The Connecticut River Valley was home to many Indigenous tribes before European settler colonialism. The area now known as Hartford was held by the Suckiag Tribe until they were ethnically cleansed by Dutch and English settlers. Suckiag was valuable due to its prominent position along the Connecticut River. Ever since the displacement of its Indigenous populations, the city now known as Hartford has been a “rearguard garrison”¹ for settler colonialism in Occupied North America and imperialism across the globe. When English Hartford was founded in 1636, the Connecticut colony consisted of scattered settlements along the Connecticut River. These towns acted in self governance for the first time to declare war against the Pequot Nation, which governed what is today southeastern Connecticut. Settlers from the river valley towns sent delegates to Hartford, where the colonial court issued its decree to recruit 30 men from each town to commit genocide of the Pequot. The English also recruited hundreds of soldiers from the Narragansett and Mohegan Nations to assist in the war effort. Together, they killed most of the Pequot and forced the survivors into slavery, with the English seizing all their land. The English successfully took advantage of the competition between Indigenous nations in Connecticut, a tactic of exploiting existing contradictions the modern U.S. state now regularly employs to destabilize nations. Of course, the temporary allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan, also saw all of their land – at first slowly, then all at once – stolen by settlers in the ensuing, decades-long land grab. 

Hartford’s dominant industries at this time were agriculture and rum distillation. Both were dependent on slave labor; in Hartford, Black and Indigenous enslaved people worked the farms, while in the Caribbean they harvested sugarcane that was fermented and shipped up the eastern coast to Hartford and other northern cities. These Caribbean plantations were made dependent on such cities for food supplies, because even though the islands could grow ample food, sugar was the only crop produced on the land since it was more profitable to sell. The Caribbean experienced waves of manufactured famine that continue to this day. Census data for slavery in Hartford only goes back to 1791. In that year there were 263 enslaved people in Hartford out of 2,764 in the state. There were 430 “free persons” (free Black citizens) in Hartford who were members of the city’s proletariat and sub-proletariat. The first recorded murder victim in Hartford was a Black man named Louis Berbice, murdered by his enslaver in 1639. The enslaver, Edward Opdyck, faced no punishment. 

From Garrison Town to Inventor’s Workshop

Hartford became a manufacturing city beginning around the 1850s, when Samuel Colt opened the largest private gun factory in the world. Colt revolvers were key to westward expansion, used by both individual settlers and the U.S. army. A half century earlier, Eli Whitney initiated the local mass production firearms industry with the interchangeable parts design, developed out of a factory in New Haven. A year later, he would invent the cotton gin, kickstarting an exponential expansion of slavery production and New Afrikan misery. Additional companies, such as Billings and Spencer, Spencer Arms, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Smith & Wesson have bestowed a historic tie between settler militarism and Connecticut. 

The city’s role in colonial occupation did not change, but its form of service took on a new, advanced appearance. Amerika’s new settler armies needed advanced, mass-produced weaponry that could overwhelm the western Indigenous nations still fighting for their national territory. Tucked away safely in the Northeast and bolstered by several centuries of superprofits, Hartford was well-positioned to serve as an inventor’s workshop for the next era of military technology. 

We see the same transition fulfilled today by “israel” in Occupied Palestine. The zionist entity is both a garrison launchpad for the U.S. in Asia, and the empire’s principal inventor of military technology. Their weapons are primarily used against Palestinians to continue the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Their secondary purpose is that of testing and experimentation; advanced technology is exported from occupied Palestine to wherever in the world the empire needs them for asymmetric violence, including U.S. cities such as Hartford. 

From Inventor’s Workshop to Financial Hub

Hartford’s modern image as a finance center is characterized by massive insurance companies whose offices take up most of the city skyline. Connecticut’s capital is the birthplace of the insurance business itself. River captains, dealing in enslaved people and foodstuffs for slavery plantations, wanted to avoid the expectable financial hits from the dangerous sailing business; storms, piracy, and disease were threatening enough to the capitalists’ fortunes that it benefited the overall class to compensate one another when an individual merchant lost their investment. Thus, they created a system of profit and risk sharing among the merchant class. The financial logistics of slavery laid the foundation for the emergence of the insurance industry. Hartford is still considered the insurance capital of the world, although there are fewer actual insurance employees working in the city than in the past. 150 of these companies generate $16 billion a year combined. They are centered in the downtown area and housed in the largest office buildings. This industry is, of course, white dominated.

