Every New Yorker should be furious. 

But where should that fury be directed? To Eric Adams, current mayor of the city? He is a valid target, but to solely blame him and those like him (individual actors of the local, state, and federal government) is to miss the forest for the trees, rotten and withered as those trees may be. The crimes of Eric Adams and his toadies in authorizing and implementing the new 60 day limitation on shelter occupancy for migrant families are crimes they must answer for. But these crimes against the people are not aberrations of an otherwise healthy system, they are as diseased and rotten in their nature as the system which spawned them; like fruit from the branch. 

And while some may regard the articles above and remark “Well, this is all about migrant families, really. The illegal ones especially!” those folks aren’t looking at the data. The Chief Financial Officer reports a 22% increase in the amount of homeless children in the education system between 2023 and 2024, an increase that does not correspond with an increase in migrant family populations present in shelters.¹ 

Furthermore, while the comptroller data does show an increase in Hispanic persons documented among the homeless beginning somewhere between summer 2022 and late winter 2023, it also shows a fascinating abnormality in the data: a great canyon that plummets as low as 10,914 families TOTAL present in the state shelters during the month of March, 2022 (See figure). Then, just one month later, it spikes back up and then climbs dramatically for Hispanic families, somewhat for Black Families, and more slightly for all other categories. 

How does this happen? It’s simple. The state does only as much as is necessary to ensure that business can continue as usual.

See here: Housing and Urban Development (HUD) waivers granted due to the pandemic, along with other programs initiated during the years from 2020 to 2022, ran their course and were ended or rendered inert. The HUD waivers specifically became invalid on March 1, 2022, which just so happens to be the point on the graph where shelter inhabitancy plummets. The graph above makes perfect sense then: The aid programs that had served as floodgates stemming the tide of a steadily growing homelessness crisis burst open, and so a flood of new families entered the formal shelter programs as pre-existing families who were once in those shelters scrambled to renew their occupancy. These early pandemic programs, including rent freezes and free emergency housing in commercial hotels, kept the most precarious families housed, until they didn’t.  Then, the suffering masses of workers — migrant or otherwise — were consigned to the streets not by accident, but by calculating and willing actors doing their part to keep business moving. 

They knew this would happen, if not explicitly, then implicitly. The logic is all too easy to follow, and many organizations warned of such consequences back when COVID-19 benefits were being cut. But it wasn’t just COVID-19. It’s been decades upon decades of capital accumulation, mismanagement, and decay. Not even the bourgeois corporate media can deny this fact, as illustrated by a CBS News report this October which relayed that New York City has only processed 65% of SNAP and 42% of financial assistance applications on time this year. 

This is why Eric Adams and his goons are merely playing a role, why they are “actors,” and not the sole perpetrators in this travesty. They are part of a greater schema, that of capitalism — particularly, that of an empire in its most advanced stage of growth, which is beginning to experience its inevitable and historical decline. This is not to excuse anyone for their actions, but to put the current problem of homeless children and families into a perspective informed by a type of analysis that grounds us in evidence and accounts for the clash of interest between classes of people: dialectical-historical materialism.  This is the science by which Marxists understand and act upon the present; a science that any person can understand, and may even be engaged with in a lay-person’s fashion, such is its ubiquity and validity. 

People know why they are suffering. We know why there are families left to rot in the streets. We know why one in eight NYC schoolchildren sleeps in a shelter or out in the cold. But the system, hegemonic and deeply rooted in our culture as it is, is skilled at obfuscating the truth; shifting the blame, or at the least misdirecting the concerned with incorrect ways of resolving the problem. This is not an issue that will be solved by Eric Adams suddenly finding the goodness in his heart and becoming a better man; it will not be solved by electing a more upright and righteous mayor to steer the decaying ship. It will not come because we merely want it to; as it stands, the bourgeoisie (see Blackrock), and in the case of housing, the petit bourgeoisie (individual landlords), gain much from the continued suffering of the hardest workers and the ever present threat of homelessness. By design, it is this shared class interest among the rich and powerful which dictates policy in a capitalist state, and it is this bourgeois-dictated policy that tears children from warm homes to fatten overstuffed wallets. This conflict of interests, this contradiction, can only be resolved through class struggle and class war. 

Currently, in NYC, there are over 120,000 active hotel rooms and anywhere between 33,000 and 67,000 housing units vacant of any occupants; a rough total range of 187,000 to 153,000 empty potential homes across the five boroughs.²

Then, based on the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS), there is a general demand for 275,000 households/residents, a demand which supply “failed to meet.” And while it is true that the maximum range of empty housing units by our current measure still falls short of the 275,000 figure by at least 88,000 units, the fact that so many beds remain empty cannot be ignored. The price for these units, and the use of these units in the case of hotels, far exceeds or is irrelevant to the desperate masses struggling just to keep a roof over their head, and the reason is simple — profit is the chief motive which drives capital, and capital is what bourgeois and liberal society enshrines as the most important element above all else. Yet this notion would seem to be incorrect, one may think, because is it not pointless to keep units empty rather than have them filled while charging a lower rate? Would this not create at least some profit for the owner? It would! 

Indeed, something would be gained by all parties, and society at large, if even a fraction of the above housing units were given over to the homeless to be rented below the “market value.” The effects of homelessness can truly never be understated, especially for children, and it doesn’t take rigorous study to understand that a stable family is a productive family, both for their own sake, and for their communities. Jobs cannot be reliably attended to when you have no idea where you’ll be sleeping that night, or if you’ll be arrested for “vagrancy,” just as well as schoolwork cannot be adequately completed by children whose parents must rifle through trash in order to feed them. 

But none of this matters to the bourgeoisie or the petit-bourgeoisie beyond how they take base offense to the “unsightliness” of the homeless. To them, what matters is the accumulation and valorization of their own capital. In the case of landlords and hotel operators, this is done through commodifying shelter, the most basic element of survival, and uses the bourgeois and pre-bourgeois social structures to justify and legalize the constant parasitism of their class off the backs of their renters, the working class; the people at large.

