Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members from Kentucky organized a protest in downtown Corbin on Friday, August 30th to bring attention to rising rents and record evictions in the state. We also wanted to call out HB5, a bill which criminalizes homelessness, as an anti-worker bill supported by both Democrat and Republican legislators. The protest was sparked when local PL’ers noticed that a particular group of landlords, known as the Freeman Brothers, were notoriously infamous in Corbin for charging high rents and doing very little maintenance or upkeep on the properties they manage. The brothers are not just landlords, but also lawyers who own a property management business, a real estate brokerage, and have their own podcast. They have been known to make posts on social media websites such as Facebook, where they gloat about the negative attention that they receive from workers online who have seen their own rents go up as a result of the Freeman Brother’s influence on the market. Freeman Brother’s posts are often littered with comments from working-class tenants complaining and attacking the landlords for their disgusting behavior. 

Shutting scum landlords down with communist fightback

This was how local PLP members realized the need to organize a protest and bring these workers together so that they can realize their struggles are the same! The local PL’ers sprang into action before the summer came to an end by creating an event page with a flyer that had the PLP logo. By sharing it with friends on social media, the event page quickly got 52 responses because of the already existing hatred against the crooked landlord brothers. In addition to this, PL’ers went to properties managed by the Freeman Brothers and spoke with the local tenants, handing out flyers and explaining the causes behind this crisis and the need for workers to join together and fight back. The response was positive and many of the workers who we spoke to were in agreement with the need for a communist society run by and for the working-class. 

At the protest we had a small turnout made up of PLP members from the area, members of the Madison County Tenant Union, as well as local residents. The turnout was smaller than expected, but despite this, PLP led the group of militant organizers out into the street where they marched to the Freeman Brother’s Property Management office. We were  shouting chants against landlords, capitalism, racism, and the Brothers themselves, linking together all these things as symptoms of the capitalist system which needs to be gotten rid of. When the protestors made it to the Property Management office, it was closed despite being during their business hours. The group decided to stand in front of the office anyway and chant, where many passing cars honked in support, and some workers even pulled over expressing their hatred for landlords and sympathy with our cause! We gave them copies of CHALLENGE and invited them to join us. 

Liberals show their true, racist colors 

Afterwards we returned to the park where the protest began and shared hotdogs that a PLP member cooked while having important discussions. One member gave a speech highlighting the absurdity of workers being the ones who built all of the houses, only to be forced to pay rent to landlords who produce nothing. This same comrade also called out the Democrats for supporting HB5, as well as the lackluster response from Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky who vetoed the bill, but in a letter, wrote that his concerns were the bill’s lack of any plan for increased prison funding that would be needed to deal with increases in incarceration. “He claims to be against the criminalization of homelessness, but at the end of the day it’s only under the condition that anti-working-class legislation isn’t carried out logistically.” 

This same governor was also one of the potential candidates for Kamala Harris’ VP pick, which makes sense as he has been a large supporter of police, and has also stood idly by as anti-trans legislation has been passed in Kentucky, and as abortion was banned. A worker at the protest in a discussion about electoralism as a route for change said “I think that’s what’s caused me to become cynical, following electoral politics and seeing very little change made.” Another PLP member who works as a social worker gave a speech sharing her experiences seeing those who struggle with housing. Her speech was submitted as a letter to CHALLENGE. By the end of both comrades’ speeches, they stressed that the reason housing was treated as a luxury and not a necessity is because of capitalism’s drive for profit, and that in order to change this we need to fight for a communist society and join the PLP!