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THE last couple of years can seem a bit of a blur, a depressing sequence of semi-lockdowns and partial reopenings.

The virus casting its shadow over all our plans, as in the background the Conservative government assiduously strips away rights to protest, to vote, to freedom of speech, to seek refuge from persecution, even to receive warning if it decides to remove our citizenship.

This monotony should by now have exploded any notion that Covid is a temporary emergency after which we can go back to normal.

As the left economist James Meadway points out, it has long been obvious that the period of time over which the virus would be an acute social problem [is] likely to be measured in years rather than months.

The same is true for the Morning Star itself. The first lockdown caused an immediate crisis from forcedadaptation to home working to the collapse in shop sales, sales to trade union offices and advertising for inevitably cancelled events.

We weathered these thanks to the hard work of staff and the extraordinary commitment of our readers, who met two special fundraising appeals on the trot.

As time went on, improvements to our web operation and e-edition boosted online subscriptions, while a new home delivery service is also taking off, allowing easier daily access to the print edition.

But it has become clear that print sales will not simply bounce back during reopenings a precarious title marginal to most vendors takings is vulnerable to being taken off the shelves, while shoppers habits are changing as are union office working arrangements.

At the same time soaring inflation affects our costs too. For the Star like the broader left, 2022 must be a year of hard miles steady work to rebuild sales in whatever format to secure the future of our newspaper.

It continues to play a unique and irreplaceable role on the British left and we plan to hold a major Morning Star conference this year because of that.

The reason for the viruss especially severe impact on Britain whether measured in the number of deaths or the economic fallout is linked to the nature of the neoliberal state, the extent of privatisation and outsourcing in our public services, their chronic underfunding and understaffing especially in the NHS, the prevalence of poverty pay and insecure jobs and housing.

Yet as in some previous national dilemmas that over EU membership springs to mind the ruling classs domination of the airwaves, print and social media shapes a debate in which working-class interests barely get a look-in.

Take the discussion on protecting the NHS, which is often restricted to how far we ought to impose lockdowns and seldom touches on the deeper structural reasons for NHS fragility most prominently understaffing, with tens of thousands of vacancies across the health service now regarded as the norm.

While trade unions are raising these questions, the defeat of the left in the Labour Party means they are not being fought for at a national political level.

The government is clearly not prepared to protect the NHS by raising pay to reward existing staff, attract new staff and reduce workloads which are becoming unsustainable.

By voting in favour of whatever Covid powers it asks for without making these conditional on specific demands that address deeper problems raising NHS pay, raising statutory sick pay, restoring the universal credit uplift Labour helps to normalise both the degrading of our public services and the states right to impose highly intrusive restrictions on ordinary people not as an emergency measure, but as a means of covering up for its refusal to invest in our health service or its workers.

This problem will only become more serious the longer Covid remains a fact of life which it seems sure to be for the indefinite future, given the effectiveness of British and EU support for big pharma in blocking a vaccine patent waiver.

The channelling of anti-system anger into the anti-social opposition to vaccines and Covid precautions is only likely to grow.

Currently, both Labour and Tory policy is to ignore the social causes of these phenomena and make up for the lack of public confidence with heightened authoritarianism.

Labours bid to ban anti-vax disinformation online is reminiscent of its calls for a ban on the RT channel for allegedly spreading propaganda ahead of the EU referendum both show a tendency to ascribe popular discontent to the work of malign agitators and a complacent belief that increasing state power to police communications is a solution with no downsides.

In the process they make the underlying problems worse. Mandatory vaccination for health workers does not address the particular reasons why people from some communities (particularly certain ethnic minorities) show higher levels of vaccine hesitancy.

It smacks of contempt when health workers are being denied a proper pay rise.

It is likely to exacerbate understaffing if it drives more health workers away, especially in particular sectors.

The British Dental Association has warned of a devastating impact on NHS dentistry, already a service reduced to the point of non-existence across large parts of the country, as the Communist-led Toothless in England campaign has demonstrated.

That campaign which began when a couple of comrades in Leiston noted the closure of the towns only two dental practices that provided NHS services is an instructive one.

The speed with which street stalls, social media and petitions attracted support was impressive.

The campaigners have built a high profile and won significant local media coverage. It has spread beyond Suffolk and secured meetings with the East of England NHS commissioners.

All because campaigners were finally taking action on an issue which concerns millions of us the extortionate cost of privatised dental care but about which our established politics is silent.

Many people see the inability to afford a dentist as a fact of life. Toothless in England says its one we shouldnt have to put up with.

Thats an attitude we need to build across a whole range of issues, because it is clear by now that rather than levelling up the Tories are intent on levelling down, and using the disruption caused by Covid to permanently inure us to lower living standards.

For all their heady promises on climate change, Conservative policy is, as in the health service, making things worse: passengers face the biggest price rises for train tickets in a decade while from London to Scotland hundreds of routes are threatened.

A drop in revenues caused by the pandemic and lockdowns is being used to permanently degrade our transport systems.

In London, headlines suggesting hundreds of bus routes and entire much-used Tube lines could be axed the Bakerloo and Jubilee Lines have been mentioned are met with scepticism.

The prevailing attitude is that they couldnt get away with such a blatant downgrade to the capitals network.

The truth is of course that they can get away with anything unless they are stopped.

For much of Britain the axe looming over Londoners did its dirty work years back.

Our transport network was much more extensive, much more reliable and much cheaper a few decades ago than it is today.

Yet because of the pro-privatisation, pro-car consensus at Westminster, we have usually lacked a political movement prepared to say, like the Toothless in England campaigners, enough is enough.

The defeat of Corbynism in 2019 has left us without such a movement on a national scale. But the necessity of rebuilding one is clear.

Aside from a pandemic whose impact underlines the urgency of taking greater public control of the economy, we face a climate catastrophe that politics as usual is simply incapable of addressing and an increasingly tense new cold war with the nuclear powers Russia and China.

Nor does the logic of capitalisms constant need to break open new markets and exploit to the end every last resource make it amenable to gradual reform.

The half-hearted calls for a more responsible capitalism by Ed Miliband in 2015 resulted in a media savaging only tame by comparison with the attacks on Corbyn which followed.

Similarly, Keir Starmers leadership of Labour aims not at offering a more electable form of the politics Corbyn stood for though this was the false prospectus on which he stood for leader but at the systematic removal of all socialist content from the partys offer.

Every shift, from abandoning the Green New Deal to ditching support for energy nationalisation, and every shadow cabinet reshuffle have marked this consistent march to the right.

Starmer is not the candidate of reforming the capitalist system, but of restoring its unquestioned supremacy.

We face a serious assault on living standards. This takes multiple simultaneous forms: the attacks on public transport, the refusal to take action to strengthen the NHS despite the pandemic, soaring utility bills accompanied by cuts to social security and below-inflation pay offers.

Industrial resistance has already begun in the transport sector but has got off to a rockier start in the health service.

But alongside the organising to be done in workplaces, workers need the confidence of knowing the public are on their side.

It is all of our responsibility to make it clear that we see what is going on here and that we though not the health contractorsor the rail profiteers or the majority of our representatives in Parliament are truly all in it together.

We cannot shy away from political demands the case for energy nationalisation is obvious and it commands majority support.

With unions, campaigns like We Own It can raise the profile for such demands, but we need to put politicians on the spot at local level, which means building effective local activity whether through trades councils or branches of the Peoples Assembly or other bodies.

At the same time, the immediate response we see from unions in multiple sectors is the right one. Rising energy costs are one aspect of rising living costs and the answer must be higher pay.

The wave of workplace militancy we are seeing in several major unions is key to this. Fighting and winning regardless of Westminster is our only option. But understanding the context of these attacks is also crucial.

As with the attacks on our public services, the long-term plan to force down living standards for the majority of people in this country is down to capitalisms inability to satisfy the take the money and run demands of a tiny elite while meeting ordinary peoples expectations of life and work.

The same dilemma prevents meaningful action on climate change and a rational, global approach to handling the pandemic, while the refusal of the worlds dominant imperialist power, the United States, to countenance a loss of hegemonyis behind dangerous tensions with China that could yet erupt into a catastrophic war.

It is more than a century since Rosa Luxemburg said the choice we face is between socialism and barbarism. All the crises threatening our world today demonstrate how right she was.

There is only one daily voice in the British media fighting that corner thank you for keeping the Morning Star shining in 2021, and lets build a wider readership and a higher profile through 2022.

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Socialism is still the only answer to the war on living standards, public services and the planet itself - Morning Star Online

John Stipa| Guest columnist

A guest column by ChuckGabrielepublished Dec.12in The Desert Sunused a fabricated conversation between FDR and Harry Truman to accuse Democrats ofpushing the U.S.toward socialism.

Abraham Lincoln feared that would happen when he freed slaves in 1863, but his crystal ball was better than Franklin and Harrys. Old Abe knew capitalism would be the root cause.

Using some of Lincoln's actual words as a basis, I can imagine Abe talkingto his wife, Mary, when drafting the Emancipation Proclamation:

Evenas IwritethisMary,I worryabout those damned capitalists.

Abe, capital has its rights, which are worthy of protection as any other right.

Capital is only the fruit of labor,Mary,and could never have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. His moodgrew grim. These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.

