The red wrecking ball, communists vs capitalist housing, Part 2: “This is the comrade party; the others are the boss parties.”

The following is part two of a seven-part series reprinted and lightly edited from the communist newspaper Daily Worker in September-October, 1932, written by famous communist Mike Gold.

Workers here are referred to as Black instead of the original “Negro” to reflect our antiracist priniciples as well as the linguistic shifts that occurred over decades of antiracist class struggle.

Communists have a long history of fighting against racist attacks on our class. One such fight was against landlords and evictions. In the early 1930s, amid Jim Crow segregation, a great depression with record unemployment levels that sunk the working class—particularly Black workers living in the urban industrial core—into deeper poverty and despair, the Communist Party in the U.S. (CPUSA) was fighting for revolution inside U.S. borders. This period was a golden age of class-conscious fightback when communist ideas were popular and gripped the imaginations of the working class. Under the leadership of the CPUSA, workers organized militant housing councils, tenant unions that led bold actions that weakened the power of profit gluttonous landlords.

Today our class is in a different period marked by increasing volatility. We are choked by record-high inflation, rent hikes, food price gouging compounded by stagnant wages, high unemployment, and an eviction crisis worsened by a still-raging global pandemic. Though the CPUSA is a shell of its former self, decaying into a toothless, reformist party, their history is just as valuable as they were in 1932. This series highlights this antiracist revolutionary fightback and contains kernels of working-class wisdom.

In this article, the popularity of communist ideas and struggles among Black workers is described by Gold, emphasizing an important aspect of our line that Black workers play a key role in organizing for communist revolution. Another important political aspect highlighted by Gold’s piece is the role of churches in misleading Black workers, winning them away from communist ideas. The relationship between cops and churches in maintaining capitalist oppression is as true today as it was in 1932.

Thousands gather around those eviction scenes, and watch the council volunteers hauling in furniture. At first, the crowd seemed only a casual and neutral observer. But if the cops come, and begin their usual murderous slugging, the crowd turns partisan at once. It jeers, boos and even stones the gangsters in uniform. The heart of the Southside is with the Council.

Everyone on the south side knows and sympathizes with the work of the councils. It has penetrated everywhere. In a little barbecue restaurant, five truck drivers were at lunch, devouring huge platters of pork ribs. I heard their talk; they were discussing that morning’s editorial in the Daily Worker on Germany. On a wooden stoop at sunset sat a group of tall jobless men and their wives. One giant in overalls fingered at a guitar; another was reading aloud to the serious little group out of a pamphlet by Lenin.

There are several parks on the south side where enormous meetings are held daily. The communists speak here every day to crowds averaging two to five thousand, all afternoon until 10 o’clock.
The meeting was to begin at three. But at least 500 Black workers were already gathered at two o’clock, lounging on the benches around the speakers’ stand, or arguing in groups under the trees of the massive meadow.

Many of them sleep and eat here. They have no other home. “Comrade, can you spare a cigarette?” It is a chunky little woman in a torn gray sweater who asks. She has the “New Masses” and the monthly “communist” under her arm. On her other arm sits a brown big-eyed infant.

Under an elm tree fifty husky steel mill and stockyard workers are talking, shouting, arguing, roaring with Homeric laughter. A fat little buttertub of a man in comic spectacles is the butt of their jokes. All try to shout down his loud passionate speeches. He is a preacher, I am told, and every day he comes here to win back some of his vanished flock. They used to fear, respect and bring him for a pass to heaven, now they laugh at the sweaty little humbug.

“Get that good old Moscow News, daddy of all the workers’ press!” This is what a coffee-skinned little man in a torn yellow shirt and salvaged yachting cap is shouting. He is a news vendor, with a line of conversation that amuses the crowd, and makes them buy. “Get that good old Daily Worker, and learn about the world you live in! How can you talk about the revolution, if you don’t read about it? I’m always reading, and I can tell you what is happening in Germany right this minute! Read, read, read, and grow yourself a set of proletarian brains! If I had the money, I’d pay you to read, fellow workers! Get some ammunition against the boss-class! Get the Soviet Russia pictorial, or some of these here pamphlets, and learn the workers’ truth!”

“The Comrade Party”
On one of the benches sits an old woman who fascinates me. She has a grim, mysterious face, and her old shawl and bonnet seem the costume of a witch. She sits there like fate and smokes a large briar pipe. All through the meeting later I could see her. She listened and puffed grimly at her pipe. On the lap of this old pipe-smoking granny from the piney backwoods lay a Daily Worker.
Fathers, mothers, grandmothers from the deep south, and scores of children – all the generations were at the forum. This communism has become a folk thing. They have taken communism and translated it into their own idiom.

“For this cause I am ready to eat corn husks and sleep in the cold fields” – said an old Black worker.

“This is the comrade party; the others are the boss parties.”

“We Blacks love our party, because it means freedom.”

“From east to west, from north to south, the news is going forth, and as to a mother, the Black is rushing under the wings of our comrade party.”

“If we must die, we will die for Communism and a great cause, not like stuck hogs.”

After the communists spoke in Ellis Park for some months, seven churches found themselves bankrupt. The preachers grew thin and indignant, and seeing the pork-chops of this world fade and heaven approach their persons, they complained bitterly to the cops. Another plot followed, of course. It was determined to prohibit all speaking in Ellis Park.

But the communists held a meeting. That brave and sensitive young leader, Herbert Newton, was speaking when the thugs arrived. He climbed into an old oak tree, when on talking from its branches. Some of the uniformed killers tried to climb up after him, but their graft-swollen bellies interfered. It was comical, and the crowd laughed.

Then several cops pulled their guns and pointed at the crowd. The people did not flinch, nobody ran away, they cheered, booed, and yelled, “Stay up there, Comrade Newton, we are with you!” A cop fired a shot. Instantly a shower of stones and rocks fell upon the cops. Then Newton came down, rather than give the police a “justification” for killing. He submitted to arrest, but the fight was won; the speaking continues in Ellis Park.