“If accumulation, the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, necessarily creates a surplus laboring population, the latter becomes, in its turn, the most powerful lever of accumulation — even a condition of existence of fully developed capitalist production. This surplus- population forms an industrial reserve army belonging to capital just as absolutely, as if it had raised and disciplined it at its own expense. Independently of the natural increase of population, it provides capital, to meet its varying requirements, with a mass of human material always at its disposal for exploitation.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 25.

While we may not be speaking of a very industrial working population with regards to NYC, the modern U.S. economy, being one which is exceedingly dominated by banking-related finance capital, the general rule still applies. The landlord class, and the bourgeoisie more broadly, do not suffer, but benefit from, and are always able to prey on, the desperation of the people in order to fleece greater and greater amounts from our already light purses. 

In this sense, capitalism is not concerned with the use value of even the most basic things, such as food, education, and shelter. The use values of these things only matter to corporations insofar as they can be marketed and sold, such that the bourgeois class grows richer. And by this logic the burden on the buyer, the large proletariat class, grows more and more, such that bourgeois profits may be infinitely expanded. Naturally, this leads to a crisis, as infinite growth is impossible, and we saw in 2008 what becomes of a country when it suffers an uncontrolled collapse of the housing market. In a way, that collapse never ended, and to this day, we, the people, are still suffering the harm caused to us by the arrogance, greed, and short sightedness of capital and the systems which support it. 

Thus we are left with the harrowing realities on the ground; a child from Santa Clara committed suicide due to the bullying he received from being homeless. This occurred just eight days before U.N. World Children’s Day, in the last remaining country on earth who has not ratified the U.N.’s Charter on the Rights of The Child, Somalia having done so back in 2015. This is the reality we have been forced to accept, under pain of death and imprisonment should we ever try to resist. 

But resist we must. 

A better world is possible, and we need not speculate how situations such as the one in NYC and the U.S. more broadly can not only be alleviated, but anticipated and avoided entirely. The People’s Republic of China, despite its large population and history of poverty, has effectively eliminated homelessness through measures including a household registration system, which ensures access to hometown social services, and laws requiring local governments arrange proper assistance to those who still lose housing, rather than punishing or expelling them. The great strides of the Chinese people, and the people of socialist countries overall (Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cuba, etc.), are possible only through complete control of the state belonging to the working class. With a dictatorship of the working and oppressed peoples — a rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, in truth and not just words — we will put homelessness and poverty in the dustbin of history where they belong. 

1. Current estimates suggest 50,000 migrant families with children lived in shelters over the summer of 2024. Doing some simple math, dividing the prior estimate of 146,000 homeless children currently enrolled in some form of schooling by the 50,000 families recorded by the city’s comptroller across all the summer months, then you would have to presume, on average, that each family has 2.9 children being cared for. And while that is not only dubious to claim from the perspective of mere probability and statistical chance, it is also a figure representing an incomplete population! The above estimate of 50,000 only accounted for migrant families who lived in shelters, and the 146,000 figure accounts for all unhoused children enrolled in schooling across the five boroughs. And of those 50,000 migrant families, only 13,500 of those families were housed in shelters during the month of September, 2024. Looking back on the readily available data reporting on the number of families present in September 2023, we can see the figures are practically the same. Therefore we can include that the homeless population is rising steadily, and that the source is not uniquely foreign in origin.  ︎
2. This figure was arrived at by taking the number of active hotel rooms and adding them to the upper and lower bound limits of vacant housing as documented by surveys from 2022 and 2023, the most immediate and relevant data the author could find on the subject. Specifically in The City’s article on the subject, the average amount of rent stabilized units vacant in the city yet not available to potential renters was compared with the figures they gave for vacant units of any available housing, not just rent frozen unitsy. By taking the low estimate of 33,000 and the high estimate of 67,000, and adding each to the estimate of 120,000 active hotel rooms, our range of available housing is made clear.  ︎

When the man becomes frantic and wraps the seat belt around his neck, the video shows the cruiser stopping. Harris opens the back door and, for no apparent reason other than to vent his own frustration and hurt someone else, Harris then proceeds to punch and elbow the detainee in the head and then place the man’s head in the open cruiser door and slam it shut.

Within hours of this coming to light, he was fired.

This seems like the right outcome — until we look back and see that he’d already been suspended without pay two years ago for excessive use of force, and was also named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against in June.

This comes in the wake of the murder of Sonya Massey and the swift response to the killer cop Sean Grayson. In the lead-up to November and the elections, the Democrats, who currently control the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice, cannot afford to be seen as allowing police murders to go unpunished. They are, after all, running Kamala Harris as the “top cop,” and have already begun to seek conciliation from reactionaries (both Republicans and Independents) by airing her very first campaign video in which she promises to increase the size of the vicious U.S. Border Patrol.

Just as in the murder of Sonya Massey, the beating here is an opportunity for the police to burn one of their own to save their bankrupt system.

We musn’t be mollified. Only fire can burn out the rot in the heart of the U.S. policing system, and that fire must rage broadly and widely.

On May 12, the Baltimore Student Union received word through a secondhand source that we had been invited to a town hall to be co-hosted by WJZ, the Baltimore Banner, and the University of Baltimore Law School where some of Baltimore City’s top political leaders — Mayor Brandon Scott, State’s Attorney (DA) Ivan Bates, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, and City Schools Chief of Staff Allison Perkins-Cohen — would be present to engage in a conversation about what could be done to curb the rising tide of youth violence. 

In response, we issued the following public statement outlining that we would be boycotting that forum, and any such forum where student voice was an afterthought rather than a deliberate, centralized goal:

This week, Baltimore Student Union received a secondhand request to participate in a so-called “youth violence” forum hosted by WJZ, UBalt Law, and the Baltimore Banner to be aired live next Thursday. Also in attendance will be mayor Brandon Scott, police commissioner Michael Harrison, City Schools chief of staff Alison Perkins-Cohen, and state’s attorney Ivan Bates.

We want to be clear — “solutions” to youth killings will not be found in BPD, who allowed the death of Donnell Rochester, and just last night allowed the shooting of a 17 year old, or in district board staff, who are authorizing Evolv, or in the mayor, who has accelerated the police budget & eschewed every promise that got him elected.

