New York Communists Make A Killing

THEY may be engaged in a class struggle to make the world a fairer place but that hasn’t stopped New York’s Communist Party from cashing in on the real estate boom.

The party owns an eight-storey building in Manhattan’s chic Chelsea neighbourhood. But in recent years it has come to realise that the building is more than enough space for the tiny organisation.

So the New York comrades had a clear out. They moved 12,000 cartons of party documents to a center for research on labor and the left at New York University. And they relocated the editorial staff of the People’s Weekly World, the party’s newspaper, to Chicago.

The reorganization has freed up four floors in the Communists’ Chelsea HQ. They won’t say how much their new Capitalist tenants will haev to pay for space in the building. But the New York Post reckons that based on local real-estate prices, “rent for each 5,000-square-foot floor…could command well over $135,000 a month.”

Libero Della Piana, chair of the state Communist Party told the Post: “This is Manhattan. It’s the biggest rental market in North America.”

She defended the party’s foray into real estate captialism, saying: “We live in a capitalist society, and in order for us to play our role, we have to make money.”

We’re sure that once the proletariat has overthrown their bourgeois oppressors, the Communist Party will redistribute the millions of dollars in rent it will make in the coming years.

Anorak

Posted: 19th, June 2007 | In: Anorak In New York Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink