I attended a Martin Luther King march organized by the Coalition to Protect Chinatown & Lower East Side. The main lesson is that we cannot trust liberal politicians and that we can only rely on the working class to get what we need.
I’ve been involved in fighting the housing crisis affecting the vast majority of workers in New York City. This is the second year I’ve participated in the MLK march to call out the city’s racist displacement agenda. The rally had a multiracial and multi-generational character. While the march was smaller than last year’s, it was qualitatively better. The workers speaking testified to the communities organizing to unite all members of the community: Black, white, and Latin, and Asian against the City’s racism, in order to fend off their plans to build four luxury mega-towers not just  in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, but throughout NYC.
Moreover the politics of the march were sharper. Last year, the coalition ended the program by directing us to vote for a better public advocate. This year, the speakers emphasized the need to organize and not depend on politicians to change the system. Our speakers publicly exposed the local liberal Big Fascists by denouncing Councilmember Margaret Chin and Mayor Bill de Blasio, and their record of colluding with real estate developers and displacing communities. Though Chin is Chinese and de Blasio has Black family members, they are not friends of workers.
They also called out Corey Johnson, the head of the City Council, and a representative of the gay rights movement. We delivered a 5,000-signature petition demanding Johnson stop the mega-towers and support our community led rezoning plan to protect the entire neighborhood  from more luxury out of scale developments,that destroy the environment and displace workers.  He was nowhere to be found. The coalition charged him with covertly facilitating the displacement of the community by electing to use the city’s sham land review process called the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP).The ULURP process exposes the fundamental futility of capitalist democracy, because the bosses let you participate in it to fool you into thinking your voice matters, but ultimately they use it to give their class (in this case the developers) more power to exploit workers and rob us of resources.
Through experience, the workers in this mass organization are learning that the only way workers can win is if we unite against racism without the handouts of politicians. In this political climate, not many workers are calling out the liberals in addition to the conservative scumbags. Most nonprofits are laser focused on just president Donald Trump being the main enemy. Hence, it is progress for this multiracial group of workers to attack all politicians.
A few Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades who attended distributed CHALLENGE and made contact with workers. After the march, I spoke with friends about why liberals are the main danger. I pointed out that this system is rotten and even if we elect members of oppressed groups that profess the best intentions, they will continue to grease the machine that keeps the capitalist machine functioning. The response I received was very positive.
There is a lot of potential to win workers through this area of work. I plan to continue to build a base with the help of fellow comrades, to make CHALLENGE a staple there and to infuse the day-to-day organizing with communist politics. Under communism we would abolish the toxic cycle of ownership, exploitation, and the profiteering of workers’ labor and natural resources like air, sunlight, and water. No one  would be homeless and housing would be a public non-negotiable right not a commodity that can be bought and sold. We must win workers to the idea that if we the workers create all of the value in society, we should be able to control and decide how it is distributed and for what purpose. That’s communism. We must not only fight for better housing conditions today, we must fight for a whole new world, for a better tomorrow.