As community organizers, we understand that political “solutions” to the deaths of young people in Baltimore will not be found through the theatrical exchange of ideas on live radio, but through a comprehensive mobilization of civil society & community residents in Baltimore fighting in one motion for true community safety.

As such, we will not legitimize the authority of city officials who have failed to act in arm with the demands of the community, and we certainly will decline to participate in any event where youth voice is an afterthought; these events must be after school hours and easily accessible to student attendance.

If the press wants to hear from us, they know how to reach us. Solidarity.

Indeed, there is an epidemic of youth violence in our city. On the very first Friday of the school year, a Mergenthaler High student was killed amid a dispute between several people on the street. Only four days later, a Carver High student was killed, and Baltimore students were thrust into a fever pitch of fear and mass panic as the school year kicked off in early September.

Then, in January, a student at Edmondson-Westside High was killed, followed by a nonfatal shooting at Ben Franklin High only two days later, setting students into a spiral right after a return to school from the December holidays.

In March, gunshots afflicted Baltimore students yet again with a mass-shooting ‘false alarm’ at Digital Harbor High, resulting in a school lockdown and a SWAT team being sent in. Students, already on edge, then watched as a Patterson High student was shot and killed, and only three weeks later, a mourning Baltimore City went aflame with rage and grief as the Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville made national news.

The school year is now approaching a close, but it has been a year bereft with loss of life, and a city already weary of ineffective government has only grown more discouraged by the embarrassing missteps made by various government institutions in response to this epidemic of violence in the school system.

In response to the Edmondson-Westside High shooting, Councilman Kristerfer Burnett introduced legislation to the Baltimore City Council to raise fines on businesses that serviced minors during school hours — say, students going to the mom & pop shop on their lunch break for a coffee — and Mayor Brandon Scott announced that new youth curfews would be imposed over summer break, prohibiting students under 16 from being alone in public after 11pm. On the part of the school district, the School Board moved forward with a $300,000 new weapons detection regime pilot program from Evolv — a manufacturer that is notorious for producing ineffective, shoddy equipment that has been pulled out of numerous school districts in the last 5 years for ineffectiveness, most recently in Utica, NY. And the City Council, which unanimously passed resolutions asking the School Board to adopt restorative justice practices in all schools and institute trauma-informed training for teachers and staff, has seen their pleas ignored by the school district. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Police Department has been embroiled in scandal over the cops’ murder of Donnell Rochester, an 18-year old who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in 2022.

The Scott administration, like all others before them, has continued to offer nothing to the city’s youth but condescension, disdain, and harm. It is no coincidence that the city has selected Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Federal Hill as their “primary static locations,” stationing police around the sites of the greatest class privilege in the city. The message sent is clear: the mere presence of working class and racialized youth is offensive to bourgeois interests, and must be met with the full force of state repression. The young people of this city are not so easily placated by facile promises of an “exchange of ideas” or fooled by empty gestures that hint toward reform. They demand — and deserve — justice, dignity, and an end to the policing of youth.

The battle over gerrymandering has been fought since the introduction of the current political machine by antebellum Democrats in the early mid-19th century. In fact, the term comes from 1812 and the redrawing of Massachusetts electoral districts by Governor Elbridge Gerry, when he redrew a district in Boston to look like a salamander on a survey map. The practice is designed to combine various districts so that the voting population of the enemy — the party not currently in power, whichever that may be — is concentrated in the fewest number of districts or broken up so that they are counteracted by larger numbers of the party doing the drawing. Gerrymandering is nearly as old as elections in the U.S. and almost coeval with the founding of the U.S. settler-republic itself.

It has always caused righteous and justified outrage among the people who are actually doing the voting. By its very nature, Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. In electoral regions where the ruling party has a safe majority of the votes, there’s no reason to Gerrymander. It’s only where the ruling party is slipping from power or foresees a loss in voters that it goes to the district maps and tries to draw the borders in its own favor.

In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States, stacked with right-fascist jurists, ruled that partisan gerrymandering, even when “excessive,” was “nonjusticiable” and involved “political questions.” This was the case of Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2491, 2507 (2019). In the everyday language of human beings, this tortured legal-speak means that, should a political party redistrict your entire state to make sure it, and it alone, can win elections in the future, the courts have no power to aid you. “Nonjusticiable” means there is nothing the court can do; a “political question” is one that the courts have decided must be fixed by elected representatives. Never mind that the gerrymandering itself makes it impossible to elect representatives who would undo the partisan redistricting.

Under a little-used and even less-granted rule of procedure, the legislature of North Carolina asked their state supreme court permission to re-argue a case that had been decided once already last year, when the judges of that court had held a Democratic majority. That case, Harper v. Hall, 380 N.C. 317, 390 (2022), had determined that the North Carolina constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering.

On 28 April, 2023, the Supreme Court of North Carolina, newly-packed with pro-gerrymandering right-fascist Republicans, overruled Harper v. Hall. The new Harper v. Hall ruling explicitly mirrors the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause — that is, since the redistricting has already been done, there’s no way to fix it. The question is, in the twisted language of the law, “nonjusticiable.” In other words, to those who have lost the ability to have their voices heard in even the meager and anemic elections we’ve become accustomed to in this dying bourgeois republic, the answer is: “Too bad!”

Gerrymandering: the Legal Landscape

The most prominent gerrymandering cases were, of course, all within the territory of New Africa — that band of fertile soil in the U.S. South where the biggest and most prosperous slave plantations were founded, which imported the most Black African slaves, and which are, consequently, today the regions where most Black people in the U.S. Empire live. The practice of redistricting to disenfranchise Black voters came under federal scrutiny in the 1960s and was explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Under the liberal order, any victory secured by the oppressed, by the laboring masses, is subject to reversal. Liberalism, and in particular the brand of left-liberalism popular among the functionaries of the Democratic Party, functions on the level of form rather than content. To the left-liberal, there is no higher principle than applying, however unequally, the same form to many situations and arguing, from the fact that the form remains unchanged, that this, in some abstract and metaphysical sense, represents equality. 

