Out of the past: Chelsea’s socialists oppose the Iraq War

Libero della Piana, national organizing secretary of the Communist Party USA, in their offices on West 23rd St.
A news box for the Workers World newspaper announces this weekend’s march on Washington aimed at bringing home the troops from Iraq.

By Chris Lombardi

Last week, in preparation for the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19, some New Yorkers were standing on corners reciting the names of the war dead. Others were preparing for Sunday’s much-anticipated anti-war march from Herald Square Park to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, next to the United Nations. Still others were preparing to camp out in Washington, D.C., to unleash their discontent on Congress and the media. The latter group includes Chelsea native Sharon Eolis, who has been protesting U.S. wars for more than 40 years.

Eolis, a sixty-something retired nurse with short purplish hair and a slow grin, lives on 20th Street and Eighth Avenue. Last week, in a sunny office at 55 West 17th St., she described to Chelsea Now her first anti-war protest in 1963, a Vietnam-era action at the Times Square U.S. Army Recruiting Center. Back then, she was a member of Youth Against War and Fascism, a group sponsored by what was then the new Workers World Party (WWP), which is the true tenant of this large, sun-filled office down the block from Loehmann’s department store.

Forty-four years later, the WWP is still supporting anti-war protest through numerous groups, including Eolis’ Troops Out Now Coalition. But it is far from the only old-line lefty group still active in the neighborhood. Despite the glitz that is currently Chelsea, the neighborhood’s roots are sunk deep in the working class. Perhaps inevitably, a panopoly of sectarian left organizations have set up offices here over the years, gaining passionate local adherents, including in places like Penn South. These groups have then pitched in on local causes, from union fights to rent strikes, and have taken on each of the nation’s wars.

This week, as the Iraq war begins its fifth year, both the Workers World Party and its venerable uncle, the 87-year-old U.S. Communist Party—run from its national office at 235 West 23rd St.—are taking their place in a vibrant local anti-war movement, one that includes Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War (whose weekly vigils have been covered by Chelsea Now) and the Penn South–based Chelsea for Peace.

Chelsea for Peace was founded in spring 2002, when Penn South resident Estelle Katz became troubled by the early talk of the U.S. invading Iraq while the war in Afghanistan was already raging. She and some of her neighbors surveyed the landscape and said to each other, “There’s nothing around here,” said Katz in a phone interview last Friday. “So, we had to start a group if we wanted to stop the war.”

At 91 years old, Katz knows from whence she speaks, having been a social activist for more than 50 years, working on behalf of causes ranging from the Chelsea Democratic Club to tenants’ rights. Chelsea for Peace meets twice a month at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, at 346 West 20th St.; holds regular public events at the church, the Fulton Center and the Hudson Guild; and shows up at local high schools, including Bayard Rustin High School, at 351 West 18th St., to counter the omnipresent military recruiters.

Right now, Katz said, all focus is on the Sunday’s march. “We’ll have a table at the Peace Fair,” she said, clearly relishing the thought of spreading the word to crowds on 47th Street and First Avenue, where the planned march route ends.

In addition, Chelsea for Peace takes on what Katz called “side projects,” such as protecting the Croton Watershed and the continuing the fight for affordable housing. “I personally see the war as the hub of a wheel,” said Katz, who has been on Penn South’s board of directors as well as its Social Action Committee. “They’re spending so much money on this war, and even shafting the veterans…I’m against this greed.”

Katz’ comment about greed is typical of many Chelseans, and typical of residents of Penn South, according to writer Leonard Kriegel, a former City College professor who once directed its Office of Worker Education in Chelsea, and who has lived in the co-op since 1962. In his essay “The Co-op: On Urban Planning and Socialist Dreams,” published last year in Dissent magazine, Kriegel writes: “In Penn South, though, politics was religion. Communist, socialist, anarchist, reform Democrat, libertarian—each and all insisted on being heard. As the rest of America grew conservative, as fear spread through the outer boroughs of the city, Penn South, too, felt under siege. The difference was that the co-op froze to the left.”

Last week, Kriegel told Chelsea Now: “If there is such a thing as a time warp, Penn South is living in one. The battles it’s fighting were settled 30 and 40 years ago.” Noting that the rest of the world, including much of Chelsea, has turned far more capitalist since United Housing Federation, a nonprofit branch of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, first built his sprawling housing complex, Kriegel sees Penn South as a signal of old Chelsea, still hanging on long after the neighborhood left its fabled liberalism behind.

When asked about the old-line communist groups still flourishing in Chelsea, Kriegel sighed, “This co-op—it’s the only place in the U.S. where, in 1970, you could still find people who considered Stalin a hero.”

Such people may have belonged to the Progressive Labor Party or the Spartacist League, though not to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party or to the U.S. Communist Party, which had denounced Stalin along with Khruschev in 1966. All of these groups, along with numerous other spin-offs and front groups, peppered Chelsea in the 1950s and ’60s, according to Kriegel. What astonishes him, and many others, is how they’re still hanging on.

“In terms of running certain unions, they’re tremendous,” Kriegel said of the CPUSA, which he acknowledged as a powerful force in the furrier’s union. “But they tend to look at things ideologically,” he explained, “and the real world, it just isn’t that way.”

