Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib are not a “bunch of communists” as Sen. Lindsey Graham has charged. I should know—I represent the largest “bunch of communists” in the country. A few weeks ago, I was elected co-chair of the Communist Party USA.
As a younger man, I was organized as a communist not via Moscow, Russia, and the KGB, but in Youngstown, Ohio, by U.S. Steel and the collapse of the steel industry.
A 22-year-old graduate of Oberlin College in 1979 and descendant of three generations of steelworkers, I experienced firsthand the “American carnage” Donald Trump spoke to so demagogically during his inauguration. With tens of thousands laid off, Youngstown, like so many other Rustbelt cities, became a post-industrial ghost town without a future. With Dad retired, brothers and everyone else I knew laid off, there was nothing to return to. I moved to New York, joined the staff of the Communist Party and have remained there ever since.
Thoughts that I had made a bad choice after the fall of the Berlin Wall were tempered by the recurring economic downturns, the unrelenting attacks on labor, the heartless shredding of the social safety net and, to top it off, the wholesale robbery inflicted on Blacks, Latinos, and senior citizens during the banks’ subprime rip-off. Nothing like Wall Street barons stealing billions to revive your revolutionary vigor!
That I made the right choice was recently reinforced once again by General Motors’ closing of its Lordstown assembly plant, yet another blow to the Youngstown area’s finest workers. Want to produce more communists? Keep it coming, GM!
Notwithstanding Rep. Tim Ryan’s entry into the Democratic primary to “stop socialism,” it was Big Business’s maximum profit imperative, in a word, capitalism, that has precipitated the collapse of basic industry all across the country. It’s NAFTA, not socialism, that has held down wages and kicked U.S. workers in the gut...
And yes, Americans, many of them young, are gravitating to socialist ideas... Read More »
