NEW YORK CITY, October 12—Hundreds of retired New York City workers rallied outside of city hall today in a continuing struggle to prevent reductions in their health benefits. Retirees have been fighting for over a year against a plan to force them into privatized medical insurance, the Medicare Advantage plan, rather than traditional medicare coverage with city paid secondary insurance. The original plan was for premiums of $191.00 monthly per person to be charged for those who wanted to opt out of the Medicare Advantage plan. This racist plan meant that low income retirees (disproportionately Black and Latin) would be unable to afford to opt out. Angry retirees understood that Medicare Advantage plans rip off the medicare program in order to insure maximum profits. This was found to be the case by the U.S. inspector general (NYT, 10/8). Retirees also feared that needed tests and treatments would be denied or delayed by profit seeking private insurance companies, again found to be the case in a federal audit (NYT,  4/28). Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have pointed out that capitalist medicine is dangerous for us all, be it government or private run systems. In a communist run system, medical care would be determined by need, not cost or profit. In the heat of battle, we need to build the PLP so that the alternative of communist run health care becomes real.

PL'ers involved in this struggle have pointed out how “friends'' in the city government, led by the Democratic Party (first by Mayor De Blasio and now by Mayor Adams), have teamed up with the main city worker union leaders, the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) to put retirees into a Medicare (dis)Advantage plan. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies!

Earlier this year, a court ruling allowed the city’s new Medicare Advantage plan to begin but denied the city the right to charge premiums to those who wanted to stay with traditional Medicare and a city sponsored secondary insurance they now enjoy. That decision is now being appealed by the city and MLC. Meanwhile the city and MLC have hatched a plan to change the local law upon which the court case was decided.

When PL’ers chant  “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan, all are part of the bosses’ plan” we are pointing out how the ruling class uses both state power and their allies to attack the working class. In this struggle, we have seen how the bosses have used their state apparatus and their allies in the unions to attack retirees.

Today's demonstration focused on the plan to change local administrative code 12-126, to undermine the court’s finding earlier this year. We are pointing out to current workers that this change could mean the ending of premium free health coverage for them as well as worsening the health coverage for retirees. Retirees once again are appealing to local politicians in the New York City council to block this change. Relying on the goodness of politicians is a dubious plan at best. It is leading us into the arms of the ruling class. Capitalism rules by many means. Sometimes with an open iron fist. More often by getting workers to follow the leadership of enemies of the working class who lead mass movements like the unions and the Democratic and Republican political parties.

PL’ers stand with our sisters and brothers in fighting back. While doing so, we unmask our class enemies wherever they are and whoever they may be.

The following 7-part series is reprinted and lightly edited from the Communist Newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, by famous communist writer Mike Gold.

Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist priniciples 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 sunk 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, unemployment councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of 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.

This unemployment is a famine, a Mississippi flood, a major disaster to the human race. More than 50 percent of the Black workers in the city are unemployed. But the Black and white capitalists of Chicago, like their fraternity the world over, have been concerned only with preserving dividends.

A year ago, they were throwing thousands of Black workers out into the naked streets to die. But then a revolt began. Unemployed Councils sprang up, under communist guidance, which fought the evictions. As fast as a poor worker’s furniture was thrown into the street, the councils carried it back. The police used clubs, blackjacks and jail sentences, but the revolt could not be stopped.

The landlords grew desperate. Oscar DePriest, the Black congressman, is also one of the chief landlords on the south side. He retained as lawyers certain other Judas-liberals from the National Association of Advancement for Colored People.

Then he called a secret conference. That night the profit-hoarders and racketeers decided on nothing short of murder.

There was to be an eviction on Dearborn Street the next day. A 72-year old Black working woman was to be kicked out like a dog to die. But the Council arrived to stop the crime.

While they placed back the furniture, the police appeared. This time they did not merely club, maim, gouge and crack skulls. With not the slightest warning, they shot their rifles again and again into the crowd. They killed three Black workers, one of them a communist, and wounded many others.

It was a murder plot. I found proof of this a year later when I came to Dearborn Street.

The brown ruined wooden shacks have not been painted or repaired for decades. They are allowed to rot away. It is the landlord-economy in America to buy up putrid slums that should be burned, and rent them to Black workers. When the homes finally collapse they are torn down. Meanwhile they pay high dividends and cost nothing to maintain.

On Dearborn Street the garbage is heaped everywhere, foul as a landlord’s heart. The city has not removed garbage for months; it is bankrupt. Garbage, flies, stink, leaky roofs, broken windows and doors, moldy wet shacks swarming with vermin; all the houses in crazy tatters and out of plumb.

This is Dearborn Street, which has sent so many landlord’s wives to Paris, their sons to Harvard or Fisk. And women agonize in childbirth, and strongmen rot of hunger and despair, and babies’ bones shrivel because there is no milk.