Fleece is a strong word, Abe.

Youre right,Mary. Abuse is a better descriptor.Markmy words,thosecapitalists will refuse toshare profits with employees, the workers whogeneratedthose profits.Or, theyll hold wages down.Hell, they might even find ways to have work done by machines or in other countries to eliminate jobs.

Why would they do that, Abe?

Because maximizing shareholder wealth is their priority.Capitalists dont care about workers. To them, labor is expendable, easily replaceable and abundant in supply.

Abe, calm

The great man slammed his fist on the table.

This greed will extend into controlling food, water, housing, and healthcare. Can you imagine whatcapitalists will do to the cost of education? The average working man wont be able to afford to send his children to college or buy a houseor take a decent vacation. They wont ever be able to retire; all their meager income will go to food and rent. Both parents will have to work which will endanger the family as a sacred unit. Theylltoilsofeverishly untilthey wear out and get sick. Of course, capitalism will take control of peoples medical care. Theyll make care something thatonly the rich can afford. Theyll dream up Machiavellian excuses to avoid paying for peoples care.

Abe, how will they do that?

Capitalism will create mechanisms of control to influencewhat people read, listen to and learn in school. Like a fox, they will trick people into believing false narratives likethe Civil War was about states rights instead of slavery. When Tom Jefferson wrote All men arecreated equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, he meant all people, not just people with money.

They might even go so far as to saythere is no point in protecting the masses frompollution ordisease. Where does all that smoke from trains and factories go, Mary?Can you imagineifGeorge Washingtondidnot inoculatehis troops against smallpox? Theres no way wewould have won the Revolutionary Warif he hadnt mandated that. IfBen Franklin knew capitalistswould pervert his free press to support all of this, he would roll over in his grave.

Capitalistswantto divide people intohave and have-notsbecause poor peoplewill always be hungry and thereforeasier to control.When people go hungry, not just for food, but alsotheir right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they will become unruly and desperate. Theyll use their guns to take their frustrations out on the world.

How much damage can a musketdo, Abe?

Trust their greed, Mary.Capitalists will invent better weaponry thatwilleviscerate people in mass quantities.If I had myway,Idallow people to bear arms,but restrict the seriously dangerousweapons to our military.

But the Second Amendment allows you to regulate the militia. Its necessary to the security of a free state.

It also says it shall not be infringed, Mary.Capitalistswillfocus on thepart that allows them to profit.

Whoever drafted thatAbe,should be sent back to grammar school.

I agree. Ultimately, the people will look to their leaders for solutions. But I fear, Mary,instead of solving the root causethat capitalism abusesthe workerwe will drift toward socialism.Someone will create a retirement fund ortax-funded education or medical care.

The sad partisit all could be avoided.If capitalism would simplydo the right thing share their profits withtheir workers,at leastenough tolead a comfortable lifethere would be no need for socialist solutions.

Im not optimistic, dear husband, Mary said, But Ihope capitalists take your advice.

John Stipa lives near Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Counterpoint: If capitalism did the right thing, we wouldn't need socialism - Desert Sun

On April 17, 1945, Hilda Montes luck ran out. In unclear circumstances on the frontier between Nazi Germany and neutral Liechtenstein, the lifelong socialist and resistance fighter was mortally wounded in the final few weeks of war in Europe.

Yet despite her apparent aptitude for hiding details about her life in order to remain an anonymous militant in the anti-fascist struggle, Monte wove a fascinating thirty-one years of life, which today highlights the forgotten stories of the many unknown Germans who went as far as to physically fight the Nazi regime but also of a largely unknown effort by a founder of Tribune, her onetime publisher, to fund an attempt on Hitlers life.

Born Hilde Meisel in 1914 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Montes parents relocated to Berlin, where they had previously lived, in 1915. It was in the combustible environment of 1920s Berlin that she became politicized, joining her sister Margot in the Schwarze Haufen (Black Company), a Jewish socialist ramblers youth movement which took its name from a rebel group in the sixteenth-century German peasant revolts.

It was here that Margot met Max Frst, whom she soon married; she then worked as secretary to his friend Hans Litten, the lawyer who notoriously dared to cross-examine Hitler for three hours in a 1931 court case and who ended his life a decade later in Dachau concentration camp.

Meisel had been on the left of German social democracy since 1928. Moving to England a year later, she became an informal student of Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. From there, she seems to have worked for some time in the German mining heartlands of the Ruhr before joining the editorial staff of Der Funke(The Spark), the paper of the Internationale Sozialistische Kampfbund (ISK), a socialist split from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that called in vain for left-wing unity against Nazism.

