In 1943, the New York City government expected a huge demand for affordable housing from returning soldiers. It approved construction of 1,232 middle-income apartments to be named Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village. The new apartment complex was built by the notoriously racist Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. that “had two million Black policyholders carrying $77 million in insurance while employing no Blacks.”

This involved demolishing 18 square blocks of the “gas house” section of lower Manhattan’s East Side, displacing 11,000 low-income workers and their families. No more than 3 percent of them would be able to afford even the modest rents in the new development.

Bosses’ stooges back racist exclusion
MetLife “developed Stuyvesant Town with the understanding that better living conditions would improve the company’s mortality numbers and therefore annual earnings”(nycurbanism.com). “Both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune argued passionately for the right of Met Life to bar Blacks from the complex” (Horne, page 126). 

Communist councilman Benjamin Davis and allies got a City Council bill passed fining corporations that discriminated. But Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Port Authority Chairman Robert Moses, and MetLife chairman Frederick Ecker made sure MetLife was exempted. MetLife agreed to build the Riverton Houses in Harlem for Black residents – but these were much smaller and substandard. Of course, this in no way excused MetLife’s refusal to rent to Black workers at Stuytown.

Davis and a few others insisted that “Stuytown” be integrated. Frederick Eckert, president of racist MetLife, refused, saying:
"Negroes and whites don’t mix … If we brought them into this development, it would be to the detriment of the city, too, because it would depress all the surrounding property."

Reds lead fightback
In a 1947 lawsuit filed by three Black veterans, the court sided with MetLife. No Black families were allowed to rent. Davis kept up the pressure on MetLife even after he was defeated in an anticommunist campaign in 1949. He called MetLife chair Ecker “the white supremacy architect of Stuyvesant Town [and] head of the biggest Jim Crow oligarchy in the world.”

Lee Lorch, a Communist Party member and a leader of the antiracist struggle, said it was well known that Stuyvesant Town:
"was going to be an all-white project… going there carried an obligation to fight discrimination. That’s the way a lot of people felt."

In a 2010 interview, Lorch added:
"When you got into Stuyvesant Town, there was a serious moral dilemma … In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people had seen the end results of racism."

Committee formed to combat racist attacks
In 1948, with communists in the lead, residents formed the Town and Village Tenants Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town. The poll they took proved that 62 percent of Stuytown residents supported integration.

The Committee published a pamphlet titled A Landlord vs the People … The cover photo shows all the Committee’s leadership.

Liberal courts defend racists
When the court denied the lawsuit, the Committee swung into action. First, they arranged for the Hendrixes, a Black working-class family, to stay in the apartment of the Kessler family while they were away. Jesse Kessler, an organizer for the union District 65, CIO, was a communist too. When he returned, the Lorch family invited the Hendrix family to live in their apartment.

Led by communists and union activists, the Tenants Committee put out flyers and pamphlets attacking MetLife’s racism.

Leo Miller, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where “the courage and sharp shooting of a Negro machine-gunner saved my life with a dozen other white GIs,” asked, “Can anyone of us who live in Stuyvesant Town say he may not be my neighbor? I can’t.” Another veteran and his wife said: “We don’t want our children growing up as part of a privileged group and believing from their experiences that Negroes are a people apart.” (Biondi, page 128)

MetLife refused to renew the leases of the Committee organizers and scheduled their forcible evictions. Lorch recalled:

"We had decided -- and this was the general feeling on the committee -- we weren't going to go quietly, that we would resist, they'd have to throw us out by force."

The Committee and activists from pro-communist unions guarded the apartments and prevented the evictions.

MetLife finally gave in – but only a little. It permitted 15 Black families to move in. However, it insisted that “in return” the Committee organizers move out! The Lorch family and others did so, so that Stuytown would no longer be “Jim Crow.”

Red-baiting of an antiracist fighter
City College fired Lorch because of his antiracist work in the Stuytown committee. He then moved to Penn State, where the president told him:

.. to explain this stuff about Stuyvesant Town  they'd been getting phone calls from wealthy alumni essentially wanting to know why I had been hired and how quickly I could be fired.