The Landlords’ Warning
We went into one of those miserable tenements, and knocked at a door. An old woman answered, a soft-voiced gentle person with a motherly face. She apologizes for her appearance: her gray hair was knotted in paper; she was dressed in a wrapper and apron.

“I’ve been clearing,” she said, “and look a fright, but do come in and rest yourself.” Her home, despite the cracked plaster and grimy walls where lathes stuck out like a pauper’s ribs, was as neat as two hands could make it. It was touching to see her beautiful natural courtesy. It moved one to find her home so painfully clean. Would a landlord’s wife have retained her human dignity in such surroundings?

She was Ms. Martha Ormshes, wife of a stockyard’s worker. She did not want to talk at first; the Black [workers] have learned not to trust white [workers]. But then, convinced that we came from the workers’ press, she told us an amazing fact.

Her windows look out over the spot where the eviction-murders took place. The night before, her landlord had phoned her a warning not to look out of those windows the next day; there would be shooting.

But we did look out until the shots began coming too thick,” she said, “and my husband and I had to throw ourselves on the floor. It was murder; the police warned nobody, just started to shoot. Such a lot of black smoke around; my my, they just kept on shooting and shooting! And those poor people had nothing to fight back with, just a few stones. It wasn’t right. Everyone on this street is still wild about it.

Others on Dearborn Street had much the same story to tell, of whispers, telephone warnings, and the like. It was a plot. The landlords evidently decided to create an atmosphere of fear, to demonstrate to all that they controlled the police. But the plot failed.

Three Black workers were killed, but during the next weeks five thousand others joined the Unemployed Councils; 500 filled out applications to the Communist Party; hundreds of others became members of the International Labor Defense. Many of these Black workers are now in the leadership of these organizations.

Some of them have since drifted away. The Party in America has not yet worked out some simple, consistent plan that would hold such masses. Yet the South Side was a forest fire of indignation. Nothing else but the eviction-murders was talked about in barbershops, restaurants and churches. Groups of Black workers, after much hunting and questioning, would discover the address of party headquarters and march there in grim, determined squads to join up.

A Great Mass Funeral
There was a mass funeral for Abe Gray, John Oneal, and Thomas Paige, the three victims of the blood stained landlord system. More than 100,000 workers, Black and white, marched through the South Side street, a great solemn army of proletarian vengeance, waving red banners. That day has never been forgotten. It marked the beginning of the revolt.

Hundreds of evictions since then have been foiled by the Unemployment Councils. They take place almost every day. As Brown Squire, one of the leaders, told me, “when the first stick of furniture gets thrown out, a crowd gathers like magic. Somebody unknown telephones at once to the nearest council; everyone knows us. We first send a few delegates to investigate, to see whether the tenant wants us to move him back. If he does, we go there and carry on.”

Capitalist powers choosing sides as world gears up for growing war
Al Jazeera, 10/16–United States President Joe Biden has “no plans'' to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at next month’s G20 summit in Indonesia, a senior US official says, as tensions over the OPEC+ decision to cut oil production continue to reverberate. Relations between the US and Saudi Arabia are on thin ice over the oil production cuts. Last week, the Riyadh-led OPEC cartel and an additional group of 10 other oil producers headed by Russia decided to reduce global output by up to two million barrels per day from November. The move is expected to lead to higher oil prices, which would help Russia pay for its offensive in Ukraine.

Biden has warned Saudi Arabia that there will be unspecified “consequences” for siding with Russia in supporting the cuts. The OPEC+ move undermines Western countries’ plans to impose a cap on the price of Russian oil in response to Moscow’s war in Ukraine. The move could lead to soaring energy prices, raising concerns in Biden’s Democratic Party about how it will fare in November’s midterm elections. Washington suggested Gulf producers were aligning with Russia at the expense of the United States and its Western allies.

U.S. preparing economy for war with China
The Economist, 10/13– “China’s government is planning on winning the AI race, winning future wars and winning the future,” warned Todd Young, an American senator, in July.

Western countries are embarking on a frantic effort to retain or regain their technological edge. On October 7th America issued fierce new restrictions on exports to China of advanced semiconductors and related equipment. “It’s a total clamp down, trying to cut off every head of the hydra of China’s chip industry.”

China’s output of a basket of sophisticated goods including information technology, pharmaceuticals and electronics is expected to surpass America’s this year…As well as trying to disrupt the flow of technology abroad, America’s government is investing more in innovation. In August Congress approved $370bn of spending on green energy, including lots of money for research.

D.R.C. is a key battlefield for U.S. and Chinese imperialists
Agence France Presse, 9/30– A military prosecutor in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday requested the death penalty for 11 people allegedly implicated in the murder of two Chinese mine workers this year. On March 17, a convoy of Chinese nationals returning from a gold mine came under attack in the village of Nderemi in Ituri province. Two Chinese workers were killed. A military tribunal launched proceedings against 12 people, including 11 army members, on charges of murder and criminal conspiracy…During a hearing on Monday, military prosecutor Colonel Kumbu Ngoma requested the death penalty for 11 of the suspects, who include two army colonels. Attacks on Chinese-managed mines and Chinese workers are not uncommon in resource-rich eastern DRC.