Lastly, Hartford and Hartford county continue to serve the U.S. war machine with several weapons manufacturers. In West Hartford, the Colt factory produces M4 rifles that are continuously sent to Occupied Palestine. The modern “inventor’s workshop” has moved across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where Raytheon operates a five-story “research” facility to engineer new weapons systems like radars, missiles, and drones for the US and its vassals. A short walk away, Pratt & Whitney builds engines for the F35 fighter jet. While many of these weapons workers are commuters, it is also the perception among community members that the companies are too powerful and entrenched for anti-imperialists to challenge them.  Tracking the city’s development from garrison fortress, to inventor’s workshop, to financial hub of global imperialism, can we really say Amerika was ever not fascist? No, we cannot; it is only the form and proximity to genocide that has changed. 

Demographics

The city has 17 neighborhoods, which are more sharply segregated by national and class contradictions than the average U.S. city. Population maps show that the New Afrikan population is primarily segregated to the north end of the city. The New Afrikan neighborhoods are separated from the Hispanic neighborhoods by insurance offices and the I-84 highway, constructed in 1964 to connect the downtown offices with the white suburbs in West Hartford. As in many cities, the construction of the giant highway through the city devastated the “minority” neighborhoods it crossed over. 

National Groups in Hartford according to 2020 census

Map of the I-84 Highway through Hartford

Although the downtown area saw the highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2020 (increasing by 53%), this area is still notoriously empty at night and on weekends, when office commuters leave for the suburbs. Downtown is the only neighborhood with a majority white population in Hartford. Note that the North Meadows neighborhood has no official population, since the area contains the Hartford Prison and commercial businesses. (See below.)

Hartford Neighborhoods, Population Change 2010 – 2020

We began our social investigation at the intersection of Park and Main St. In 1969, this intersection was the site of an uprising of the Puerto Rican community against a white biker gang. As the story goes, a white man belonging to the Comanchero biker gang assaulted an elderly Puerto Rican, and the community decided they had had enough. The groups confronted each other in the streets, but Hartford police only arrested Puerto Ricans. This agitated the community even further. The cycle of protesting, followed by police repression, followed by even heavier protesting, would continue for weeks, until an even greater escalation occurred. On August 29, 1969, West Hartford police shot Dennis Jones, a 16 year old New Afrikan, to death. Two days after the murder, a slumlord tenement building burned down, killing three people. These two events were too much for the community to bear, and people took to the streets against both police and white-owned businesses in the north end. But unlike the “Comanchero clash,” this time New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans fought together. The protests spread from the Clay Arsenal Neighborhoods, through downtown, and into Charter Oak and South Green. By September 5, over 500 people had been arrested and 4 people were shot. 

1969 Hartford Uprisings, August-September 1969

This one and a half month period marks the most significant uprising of the oppressed communities in Hartford. Since then, Puerto Ricans have gained representation on the Hartford City Council, giving the community a chance for a larger “piece of the pie” of imperial superprofits. They now have a place in government to address economic inequalities and police oppression. Of course, representation in local politics has not smoothed over the glaring contradictions between different nations in Hartford. Puerto Ricans are still concentrated in specific neighborhoods that receive lower investment ratings than nearby white neighborhoods, and the contradictions of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty are more present in the Hispanic neighborhoods than in the white-dominated West End. Puerto Ricans make up 74% of the Hispanics in Hartford, but there is a significant Dominican population (8%) now as well. 

Beginning each outing with a briefing of goals and logistics, we set out in both directions along Park Street and the surrounding area. Below are the major contradictions we observed. 

A Note On Methodology 

Methodology refers to a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. As Scientific Socialists, our area of study is the material world. Our activity is Social Revolution. This means that we study the material world in order to apply the data we perceive — creatively and usefully — towards our material goals. In the context of a social investigation in Occupied North America, our methodology guides us to find those pockets of space and human groupings which could be the situs of a Communist beginning. 

In practice, this means we need to do a cursory study of the local area before committing to a social investigation on the ground. This introductory investigation may require more than just visual information (the phenomena we can see with our eyes in a community). Most often, we will need to study economic and political data as well. For example, studying that an area has an average household income which is significantly less than bordering neighborhoods could clue us in towards an investigation in that area.  

We chose Park St. for several reasons:

1. The area has a high proportion of nationally oppressed people, primarily from Occupied Puerto Rico, but also from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish speaking countries. 
2. ICE has kidnapped more immigrants in Hartford than in any other city. 
3. Most of our political education work occurs in Hartford, making it the best area from which to draw labor. 
4. Visibly, we observe a high degree of homelessness in the Park St. area. 
5. The street has a number of empty residential buildings, indicating ongoing gentrification.

Homelessness

Roughly one third of the people we interviewed were experiencing homelessness of some sort. Some were living in a shelter or a halfway house. Others reported living outside in parks or under building edifices. One person reported an incident of homeless displacement by the city. According to the community member, a group of people were previously sleeping in tents at Barnard Park. The city reportedly moved them and their belongings to a larger park elsewhere in the city, after complaints of drug use. Of course, these community members reported huge difficulties finding housing in Hartford and Connecticut. 