The grand-uncle on the block, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was founded in Chicago in 1921 and moved its headquarters to Manhattan shortly after. The group owns the building of its national headquarters, 235-239 West 23rd St. According to Libero della Piana, party secretary for communications, the party bought the building outright in the 1980s to consolidate some of its other holdings in the city. “It’s funny how things have changed in Chelsea,” he said with a sly smile, noting that the party now rents out the super-desirable top floors to commercial tenants.

His party’s landlord status notwithstanding, della Piana went on to sketch its longstanding support for tenants and affordable housing, including the rent strikes of the 1930s (which led to the state and city’s first rent-control laws) and the co-operative movement of the 1950s and early ’60s, which led to developments like Penn South. Those early days also included support for unions, and led to the party’s first anti-militarist work, starting with the U.S. presence in South Korea.

“We see war as being in service to a system of capitalism,” said della Piana, “for the interests of the elites.”

During the Vietnam War, CPUSA pioneered the slogan “Negotiations Now,” said della Piana. “Others were all ‘Troops out now,’ but number one, that wasn’t what the Vietnamese people were asking for, and number two, it was not something Americans could get with yet.” CPUSA, he stressed, always focuses on achievable goals, not on ideological purity or dramatic action.

Asked about his party’s stated goal of revolutionary change in the United States, della Piana, who joined its Young Communist League as a Brown University student in 1989, gives a big smile. “We used to say ‘socialism is possible,’” he said. “Now, with everything—war, the environment—I’m now saying socialism is necessary.” He also sees such change as inevitable but adds that any violence along the way would simply be the usual response from a violent system, “like the beatings in Argentina, or even at the Republican convention in 2004.”

In the past few years, he added, “a lot of anti-communism has fallen away,” enabling the group to work with a much broader spectrum of groups, many of whom refused to work with them before. For example, CPUSA is now on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which coordinated a January march and lobby day in Washington as well as the United Nations march this weekend.

“The best thing to come out of [the UFPJ] protest in January,” said della Piana, “was all the lobbying. That was the most hopeful sign.”

By contrast, one group specifically excluded from UFPJ actions is the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, which convened numerous rallies in the wake of September 11 until it was denounced by a range of groups for its militant rhetoric and behavior, and “outed” as a front group for the Workers’ World Party.

Established in 1959 after splitting from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, WWP operates on what it calls a “united front” strategy, characterized by the building of “allied” front groups attached to various causes and wars. In addition to ANSWER, recent groups have included International Action Center (IAC), Not in Our Name and Troops Out Now, the banner longtime activist Sharon Eolis is carrying to Washington this week.

WWP has also thrown significant resources behind dissenting soldiers, starting with Andy Stapp during the Vietnam War. Sharon Eolis grinned, as she described going to Fort Sill, Okla., to attend Stapp’s court martial. “First day, they closed the gates. So we went back the next day, and the next, and they finally let us in.”

These resistance efforts eventually included a Vietnam-era serviceman’s union (unions are illegal under military law) and campaigns on behalf of Gulf War resisters like Jeff Paterson, who now staffs a Not in Our Name office in Oakland, Calif., and Iraq War resisters like Marine Corps conscientious objector Stephen Funk. The spokesman for Troops Out Now Coalition is yet another example: Chelsea Now caught up last week with Dustin Langley, who left the Navy in 1986.

Like his CPUSA peer della Piana, Langley says the Iraq war has enabled the Troops Out Now Coalition to reach “many groups who wouldn’t work with us…they sat down with us and agreed that we could work together on one thing and one thing only: cutting funding for the war.”

The long list of endorsers for Troops Out Now, along with grudging acknowledgments from Code Pink and even some branches of UFPJ, confirms this assertion. Langley added that differences among all the groups are “real and important, but not as important as this: The war is clearly lost, and each vote is to continue funding for the war…[Congress] could cut them off today!”

Coalitions aside, WWP and its groups are less inclined toward talking to Congress, and more inclined toward getting people out in the streets. “In Washington, we’ll be…more disrupting things,” he said. He wouldn’t describe planned actions but allowed that they might not be unlike the “balloon drop” on the Senate floor, for which activists in the Senate gallery were arrested on Jan. 31. (That action was sponsored by yet another front group, World Can’t Wait/The Revolutionary Communist Party, which is based in Harlem.)

While all of these older groups keep debating the best strategy for transformative change, the two nimble local groups will keep working in the City, joining with Saturday’s march and stressing that their work links issues important to New Yorkers.

Chelsea for Peace activists, when not marching or leafleting at Bayard Rustin High School, continue to reach toward their neighbors; they recently handed out fliers at Elliott Chelsea Houses, Katz said, where people seemed “kind of hungry for answers.”

And Chelsea Neighbors United to Stop the War, whose 15 to 20 members range from teenagers to in those in their 90s, will continue its vigils every Tuesday night, joined occasionally by members of both CPUSA and Chelsea for Peace.

Robert Rodriguez, co-founder of Chelsea Neighbors United, shrugged when asked if his group is affiliated with either.

“We’re non-affiliated,” he said. “If you’re against the war, you’re on our side.”