Lorch lasted only a year at Penn State.  A college official told him that his decision to permit a Black family to live in his New York apartment was “extreme, illegal and immoral and damaging to the public relations of the college.”

One thousand students signed a petition saying that his dismissal was “unacceptable.” The world-famous scientist, Albert Einstein, also weighed in on his behalf. (Bagli)

Lorch and his family then moved to Fisk, a histroically Black university in Nashville, TN.

At Fisk, Mr. Lorch taught three of the first Blacks ever to receive doctorates in mathematics. But there, too, his activism, like his attempt to enroll his daughter in an all-Black school and refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist ties, got him in trouble.

Fired from Fisk in 1955, he moved to Philander Smith, a small Black college in Arkansas. There Grace Lorch, who had organized teachers in Boston, organized help for Black students who were integrating Little Rock’s Central High School, walked with the Black students and tutored them. She and Lorch enrolled their daughter in an all-Black school and became active in the NAACP.

Lorch was fired here too because he refused to cooperate with the anticommunist Congressional committee. The field secretary of the NAACP wrote him:

The best contribution you could make to the cause of full citizenship for Negroes in Arkansas at this time would be to terminate, in writing, your affiliation with the Little Rock Branch, N.A.A.C.P.

 Meanwhile, Lorch said, “Thurgood Marshall has been busy poisoning as many people as he can against us.” Marshall later became a Supreme Court justice.

Ethel Payne, of the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender wrote:

Because he believed in the principles of decency and justice, and the equality of men under God, Lee Lorch and his family have been hounded through four states from the North to the South like refugees in displaced camps … And in the process of punishing Lee Lorch for his views, three proud institutions of learning have been made to grovel in the dust and bow the knee to bigotry.

Communist Black poet Langston Hughes had written about the promotion of anti-Black racism by these and other Black colleges in the essay Cowards From the Colleges.

Unable because of racism and anticommunism to get a job anywhere in the U.S., the Lorches moved to Canada, where Lorch taught and did research for the next 60 years. He does not regret the decision he made at Stuyvesant Town six decades ago.

I would have paid a higher price living with my conscience if I hadn’t done it … I thought then, and still do, that it was an important struggle worth any sacrifice in pursuing it. I have no regret over what we did, or what it cost us …

“Stuytown” remained open to Black residents until it was “privatized” 20 years ago.J

Sources: Martha Biondi. To Stand and Fight (Harvard, 2003); Liz Fox, “Desegregating the ‘Walled Town’ (online); Amy Fox, “Battle in Black and White;” Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects (Oxford, 2010); Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money (Dutton, 2013); Bagli, New York Times 11.21.2010; Obituary of Lee Lorch, L’Humanité March 5, 2014 (in French); Lee Lorch obituary, New York Times March 3, 2014; Gerald Horne, Black Liberation, Red Scare (Newark, DE 1994). “Lee Lorch”, “Grace Lorch”, Wikipedia; CHALLENGE January 30, 2002.

NEW JERSEY, January 31—As the class struggle in higher education intensifies and the echo of war drums gets louder every day, there is a desperate need for a class-conscious, anti-imperialist war movement on university campuses around the world. While the role of universities is to ideologically train the next generation of exploited workers, middle managers, and soldiers, reproducing the bosses’ racist and sexist divisions within capitalism, they are also an arena for class struggle fertile for planting revolutionary ideas, and winning students to communism.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been working to build that movement through the Radical Caucus (RC) of the Modern Language Association (MLA), putting forth a revolutionary agenda that stresses the necessity of  building a revolutionary party to liberate workers and students alike from the chains of capitalism.