It was only a matter of time before this liberal mania of honoring procedure and process over results caused an utterly ludicrous shift in the very meaning of the law. Although the fight against gerrymandering had taken on an explicitly anti-racist cast, it would, in 1993, be used to deprive a Black population of its political power.

Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, was a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case that came up out of North Carolina. In the 1990 census, North Carolina qualified for a new electoral district. This district was drawn by the North Carolina state legislature in a “snake-like” manner to create what is called a “majority-minority” district; that is, the new electoral district was majority Black. North Carolina was under the rule of the Voting Rights Act, which meant any redistricting had to be approved by the federal government, which would approve or deny the redistricting based on a test as to whether the new districts jeopardized minority presentation. The Justice Department accepted this new district.

Ruth O. Shaw and a group of other white residents sued the U.S. Attorney General and various state officials over the plan. The Supreme Court, then under the conservative right-fascist leadership of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ruled that the electoral district, because it separated out Black voters, was an effort to segregate races and was therefore a violation of the white resident’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law. You’re reading that right: the redistricting was held to be unconstitutional because it violated the white resident’s rights by attempting to ensure that Black voters were heard in North Carolina, a state with a historical record of suppressing the Black vote.

Now that the reactionary elements had realized they could use the anti-gerrymandering rules to their benefit, a drive kicked off to make gerrymandering illegal on its face and reverse the gains made by the Black voters of the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This legal push has resulted in the modern division of gerrymandering into two categories: the legal, and the illegal.

Racial gerrymandering is still per-se illegal. But, thanks to a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions culminating in Rucho v. Common Cause, politically partisan gerrymandering is not. That is, it is illegal to design an electoral district such that Black voters are concentrated and can form a majority, but it is not illegal to design an electoral district such that Republican voters can form a majority.

Under the hood of the bourgeois democracy under which we live, district-drawing is one of the mechanisms used by both parties to try to gain an advantage in the federal government. Both Democrats and Republicans aggressively redistrict to shore up seats where they’re weak. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans have been pursuing a united strategy for redistricting since 2010. REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) was founded in that year and the Republican party has poured some $30 million dollars into this project. Over the past 23 years, REDMAP has used computerized mapping software to help redraw hundreds of districts in each round of redistricting. By 2012, the Republican party had already received an enormous benefit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, many states that were formerly controlled by Democrats are now bastions of Republican power thanks to this, and other efforts to control which votes are counted and which are neutralized.

Voting in the Bourgeois Republic

Once every few years, the workers in the United States Empire have been accustomed to being given the opportunity to engage in a piece of political theater: voting which wing of the great vulture will be in charge of our oppression. State ideologists, textbook authors, and talking heads on television cloak the bourgeois republic in the dizzy and eager language of democracy. We, the working people, know better. This is shown in every election in our lifetime. Voter turnout in the presidential elections, for instance, has hovered between 50 and 65% throughout the entire 20th and 21st century. Why don’t people vote? Because they know, both from history and experience, that their votes don’t matter.

Why don’t the votes of the working people matter? There are numerous ways and means used by the ruling class to denude, sift through, sort, and screen the votes of the working people. To address them all would be an involved exercise, but some of the ways the power of the democratic vote is reduced and winnowed away include: first-past-the-post elections, election days coinciding with work time, polling stations that are inaccessible, the electoral college, huge costs of running a campaign for office, and the worst and most potent tool of the ruling class of all: backroom dealing. We all know that the way politics works in this country is that moneyed interests talk directly with politicians outside of the view of the public. Even supposedly “progressive” politicians take pride in their ability to manipulate the system of deals, bargains, and secret handshakes that pervades the halls of power. The fact of the matter is, all the decisions made by our politicians are made in private. We are never in the room. The money is.

But because the power of the vote is often useless or meaningless, that doesn’t mean it’s always meaningless. There have been times when the vote has mattered. There have been times when the vote has shown an expression of collective rage, even of class power! Those times are few and far between.

More importantly, though, the franchise, the right to vote, has expanded significantly since the settler-republic was first founded. Initially, only propertied white men of English heritage could vote in most states (and, consequently, in federal affairs). As this changed, the power of the vote was reduced, to prevent what the liberal hysterics refer to as “mob rule” or the “rule of the many.” (Why are they so afraid of the rule of many? Because they are the few!) In liberal democracy, enfranchisement is not political power in its own right, but rather an indication of which segments of the population the ruling class deems important enough to placate. 

So why should we be up in arms about voting rights, which we have just agreed don’t mean much, being taken away? Here’s why: Those rights have been secured through bloodshed. They are the concession, wrung through the centuries of hard class struggle, that we have forced from the ruling classes. It’s not so much the fact that we begrudge the blood-suckers and parasites in our government or the bloated hypocrites that own the companies and thus the country the right to participate in their dog-and-pony show. But winning the vote was a step toward winning the political battle. Losing the vote — watching them strip it away from us with gerrymandering and other tricks — that demonstrates not only the disdain in which they hold the working people and the nationally oppressed, the disgust they have for you and I, but it is the worrying and dangerous call of the rise of open violence and reactionary attack.

What should stir our blood is not that our voices carried weight with the ruling class, but that we are now being told not to talk at all. The fact that they feel no need to operate under even the scant theater of pluralism and popular will should concern everyone.

The Sharpening of Partisanship 

Since the 2016 elections, following on the heels of Republican victories in redistricting in the early 2010s, partisanship has sharpened on the right side of the aisle. The GOP has been tilting steadily rightwards into more and more brutal forms of right-fascism since 2001, and in 2016 the far-right fascist element within the party won control, not only of the party, but of the entire country.

We are now in an era where the entire U.S. government at all levels stands divided between the left-fascists, who merely want to see a stabilization in the current capitalist world-order, and the right-fascists, who call for increased exploitation, white class collaboration, and much more vigorous suppression of the growing Communist movement within the empire.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina lost two of its Democratic Justices last year, and these were replaced by Republican Justices. This is what enabled the clever maneuvering by the North Carolina legislature to get the case in which gerrymandering had been rendered illegal under North Carolina law heard for a second time before a new, sympathetic — we might even call them co-conspiratorial — court.