For every one homeless person, there are 28 abandoned properties. At the site of the Comanchero riot, a new luxury apartment building sits empty. Buildings just like it are being built in several neighborhoods, increasing rent beyond what people can afford. For example, in the North End Blue Hills neighborhood, aging and starved of government investment, the Bowles Park Public Housing Complex was torn down to be replaced with Willow Creek. The new development having fewer dwellings is part of the reason why the Blue Hills population decreased 13% between 2010-2020. 

Of the people we spoke to who did have housing, many reported homelessness as the biggest issue in the city. Some had been homeless previously themselves. We also spoke to people who disparaged the homeless, to varying degrees, for presumed drug use and lack of social etiquette. Most, however, assign blame in both directions; they might blame the individual for poor choices, while the government is blamed for not helping them. There was a common understanding that the shelter and post-incarceration assistance programs do not help people find permanent housing. To this, several people brought up abuse that takes place within the shelter system.

In connection with the lack of housing, another major contradiction we observed is the dominance of slumlords. Just about everyone we spoke to who had housing was a renter. Most, if not all, complained about their rents going up every year. We could have asked more follow up questions about people’s specific living conditions, such as whether repairs are made, whether security deposits are returned, etc.  At times, our investigators were too focused on getting a general sense of the neighborhood’s problems, and this likely caused us to leave certain wells of information untapped. One reason for this error was that we were looking for broad themes of oppression, themes that could take center stage in a future agitation program. But any possible theme would depend on the experiences of individuals in the Park St. area, therefore we should have sought a detailed explanation of exactly why housing access is such an issue in the neighborhood. The individual and the whole are two ends of the same dialectic, and we should ruthlessly investigate both if we expect to organize in any community. Going forward, we have a better idea of when we need to ask more follow-up questions, and we declare our intention to do so in the future. As part of our investigation process, some of our investigators created a hotline for community members to report incidences of abuse by the structures that be. People can now report slumlords, police brutality, ICE activity, and other instances of oppression to this hotline. This reporting would not only continue the investigation process, but refer us toward material injustices which could form the basis of a future program. A future program could take on one of several forms: agitation, Mass Meetings, Community Defense or CopWatch, Red Aid (Communist form of Mutual Aid), or another experimental program that solidifies our contacts with the masses. 

Police

Several community members reported feeling a sense of danger on and around Park St., especially at night. They reported high rates of crime and heavy drug use. When asked about solutions to these problems, several responded that more police were needed. This was a relatively prominent idea of a solution for many people. A slightly lower number of people had nothing but bad things to say about the Hartford police. They reported corruption, harassment, and a lack of material assistance from the police. Based on these conversations, the contradiction between police and the oppressed communities is not the sharpest contradiction in this part of the city, currently. However, this is an issue that needs to be “brought back” to the people in subsequent outings. Hartford currently has 3.42 police officers for every 1,000 residents, while the national average in cities of similar size is 1.6. Hartford already has over twice as many police officers as comparably sized cities. The city spends 8.8% of its budget on police. Hartford is happy to throw as much money as possible into the police force. 

However, the community either does not perceive this outsized number of police, or the police do not prevent crime in the way community members expect. We know that the latter is the case, and that police do not prevent crime. In order to bring this issue back to the community, our investigators need to explore some tactical questions that get to the heart of the fundamental antagonism between the community and the police force. Some questions we may wish to put forward are: 

• What kinds of crime do you perceive most in the community? 
• If the current number of police is not enough to prevent crime, how would increasing their numbers address the problem?
• How could the community itself perform the task of protecting local residents?

We should also bring forth the current statistics that show an already outsized police force to cast doubt on the idea that more police would reduce crime.  

Occasionally, the people we were interviewing would ask us about our ideas for solutions to these contradictions. We generally responded with a critique of state institutions and the fact that they do not help the people. We highlighted the need for grassroots organizing that did not simply participate in the election cycle. Most responded positively to these ideas, and were happy to share their contact info to keep up with our progress. On this note, we could have done a better job at seeking the community’s participation in the social investigation itself. A common goal of social investigation is to recruit those you are interviewing – the people who actually live there – into the project itself. 

Individualism 

Individualism was a very common outlook among the people we spoke to. In regards to problems in the city, one person phrased it as “caring but not caring.” We have heard nearly verbatim reports from other social investigations in the past. Previously, someone phrased it as, “It’s like I give a fuck but at the same time I don’t.” This tells us that community members perceive the contradictions around them, but do not believe there is any movement currently capable of addressing them. The result is a recognition of existing oppression, and perhaps feeling bad about it, but not yet taking the crucial step of organizing the community. 