MLA: a fountain for communist ideas in academia
Founded in 1968 in the context of mass protests against the Vietnam War, the Radical Caucus insisted on viewing the war as imperialist, and not just a “tragic mistake.” Over the following decades, the RC sponsored sessions on antiracist, antisexist, and pro-working class literature. It brought before the Delegate Assembly resolutions defending immigrant students, graduate student and adjunct unionization, and student organizers fighting campus racism. Deeply involved in all these activities and struggles, PLP continually stressed the pitfalls of liberal reformism and the need for a revolutionary communist outlook.  No doubt because of the RC’s modest success in shifting leftward the outlook of the Association, several years ago the MLA leadership affected constitutional changes making it virtually impossible for resolutions to be passed through the membership.

The angered reactions of millions worldwide to the 2020 police murder of George Floyd led the RC to focus on ideological combat over the language shaping mass consciousness.  Responding to the need to understand and critically interrogate popular concepts such as “abolition” and “democracy,” “intersectionality” and “sustainability,” the RC organized the “Keywords Project.” Its first online mini-conference, called “New Keywords of Our Struggle,” was held in September 2021. More than 80 academic workers, students, and organizers showed up to discuss how to fight back against the higher education bosses. The RC organized three additional mini-conferences on timely topics (war, climate catastrophe, and reproductive justice).

Given the recent intensification of fascist developments worldwide—“Fascism” is now a keyword on the lips of many—PLP, working in the RC, has upped the ante on its activity in the MLA. At this year’s MLA convention in San Francisco, the RC hosted two sessions. The first addressed “The Situation since April 1st.” The speakers, predominantly insecurely employed professors, outlined how our class is under attack, with the mounting barriers to liveable working conditions and increasing political surveillance of our classrooms. Every year, far more money goes into war than into higher education—access to “public” colleges is increasingly a pipe dream for millions of working-class students—reminds us of the bosses’ priorities. The capitalists control “higher education” to develop military weaponry, develop products for profiteering corporations, and to brainwash workers into supporting their system. Using education to destroy poverty and exploitation is not a priority.

The second panel focused on “Radical Pedagogy in Precarious Times.” Better attended than the MLA’s well-publicized “presidential panel” on “working conditions” scheduled for the same time, the RC panel testified to a growing interest in intervening as opposed to wallowing in the higher education crisis. A PLP speaker discussed the ways in which popular terms like “intersectionality” reduce Marxist class analysis to “class reductionism,” opening the door to the anticommunism and identity politics at the ideological core of liberal fascism.

The Annual Meeting of the RC opened with a political discussion of both the need for an antiwar movement and an assessment of the union sell-out in the University of California strike—the largest strike in the history of higher education. A long-time PLP member spoke passionately about how both “sides” in the war in Ukraine are the losing one for workers. Although the recent surge in class-conscious unionizing in higher education offers opportunities for students to learn more about the nature of capitalism, the omnipresence of blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags on U.S. and Canadian college campuses indicates that it will be hard work to bring anti-imperialist consciousness to current understandings of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

PLP members will continue to strive to keep the RC oriented towards a communist revolutionary horizon. It has been decided that the RC’s future mini-conferences will be less focused on ideological analysis—via Keywords—and more issue-oriented, posing and responding to the problems the RC will face as it seeks to build its anti-capitalist capacities. PLP is the solution for transforming these anti-capitalist capacities into revolutionary struggle.

Imperialism and wars
PLP and friends organized against the imperialist wars in Iraq and Central Asia. Our resolutions exposed how the war in Iraq was a grab for oil profits. In the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. tried to secure a strategic geopolitical position to counter Russian and Taliban power. 

We marched militantly to the military booths at APHA meetings to oppose military recruitment for imperialist wars. We opposed booths with contraception disinformation and Nestle’s promotion of infant formula over breastfeeding.

At the 2022, People’s Public Health Conference we opposed the war in Ukraine. We contrasted the immense amount of funding the U.S. sent to Ukraine with the unmet funding needs to prevent and treat Covid-19. We advocated for soldiers and civilians to rebel and refuse to fight one another to end the war. We explained that this war was a fight between two imperialist powers competing for economic and political power that only a communist revolution against capitalism could stop. People listened with open minds about communism.