This battle between the left-fascists and the right-fascists is playing out not only in the political arena, where it traditionally has been fought, but also in the country’s courts. Long having pursued a project of planting arch-conservative lawyers into positions of high authority in both state and federal courts, the GOP is now poised, pushed by its dominant far-right wing, to deliver body blow after body blow to their political opponents. The reversal of Harper v. Hall is one such stroke; and because the Democrats had relied upon the oppressed Black masses to support their capitalist program, it is also a blow against the already-shaky structure of the bourgeois “democracy” enjoyed under the empire.

Harper v. Hall

The Democrats, and by extension (though of course, not by design) the people of North Carolina, won Harper v. Hall in 2022. This was a case brought in 2021 by the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and individual voters joining together to file suit against the president of the North Carolina senate, the speaker of the North Carolina house, and the chairs of the redistricting committees, challenging the constitutionality of the redistricting maps that were drawn. The maps, of course, only got that far because the U.S. Supreme Court had repealed key sections of the Voting Rights Act, mentioned above.

On 20 January, 2023, the legislature of North Carolina filed a motion for rehearing before the new, right-fascist Supreme Court of North Carolina. The court gave no real reason for its decision to rehear the case (“a recently issued opinion appropriately is reheard if the petitioner makes a satisfactory showing that this opinion may be erroneous” was all the logic it provided). It needed none! The GOP-controlled court reheard the case because they wanted to reverse it. On 28 April 2023, they did exactly that.

In its new decision, the Supreme Court of North Carolina sneers, “such claims ask courts to apportion political power as a matter of fairness…. Individuals have no constitutional right as members of the public to a government audience for their policy views.” Harper at *48 citing Minn. state Bd. for Cmty. Colls v. Knight, 465 U.S. 271, 286 (1984). (emphasis added.)

The left-fascists still cling to a form of bourgeois democracy, but increasingly the right-fascists have determined that even the shreds of participation in government that have been won over the past century and a half are too dangerous to the ruling class. This is a naked, undisguised attack on democratic participation in government. We should read the decision of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the same terms that they state it: 

As long as you get to cast a vote, the fact that it is purely symbolic doesn’t matter.

In the afternoon of Tuesday, May 2, 2023 — one day after International Workers Day — a white supremacist murdered Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man known locally as a street performer, particularly for his Michael Jackson impersonation. The murder was not carried out under cover of darkness, nor even under color of law.

No, the murderer was not a cop — as is usually the case — but, according to reports, a former U.S. Marine acting in his “civilian capacity” as a deputy pig. The method of killing was not a gun, but a strangulation by choke-hold.

The NYC murder comes almost three years after the murder-by-suffocation of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, and almost nine years after the murder-by-strangulation of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by several NYPD pigs, while repeatedly crying out the now-infamous phrase, “I can’t breathe!”

NYPD officers took the murderer into custody for questioning and light refreshments — such are the “perks” offered by the white-terror police to a white man who murders Black people. Recognizing the civilian-fascist terrorist as one of their own, the pigs at the New York Police Department released him the next morning without charges — signaling to other would-be deputy fascists that they have free reign to murder Black civilians at will.

In fact, a wave of white terror has swept the U.S. Empire of late. In “defense” of private property and “decorum,” vigilante white men across the Empire have deputized themselves to maim and murder Black and other oppressed people. To be merely suspected of petty theft, trespassing, loitering, or indecency — in this case, to be homeless and in need of help — by the wrong sort of white man often amounts to a death sentence.

A harrowing video of the murder was uploaded to Facebook, and has circulated on social media and via news outlets: The victim flails, attempting to break free of the murderer’s hold. But he is prevented from escaping by two other men, who help the white vigilante hold him down — one Black man, who restrains the victim’s arms by grabbing his wrists, and one white man, who applies pressure to the victim’s shoulder. After several minutes, the victim loses consciousness. Onlooking passengers verbally reassure themselves that he has merely fainted, and will be alright.

In fact, tragically, the victim has suffered brain death. Soon after the incident, he will be pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, after attempts to revive him fail.

Derek Chauvin suffocated George Floyd to death by kneeling on his neck for eight brutal minutes. Yesterday’s killer, reportedly a Marine who has yet to be identified by the NYPD, kept Jordan Neely in a murderous chokehold for nearly fifteen minutes. This was no desperate act of self-defense or “heroism.” It was a cold-blooded murder, executed by a trained marine who’s served in this country’s imperialist armed forces.

In the moments just before the murder, the victim, a 30-year-old, unarmed, emotionally distressed, and apparently homeless Black man, was begging for food and other material aid. He exclaimed to fellow subway passengers, “I don’t have food, I don’t have water, and I’m fed up.” In his anguish, he expressed a thought that many unhoused persons have after suffering years of deprivation and despair: “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”

A witness, Juan Alberto Vazquez, the freelance citizen journalist responsible for filming the murder and uploading the video to his Facebook page, Luces de Nueva York (“New York Lights”), confirmed that the victim did not attempt to touch or otherwise harm anyone. Vazquez recounted in an interview that the victim boarded the northbound F-train in a state of psychological distress, and began “yelling” at other passengers for help. The situation became tense, and likely uncomfortable, but not violent.

That is, until the white vigilante-murderer decided that the punishment for being homeless and distressed in public was summary execution. The murderer then lunged at the victim, tackled him to the floor, wrapped his arms around the victim’s throat, and squeezed.

Perhaps the vigilante-murderer believed himself a “defender” of the “peace.” Perhaps he just wanted the thrill of murdering a defenseless Black person. It doesn’t matter — murder is murder.

Whatever the case, a pattern is emerging in this year’s wave of vigilante violence: confrontations over property. A homeless person expressed his desperation in a public space, and in so doing created a “disturbance” sufficient to be considered a “threat.”

Shockingly, none of the other train passengers intervened to help the victim. Instead, they sat by and watched as the life was slowly choked out of him. The only two passengers who intervened did so to aid and abet the murderer.

Jordan Neely paid for this bystander inaction with his life.

