This is part one of a three-part series on Hughes.

Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and activists made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930’s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.    
The 1930’s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South. (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union in the film footage) Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:
            Good-morning, Revolution:
            You’re the very best friend I ever had
            We gonna pal around
         together from now on.
            …
            Listen, Revolution,
            We’re buddies, see –
            Together,
            We can take everything:
            Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
            Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
            Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
            (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
            Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
            All the tools of production,
            (Great day in the morning!)     
            Everything –
       And turn ‘em over
         to the people who  work.
            Rule and run ‘em
         for us people who work.

The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CPUSA focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home. In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas. The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of heavy air bombardment.”
In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126 Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over 600  people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote:

The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers. But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions. Why should your windows be broken? They shouldn’t. I am sorry they are.  But I can tell you WHY they are broken.

Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing.
He ends by observing:

I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems.  But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.

In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the communist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA. In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was…

The most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.

By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open political organizing. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.

NEW YORK CITY, February 12— Capitalism makes sure that exploitation and profiteering are ever present even as homelessness becomes just another business.
“Man, I feel like there’s some exploitation going on here. I feel it!”
That is what one of the more than 250 homeless men, almost all Black, told a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrade last July, after New York City (NYC) officials  moved them into the Lucerne Hotel for emergency lodging during the Covid-19 pandemic (see CHALLENGE, 12/4/2020 and 10/22/2020).
New York City spends in excess of $2 billion yearly to shelter providers to serve the more than 80,000 homeless New Yorkers. Much of this money is doled out to so-called nonprofits, no matter which political party is in power. While there are at least 20,000 homeless children and 97 percent of those in shelters are Black and Latin, the “do-gooder” leaders of many of these “nonprofits” make salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The murderous inequality on every level, alongside the wealth of Wall St. and Billionaire’s Row, enforced by racist police terror, cries out for an end to the profit system with communist revolution. Communism would eliminate all homelessness immediately.
Gov’t enables nonprofit corruption
Recent events have shed some light on NYC’s $2 billion “homeless industry,” where business is booming! The Doe Fund is a nonprofit that works with formerly incarcerated and homeless people. While providing shelter, it also supplies local business improvement districts (BIDs) with an army of minimum-wage sanitation workers that sweep the streets, clean the parks and deliver meals to hotels during the pandemic. This work used to be done by City workers with union contracts. The BIDs pay $12/hr., less than the $15 minimum wage. They would have to pay over three times as much for private sanitation. The Doe Fund makes up the $3/hr. difference in workers’ checks but gets back twice as much by charging the workers $249/week to cover coronavirus expenses (PPE), food, clothing and vocational training.
“It’s feudalism, pure exploitation,” one DoE Fund worker in the program said. “They receive money from the city and private donors, and they take money from us. A thousand dollars a month. Where is it going?” (The Appeal, 7/29/20)
Let’s take a look where it goes. The “non-profit” Doe Fund took in $54 million more in revenue than it spent in 2019. Founders George McDonald (who died on January 26) and his wife (Harriet-Karr McDonald) collect salaries of $400,000 each. His son draws $308,000 and his stepdaughter more than $100,000 (Dana Rubinstein, Politico, 11/7/19).  McDonald is also the Doe Fund’s landlord, collecting $17,000/month in office rent (Politico). The Doe Fund owns a number of apartment buildings across the City, but they are not available to the workers in the program.
Another profiteering, corrupt “nonprofit” is the Bronx Parent Housing Network (BPHN). On February 7, Victor Rivera, its CEO was fired and is now facing a criminal investigation after The New York Times reported that 10 women, both staff and women living in the shelter system, accused him of sexual assault. One woman had formally filed a complaint with the City, only to have it referred back to the BPHN, who dismissed it. Rivera is also accused of nepotism (unlike McDonald), directing contracts to friends and mixing his non-profit with his for-profit businesses (NYT, 2/7/21).  The complaints of sexual assault by 10 women and financial corruption did not stop NYC officials  from paying him about $275 million since 2017.
The working class needs communism
NYC is a showcase for a capitalist system that doesn’t work and needs to be replaced. Thousands of available hotels and office buildings remain empty, yet the number of homeless is rising along with tens of thousands of workers trying to survive the pandemic on poverty wages. Not so ironically, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio wanted to send the homeless workers in the Lucerne Hotel to a homeless shelter in the Wall St. area, the home of the bankers and businessmen who have gotten richer during the pandemic while increasing poverty. Now Citibank billionaire Ray McGuire is running for Mayor to try to save NYC for the rich. We need communist revolution to take back the whole world for the working class.
The real-estate developers and the financiers that invest in luxury housing, the bankers and their politicians; it’s this capitalist class who are responsible for homelessness and mass incarceration.We can end homelessness as soon as we overthrow capitalism. Communist revolution will mean a society run by and for the working class.