Mutual Aid Groups

We encountered one mutual aid/ charity group, Food4Lives, conducting a free lunch program in Barnard Park. The organizers were from a different area, considering the large amount of cars they brought. They serve meals once a week, drawing crowds of over 50 people each time we see them. We did not interact with the group, mainly because all of the members were busy serving meals to the large crowd. We were also somewhat skeptical of what information the organizers could provide on the local community. In hindsight, this was an error on our part because we should not neglect interacting with organizers who may be from outside the community, especially considering we are also not residents of the Park Street neighborhood. We did speak to some community members who were waiting in line for food, who reported that the group has been serving meals consistently for several months. 

Based on their website, Food4Lives does not appear to have a firm ideological standpoint besides feeding the homeless through regular meal services. Their vision is “a community where homelessness is addressed with compassion, empowering every individual to rebuild their lives.” We will make sure to interact with the group the next time we see them in person. In the meantime, our investigators should brainstorm ways in which we can constructively struggle alongside existing charity groups such as Food4Lives. 

From Investigation, to Agitation, to Organization

Social investigation is an important first step to community organizing, but we cannot investigate forever. Once enough information has been gathered and the key contradictions are identified, the organizers should collectively synthesize this information before returning to the community with the “new” information. To “synthesize” means to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. By synthesizing contradictions, we are taking the reported issues and connecting them to the capitalist system as whole. Therefore, when we return to the community with this synthesized information, it is not “new,” but it is being presented in a different form.  

The agitation stage can take the form of speaking with people, posting flyers, or other creative means of propaganda. Whereas social investigation is primarily about listening to the concerns of community members, agitation requires a more mutual conversation. Social investigation is listen, listen, listen, while agitation is listen, respond, listen, respond. It is a conversation in which we expose the contradictions in their barest form, while gauging the community member’s own opinions and political consciousness. 

For example, we know that homelessness is a fundamental law of capitalist development, that this sub-proletariat serves as a reserve labor pool for the capitalist, and that the Amerikan welfare system tries to paper over this contradiction with a small percentage of imperialist superprofits. In the social investigation phase, we hear all varieties of opinion on the homelessness question. We hear both sympathy and chauvinism from property owners. In the agitation phase, we may push back on chauvinist ideas from the petit-bourgeois, in order to investigate which, if any, progressive causes can be used to organize small property owners. For example, a renter may say something along the lines of, “I feel bad for the homeless and I know pushing them out won’t solve the problem, but I hate it when they trespass on my property.” A statement like this shows at least some level of consciousness on the homeless question, but there is still a clear element of respect for private property and a short term interest in labor discipline against the homeless. This sentiment is also another example of individualism; empathy for the homeless person is subverted because they are being personally impacted in a negative way. While we may not fully challenge these ideas on a social investigation, we should challenge them when we return to the community for agitation. 

Among those already displaying a revolutionary, or at least anti-state, consciousness, we can take the conversations much further, and even begin to approach the person’s thoughts on organization. 

We should expect the politically advanced individual to hold unacknowledged contradictions in their ideology. For example, a person may agree with the need to organize the community, and to hold mass meetings outside the electoral framework. In this same conversation, the same community member might express the long term goal of setting up a non-profit organization, applying for grant money, and other forms of integration with the state. We would agree with the need for grassroots organizing and mass meetings, but would almost certainly disagree with the notion of embedding ourselves in the non-profit complex. Those grants generally come with strings attached. The agitation stage is the correct time to pose these problems to the community member, to start a conversation around correct organizing models. 

The agitation phase should be used as a precursor to more grounded and collective forms of organization. We have identified the mass meeting as one possible method having significant potential in many oppressed localities. The mass meeting is not a new concept, having been utilized by Indigenous nations for centuries, as well as among the “heretics” in Medieval Europe. In more recent times, both the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) took their original forms through a series of mass meetings. For more information on the Mass Meeting, read The Mass Meeting by the Red Clarion. 

Investigation Never Truly Ends

While we emphasize the need to create organizing models that extend beyond the initial investigatory phase, there is also the need to continuously analyze the situation through a dialectical lens. The contradictions are fluid; they may be exacerbated or reduced by a number of factors, especially the state, which may or may not make concessions depending on the situation. To say that the investigation never truly ends means to affirm our role as dialecticians, always looking to criticize and improve our past analyses. 

The All-Empire Worker’s League encourages all its member organizations to conduct propaganda among the masses with revolutionary potential. If you or your organization are interested in beginning or refining a social investigation, do not hesitate to reach out. 

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

1. A garrison refers to a fortified location from which military campaigns are planned and enacted against outside groups.
   ︎

[New Britain, CT] – We are inviting any and all media to our rally at Central Park in New Britain on April 22nd 2024 at 3:30 pm to bring attention to the gentrification unfolding in New Britain and around CT, as well as the gentrification yet to come. It is also to call out one luxury developer in particular, Jasko Development LLC and its CEO Avner Krohn. He and his company have been described as leading New Britain’s “comeback” (translation: bringing rich people in and kicking poor, homeless, and long time residents out). Like all luxury developments that have been built in once poor and underdeveloped areas across the U.S, the 3 luxury developments Jasko is building downtown will release the floodgates of gentrification. As more wealthy people, who can afford Jasko’s $1650 / month rent for a studio, move to New Britain, as more landlords in the surrounding area speculate that they can charge more for rent with the influx of rich people, the homeless, poor, and long time residents who can’t afford the rent increases and housing costs will be displaced. They will either end up homeless or be forced to move to an area with cheaper housing. It’s a process and story that has unfolded in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Boston. Look at the changes in New Haven over the past 10-15 years!

We are here to say enough! Jasko Development LLC and Avner Krohn are the face of gentrification in New Britain whether they intend to be or not. If they want to be helpful to the New Britain community, where plenty of people are desperate for housing they can qualify for, then they should meet the following demands from the community:

1. Cut the rent in 1⁄2 and don’t raise it
2. Remove 3x income requirements, disregard prior evictions, credit history, and criminal records,
   no application fees
3. Prevent police harassment, especially of homeless and poor people, on your property
4. Only rent to New Britain residents, employ residents of New Britain with a living wage
5. Subsidize rents with your estimated $7.5 million tax break

If they are unwilling to do the above, then they make it clear they are not for the people of New Britain in these desperate times, they are only about their money, and we need to evict them before they evict us!

Last February, NSC worked with Patriot Front (the two groups may now have merged) to physically attack the Red Ink Community Library in Rhode Island. NSC-131 fliers were dropped this April in the New Haven suburb of Hamden and in New Haven itself. The “club” is expanding its reach, growing in threat, and consolidating its membership among the most violent Nazis in the Northeast.

Their name, NSC-131, stands for National Socialist Club and the letters ACA (the first, third, and first letter of the alphabet), or “Anti-Communist Action.” We have previously reported on the makeup of the NSC militia and its leadership.

Who is [Chris] Hood and who are his Nazi followers? White suburbanite psychopaths; the spoiled, dead-eyed sons of wealthy small business owners, landlords, real estate developers, white-collar professionals, and cops; silver spoon-fed university students at UMass Lowell; “security experts”, NRA-certified firearms instructors, members and ex-members of white-power militias, such as the III%ers; undercover cops and undisguised klansmen. NSC-131 is a club for future mass-shooters and fascist insurrectionists of the type who carried out [Trump’s January 6th, 2021]  coup attempt. These neo-Nazi civilian fascists are the shock troops, the unofficial brownshirts, and the state-sanctioned terrorists of the settler-capitalist ruling classes, and they will only become more violent and better organized as the accelerating periodic crises of capitalism jolt the imperialists and lesser capitalists into heightened panic and frenzied reaction against the oppressed masses.

Local anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizations have begun organizing a response to the Rocky Hill flier drop scheduled for this Sunday, April 30 at the Academy of Aerospace in Rocky Hill. This is a good first step, but by no means will it be sufficient to cure New England of its neo-Nazi infestation.

Fascist terror can only be stopped by the organization of the colonized, racially oppressed, and working-poor communities NSC-131 threatens. March! Shout! Let the NSC know that they don’t have the community on their side. But don’t stop there!  Organize community meetings; discuss the fascist threat and how to combat it with your neighbors. Organize community self-defense committees and neighborhood watches! The only way to keep the NSC fascists out is to make them unwelcome. Only the oppressed people of Connecticut (and New England at large), united, can stop the march of pine-tree Nazism. We must heighten our efforts; one-time marches may make NSC and its sibling organizations angry, but it will not send them packing.

Rocky Hill is calling for organized, united anti-fascist action! — not only an action for one afternoon, but persistent resistance against NSC-131 and all other fascist militia encroachments. We must fight back, not only today, and not only tomorrow, but day after day, week after week, and year after year. Only then, only in unity, will we find the strength to forcibly expel the fascists from our communities, once and for all.

UPDATE: The organizers have, due to the inclement weather, determined to hold this meeting on the following Sunday, May 7, at 1 PM.