Even more alarming is how common such white-vigilante murders of Black people are across the U.S. Empire — a country in which the Jim Crow regime and other forms of racist apartheid have ostensibly long-since been abolished.

Little more than two weeks have passed since the attempted murder of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl at the hands of an armed white man. Ralph was unarmed, and his only “crime,” as is well-known, was accidentally going to the wrong address to pick up his little siblings from a friend’s house.

The incident provoked outrage in Kansas City, Missouri, not least because the would-be child-killer, Andrew Lester, was released without charges by police within 24 hours of the attempted murder. Kansas City police eventually arrested Lester and charged him with multiple counts of assault — but only after the Black community of Kansas City and their allies poured out into the streets, demanding justice, over the following days.

Thankfully, Ralph survived. He was soon discharged from the hospital to recuperate at home in the care of his family, and is expected to make a full recovery, despite having suffered a bullet-wound to the forehead.

But how did Ralph survive? When he fled Lester, bleeding from his head, he was barely able to walk, let alone run; he was screaming for help, but he was in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and there was little he could do. Police had sent out a public warning that a shooting had occurred, and instructed residents not to leave their homes. Most neighbors, obeying the cops, ignored Ralph’s pleas for help — until, at last, two neighbors intervened, providing Ralph, who had collapsed near their house, with first aid, and calling an ambulance for him. It is only thanks to this relatively small act of basic neighborly decency and kindness — of solidarity — that Ralph survived and is expected to recover in full.

Sadly, Jordan Neely was not so “fortunate.” This time, the murderer was successful — exactly because not a single passenger in that train car did the right thing.

All the victim in this case would have needed to survive was for a few people to break the vigilante-murderer’s grip on him. If only someone had pulled the murderer’s arms off of the victim’s neck, and attended to the victim to ensure he wasn’t injured, then he most likely would have survived. And, if only someone — optimally, a mental health professional trained to respond to such cases without involving the police, and as an alternative to police violence — had talked with the man, whose only “crime” was being homeless and desperate for aid, then he might have gotten the help he needed.

Instead, another Black person is dead — and, at least for the present, his white murderer has walked free, under the blue aegis of the colonialist police.

Only in the following days will we know whether the civilian-fascist, white supremacist, deputy-pig terrorist murderer will be charged by his badged, blue-uniformed brothers-in-arms for his crimes. If he is brought to any semblance of “justice,” it will be so only because the Black community and their allies in New York City, joined in solidarity by masses across the country, rise up in outrage and demand justice now. And if, on the other hand, the vigilante-murderer is allowed to walk free, we will then have a clear sign that the state-terrorist pigs in the NYPD know that they can deputize lynch-mobs with impunity.

Justice and peace, in other words, are in our hands — in the hands of the working-poor and oppressed masses of this country. So, too, are the very lives of our brothers and sisters.

The duty of the cops is not to “protect and serve” the people, but to terrorize, brutalize, incarcerate, and repress us.

Only we, the oppressed, can keep our brothers and sisters safe. Only we, the oppressed, can be our siblings’ keepers.

Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers.

On Thursday, December 8, around 1,100 New York Times reporters, editors, salespersons, IT specialists, concierges and security personnel, and other union workers represented by the Times Guild, a member of the News Guid of New York City, initiated a 24-hour strike, beginning at midnight.

The mass action was initiated after the Times Guild workers warned, last Friday, December 2, that they would launch a strike on Thursday if a “fair deal” was not reached with their employer, the New York Times Company, by Wednesday, December 7. In return, on Wednesday, the company’s representatives snubbed the workers by walking out of ongoing negotiations after 12 hours at the table, and with more than 5 hours left until the Guild’s deadline.

As if to mock the workers, the company’s spokesperson claimed that the strike was unnecessary, and chastised the Guild for taking “extreme action.”

The warning and subsequent strike followed nearly two years of stalling by the New York Times Company, which has refused to negotiate in good faith with its workers toward a new, “fair” contract.

The Times Guild’s demands are wide-ranging and fairly ambitious, but also, at the same time, perfectly reasonable.

In addition to general salary raises, the workers are demanding equal pay for equal work for women and people of color, who are paid, on average, significantly less than white men. Among other “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” demands, the Guild specifically wants more women of color to be elevated to leadership roles within the company’s newsroom, in order to address the company’s lack of diversity.

The workers are also demanding a more robust and comprehensive health-care plan. In particular, the workers want coverage for mental health, fertility, and family planning services. On this point, the Guild has included a demand of “equitable treatment for temporary and casual workers employed by the company on a regular basis.”

So far, the company has agreed only to a few of these demands, and even then, only to partially fulfilling them. This is despite the fact that the company’s profits have grown considerably in the last few years. The New York Times Company’s projected adjusted operating profit for 2022 is estimated at over $320,000,000.

On Thursday, hundreds of workers picketed outside the New York Times office near Times Square. The Times Guild workers were joined by comrades from other newspaper guilds, who commuted from as far away as Pittsburgh. Workers delivered speeches and chanted slogans like “We make the paper, we make the profit!” and “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me!” 

The Times Guild strike is the latest in a recent series of organized labor actions in the news media industry.

Across the labor movement, a mood of solidarity has prevailed. However, some socialists and progressive activists have balked at supporting the Times Guild workers.

Some socialists have objected on the grounds that New York Times employees are already paid far more than the average proletarian worker. Some have gone so far as to say that the strike is reactionary, that it is against the interests of the proletariat as a whole, because it expresses the demands of a privileged upper stratum.

According to Business Insider, base salaries at the New York Times range from $53,392 to $306,000 per year. A recent article on the strike in a local New York paper, The City, stated that some employees “earn as little as $52,000 a year.” By contrast, in 2021, the U.S. median wage was $37,586 per year, according to the Social Security Administration; meanwhile, a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour would earn about $15,000 per year. Clearly, even the lowest-paid employees of the New York Times Company are among the best-paid waged workers in the U.S., which, in turn, is one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita — New York City’s astronomical cost of living notwithstanding.

The Times Guild is fighting for a $65,000 per year salary floor, as well as an immediate 10% pay raise for all employees.

