They were protesting the growing number of immigrant workers who had moved to Vitry in recent years.

This reprehensible action was taken with the approval of the Communist Party mayor of Vitry, Paul Mercieca. The mayor charged that the African immigrants had been secretly transferred from the neighboring community of Saint-Maur to his municipality.

Claiming the working class community of Vitry already had too many immigrant workers, Mercieca issued an emergency decree forbidding their settlement in Vitry.

In order to try and justify this scandalous policy, CP officials explain that when their numbers rise “above a certain threshold,” immigrants inevitably encourage racism.  
 
February 6, 1956
JAN. 30—In a stepped-up drive to win back his Veterans Administration job, legless veteran James Kutcher on Jan. 26 appealed directly to President Eisenhower to order the VA to reinstate him.

Kutcher’s letter to Eisenhower recalls that he was honorably discharged from the army after losing his legs in the Italian campaign of World War II. Then after being equipped with artificial limbs he secured a file clerk’s job with the V.A. In 1948 he was fired solely for his avowed membership in the Socialist Workers Party which had been arbitrarily designated by the U.S. Attorney General as “subversive.”

“Now I belonged to the Socialist Workers Party before I was drafted, during my army service, and I still belong to it. I am a socialist and proud of it,” the letter declares. “I intend to keep on belonging to the Socialist Workers Party as long as I think it is in the right.”  
 
February 1, 1931
In the present period, with the intensification of the organic ills and weaknesses of capitalism, with the dawn of new and broader horizons of class struggle, war and revolution, the vanguard of the working class, the Communists, must more than ever look to Lenin for inspiration, for guidance. It was Lenin who characterized our epoch as one of social convulsions, as one of international struggle for the proletariat. Lenin was the founder and organizer of the party of the working-class, the Communist International, which as the conscious arm of the class will inevitably lead it to victory.

Today the epigones of Leninism are in power in the International. Today the teachings of Lenin and of Marx are being ground underfoot, while reactionary theories like that of socialism in one country are proclaimed the acme of Communist wisdom. The Communist International has been crippled and paralyzed by the Stalinist bureaucracy.  
 
 
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