After the Nazis suppressedDer Funke in February 1933, Monte then took responsibilities organizing illegal groups, briefly moving to Cologne to do what she described as frontier service work helping smuggle hunted labor movement figures and finances out to nearby Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, while smuggling banned literature into Nazi Germany. Upon her return to Berlin, she set up underground socialist propaganda organizations, organizing mass opposition to the August 1934 plebiscite which confirmed Hitler as the Fuhrer.

After moving to Paris to join the editorial board of theSozialistische Warte(Socialist Outlook) newspaper, Meisel still continued regular trips into Germany, helping facilitate underground trade union groups and sending propaganda and other material into the country, until moving to England in 1936. However, operations were getting increasingly difficult. Mass arrests had hit the ISK hard in 1937 and 1938, leading Monte to return to Germany to presumably complete necessary tasks herself for several months.

It was during this period that the drums of war beat ever louder; in this moment of great intensity, Meisel broke with the ISK over its perceived lack of militancy. In that same desperate year, Monte entered into a marriage of convenience to John Olday, a gay German artist who had fought in the 191819 Spartacist Uprising and whose half-Scottish heritage gifted him and her the relative safety of a British passport.

It is also likely that this was the year she first met with George Strauss. Strauss, the Labour MP for Lambeth North and future Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson, was a young, wealthy, and idealistic left-winger who, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, helped finance, establish, and organize Tribune in order to in the words of its January 1937 first issue advocate a vigorous socialism and demand active resistance to fascism at home and abroad.

In 1946, in an uncharacteristic revelation to theSunday Times, Strauss admitted that in the late thirties he had funded a mysterious firm called Union Time Ltd. While formally a press agency, the organization was in reality a front for various German emigres working across various professional fields to encourage anti-Nazi opinion in Britain and combat Nazi propaganda in general. It was Union Time Ltd which had camouflaged, among many others, the activities of Meisel, who approached them with plans to assassinate Hitler and in doing so, hopefully averting the imminent outbreak of war.

The details on the exact events are, like many aspects of Meisels life, unclear. It seems that after returning to London from a period organizing underground cells in Germany, she approached Strauss asking for money to murder Hitler. Strauss sent her to the City of London to meet Werner Knop, a financial journalist connected to Union Time Ltd. In a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article regarding the affair, Knop wrote that Strauss visited him on May Day 1939 to ask if he would meet an unusual visitor with an unusual proposition. He was then introduced to Meisel, who described her plans.

After recognizing the compelling quality of Meisel, as well as her cold matter-of-factness, Knop granted her the necessary financial support. On a trip to Cologne, Monte was given part of her expenses for the trip, with another part of it to be collected by a trusted person. This figure had been told to shadow her during her stay in Germany in case she was an agent provocateur or a fantasist; the contact reported that she had vanished within thirty minutes of collecting the money, causing Knop to reflect that they had at least negative proof that she was an old hand in the tricks of the underground trade. Monte had given notice to Knop that on July 18, her group would conduct a demonstration attack on that day, nine people on the Nazi-chartered Strength Through Joywere killed in a boiler room explosion.

At this same time, she wasnt the only radical British citizen out in Cologne on orders. The committed young anarchist Albert Meltzer was also sent to the city by German anarchist exiles, with orders to pass on clandestine documents to comrades there the hope being that Meltzers British citizenship would protect him from any potential security intrusions. Though at the time he thought the documents were related to emigration, he was later told by the anarchist Willy Fritzenkotter they were for the escape of [a] planned attacker in the assassination attempt which never happened. He had met Meisel with Fritzenkotter, remembering her unusual backing from Strauss.

History tells that whatever happened with Meisel and her contacts, her organized attempt on Hitlers life never happened. But two months later, on November 8, 1939, a time bomb engineered by Georg Elser detonated at the Brgerbrukeller in Munich, killing eight people and injuring sixty-two and missing Hitler by just seven minutes.

There is open speculation over whether Meisel was directly linked to the Elser bomb; her husband, John Olday, certainly thought so. Her long-standing ISK comrade Fritz Eberhard was more open-minded, however; while he believed it highly unlikely she had anything directly to do with it, he stated the possibility that she had made a financial transfer to the assassin Elser as part of her Union Time work, particularly since it was clear that Elsers attempt on the Fuhrers life was a long-term, planned venture.

Following her split with ISK and the Western failure to halt fascism before it threw the world into war, Meisel lived with the Austrian artist Hannes Hammerschmidt and his wife Tess in the town of Sleights, by the North Yorkshire moors. She changed her underground code name to Hilda Monte and began writing regularly in English for Tribune, Victor GollanczsLeft News, and coauthored a book, How to Conquer Hitler, with Eberhard. She became a popular Workers Educational Association lecturer, and also found work as an advisor to the International Committee of Labours governing National Executive Committee.