MEXICO, February 16—In December, intent on projecting an image of control over the health crisis, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), presented a vaccination plan for the country.
The first stage would consist of immunization of all healthcare workers, and the second, would pursue vaccination of 15 million older adults concluding in March. Until yesterday, only a little more than 700 thousand people have been vaccinated, which does not even cover all employees in the health sector (Expansion Politica, 2/10).
On display is the liberal deception of AMLO's self-proclaimed fourth transformation, which in reality has taken advantage of his power to maintain his party’s position and to militarize the country by deploying the National Guard. The only transformation that will serve the needs of the working class is communist revolution.
Just as the pandemic unmasks capitalism's reign of terror, the vaccine program demonstrates capitalism’s complete inability to meet the working class’ basic needs.But more deeply it reveals that under capitalism profits matter more than workers’ health. Capitalism cannot hide its criminal nature. Today it is more evident that it’s a matter of life and death to fight for communism: a society that serves the workers, where our health is a social priority not a profit margin.
Capitalism gutted healthcare system
Mexico’s national healthcare system claims to guarantee access to health care for all those living in the country. But in reality, for 40 years the health structure has been abandoned to give rise to privatization turning healthcare into one more commodity of the capitalist system. The Covid-19 crisis made this situation even more visible, demonstrating the mercenary nature of the system. Today hospital saturation of 100 percent and a massive rate of infection continues to devastate the working class (Milenio, 2/8). This crisis intensified recently in January. Given the overflow of hospitals and the near impossibility of finding oxygen tanks due to excessive pricing, many  infected people suffered the disease untreated from home (New York Times, 2/9).
The same corrupt incompetence defines the “vaccination strategy.” The politicians closest to the president, like Marcelo Ebrad, Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced with great fanfare the contracts with Pfizer and AstraZeneca for the acquisition of their vaccines. Two months later Mexico’s vaccination coverage is abysmal. Ebrad is one of the leading candidates to succeed López Obrador along with Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mayor of Mexico City. Both try to present themselves as the most competent officials to face the pandemic, but they can’t escape the reality of an overwhelmed healthcare system.
The AMLO government claims to have contracted for more than 200 million doses of vaccine, but to date, not even 1 percent of the 125 million inhabitants of the country have been vaccinated. The government says it has 10,000 vaccination brigades made up of the military and the so-called servants of the nation. But these brigades, whose 12  person teams include only two healthcare workers, are more likely to solicit the vote for Morena, the ruling party, and create a National Guard presence on the streets than provide vaccinations (Mexico Daily News, 1/6).
Bosses turn vaccines into a commodity
Under capitalism vaccines, like housing and food, are commodities rather than a human necessity. Pharmaceutical hace increased several times over their market value. As a result, vaccine distribution will be motivated primarily by purchasing power rather than disease prevention. Under capitalism this will undoubtedly mean that the poorest sections of the working class will be last to receive the vaccine. Once again, capitalism has demonstrated its inability to manage this crisis.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that workers are disposable under this system where the only thing that matters is the profits of the capitalists. The consequences are lethal for the working class with almost 2.4 million deaths in the world by February 13 (World Health Organization). Mexico ranks third in the world with 171,ooo official deaths and many more uncounted. The management of the pandemic has been a disaster in Mexico, as in the rest of the world. The Progressive Labor Party continues to call on workers to reject the deception that elections can lead to workers power and change this exploitative system. Let’s fight for workers’ power, communism.

HAITI, February 14—The Haitian working class is once again facing a political and economic crisis, mired in widespread violence unleashed by an emboldened president. There were mass demonstrations over the last year demanding that President Jovenel Moïse step down on February 7, the end of his constitutional mandate, culminating in a nationwide general strike that shut everything down. But this was not enough to force Moïse out.
The U.S. and other imperialists support this criminal because he is useful to them. Haiti was crucial in the U.S. ouster of Venezuela from the Organization of American States (OAS) and Moïse continued the opening of Haiti to foreign business interests. The arrogant Moïse celebrated his success by travelling to the Jacmel carnival festivities on February  8.
The anti-government demonstrations are being led by the opposition parties who have positioned themselves as reformers of Haitian society. While many of the people involved in the anti-government movement believe they can improve conditions, the main opposition groups, led by judges and government reformers, are looking to be the new Haitian ruling class. Supporting a new lesser-evil capitalist ruling class will not liberate the working class.
This has been tried over and over. Haiti has had numerous governments in the 28 years since the end of the Duvalier dictatorships, with only two presidents serving their complete terms (Reuters, 10/11/19). But the same capitalist exploitation and corruption remains.
We are working to build Progressive Labor Party and the struggle for communist revolution as we fight back against the attacks of the Moïse government.
These days there is even more widespread instability as Moïse has armed street gangs and militias to create an atmosphere of mass terror. There are assassinations of known opposition organizers and a kidnapping spree of opposition organizers as well as ordinary workers. Many have been fired for speaking out against the government. The life of workers here continues to be pure misery. There is raging inflation and an unstable currency exchange rate. With massive un- and underemployment, Haitian workers depend on remittances from their families abroad. In 2019, $3.55 billion was transferred, up from $1.5 billion in 2011 (tradingeconomics.com).
Those 2019 remittances accounted for 36 percent of Haiti’s GDP. But today, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of these remittances are falling off. March 2020 alone saw an 18 percent decline in remittances when the U.S. lost more than 700,000 jobs (Haitian Times, 4/20/2020).
Deepening ties to workers
The Party in Haiti is using the current capitalist crisis to deepen our ties with our base among workers and students. Because of the widespread atmosphere of terror created by the pro-capitalist forces, we are tasked with coming up with creative ways to continue to meet with our friends, sharpen our discussions and respond to their questions about our line. We are also becoming more creative in putting our line out in a mass way under the current conditions. Furthermore, we are strengthening our own resolve as communist revolutionaries.
Some of our newer comrades and friends are not yet steeled in fighting the bosses on many fronts. We are trying to address their own unease and conflicts, pointing out that our strength and courage comes from relying on our collective wisdom and experience of our Party. We are learning from those revolutionaries who have preceded us, and from our class. We understand the dangers that we and the working class face from our capitalist enemies, but we are not standing down. We will face our class enemy and grow our Party in the process.