Vaccine equity
When Covid-19 hit, PLP members and colleagues joined forces with Justice Is Global and others to demand vaccines for the world. While the U.S. and European countries had vaccinated over 60 percent of their residents, poorer countries in Africa had vaccinated less than 12 percent; Haiti had even less protection. With many friends, we helped write and pass a successful resolution that attacked the trade and patent policies that prevented other countries from developing their own vaccines.

Joining forces with APHA’s International Section, we supported another resolution calling for debt cancellation and public funding of health and social services.

PLP members also attended demonstrations organized by Justice Is Global to demand that the pharmaceutical company Moderna help other countries produce Covid-19 vaccines. PLP members joined a large demonstration at Moderna’s headquarters in Boston, rallies at the White House, and a “sleepover” at the home of Biden’s Covid-19 advisor.

Liberation for workers in Palestine
A doctor in PLP joined three trips of health workers to Israel and the West Bank from 2004-2010, delivering health care and meeting with many Palestinian and Jewish political and health organizers. This doctor and another PLP member then led several trips of comrades and friends, revisiting these contacts, and recruiting a few workers from Israel to PLP.

In the U.S., a PLP member spoke at several forums to advocate for unity among workers from Israel and Palestine to establish a communist state. She emphasized that both Israel and the Occupied Territories are highly unequal capitalist societies with great internal health and wealth disparities.

Since 2014, a Party member has participated in Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. anti-Zionist organization, to promote JVP’s involvement in antiracist struggles in the U.S. as well as opposing U.S. support of the illegal and fascist Israeli occupation of Palestine. She also argues against uncritical support for Palestinian nationalism as opposed to building a working class antiracist alliance of Jews and Palestinians against an increasingly fascist Israeli occupation.

Immigration and Title 42
At the 2021 APHA meeting, PLP members and friends led a militant march to the ICE (Immigration and Control Enforcement) office to demand an end to Title 42 and the detention and deportation of migrants.

Title 42, implemented under Trump, allows the U.S. government to stop asylees from entering the U.S. because of a perceived health risk from Covid-19. Homeland Security returned tens of thousands of desperate people from Haiti and Latin America to countries where they faced arrest, death, and starvation. Public health and immigration organizers opposed Title 42 with demonstrations, petitions, and appeals to President Biden who deported more people than Trump.

The policy was scheduled to end in late December 2022 but has been extended.

Haiti
The Progressive Labor Party launched a summer project with medical workers and friends in Haiti. Doctors and nurses delivered supplies and medications to a large camp and campuses. We led a large rally around the hospital that was shown on Haitian TV.

After an earthquake in 2010, there was a huge outbreak of cholera brought by U.N. troops. The epidemic sickened 820,000 people, killing 10,000. In APHA, PLP worked with a nurse on a policy statement calling on the UN to pay compensation for the damage and develop a clean water system. The policy eventually passed despite the leadership’s concern about criticizing the U.N. The 2011 APHA meeting sponsored several special sessions about Haiti with the participation of local advocates.

PLP health organizers are currently raising funds for our comrades in Haiti who are providing mutual aid to workers suffering from the current upheaval while organizing study groups to involve more people to fight the exploitation from Haitian and U.S. rulers who maintain poverty and violence.

Lessons
As APHA members, we need to ensure there is action tied to these policies and recruitment to our Party. Most importantly, we need to convince our public health friends to go beyond pushing unlikely reforms and become communists to give workers the power to end war, health inequities, and wage slavery.

 

While “abolition” politics has become the trend among armchair intellectuals in the academic community, some PLP members working in the Marxist Literary Group this past year have engaged the political writings of two preeminent Marxist philosophers, Karl Marx and W.E.B.DuBois, alongside academic workers who can potentially join our party.  Struggling over the main political contributions put forward in Marx’s Capital, Vol. I (1867) and Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), our comrades in the MLG underscore Marx’s concept of “human labor pure and simple,” as a foundation for emphasizing PLP’s call for egalitarian communism.  PLP demonstrates how this concept was absorbed by Du Bois and became the foundation of his new theory of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era in the US; namely, that it was an uprising of Black “human labor pure and simple” that radically challenged “the dictatorship of property” in the slaveholding Confederacy.  These ideas reinforce our current recognition that black workers are key to communist revolution at this moment in history.   