Run by William Gillies, the International Committee was involved in rescuing senior German social democrats and was strongly backed by Labours minister for economic warfare Hugh Dalton and Dick Crossman, the propaganda chief and head of Daltons German bureau. Being brought into the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Meisel started working with Walter Auerbach, a German official of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) broadcasting to Germany from Crossmans left-wing radio station, SER (Transmitter of the European Revolution).

In the ministry, Monte worked within the Central European Joint Committee. As the ministry was the parent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was formed by Churchill to set occupied Europe ablaze by sabotage, assassination, and dirty tricks, the multilingual underground veteran Meisel found a niche role, and was flown to Lisbon in 1941, where she acted as the courier of international telegrams using the codes of both SOE and the ITF.

Though it seems she was scheduled to go into Switzerland and unoccupied France to build links with German, Italian, and Spanish anti-fascist refugees, these plans seem to have run into a wall, and Monte remained in Lisbon until June 1941. There, she met Peter Leopold, a German exile living in Marseille, who took over for her while she herself established a distribution service for German anti-Nazi literature.

In London and neutral Sweden, exiled ITF leaders were working out how to smuggle information, cash, and fugitives on barges, ships, and trains in and out of Nazi Germany, with connections far more established and professional than the British secret service. Although the deliberate postwar destruction of SOE files makes this hard to ascertain, it is more than possible that this is how Monte got back to London from her foreign missions time after time.

Once back in England, she continued her propaganda, using the firsthand knowledge of her resistance contacts in her appeals to German people. In a 1943 BBC radio broadcast, she made one of the earliest references to the Holocaust in the Western world:

What is happening today in Poland, the cold-blooded extermination of the Jewish people, this is being done in your name, in the name of the German people. Show evidence of your solidarity to these people, even if it requires courage especially if it requires courage.

In 1942, Victor Gollancz published Help Germany to Revolt, another book cowritten with Eberhard, in which they told the reader that

We feel that you and some of your comrades in the Labour Party are beginning to realise that an immense responsibility falls today on these last vestiges of European Socialism which exist in Britain. The suppressed masses on the continent look to the British Labour Movement for guidance and assistance in the fight for their liberation and the establishment, after this war, of a European Commonwealth and there is only one way of laying that basis: the way of a German revolution.

Monte went back behind the lines again in September 1944 as agent Crocus of the United States Office of Strategic Services, organized by Wild Bill Donovan who had recruited droves of hardened anti-fascists, International Brigade veterans, and assorted radicals into its ranks. Monte and Anna Beyer became agents in the Faust Project and were trained near London in summer 1944 to act as undercover agents inside Nazi Germany.

After being flown by an RAF Lysander and landing by moonlight in a meadow near Lake Geneva, the French Resistance took Monte and Beyer by lorry to a disused railway tunnel. There they met a British army officer who took them into the lakeside frontier town of Thonon-les-Bains, where they waited four weeks for a connection. The Swiss socialist Ren Bertholet, who had worked with Monte onDer Funke and had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, had also become an SOE agent, and had arranged the cover job at a garage in Montauban for SOEs most successful agent, Tony Brooks.

Brooks had been dropped into occupied France at the age of twenty, where resistance fighters sent him by bicycle and train to a caf in Toulouse. There he recognized Bertholet not as his SOE contact, but as a prewar friend of his family in Switzerland. With the assistance of railwaymen belonging to the illegal General Confederation of Labour (CGT) union, Brooks and Bertholet organized rail sabotage between Toulouse, Marseille, Lyon, and the Swiss border. And soon enough, it was Bertholet who took Monte and Beyer into Switzerland, where Monte was handed new papers and assigned as a courier to Jupp Kappius, a German socialist who was parachuted into Germany by the RAF in late 1944 for a campaign of sabotage.

With the exception of a tersely written CV discovered in war archives, it is clear that Monte was acutely conscious of leaving little traces of her activities behind. We know that she found herself in Austria on April 16, 1945, as the Red Army launched its final attack on Berlin. After a mission to the Austrian resistance group 05, and with papers identifying her as Eva Schneider (allegedly a clerk with a home address in bombed-out Berlin), she was walking through the dense forest of Rappenwald, close to the frontier with Liechtenstein, with a gun and nearly three thousand Reichmarks in her rucksack.

At 3:45 AM, she encountered a border patrol; after telling the part-time officials she was delivering two letters to Switzerland for Joseph Goebbels (to presumably justify her handling of a pistol), she persuaded the patrol to detach a single guard to escort her to the Hauptzollamt at Tisis.

