Fighting LA’s racist housing crisis
On March 25, I attended a rally in support of homeless residents who were being “swept” and displaced from Echo Park, located in Los Angeles. The sweeps were conducted by city workers, backed up by a massive Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) presence. Hundreds of people, including neighborhood residents, protested and marched for hours to demand a stop to the sweeps and permanent housing for everyone. The LAPD penned in and arrested 182 people after they sat down in the street. Two news reporters were also charged and National Lawyers’ Guild legal observers were detained, before being released.
There are hundreds of homeless encampments across the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The 2020 official Point in Time Count for LA County (likely an undercount) was 66,436. Recently, the Los Angeles Times newspaper even compared LA to the encampments described in Grapes of Wrath, the John Steinbeck novel about the great migration from the “Dust Bowl” to California in the 1930s.
Those who migrated in the 1930s were mainly white tenant farmers and sharecroppers from the South, thrown off their lands when their owners’ profits were hit after a years-long drought that resulted in massive crop failures. In contrast, today’s houseless population in LA County is overwhelmingly Black and Latin. Homelessness here has exploded, in the wake of mass racist unemployment caused by shutdowns of hundreds of factories and other workplaces over the decades, due to an overproduction crisis that sunk the bosses’ profits. This was compounded by skyrocketing rents due to gentrification, and the huge drop in workers’ wages during the pandemic.
LA politicians are doing the bosses’ dirty work, claiming that Echo Park and other encampments are unsafe and unhealthy. But so far, their plan to end homelessness with “Project Room-key” (placing houseless temporarily in hotel rooms) has been a disaster for the working class. Homeless residents are rightly suspicious that the politician’s promises will turn out to be hollow.
The scene at Echo Park was surreal, with five LAPD helicopters circling and diving through the area and hundreds of riot cops at all park entrances blocking any of the protesters from joining with their houseless brothers and sisters. The rally was apparently led by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Streetwatch LA. DSA promoted non-violence, but the young, overwhelmingly white workers responded favorably to a Black homeless speaker who called for multi-racial unity and militant fight-back.
People also responded favorably to CHALLENGE newspaper. I distributed 40 copies of the issue with the frontpage article about our campaign here against racist gentrification. People were open to seeing the connection between evicted homeowners and tenants; those threatened with eviction; and the homeless fighting for permanent housing. Only a system that abolishes the commodification of basic human needs like housing can end this plague on our class. That system is communism.
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Capitalism robs workers of  clean water
Water. Shouldn’t clean water be available to all workers? Under capitalism, it is being stolen, sold, and traded and the working class is suffering. Under communism, ensuring clean water for the international working class would be common sense.
Recently, I was told that the water fountains at the local schools have been shut off because of Covid-19. Health officials rightly don’t want multiple people removing their masks to drink from public water fountains. Students will have to bring their own water. This adds insult to injury in neighborhoods like the one in which I teach where many families can’t afford their rent, never mind extras like clean drinking water. My principal is going to use an already strapped local school budget to buy bottled water for students who don’t have it. A domino inequity effect will ensue: local schools with small budgets like this one will buy drinking water and forgo other extras while schools in well-off neighborhoods with deeper pockets won’t think twice—their students will have clean water available and will purchase the extras my students will have to forgo.
Inequality in educational resources is grotesque. In my school district of 205 schools, five billionaires and 3,200 millionaires (USD) live – these capitalists don’t intend to pay for the water! Racism is plain to see. The families with the lowest incomes are Black, Latin and Asian.
The issue of clean drinking water for the working class should be on the forefront of everyone’s mind - and not just because of Covid-19. One in three people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water (WHO, 2019).
The capitalists pretend to care. The United Nations passed a meaningless resolution, “declaring water and sanitation to be a basic human right” in 2010.
 In San Cristóbal, Mexico, local workers depend on the Coca-Cola bottling company for jobs. The same company has a permit (2018) to extract 300,000 gallons of water to make their sugary, diabetes-inducing drink yet their workers have no safe sources of drinking water. On average, workers and their families are consuming two liters of sugary drinks a day. That’s just one example.
Wall Street started trading water on the stock market in 2020 like they do for crude oil, soybeans, and corn (Yale Environment 360, 12/2020, https://e360.yale.edu/). The capitalists are betting on the future price of water! Their interest in clean water is only so they can profit. Forget the platitudes of the World Health Organization and the UN. Workers’ needs will not be met without communism.
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Addition to ‘Red Army Defeated Fascists’
"The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army." The CHALLENGE article "Red Army Defeated Fascists''  (2/15) was right on!
With all the lies spread by the world's ruling classes about the U.S. and its allies winning World War II, and about the Bolshevik Revolution, I would add the following: the capitalists were fearful that the Russian working class that seized power in 1917 in the fledgling Soviet Union set an example for the international working class which was why the armies of 17 capitalist countries invaded the workers' state from 1917 to 1925. They were repelled. Some 4.5 million workers died in that bosses' invasion—only 18,000 in the Revolution itself. That defeat of Western armies ended British imperialist Winston Churchil's dream of "strangling the baby in the cradle," referring to the Bolsheviks.
Actually numerous Western historians agreed that the Red Army's smashing of six Nazi armies at the Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of World War II. That fact was endorsed by no less than the U.S. Pacific Commander Douglas MacArthur. His statement to the Associated Press is worth repeating: "The hopes of civilization rest upon the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army." Their heroic "resistance to the heaviest blows of a hitherto undefeated enemy" is "The greatest military achievement of all time."
The solidarity of U.S. workers should also be noted: West Coast longshoremen refused to load ships with military supplies headed for the American Expeditionary Force which had invaded Siberia.
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