Lesson #1: Black Workers Were the Greatest Abolitionists of the Civil War
The two books have many points of contact. Capital is the definitive analysis of how capitalism works, the exploitation of workers’ labor-power through the wage-form. It was written before and during  the U.S. Civil War, which Marx called “a pro-slavery rebellion,” and published just as Reconstruction began in the U.S.. Marx’s own communist party, the International Workingmen’s Association, got going at the same time as Reconstruction, and corresponded with the new American labor movements, whose tragic flaw of racism was highlighted by Du Bois. A fierce abolitionist, Marx refers often to American slavery in Capital, including the famous  passage “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” (p.414). Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” with its horrific picture of mid-century factory work in England, often compares forms of workers’ enslavement in the factory or on the plantation (pp. 345, 377-8, 398, 414-5).

For his part, Du Bois wrote his history of Reconstruction in the Depression 1930s, when communist thinking was at its most influential in the U.S., and he was reading Capital as he wrote. Black Reconstruction is considered his most Marxist work. Several times, for example, he calls for an international “dictatorship of the proletariat,” most resoundingly at the end of Chapter XIV, “Counter-Revolution of Property.” Here in the depths of the Depression he sees the surge of Black revolt in Reconstruction pointing ahead to a global workers’ rebellion:

The exploiting group of New World masters…fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war…. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876—Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat (p. 762).  Marx and Du Bois both understood that workers necessarily had to take state power by force, to abolish capitalist property, and to keep power in their hands to suppress the inevitable counter-revolution. Their radical understanding of workers’ power came from their belief that it is workers’ labor, “simple average labor,” which creates the world, and with capitalists out of the way it is simple average labor which will rebuild it.

LESSON #2: ORDINARY, ANTIRACIST WORKERS CAN AND MUST RULE THE WORLD
What was this core idea of Marx that so galvanized Du Bois, “equal or abstract human labor”?

Early in Chapter 1 Marx writes:
"Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc., and in this sense both human labor….More complex labor counts only as intensified or rather multiplied simple labor…all labor is an expenditure of human labor-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labor that it forms the value of commodities (pp. 135-7)."

The political consequence of seeing labor this way, in both Marx and Du Bois, is to affirm the right and duty of ordinary workers to rule the world. That was the lesson Marx drew from labor in the capitalist system and Du Bois from the Black revolt against American slavery. Du Bois describes in Chapter IV how Black workers withdrew their labor from the slave regime by escape, sabotage, and armed struggle in the Union Army. He saw that massive upheaval by enslaved workers as a kind of “General Strike” of Black labor to abolish slavery. It was racist ideas, plain and simple, that prevented white workers from joining in the radical aim of “abolition democracy.” While the 1880s multiracial class struggle led by the Knights of Labor showed the power of workers from Louisiana to Chicago when they organized as a class, internal weaknesses in these groups and the labor movement overall left white workers—then and now-- handicapped in seeing fellow-proletarians in the enslaved or freed Black worker. Yet for Du Bois the defeat of Reconstruction merely invites us to re-see ourselves, and rebuild , as one.

Lesson #3: No Good Bosses in a Racist System
Just as the so-called abolitionist Northern capitalists, whose military presided over the entire process of Reconstruction, ultimately prevented that legal abolition from going further towards workers’ power, so too do the liberal fascist bosses of today stand to implement the most imperialistic, war-mongering, and anti-immigrant policies of the working class in the US.  Whether it is was the Obama-led oversight of crackdowns on antiracist protestors from Ferguson to Baltimore or the current Biden-led oversight of anti-immigrant concentration camps across the Mexican border, history shows that capitalism always makes good on its commitment to racism, and that the best ideas of Marx and DuBois remain more valid today as ever. Join us!

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction & Other Writings, Library of America edition, 2021.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (trans. Ben Fowkes), Penguin Classics edition, 1990.