As conditions for working and poor people have  stagnated and degraded throughout the territorial U.S. Empire, a rising tide of class consciousness has spread throughout the working classes. The long-delayed struggle to raise the federal minimum wage has polarized the divided strata of the working classes; the turn-coat labor aristocracy, those for whom the conditions are already “good enough,” have abandoned the common workers and allied themselves with the capitalist bosses in belittling the struggle for livable working-class incomes.  (“Why should you make $60k a year flipping burgers, when I do so and so?”). All over the country, the brutal conditions suffered by workers, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been exposed and brought to light: the momentous increase in Amazon’s infrastructure, the proliferation of snooping Ring-camera technology to monitor package deliveries, the mass social murder of workers by exposing them over and over to the COVID threat, and on and on. These legitimate grievances have fueled the resurgence of  a growing labor movement, and instilled in large sections of the U.S. proletariat a trade-union consciousness that spurs the organization of laborers into new union formations,  through which they can confront their bosses — and not only confront them, but confront them and win.

We’ve seen this trend in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks storefronts across the country. It should come as no surprise that the labor movement within the U.S. Empire, the political and economic center of world-imperialism, would first rise in the unorganized service industries that support the lifestyle of the labor aristocracy. For nearly one hundred years, the capitalist masters of the U.S. Empire have staved off revolution by doling out handfuls of scraps to the working classes. Fast coffee and speedy delivery of any commodity imaginable is the price the monopoly capitalists pay the suburban labor aristocrats and small-business owners haunting the colonial-estate suburbs of the imperialist metropole in exchange for their loyalty. The adherence of all those doctors, well paid tech workers, and small-business tyrants to the parties of the big capitalists has its costs.

This trend has entered Connecticut through Starbucks, calling Starbucks workers across the state to take action and get organized. Connecticut has long been a preserve of the ruling elite. New England boarding schools train the children of the ruling class. New England colleges like Yale prepare them for the management of the imperialist system. The state is the seat of the eastern seaboard’s defense contractors. The financial hub of New York is a mere two hours away and the protected, walled gardens of its monopolist elite can be found all along the southern Connecticut coast — comfortably far from the “danger” of the urbanized city where the finance market sits.

In Connecticut, the trade-union consciousness has surfaced most intensely through the union drive at two Starbucks stores — one in Corbin’s Corner, West Hartford, and the other in Vernon. These stores voted to unionize over the last six months and now stand as the  latest outposts of a campaign for Starbucks unionizations sweeping the country. While the Corbin’s Corner store has not yet seen aggressive intensifications of class conflict (to our knowledge), the Vernon store has been subject to the worst kinds of retaliation — unjust firings, refusal to bargain, and other anti-union tactics.

Generally, across all Starbucks stores in the U.S. Empire, the returning CEO Howard Schultz has waged what’s been called a “scorched earth” anti-union campaign. More than 325 unfair labor complaints have been filed against Starbucks since the first drive began. These complaints include one-on-one meetings between managers and workers to threaten them, captive-audience meetings with entire stores to give them anti-union rhetoric, and the roll-out of added benefits only in non-union stores. These are classic anti-union tactics that our forebears in the labor movement fought and bled to expose and defeat.

Here in Vernon, a local union leader was fired under the ginned-up pretense that a safe had been discovered unlocked during her shift. No money was stolen and no evidence presented that the union organizer in question was at fault, but she was summarily fired and given no opportunity to contest management’s decision. This kind of immediate firing using suspicious or outright fabricated reasons isn’t uncommon in non-union workplaces; managers, acting to protect the interests of the firm’s owners and shareholders, have near-dictatorial power over the workplace, and are encouraged by the capitalist bosses to fire “unruly” workers at will. In this case, the union organizer’s co-workers immediately suspected that she had been fired in retaliation for union organizing — which, even in the fascist U.S. Empire, is nominally illegal, if it can be proved — and have set up a Go-Fund-Me to help support her while her case is pending before the Connecticut National Labor Relations Board, the adjudicatory body that rules on labor practices on behalf of the capitalist dictatorship. (The semi-official representation of the Vernon Starbucks workers, Twitter account @VernonSBWU, did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the U.S. Empire, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his anti-union mercenaries have summarily and illegally fired over 100 local and regional union leaders in their effort to crush the unionization campaign.

At the Vernon store, management just recently refused to negotiate with the nascent union so long as they used a “hybrid meeting” model, meaning, so long as they insisted on the right of their members to attend the meetings with management using COVID-safe methods like Zoom, in addition to in-person meetings. This is a transparent effort to shut down negotiations between labor and management with red tape justifications, so that Starbucks can throw up its hands, while blaming the organized workers for their “unreasonable” ground rules.

The capitalist class is already scrambling to get ahead of this surge in trade-union activity and organization here in Connecticut. Amazon, which over the last two years has engaged in various union-suppression tactics to maintain “order” in their notoriously inhumane warehouses, is giving piecemeal raises to its Connecticut warehouse workers. These raises come just as, over the border in New York, the organizers driving the unionization effort  have fought tooth and nail to organize Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse. This is a desperate retrenchment by Amazon, a pathetic, last-ditch tactic to prevent the “contagion” of trade-union consciousness from reaching Connecticut. But miniscule, last-minute bribes will not placate an outraged employee body that has suffered, for years, some of the most depraved working conditions in the U.S. Empire.

