NEW YORK CITY — A group of PL’ers recently went with a coalition of community groups to call on New York State legislators to save a “rent stabilization” law at risk of being gutted by the local bosses in favor of “mixed”-income neighborhoods. The current law limits rent increases for workers on short-term leases (one and two years) to those determined by a Rent Stabilization Board, with a cap on how much landlords may increase rent.
Landlords and others who support throwing poorer workers out to attract wealthier tenants insist that “mixed”-income neighborhoods are necessary to bring in services. These filth use racist code words, like making Black and Latin-majority neighborhoods “cleaner,” or “safer,” or “reducing crime.” They support changing the laws to better suit their profit agenda. Liberal rulers would like to put power into the hands of the Warren Buffets who can “take care of poor people” while pretending that the reality of this racist capitalist dictatorship over the working class doesn’t exist.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised to find or build 200,000 “affordable” housing units. “Affordable” is out of reach for many families whose annual income is $16,000 to $23,000. For example, new buildings will be built in East New York, Brooklyn. The city will provide incentives and tax breaks to the developers so that 20 to 30 percent of the apartments will be “affordable,” with around 10 percent meeting the definition of “low” income. This will guarantee swollen profits for the real estate industry, dramatically increasing overall rents by squeezing out low-rent apartments.
New York City has long been in a major housing crisis. It has lost 400,000 “low” and “moderate” rent housing units, including 55,000 rent-stabilized apartments where rents rose above $2,500 a month and were de-regulated by the law. Working-class tenants,including the elderly, already pay 50 percent or more of their income for rent. Gentrification of working-class communities in all five boroughs has progressed rapidly, displacing thousands of families and changing entire communities.
Landlords routinely flout the law and ignore repairs, leave buildings in dangerous conditions, and commit deliberate criminal acts and harassment to force tenants to move. Government-owned housing projects languish for lack of repairs, such as the building where the NYPD murdered Akai Gurley. Small buildings and private houses for rent are not covered by any rent laws at all, and rents rise almost overnight and transform entire blocks into upper-income housing. Working-class tenants have nowhere to go, so some leave the city to face long and difficult commutes to work. Tenant success stories in the courts, welcome as they are, are extremely few in number.
PL’ers at the rally argued that the working class needs to understand that bankers, bosses and the real estate industry hold class power. Politicians who thrive on the cheers while chanting empty slogans don’t have a magic wand to change “bad landlords.” Their bosses are the capitalists! It is dangerous for workers to be lulled by the liberal politicians into having false hopes about capitalism. We argued for moving beyond short-term limited reforms, however necessary, to overthrow capitalism and fight for workers’ power under communism. United by an international PLP, we can build real housing for all, in a system based on workers sharing what we have so that we can meet the needs of the working class worldwide.
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Students, Profs Fight Back Against Racist College Cuts
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- 04 June 2015 65 hits
BOSTON — Chants rang out across the Roxbury Community College (RCC) campus “Hands off RCC, this is our community,” and “No more top down management, no more lies, we want a college where students thrive.”
It was the day after faculty and staff voted “no confidence” in the new administration, and 25 faculty, staff, and students rallied in front of the administration building.
The strong statement was the latest step in the battle by students and teachers to keep alive an idea that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, specifically the struggle to win higher education for Black students who had been excluded by inferior schools and poverty. Now the rulers’ agenda for community colleges is to “vocationalize” them to serve area businesses’ need for workers. Just like K–12 education reform, this bosses’ reform is a response to an intensifying capitalist crisis.
RCC President Valerie Roberson’s job is to carry out this agenda. In 16 months, the administration has forced out 55 workers, increased class size, forced teachers to teach classes outside their field, and cut back on support services. The teaching of critical reading, writing, and thinking is being sacrificed and policy changes are allowing fewer students into four-year colleges.
Although RCC was plagued for decades by dysfunctional administration and underfunding, it became known as a socially conscious community that empowered students to achieve their aspirations. Now, as U.S. capitalism declines, the rulers need the public schools and colleges to help them improve our competitiveness with rival capitalists. This development is part of growing fascism when the bosses must rule with an iron fist, clamping down on workers as they militarize society and prepare for world war.