The revolution will not be on Twitter
New York Times, 09/30–Social media, which enables protests to organize and gather in once-unthinkable numbers, often with little or no formal leadership, may also paradoxically undermine those movements, according to a theory advanced by Zeynep Tufekci, a Columbia University sociologist. In earlier eras, activists might spend months or years building the organizational structures and real-world ties necessary to launch a mass protest. This also made movements durable, instilling discipline and chains of command.

Social media allows would-be protesters to skip those steps, spurring one another to action with as little as a viral post. The result is rallies that put thousands or millions of bodies in the street overnight — but that often fizzle just as quickly. Without that traditional activist infrastructure, social media protests are less equipped to endure government repression. Leaderless, they more easily fracture and struggle to coordinate strategically.

Protests were traditionally just one tool in activist campaigns to pressure governments...social media, by channeling popular energy away from such organizing, means that mass protest is now often the only tool, and typically ineffective on its own."

Street-vendor workers protest racist harassment
We were at a pro-street vendor coalition protest march. It was a reformist protest, demanding that the city increase the number of licenses for these workers. These workers are harassed daily and persecuted by the police, with numerous fines, which they have to pay. This makes life more difficult for these workers since most of them are undocumented and depend on what they can earn from their daily sales to be able to survive in a city where life is becoming more and more expensive and impossible for the working class. Life is more difficult especially for undocumented immigrants, who are victims of harassment and racism.

Two members of Progressive Labor Party, who are doing the work within a community organization of the coalition, gave leadership several times during the march, shouting our slogans, putting forth our Party’s line, and at one point in the march, we very quickly placed a large blanket with the demands in a government office. We also distributed several Challenges that were enthusiastically taken by people who already knew our paper. It was a day of militant struggle, but only communism will save our entire working class from the atrocities of capitalism.

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Two funerals and a revolution
On September 24th CHALLENGE ran an editorial on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The article did an excellent job juxtaposing the pageantry that surrounded Elizbaeth’s state-sponsored funeral with the emiseration and destruction her family’s British Empire wrought during its peak years. But, Elizabeth’s death symbolizes something else for the workers of the world. Her death, coming long after the death of monarchy and feudalism, should remind us that there was a time peasants could not imagine the end of kings and queens. In fact, the English monarchy has existed (and actually ruled) for more than one thousand years. Elizabeth was, for her entire life, nothing but a figurehead, a nostalgic mascot paraded around by capitalists hundreds of years after they themselves violently ended the rule of kings and queens. Capitalism, as an economic system, is still far younger than feudalism was when capitalism overthrew it, and yet many will confidently assure workers that capitalism is the best system possible. They say that communism, an idea barely one hundred-and-fifty years old, has had its day in the sun.

In reality the Soviet Union, the Chinese Revolution, and history’s other worker victories are only the foreshadowing of a worker-run communist world. Whether in the next one hundred years or five hundred years, capitalism’s contradictions will lead to the truly productive class, the workers, taking control, just like the capitalists took control from Queen Elizabeth and her predecessors all those years ago. Elizabeth’s passing should remind us: there will be a day when workers see a headline commemorating the world’s last living capitalist succumbing to old age, and on that day we will shake our heads and say “good riddance.”
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Looking forward to sharing vision of communism
Edward Bellamy’s book, Looking Backward, could have been titled “Looking Forward”. The first Challenge review moved me to go to the library. I applauded Bellamy’s mandatory work for ages 21-45--inclusive of folks with physical or mental challenges. Equal credit cards are distributed for necessities and “luxuries.”

Later, on reading our second review, I appreciated pointing out Bellamy’s weaknesses: attaining such a society peaceably, omitting racial issues and viewing women in a limited way.

However, the book’s best-selling reception indicated he speaks to human needs: 1) Work is a necessity and can be created for those with “lesser” abilities to develop their full potential.  The threat of unemployment and cynicism of cutthroat competition is absent. 2) People realize the benefits of their labor when capitalist waste is eliminated: i.e., glut of oversupply and duplication of brand-name goods. I reveled when Bellamy eliminated the monstrous military budget, politicians, and the court system.

Many folks I approach today with our paper agree that capitalism is violent and can only be fought with violence. But questions I hear often are, “How will you motivate people to fight for these values? How can you have a society without money?

I must remind myself to engage people more around a vision of a communist future. In achieving popular status back in the day, Bellamy’s book addressed a universal hunger for these ideas. That said, building a society with productive work and people receiving the fruits of their labor is worth fighting for!
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CHALLENGE response:
Bellamy’s racist eugenics and his disgustingly anti-communist, fascist, and sexist ideas outweigh any of his positive anti-capitalist ideas. Building a communist society requires the fight to eradicate these ideas and practices.