Although the growth of unions and their increasing levels of militance signals the rising consciousness of the workers in these industries, it’s not, in itself, enough to bring about revolutionary change. It is a sign that we are increasingly prepared to become revolutionary, but not the way in which we will fight to win.

Why can’t the unions themselves lead us toward liberation? The fact of the matter is that most of these unions are “captured.” Their leadership serves as little more than puppets of the capitalists. These are the AFL-CIO unions, the AFSCME unions. Like the old revisionist parties of the Western capitalist world, the revolutionary potential of the unions was long ago surrendered to the business interests.

This does not mean we should oppose further unionization. Far from it! But we must be clear: the business unions are given to cowardly capitulation to management, to vile back-room deals with the ruling class, and to opportunist, labor-aristocratic, petit-bourgeois, now-progress, now-reactionary positions. That is, through local organization, the membership of the big unions can be radicalized and those local organizations can be developed into real workplace councils; unless and until it is these final steps are taken, to move from unionization to revolutionary organization, the unions, even those being organized under oppressive capitalist resistance, will remain little more than a foil to be manipulated by the capitalists, to be dangled in front of the workers as a promise of class collaboration.

Unionize! Fight for your unions. But don’t stop there. Push them forward to new heights; bring them deeper into the struggle, even when they don’t want to march forward. The unions are useful only insofar as they serve you to confront the enemy state, only so far as they serve you to stand up to the capitalist and the warmonger, the imperialist and the slick politicians in his pocket. Join your unions and force them to confront reaction — if you’re in a unionized workplace, go into the union and attend meetings. This is a place to advance the front, to win allies, and to do battle with the enemy.

What is a workplace council? It is the self-acting organization of the workers in a given workplace. It is like a union, and a union can easily form the shell of a workplace council. A workplace council is a deliberative body in which everyone who contributes labor to a workplace has a say, has a vote, on what goes on in that workplace; on who “manages” that workplace; ultimately, on whether that workplace continues politely working for capital’s starvation wage, or takes up arms against the rulers. Workplace councils represent workplace democracy in its most refined form. Unions are the crib, the training grounds, of workplace democracy, but it is the workplace council that represents its mature form, a form prepared to assert its demands, to heighten the struggle, and eventually to overthrow the system that made it necessary. Like a union, workplace councils can fight collectively for the rights of their workers. Unlike a union, they are not enslaved to the capitalist system, and are bound by no law. When the time comes, it will be the councils from which our power, the people’s power, springs.

We do not want class peace! We want victory in the class war!

As Marxists warned last year and the year before that, the crisis in the housing market, so long suppressed by the last-ditch stabilizing measures  of the U.S. government, has finally broken out into the open. The contradiction was unsustainable: the working classes have been deprived of their income by death, disease, and economic manipulation, and are now being forced to pay back rent that the government suspended — rent that they can’t afford. Now that this larcenous manipulation — the issuing of what are essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors, billed in the presses as “relief” — has increased the cost of staple goods and threatens hyper-inflation, the political lackeys of the U.S. real estate capitalists are preparing to give the economy a strong dose of “shock therapy.” The real costs of the so-called “relief” are becoming more and more apparent.

In Connecticut alone, hundreds of working class families have been thrown onto the streets. A smoldering fire of evictions threatens to explode into a full-blown conflagration of houselessness far beyond the capacity of the meager resources allotted by the capitalist state to combat it.

This particular housing crisis was created by the COVID pandemic and the bungled half-measures taken by the government in response. Even as investors line their pockets, the working people sink deeper into misery. This stop-and-start “protection” has merely given the illusion of safety while allowing the capitalists to plunder the public coffers and leave growing numbers unhoused, food-insecure, and unemployed.

“I haven’t seen this in my 20 years working in Connecticut,” said David Rich of the Housing Collective in Fairfield County. Housing advocates are calling it the “perfect storm” for the working classes. The state reports a shortfall of more than 85,000 units of rental housing. As of late August 2022, only about 2% of the state’s rental units were available, which gives Connecticut the lowest vacancy rate in the U.S. Empire.

“The people who are coming into the shelter now were housed and [lost housing] either through evictions or being priced out of their housing,” said Michele Conderino of the Open Doors Community.

ACT CT, a bourgeois NGO operating in Connecticut to “address the root causes of poverty, addiction, and health,” released a report on the state of houselessness in Connecticut from data gathered on Tuesday, January 25, 2022. They identified 2,930 people who were unhoused in Connecticut on that date. Last year the same report identified 2,594 houseless persons. The very first wave of the crisis has seen an increase in houselessness by 13%, which is a reversal of a decade of decreases.