We certainly shouldn’t deny that real disparities exist within the proletariat, both within this country and globally, that privileged upper strata of the working classes do, indeed, exist, and that often, throughout the labor struggle’s history, these upper-strata workers have failed to stand in solidarity with the working-poor.

But for all this, we cannot turn away from the Times Guild’s strike.

Yes, these upper-strata workers enjoy privileges closed to the proletariat writ large, and yes, these privileges engender vacillation among the wealthy and comfortable workers, but every injustice against these privileged workers, every slight from their bosses — the capitalists and their lackey corporate managers — forces them into antagonisms with capital, and draws them closer to the proletariat, to our great common struggle for economic dignity, for social justice, for political power.

Should we isolate the relatively privileged workers? Should we count them among our class foes? Should we reflexively turn them away, back into the arms of their capitalist bosses? Of course not! To do so would serve only to grow the army of capital.

This is not to say that we must beg the high-earning, relatively comfortable, exceptionally privileged workers for solidarity. On the contrary! When the relatively privileged workers strike, we must call them to strike with us, the underprivileged mass of workers. We must awaken them to the plight of the proletariat, and demand that they stand in solidarity with the rest of the working classes. The privileged upper-strata workers must be made to realize — and, as capitalism continues to decay, will be forced to realize — that proletarian solidarity is their only salvation. It is the relatively privileged workers who must actively choose to forsake their status, who must stand in solidarity with us.

Another common objection has been voiced by anti-war activists: The New York Times is one of the premier mouthpieces of American imperialism. The Times has again and again repeated casus belli lies straight from the U.S. government, including the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” lie that the George W. Bush administration used as its pretext for the Iraq War. The Times has run hundreds of pro-war opinion columns, calling for unilateral military action against America’s “enemy” states. Some anti-war activists refuse to support a strike launched by the employees of such a company.

The vast majority of Times writers are tasked with pumping out mundane articles on mundane news items. The newspaper’s political bent, its bloodthirsty support for Yankee imperialism, is the prerogative of its owners and large shareholders, its upper management, and its editorial board — not of the company’s workers.

Still, there can be no doubt that the New York Times employee, whatever their role, stands in the conveyor-belt system of Yankee-imperialist propaganda. 

But if this were enough to rinse out solidarity with workers, there would not be a single industry within the U.S. Empire that “deserved” our solidarity. There is no “ethical work” under capitalism; every job, however “mundane” or “noble,” however quiet or celebrated, is a link in the chain of world imperialism. Doctors and nurses, however many lives they save, carry on their work so that private hospitals can profit from human suffering — the Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding. Public school teachers raise the next generation of docile workers, while private school teachers raise the next generation of arrogant rulers. Novelists, musicians, and other artists, even those who “speak truth to power,” participate in a market furnished and controlled by the ruling capitalist class.

The determining factor is not whether a worker stands within the world-imperialist system; we all stand within it. Every agent of the imperialist war machine — every cop, every imperialist troop, every prison guard, every “tough-on-crime” judge and prosecutor, every designer and manufacturer of munitions that kill our siblings in the imperialized periphery, every worker directly employed by the manufacturing arm of the war-machine, and, of course, every politician within the U.S. two-party duopoly — is, in no uncertain terms, our enemy. But we, the workers, who are forced, by the necessity of earning a wage, into the cogs of capitalist production, who are exploited and oppressed by the capitalists and their agents, have the power to abolish this machine — if only we can unite and struggle as a class.

The New York Times workers, the relatively privileged “professionals,” must realize that the sole condition of the success of their struggle, of the fulfillment of their just demands, is their class solidarity with the proletariat. We implore the Times Guild workers to continue their struggle, to demand $60K salaries, full benefits, and more — but not only for themselves! These demands must be extended to all workers, to the whole proletariat — and not only to the imperial proletariat of the U.S. Empire, but to all oppressed workers of the world.

That is why we extend solidarity to the striking New York Times workers: The workers, united, can never be defeated! The workers, united, will bring down and liberate ourselves from the system of mass violence and exploitation that oppresses us all.

Water is the most important resource on the planet. The need for water is one of the only material needs common to all living things. This fundamental need has driven all patterns of human migration and settlement throughout our history. Civilizations across the planet have, without exception, organized themselves around their ability to collect, transport, and use water. 

Innovation in water infrastructure has been the driving force that opened up new lands for human settlement. Irrigation technologies have allowed people to feed themselves farther and farther away from sources of water, and to produce greater surpluses of food to support expanding populations. Canals, wells, reservoirs, sewage lines, treatment facilities: these are all ancient technologies that have been improved and expanded throughout the millennia, giving us living conditions far beyond the “natural” limit. Water infrastructure is the bedrock of human civilization.

And yet, all around us, this crucial infrastructure is crumbling. The Flint water crisis highlighted a rampant problem in the US: lead leaching into the water supply and poisoning residents —  for years. Lead poisoning isn’t some distant Roman curiosity, it’s something that’s happening every day here in the United States Empire. In Hawaii, a military fuel storage facility leaked hazardous levels of contamination into the local water supply. Jackson, Mississippi has been quietly facing unsafe water for years, culminating in a boil water advisory that’s been in place for weeks. Recently, my hometown of Baltimore faced its own boil water advisory following contamination with E. coli in the poorest areas of the city. Ravaged by Hurricane Fiona, Puerto Rico is now staring down weeks or months without power or running water. Countless other failings of crucial water infrastructure continue to fly under the radar as we speak. It’s only a matter of time before they explode into the national consciousness, but only after these systemic failures ravage, sicken, and possibly kill entire neighborhoods.

Why do we see our most critical infrastructure failing? Why is this most basic necessity of life being left to the ravages of time? This is an ongoing pattern of abdication by the US government, intentionally removing itself from the role states have always played as the builders and protectors of infrastructure. Past infrastructure projects, such as the mass installation of sewage systems and water mains, were built with efficiency in mind, at a time when it was inconceivable that the maintenance of those systems would ever be abandoned by governments. And yet, abandon it they have.