Although we may not be able to stop this development, by fighting back we can slow it down, building unity and a spirit of resistance for the bigger struggles to come. This requires a long-term outlook, which faculty, staff, and students need to develop. Their fear was offset by the unity we built between the two unions and students as well as their anger at how they are being treated. The biggest weakness was our failure to mobilize students. As of today, the vast majority of RCC students remain in the dark about why they need to fight back. Their passivity is a weakness in our class, created by decades of ruling-class strategy to depoliticize youth and win them to individualism and patriotism.
Worried that activism and dissent will deepen at RCC and spread beyond it, the Department of Higher Education has stepped in to negotiate with the unions. For us, these on-going meetings are an opportunity to maintain momentum and win some gains — but the real gain is the growth of the revolutionary communist movement. PLP has played a crucial role sharpening up the class struggle, but we need to do more. More young people reading CHALLENGE, more meeting with us, and more workers and youth understanding our struggle—those are the steps we need to build a communist revolution.
Indiana — Progressive Labor Party’s political work here has become immersed in the Black Lives Matter Movement. We have begun to merge our campus and community bases in Indiana to focus collectively on organizing in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) struggle. The political line in the BLM movement is very nationalist at times and reformist in nature, but it is filled with many workers who want to fight against injustice. Moreover, it is our job to win these workers. If Black workers are a key revolutionary force, then the Party must organize in these struggles and provide revolutionary leadership to them.
In our local BLM movement, Party members provide key leadership. We struggle within the organization to pull it further to the left, and to keep the focus from becoming sucked into an electoral campaign. We fight against reactionary ideas like “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter” and instead assert that “Workers’ Lives Matter,” regardless of whether they are Black, Cambodian, or Palestinian. Being involved in this mass organization has given us the opportunity to unite workers in northwest Indiana, with the focus being the economically devastated and super-oppressed workers there.
‘Stop These Racist Sweeps’
Black workers here, like others in majority Black cities in America, are targets of traffic “sweeps” which have resulted in predatory fines, and mass stop-and-frisk tactics. Indiana police target youth for jaywalking. This has become a moneymaking tool in a number of cities, and Black Lives Matter, with leadership of PL’ers, has fought these polices.
Our fightback led to a town hall meeting with the community, where many workers told their stories of racist police encounters. The mayor and police chief were in attendance and spoke. People in the audience, however, saw through their lies and called them out. A comrade gave a speech that called out capitalism as the culprit, and ended with, “stop these racist sweeps.” A criticism was that there was no open PLP speech made. However, some contacts were made and two young Black women workers have been invited to a study group.
We must lead the struggle
With the recent struggle in Baltimore heating up, it can only make us wonder: Could places like Detroit and other super exploited cities be next? Building a base in high-unemployment areas is a critical task for the Party. Ferguson and Baltimore are great examples of this.
When we get involved in these mass struggles, the Party becomes stronger. Younger comrades learn how to lead and veteran comrades are sharpened as well. We also get a glimpse of communism. Through organizing rallies, marches, and events, we see how workers can and will eventually organize a society where everyone has a say and uses their skills to contribute to the collective need.
But with this look at collectivity, we also get a glimpse of fascism. The continued militarization of police shows us that the bosses in the U.S. are getting workers ready for complete fascism. But it also shows that workers are ready to fight against it. The Progressive Labor Party must be ready and in position to lead this fightback.
BROOKLYN — Medical care for working people, and the jobs of the workers who provide it are under attack in Brooklyn, as elsewhere. The good news is that workers are fighting back against layoffs, cutbacks and hospital closings.
At Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, workers are now suffering layoffs in every department, even as the state spends tens of millions on an outside consultant, PITT Management, hired to orchestrate the layoffs. Despite the construction of two big new buildings, the administration claims there’s no money!
No money for workers’ health, that is. In an area that’s heavily populated by Black and Latin working-class families, where racist cops have killed young Black workers including Shantel Davis and Kiki Gray, and where more, not less, health care is needed, Governor Andrew Cuomo has cut funds for this safety-net hospital. Long Island College Hospital has been closed. Interfaith and Brookdale workers are fighting to stop closings.
Inside the remaining hospitals, conditions are deteriorating due to the layoffs. The cleaning department is so depleted that workers are exhausting themselves with mandated overtime. Other workers have also been loaded with more work, including nurses. Large areas of maintenance have been contracted out. And yet, despite having three unions, the only advice these bosses give workers is to keep their heads down and hope that lawyers can get them reinstated! The unions hide the number of layoffs and collaborate openly with the bosses to keep us pacified.