At a point on the border just a hundred fifty meters from Liechtenstein territory, Monte bolted for Switzerland. The Austrian guard shot her once, which hit her in the right thigh, but the bullet hit an artery, and she bled to death. Allied forces took months to inform her parents, who were then refugees in Cairo, and Austrian records would not reveal her fate until 1947.

When Victor Gollancz published her novelWhere Freedom Perished after the wars end, the leading Tribunite Jennie Lee penned the introduction. Writing of the pity and the waste of Montes death she also heralded the hazardous work that had characterized her whole adult life, writing that she knew how her capture would mean imprisonment, torture, and death; Hilda Monte again and again walked alone across the frontier.

But when Hilda Monte died, it was Raymond Postgate ofTribune, her comrade and editor, who broke the news of her death in the June 29, 1945 edition. Describing her life, he suggested that it make the Tory parliamentary candidate and prominent fascist sympathizer Eleonora Tennant pause in her campaign against the presence of Jewish refugees. While no medals and no titles are awarded to her kind by this countrys ruling class, Postgate wrote, British Socialists will honor her name and remember this woman, who gave her life in the service of our cause.

The rest is here:
The Jewish Socialist Who Tried to Kill Hitler - Jacobin magazine

From December 26, 1907, to January 9, 1908, ten thousand tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York Citys Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by 33 percent. With their cry to fight the landlord as they had the Czar, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for two thousand households.

The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the citys tenants today. As the COVID crisis continues, New York City renters are again organizing against rapacious landlordism.

The 19078 rent strike was led by a remarkable woman, Pauline Newman, who had arrived in the United States from Lithuania in 1901, aged about nine (her birth certificate was lost along the way). She was one of 2 million Jews who arrived in the country between 1881 and 1924, escaping antisemitic pogroms. Still a child, she started work, first making hairbrushes and then in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Newman had been exposed to radical ideas in her homeland, where one trade unionist commented that behind every volume of the Talmud was a volume of Marx. Still young, she argued against gender segregation in the synagogue and demanded the schooling that was often denied girls. Her political education continued in America through the pages of the mass circulation Yiddish-language socialist newspaper theJewish Daily Forward, and in discussion groups that included some of the left luminaries of the time.

Pauline Newman was the epitome of intersectionality long before the term was coined. She became known as the East Side Joan of Arc, combining housing activism with trade unionism, socialism, the fight for womens suffrage, and gender and sexual equality. As a gay woman who raised a child with her partner and assumed a nontraditional style of dress, she lived in a way that challenged patriarchal orthodoxy, and died in 1986 after a lifetime devoted to the struggle that saw her go from the garment shop floor to positions of influence in the American labor movement, according to Annelise Orlecks 1991 bookCommon Sense and a Little Fire.

The legacy and contemporary relevance of Pauline Newman abounds. Inspired by the 1907 rent strike, in November 1909, she helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and its Uprising of 20,000 against the exploitation of the textile industry. After two hours of indecision at a mass meeting at the Cooper Union, one of the workers, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, famously said, I am tired of listening to speakers. . . . I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now! Once again, the strikers demands were only partially met but their women-led grassroots campaigning challenged both the employers and the male-dominated union hierarchy, leading to a wave of industrial action by textile workers across the United States.

The tradition of working-class New Yorkers fighting for a better life extended beyond housing. ILGWU members were also heavily involved in a succession of protests and boycotts against excessive food prices, beginning with a boycott of Kosher butchers in 1902. As theNew York Timesput it, when East Siders dont like something, they strike. In 1914, the ILGWU founded the Union Health Center to provide medical care to its members; they also promoted education projects in the same period, including the successful Workers University.

By March 1911, Pauline Newman was working with the US Socialist Party alongside Eugene Debs, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory firekilled 146 workers. The negligence of the factorys bosses was yet another example of the corporate manslaughter that still puts working-class lives at risk, from the sweatshops of Dhaka to Grenfell Tower. But the ILGWU kept up the struggle for better conditions, at work and at home. The union was part of a highly significant movement to build cooperative housing developments for New York City workers, several of which survive today: the Penn South development in central Manhattan, for example, was sponsored by the ILGWU, and continues to provide 2,820 truly affordable homes in the heart of one of the worlds most unaffordable cities.

Rent strikes have been a recurring theme in New York Citys working-class history and a vital weapon in the ongoing fight for better housing conditions. As Ronald Lawsonwritesin the introduction to his history of the citys tenant movement, elites do not always have their way . . . ordinary people working class and poor, women, immigrants, minorities do help shape political agendas when they are organized and mobilized.

