NEWARK, NJ, July 21—While liberal fascist Mayor Ras Baraka and Newark’s ruling class are preoccupied with portraying Newark as a model city, working people and students in Newark are left to reckon with social murder through police terror, decaying schools, displacement, high rent prices, deplorable living conditions and faux gestures of solidarity between wealthy developers, antiracist fighters and workers. Stephen Crane Village, one of the last housing projects in Newark, with a demographic of mostly poor and disabled, Black and Latin workers, made news when a horrible explosion leveled part of a building. Six people have been injured and one person is in critical condition. A total of 31 people are on the brink of homelessness, living in a hotel that they cannot afford and at the hands of Newark Housing Authority to provide access to the next crumbling complex. This is not a long term solution for working people and the longer we leave our futures in the hands of these crooked misleaders, the more members of our class will die.
The bosses’ media blankly asks, “How did this happen?” But workers in Newark and all over the world have experienced crumbling conditions for decades with no long term solution. The change that’s needed is for workers en masse to no longer rely on lying liberal politicians and their land developer friends. Workers need to turn this crumbling system into an opportunity to build a future where workers lead and run a world based on egalitarianism and commitment to their class–the working class. Under communism, housing will be a right granted to all workers. Slumlords will not exist and anyone that tries to sell out the working class will be jailed or run out of town.
Displacing workers through gentrification
Meanwhile, under capitalism, the United States Housing and Development (HUD) and the City of Newark claim to be investigating the causation of the explosion. Angry tenants have demanded answers— but have yet to receive one. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) visited some of these tenants and one told us that hours before the explosion, there was a lingering smell of gas. “It always smells like gas here. But they’re going to say and blame us for it like they always do.” Just like this Black woman worker shared, the half-told news is starting to spread that it was a resident that left their oven on that caused the explosion. Regardless of the conclusion Newark Housing Authority reaches, they will never say that it was capitalism and racist neglect that caused the explosion!
For the future that Baraka and wealthy developers at NJPAC, Prudential, Audible, Rutgers University and their friends at Goldman Sachs want, housing complexes like Stephen Crane, Bradley Courts and the Spires must go. The situation in Stephen Crane is part of a decades-long process of urban renewal and gentrification. The number of low income public housing complexes in Newark is dwindling, either being privatized by greedy developers who aim to turn them into mixed-income complexes— meaning that the rent will be set to mostly market rate prices, leaving options for low income residents limited. Or, the buildings will be demolished completely. “The fundamental problem is that investors have heightened reasons to jettison poorer tenants in favor of those who can pay more, and to evade price constrained housing in favor of unconstrained lease terms” (Who Owns Newark, Rutgers CLiME Report, 2022).
In 2022, Ras Baraka and HUD scum Victor Cirillo, celebrated the demolition of Seth Boyden Terrace, a housing complex in Newark’s South Ward and announced that $100M Lionsgate Studio would take its place. One comrade from the headquarters of Lionsgate in Canada shared that her home town is now filled with film studios and is unaffordable to the point that even the film studios refuse to pay to film there–most likely because they can exploit and displace another set of workers for less elsewhere. Now New Jersey workers are next on the chopping block to be exploited and squeezed out. We won’t let them set up shop without a fight.
No ‘safe’ houses under capitalism
When PLP organized with a comrade who lived in Stephen Crane and went door to door with their fellow neighbors, and conducted surveys last year, the residents were immediately receptive and vocalized their displeasure at the poor conditions they faced living in the complex. Those included mold, vermin, insufficient heat in the winter and repairs that often went unaddressed. The verdict is clear: There are no safe housing conditions for the working class under capitalism! Anything that is given to one group of workers is and will always be at the expense of killing another group of workers. The only way that we all win is by fighting for a total overhaul of this capitalist system and building a communist future.
While the U.S. ruling-class prepares for a potential war with Russia and China, more fascist attacks will be amplified against workers, and it will be our most vulnerable- those who live in public housing, where many workers are not only Black and Latin, but elderly and disabled, who will become the first targets. It will be homeless workers (see Jordan Neely) who will be subjected to violent attacks. We must fight back against the racist and classist policies of HUD, and against two-faced liberal misleaders like Baraka who tells Newark that buying a home is a way to combat gentrification. We must not fall for their tricks to convince workers that capitalism can work for us. This is why we must organize and fight for communism!
