back among the working class, led by Black workers unwilling to peacefully submit to forced segregation and the advent of Jim Crow laws. James Yates came out of this tradition of fighting back against racism. Escaping the South in 1923 Yates “rode the rails” to Chicago where he worked in the stockyards.
     During his first mass demonstration - a march to Springfield, Illinois, that had been organized by the Party-he came to realize the international significance of the Communist Party's struggle for jobs, relief, and equality:
     "I was a part of their hopes, their dreams, and they were a part of mine. And we were a part of an even larger world of marching poor people. By now I understood that the Depression was world-wide and that the unemployed and the poor were demonstrating and agitating for jobs and food all over the globe. We were millions."

Yates becomes member of communist party
Moving to New York City, he became a founding member of the railroad Dining Car Waiter's Union and became active in the unemployment councils, the Scottsboro defense campaign, and the movement to free Angelo Herndon, a young communist organizer jailed in Alabama for trying to form a union. In 1936 he joined the Communist Party, becoming secretary of his branch. All of the mentioned organizations and movements were led to a large degree by the Communist Party and were centers of the class struggle against racism, struggles that brought many thousands of workers into the communist movement.
     Yates set sail for France in March, 1937, arriving in Spain after a dangerous crossing by climbing the Pyrenees mountains. He served as a truck driver, then was transferred to the Thaelmann Battalion of German volunteers. Wounded in a bombing raid, he was hospitalized. When told he was being sent home, he protested: “But the war’s not over!”

Communist fighter returns to Jim Crow U.S.
Yates returned to the U.S. in February, 1938 to a war hero's welcome from the American Left, followed by a slap in the face by American racists. On his first night home in New York, buoyed by the kisses and handshakes he received at the docks, Yates was denied a room at the hotel his comrades had planned to stay in. Although the white veterans checked in without a problem, when Yates stood before the registrar, the clerk simply looked at him and said “No Vacancy”:
"Inwardly I winced. So soon? I had hardly left the boat and here it was. After having experienced being welcomed in cafes and hotels in Spain and France, I was doubly shocked to be hit so quickly. The pain went as deeply as any bullet could have done [sic). I had the dizzy feeling I was back in the trenches again. But this was another front. I was home.” Needless to say, his comrades promptly gave up their accommodations and moved on."

Yates memoralizes communist struggle
During World War II Yates joined the Army Signal Corps but, like many U.S. veterans of the Spanish Civil War, he was not permitted to serve overseas. After the war he studied electronics and had a radio repair shop. He was active in the International Brotherhood of Railroad Porters and head of the Chelsea-Village NAACP branch in New York City.
     In 1986 Yates published Mississippi to Madrid. It is the only autobiography of a Black American communist who served in the Spanish Civil War. It is full of detail about Yates’ life in Mississippi, his political activities, what he experienced and saw in the Spanish Civil War, his comrades in arms – many of whom were killed there – and the people he met, including Langston Hughes.
     In 1987 Yates was invited to be writer in residence at a writers’ retreat in Maine, where he stayed until 1992. He died in 1993.

 Sources: ALBA database; African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Hall, 1991); Brandt, Joe, ed.. Black Americans in the Spanish People’s War Against Fascism 1936-1939 James Yates, Mississippi to Madrid (two editions, 1986 and 1988).