This year has brought new evidence of this. With millions losing income and unable to pay rent during the pandemic, a huge increase in evictions and homelessness was threatened. But a vibrant, well-organized coalition of housing campaigners fought to ensure that the state of New York has been virtually eviction-free for eighteen months. This reversal of a cornerstone of capitalism is a remarkable achievement one that has not yet been replicated in other places. It results from the same kind of assertive and often women-led mobilizations that Pauline Newman personified, including rent strikes. The early role of trade unions in building these movements was vital, too, and needs urgently to be revived.

Another recurring theme of housing and social justice movements in New Yorks history is the role of radical Jewish socialists. Much of the citys truly affordable housing was inspired and built by them. Sadly, the ILGWU fell foul to the red scares and infighting that have so often afflicted the US labor movement, and its a horrible irony that, as we remember the 19078 rent strike, the leadership of the UK Labour Party is busy purging itself of people following in the tradition of Pauline Newman.

In New York City today, the call for unity to defend workers at work and at home continues. Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) in the Bronx is just one of numerous tenant organizations fighting against the renewed threat of mass evictions as COVID enters its third year in the United States. Some CASA members are on rent strike, demanding their landlord carry out repairs, and the organization is spearheading a campaign demanding that the anti-eviction protections are extended for as long as the pandemic is with us.

Private landlords have filed 240,000 cases against New York tenants with rent arrears, threatening a huge spike in homelessness next year, particularly among the citys poor people of color and immigrants. Its a situation Pauline Newman would instantly recognize. But CASA and other organizations like it are determined to fight in a way shed recognize, too.

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New York's Winter Rent Strike Inspired Generations - Jacobin magazine

Manolo De Los Santos is co-executive director of the Peoples Forum and researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He coedited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord, 2020). Vijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author of Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, Assassinations (Monthly Review Press, 2020).

They are guest editors of this special issue, The Cuban Revolution Today: Experiments in the Grip of Challenges.

On November 1, 2018, John Bolton, the national security advisor of U.S. president Donald Trump, unveiled a phrase with a sinister implication: troika of tyranny. The U.S. government, Bolton said, would focus attention on overthrowing the governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Bolton announced that the government had tightened its blockade on Cuba with more sanctionsincluding the implementation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, allowing U.S. citizens to sue any person or company who benefited from property confiscated since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Travel and money transfers to Cuba were restricted and several Cuban businessesincluding its national airlinefaced new sanctions. At the end of this cycle, Trumps administration placed 243 new sanctions on Cuba.

Anticipation that Joe Biden would roll back the Trump sanctions was quickly dispelled when his press secretary Jen Psaki said on March 9, 2021, that a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Bidens top priorities. The previous month, senator Marco Rubio and Luis Almagro (the secretary general of the Organization of American States) began a social media campaign called Crisis in Cuba: Repression, Hunger, and Coronavirus. It should be noted that, at the time, there was not a single case of COVID-19 on the island. The U.S. campaign to overthrow the Cuban Revolution accelerated.

Twice in 2021, first on July 11 and then on November 15, the U.S. government and politicians joined with right-wing Cuban exiles (mainly in Florida) to egg on protests inside Cuba. U.S.-funded organizations began a social media campaign, a Bay of Tweets, that was designed to provoke uprisings among people who suffered from the social impact of the U.S.-imposed blockade and the COVID-19 pandemic. On July 11, in the Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baos, protests took place. Cubas president, Miguel Daz-Canel, heard the news and drove forty miles from Havana to talk to the disgruntled and see what could be done. Across Cuba, tens of thousands of patriots walked onto the streets with their national flag and with flags of the July 26 Movement that formed the core of the revolutionaries in 1959. In those crowds was Johana Tablada who works in the Cuban Foreign Ministry. We are human beings who live, work, suffer, and struggle for a better Cuba, she told us. We are not bots or troll farms or anything like that.

The social media campaign that came to be called J11 was driven by Florida-based companies and websites, many of them funded by the U.S. government through its National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundations (including Cubanos por el Mundo, Cubita NOW, CubaNet, El Estornudo, Periodismo de Barrio, Tremenda Nota, El Toque, and YucaByte). At the heart of this campaign is the Assembly of the Cuban Resistance, a coalition of anticommunist groups that calls for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Its head, Mauricio Claver-Carone, is former head of Cuba Democracy Advocates, Trumps main advisor on Cuba, and now president of the Inter-American Development Bank (based in Washington DC). The hashtag #SOSCuba was mobilized and amplified across various platforms by troll farms, trying to generate a consensus about a large-scale uprising against the Cuban Revolution.