And it’s not only that there is insufficient shelter for rent — the protections for tenants introduced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have since been lifted and evictions are now being processed at an increasing pace. Those protections were still in place in January of this year, when the study was conducted, but in March there was a 70% increase in eviction filings — from an average of 1,469 each March to 2,490 in March of this year. The effects of this dramatic increase have not yet been seen.

What’s more, landlords have taken this crisis as an opportunity to drive rents up. Average rents across Connecticut are up 12% over the last 18 months and are projected  to continue rising.

Inflation caused by the capitalist printing of “free money” to the banks throughout 2020, 2021, and early 2022 has pushed many working class families already on the brink of poverty over the edge. Compounded with the lifting of eviction protection and the predatory housing purchases by huge investment firms like BlackRock, Mandy Properties, and Farnam Realty, the capitalists appear to be conspiring to drive working class people out of their homes.

There’s no sign this crisis will let up any time soon. In fact, every law of capitalist development points firmly to its intensification as the investment markets suffer contractions and the U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws its offerings of what was essentially, until now, free credit to the banks and investors. All this adds up to a worsening crisis for working class families in Connecticut and across the U.S. Empire. 

Houses and apartments are “withdrawn” from the market for a “more profitable” resale or investment. There are 700,000 unoccupied units of housing in Connecticut. The owners of these properties refuse to rent them, for the selfish reason that they can make more money by waiting and using their real estate holding sas passive investments to sell as they “appreciate” in value than they can by renting them. In other words, under capitalism, housing is often more profitable when it isn’t actually used for housing. These landlords buy up all the property, wait for desperation and misery to increase, and then sell them at huge profits.

But why is all this happening? The greed of a few is the dispossession of many.

Let’s step back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic: To save the lives of millions, measures were implemented to keep many from going to work. Clumsy half-measures at alleviating pandemic-induced poverty were adopted by the government. But the government’s policies weren’t stringent enough to burn out the disease (unlike the zero-COVID plan in China) and weren’t liberal enough to keep the markets functioning.

While “essential” industries (from food processing to restaurants) were kept open and the workers there were subject to sickness and death, other workers, especially the labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie, were protected under stay-at-home orders. COVID-19 was permitted to rage among the poorest strata of the laboring classes, resulting in government-sanctioned social mass murder.

But, for the capitalist economy to function, for money to circulate, for stocks to stay high, for banks to remain solvent, eventually even those labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie had to go back to work. To support capital during the initial period, the Federal Reserve began issuing what were essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors. Then, under immense pressure from their capitalist masters, the government declared the pandemic was “over” and forced everyone back to work by removing all the protections it had extended: rent and eviction protection, mandatory or free COVID tests, free vaccinations and boosters, school closures, work closures.

The capitalists and their lackeys in government have the tools to alleviate the misery they’re creating. The unhoused merely have to seize this property or have it ordered available by the government; that this is unthinkable speaks to the power of the bourgeoisie to command not only the police force, but the very halls of government.

The pandemic has not ended. The capitalist government did not provide long-term solutions for anything. Neither the disease, which continues to ravage and kill, nor the economic problems, which were shifted from the ruling class onto the working classes, have been addressed. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.

The government has worked tirelessly to do what is best for the capitalists. When the capitalists were afraid they might be infected, a limited amount of protections were put in place. After they’d had enough time to develop suitable defenses, like monoclonal antibodies or increased security and temperature screening in their walled gardens, they told everyone “Hey! Get back to work! And by the way, you still owe me a year’s rent.”

This is a stark example of the contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system. The government, composed of the representatives not of the renters, but the landowning classes, can’t order the forgiveness of the overdue rents (doing so is actually constitutionally forbidden, because that would be considered a “taking”), nor can it afford to pay those overdue rents itself.

Where are public funds being spent? Not on the unhoused, those with marginal housing, or those working people being forced out of their longtime homes. Rather, the State of Connecticut just held a lavish state funeral for two Bristol police officers, costing tens of thousands of dollars, diverting millions in state resources, and drawing tens of thousands of fascist fellow-officers and fascist cop supporters from across the country. Indeed, every city in Connecticut is increasing funding for the police across the board.

Thousands of evictions are expected each month going forward. The dreaded “cliff” is still ahead of us: the sharp and sudden explosion of litigation and summary process that will drive thousands of working-poor people onto the streets across the U.S. Empire.

With this crisis now coming to a long-anticipated head, the subterranean contradictions of capitalism, its sometimes-hidden brutality, stands revealed and unveiled for all to see. In response, tenants unions are springing up across the state, but this will not alone stem the tide. Only a united coalition  of unhoused councils, unemployed committees, and housing justice activists, led by a strong Communist movement, can bring the capitalists to heel and force them to concede ground.