BROOKLYN, October 1—On a sunny Sunday afternoon, after a rainstorm paralyzed the whole city of NYC, nearly 30 workers in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our friends from our local community organization held a rally in solidarity with migrant workers, fighting back against liberal fascist Mayor Eric Adams’s new ordinance to evict migrant families after just 30 days, forcing them to restart the housing process all over again.
Our small but mighty multiracial and multigenerational contingent met at a busy park nearby before the rally to make signs that reflected our internationalist and antiracist politics: Smash all Borders and Evict racist capitalists were among the dozen signs we towed as we marched across the park, handing out CHALLENGES to the dozens of multiracial workers, chanting “Workers united will never be defeated” and “Immigrants yes and evictions no” in English and Spanish. From the Park we marched through the streets of Bushwick en route to the migrant shelter, where we learned that our class siblings were put out in the street during a torrential rain storm. This putrid racism displayed today is what capitalism has to offer to families already terrorized by the profit system. A system that literally puts families into the streets in the middle of storms and floods deserves to be drowned. Smash all borders!
PL’ers have a proud history of antiracist fightback in the Bushwick neighborhood for more than two decades.''Workers readily received our communist politics, and many took both the CHALLENGE and leaflets, and some young people briefly joined the march and chanted with us. This shows that no matter the condition, no matter the location, there are antiracists everywhere.
Marching through liberals’ racist lies
The march was a welcome change from the politics reflected by the liberal community organizations in Bushwick where our friends and PL’ers organize.
The organization supports liberal politicians (including Adams, who conducted electoral campaigns in this neighborhood for many years), and their inability to respond to the crisis is just another example of how slickly the capitalists’ agents hide the racism they use to pit workers against workers. Even some Latin members of the community organization and the neighborhood are being misdirected into racist ideas against this new wave of migrants, blaming them for the rise of crimes and the lack of jobs.
The bosses have even managed to pit other undocumented migrants against Venezuelan migrants, now that the bosses have exploited the latter’s presence to spread anti-communism. The bosses have now turned their backs on Venezuelan migrants, and there are talks of massive deportations of Venezuelans back to their country to allow other and new migrants to take their place as the new super-exploited. There are now recent migrants (for example, from Ecuador, another country which is now suffering the effects of U.S. imperialism, Haiti, and Sudan) who are arriving in the U.S. and are last in line for work permits. It is clear that the sell-out politics of liberal capitalist organizations are incapable of helping workers fleeing the effects of imperialism and climate change.
Bushwick locals show solidarity with migrants
Once at the shelter, we gave speeches and chanted in front of the shelter, calling out the savage capitalist system as the cause, which needs to be destroyed and replaced by communism.
We also got harassed by a security guard, who claimed Bushwick locals would resent our presence and call the police. In fact, two locals who lived across from the shelter heard our chants, approached us, and asked to see our literature — proving that solidarity with migrants workers exists regardless of how hard racist bosses and their politicians pit us against each other. At first, some migrants were scared to show their faces in the window because of the harassment they often experience from cops. But a few of them did show their faces, and we waved to them.
Mayor Adams has been seeking to suspend the “right to shelter” law at a time when the City has the most need to house people. These politicians’ decisions—Republicans and Democrats—are driven by profit needs, not workers’ needs.
A Black woman PL’er gave a speech in Spanish that struck hard against this racist imperialist system and explained why communism is the only alternative:
We’re here today to say we need each and every one of you to join us to find a real way out of this nightmare. To fight for communism where no worker or child be forced to flee their homes because of war or poverty; a world without profits, money or borders. If we had communism no worker would need to seek refuge or be discarded.
We marched back to the starting point of our rally, receiving many nods and claps from workers along the way, distributing dozens more CHALLENGES. Our friends from the mass organization were older and struggling to walk but the strength of our solidarity and politics made it easier. By the end of our rally our friends were tired but still boosted by revolutionary energy, and were excited to continue the struggle to support migrant workers. The struggle to win our working class brothers and sisters to fight for a communist world continues. Onward!