For centuries, our water infrastructure has served us dutifully and invisibly, but decades of neglect are confirming a classic maxim of engineering wisdom: good engineering should go unnoticed. When you turn on the faucet, you expect clean water to immediately come pouring out. When you flush the toilet, you expect everything to be swept away in an instant. As long as everything is working as designed, you notice nothing. The second something goes wrong, the problem becomes the most obvious thing in the world. We only take note of the crucial role of our infrastructure once it starts to fail.

There are many ways for failing water infrastructure to impact us. The most obvious we tend to think of is a lack of water: reservoirs run dry or the water mains fail, and nothing comes out of your tap at home. It becomes impossible to drink, to bathe, to wash clothes and dishes, to even flush your toilet. This is often the result of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or droughts. A more common disaster is water contamination, which tends to go unnoticed, and to persist for far longer. This can take the form of old pipes degrading, allowing heavy metals to dissolve into the water, or it can come from outside contaminants getting into the supply. Whether it’s lead, industrial waste, microorganisms, or any of the many other dangerous contaminants, these failures are becoming increasingly common as outdated water lines start to break down.

It is often said in engineering circles that the goal of the engineer is not to make the most sturdy, long-lived infrastructure possible. The goal is to make the most efficient infrastructure by balancing cost, labor, and longevity. This isn’t simply a case of engineers being cheap and trying to save the most money in the short term: it simply doesn’t make sense to spend ten times as much to build something that lasts twice as long. As long as there is a commitment to continuously maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, it is worth it to do so efficiently.

The US state has, since its beginning, always served the interests of the wealthiest: the landlords, the slavers, the industrialists, and the financial elite. At times, those interests have lined up with the needs of the people. The maintenance of infrastructure is one such need. The capitalists want to be free of cholera and tainted water as much as the workers do, and it helps them to maintain their workforce if they aren’t dying of preventable diseases. However, over the course of centuries, the power and greed of capital has expanded, and those interests have shifted. More of the responsibility for public works has been offloaded to the private sector. Rather than hiring their own engineers, municipal governments give sweetheart deals to private contractors. Publicly-owned infrastructure is sold off to private corporations with the intention of raiding the public coffers. New infrastructure, such as telecommunications, is simply presumed to belong to the free market from the start.

The social context behind this shift is complex, but it can be summarized as a direct reaction to labor activism and socialist organizing. In the early 20th century, labor was ascendant in this country, especially among the sectors necessary for the construction of infrastructure: mining, processing, manufacturing, construction, and so on. The crucial nature of infrastructure for the functioning of society gave these workers tremendous leverage at the bargaining table, which made industrial capitalists very nervous. They began a protracted campaign of culture-crafting; a full scale assault on the public perception of unions. They smeared unionists, captured governments, laundered anti-worker policies through the media, and successfully turned the tide against organized labor. In the process, privatization became the law of the land, and our country’s infrastructure was stolen from us.

All of this privatization has been sold to the public as a way of enhancing these vital services, since private corporations are presented as being able to get the job done better and cheaper than governments ever could. (This, they attribute to the mysterious and illusory “market pressures”). In fact, the exact opposite is true. The only purpose of private industry is to produce profits, to give a return on investment in whatever way it can. It is possible for profit to be extracted by providing a public service that is efficient, cheap, and reliable, but this is not the rule. The most common way for a company to increase their profits is not by providing a superior product, but by cutting costs. This can be done by mistreating their workers, using cheaper materials, and neglecting maintenance, all of which the major infrastructure companies are constantly guilty of, and all of which lead to failing infrastructure. Because of the massive amounts of capital they control, as well as regulations and contracts from the governments they control, they cannot even be outcompeted by “more ethical” corporations.

The worst failures of water infrastructure have one major factor in common: they disproportionately impact the poorest sectors of our society, living on top of the oldest infrastructure. This is the result of decades of neglect, due to the perverse incentives listed above. The poorer a population is, the less profitable it is to install, upgrade, and maintain infrastructure for their use. This is the same reason it took massive government investment to get electricity and telephone lines to rural areas, the reason broadband internet is still unavailable in many parts of the country, and the reason giant shipping firms subcontract the USPS for many of their “last mile” needs. This ethos of private companies laying claim to the most profitable roles of infrastructure ownership while offloading the more costly features onto the state has created a system in which vast swathes of the country are left completely abandoned. When the water system fails, it’s the working class that shoulders the burden.

After extracting these massive profits, when these giant companies fail to fulfill their end of the bargain, what happens? Are they punished for the death, disease, and economic injury caused by their neglect of vital services? Are their ill-gotten gains seized and returned to the people they scammed? No. Instead, the government is tasked with picking up the slack, using money raised from the working class. Corporations retain their profits, retain their market share, and retain their iron grip on the infrastructure we need to live and thrive.

This fundamental failure of capitalism to provide vital public services is replicated across all sectors: healthcare, transportation, housing, energy, education, food, and especially water. The scam takes many different forms, but at its core it stays the same. There is massive profit to be made by promising the necessities of a functioning society, with none of the risk. Governments subsidize these sectors to keep society functioning, or they simply ignore the fallout of their failures. Increasingly, the ideology of the free market has shifted public policy towards the latter “strategy,” leading to a steady decline in every form of infrastructure. And we are positioned for this situation to only ever get worse.

Climate change is often presented simply in terms of rising temperatures, but the impact it is having is far more widespread, due mainly to water. More violent and unpredictable weather systems, caused by changing patterns of temperature and humidity, in turn cause unprecedented flooding. Floods wreak havoc with water infrastructure, drive people out their homes, and alter entire landscapes. Warming climates open up new aquatic breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria, which contaminate downstream water systems. Higher temperatures encourage evaporation, leading to tinder-dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires.

The same perverse incentives that make corporations unsuited for maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure also make them wholly incapable of addressing the climate crisis and its many downstream effects. Their only role in society is to generate profits, and it is more profitable to degrade the natural world and imperil our society, rather than pay the costs of clean, sustainable infrastructure. Left to its own devices, capitalism will continue to poison our water and choke off the lifeblood of civilization itself. We leave this power in the hands of capitalists at our own risk.