But workers and neighborhood residents are far from pacified. In the past, we organized protests outside of the hospital with many community members joining hospital workers against layoffs and the closing of the hospital. That’s the spirit of struggle that we need to re-awaken now to stop the racist layoffs. The bosses use us as pawns for profit; only a communist system can take us out of the chaos of the capitalist system. And only the working class, united and led by its communist party, PLP, can win that future for our class.
DILLEY, TEXAS, May 21 — On May 8, a federal judge in Texas refused to protect hunger-striking immigrant mothers from retaliation by jail guards at Karnes County Residential Center. Strike leaders had been placed in isolation, fired from jail jobs and accused of insurrection.
The 78 women on hunger strike are leading the fight for freedom by thousands of immigrant women and children who have crossed into the U.S. since last summer. Obama’s sexist and racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers claim that the women pose a significant “threat to U.S. national security” by their mass migration. Therefore all were held initially without bail.
In support of the women’s release, 1,000 marched on the new jail here. PLP led the strikers with anti-racist and anti-capitalist chants, but the strikers were sometimes misled by others chanting to improve U.S. democracy. Nevertheless, dozens protested yesterday at the ICE office to deliver petitions demanding freedom for all jailed women and youth. Liberal church groups call the mass incarceration of women and kids an immoral act by the U.S. government. Civil rights lawyers in the federal court action argued without success that the women’s hunger strike was an exercise of free speech.
PL members and friends attended the court hearings and worked to support the strikers. But no reform group leaders are willing to identify the real cause of the problem — U.S. imperialism’s fight to maintain the profits of the ruling class worldwide. Racist and sexist prison guards are only one symptom of U.S. imperialism.
Mass Incarceration for Profit
The mass incarceration of Latin women and youth in Texas is part of the mass refugee crisis affecting 50 million people around the world. U.S. drone attacks force millions to flee their homes in Syria, Yemen, and other countries. City police from Ferguson to Baltimore incarcerate millions. In almost every case, the underlying cause of the displacement, incarceration or murder of millions of working class people is the fight to defend or expand markets and resources by the United States. The U.S. bosses will stop at nothing to maintain dominance.
Legalistic fights for “asylum” and inmate “free speech” for women fleeing U.S.-funded oppression in their original countries are well-meaning dead ends. The U.S. government doesn’t readily grant asylum to people fleeing U.S.-backed fascist regimes. Nor will it allow hunger strikers to shut down prisons under court-ordered First Amendment free speech doctrines.
Striking women must expand their fight. We should not physically weakening our forces through a hunger strike, which runs on the incorrect assumption that our oppressors will be pressured or moved to act by witnessing our suffering. As the 2,000 rebelling immigrant prisoners in the Willisey, TX prison demonstrated earlier this year, physical destruction of prison facilities and attacks on guards by inmates are an even more serious threat to the U.S. fascist immigration system. When prisoners strike at once, with strikes in solidarity by industrial workers who can shut off profits to the ruling class, the system will be more seriously threatened.
But in this period of capitalist crisis caused by long-term decline, bosses have little ability to reform the system, even temporarily. When the working class in Baltimore rebelled last month with violent attacks on the cops, Obama panicked, calling the Black youth of Baltimore “thugs.” Obama, Baltimore’s Black mayor, and the new U.S Attorney General then followed the ruling-class script by mobilizing cops, troops, and sell-out community programs. The rulers brought a few charges against Baltimore cops and declared the crisis over. In fact, the rulers can recover quickly from any crisis short of working-class revolution to destroy the capitalist system once and for all.
Liberal Pols: Capitalist Flunkies
No demands for reform can fix the problems created by capitalism. A few racist cops do not cause the mass incarceration of Black and Latin workers. Likewise, the mass deportation of families is not the byproduct of a “broken” immigration system. These are the products of U.S. imperialism in a period of decline. This system, actually controlled by bank owners and corporations through their money and their military, depends on racist super-exploitation to survive. To foster the illusion that reform is possible, the capitalists use the media to spread the illusion that elected politicians control the system. Thus, liberals proclaim that voting is key to reform. But Democrat and Republican flunkies all take their orders from the capitalist class.
In this period of impending imperialist war, the electoral circus will serve only to revive faith in reform and get people ready to fight on the side of their country. History has shown that reforms are always taken away and that world war is inevitable. Don’t be suckered. The only solution is to fight for communist revolution based on multi-racial unity of the working-class of the entire world!