Having failed on July 11, 2021, these same forces tried again in November. First, a group called Archipilago announced that it would hold protests on November 20, a statement amplified by the U.S. government and its agencies. When it was learned that Cuba planned to open its borders on November 15, the protest was then announced for that date. Biden administration officials threatened Cuba with more debilitating sanctions if the government prevented the uprising. Archipilagos social media demonstrated that it was in favor of both regime change and the use of violence to achieve its ends. (Previous violent actions took place on April 30, 2020, when an assault rifle was fired at the Cuban embassy in Washington, and on July 27, 2021, when two individuals threw a Molotov cocktail at the Cuban embassy in Paris.) U.S. politicians such as Senator Rubio, senator Rick Scott, congresswoman Mara Elvira Salazar, and congressman Carlos Gimnez ramped up the pressure against Cuba, calling for more sanctions.

Despite the call for a Civic March for Change, nobody took to the streets on November 15, 2021. A few days before, young defenders of the Cuban Revolution wore red scarves, assembled at Havanas Central Park, and held concerts, poetry readings, documentary screenings, book presentations, and speeches. When the youththe Pauelos Rojos (Red Scarves)invited him, President Daz-Canel joined them. They defeated the hybrid attack for now.

But the U.S.-imposed blockade and hybrid war continue. This special issue of Monthly Review is motivated by the maximum pressure campaign that has intensified in Washington DC.

Very early into the 1959 Cuban Revolution, it became apparent that the U.S. government would take a hostile position against it. Despite recognizing the new government of president Manuel Urrutia a week after the revolutionaries overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship, the U.S. government proceeded to undermine the Cuban Revolution, particularly after Fidel Castro was appointed prime minister in February 1959. When Castro visited the United States in April, president Dwight Eisenhower refused to see him. Matters would only deteriorate further until the United States broke ties with Cuba in 1961 and put in place a range of destabilization mechanisms run by the CIA (assassination attempts against Castro, terrorist actions on the island under Operation Mongoose, the Bay of Pigs invasion by right-wing Cuban exiles). This was the general tenor of official U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Two other political and social forces within the United States, however, immediately embraced the Cuban Revolution: the Black liberation movement and the socialist projects.

When Castro arrived in New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting in 1960, before the U.S. government officially broke ties with Cuba, the Cuban delegation found it impossible to get hotel rooms in the city. Malcolm X arranged for Castro and the Cubans to stay at Hotel Theresa in Harlem, showing the deep ties between the Black liberation movement and the Cuban revolutionaries (when Castro was denied entry into Eisenhowers lunch with Latin American leaders, he held his own gathering at a coffee shop in Harlem for employees of the Hotel Theresa, the poor and humble people of Harlem, as he put it). At a meeting between Castro and Malcolm X, the latter told the Cuban of the revolutionary process, there are twenty million of us and we always understand.

In March 1960, Paul Sweezy and Leo Hubermanthe editors of Monthly Reviewtraveled to Cuba to have a look at the revolution with their own eyes. They met the main leaders of the revolution (Castro and Che Guevara), officials of the new state and new civic bodies, and people from all walks of life. When they returned to New York, Sweezy and Huberman wrote down their reflections and published them in a special issue of their socialist magazine (JulyAugust 1960), called Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (published as a Monthly Review Press title later that year). It was one of the first books to make the case that the Cuban Revolutiondriven by the ferocious determination to protect its sovereigntywould evolve necessarily in a socialist direction. Huberman and Sweezy returned to assess the revolution at several points. Hubermans Socialism in Cuba (1960) was well-received on the island for its sympathetic critique of the Cuban process. The relationship between Monthly Review (both the magazine and the press) and the Cuban Revolution continued from then to now, this current special issue being another indicator of that linkage.

Monthly Review Press was the original English-language publisher of Che Guevaras Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968), and the magazine carried several articles by Che. After Che was assassinated in 1967, Eduardo Galeanos fine reflection on him, Magic Death for a Magic Life, was published in Monthly Review in January 1968. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran dedicated their classic book Monopoly Capital (1966) to Che. Paul Baran had traveled to Cuba in September and October 1960, along with Sweezy and Huberman, who were there for the second time. His Reflections on the Cuban Revolution was published in the magazine in January 1961. Due to his strong support for the Cuban process, Baran was targeted at Stanford University (he had his first heart attack after returning from Cuba and felt the immensity of the pressure of supporting the revolution during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Missile Crisis, succumbing to a heart attack in 1964).

We are grateful for the opportunity to present this special issue within the pages of Monthly Review, carrying forward a tradition established six decades ago. The stance of the magazine reflects Castros June 1961 comments at the Biblioteca Nacional, where he asserted that criticism should be from within the revolution, mirroring the view of one of the most important radical sociologists in the United States, C. Wright Mills. In his Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), Mills wrote that we dont worry about the Cuban Revolution, but we worry with it. This volume is put together in that spirit.

Read more:
Preface and Introduction - Monthly Review