Progressive Labor Party (United States)

While the PLP is a transnational organization, other parties around the world with entirely different political views may have a very similar or identical name. For others currently available on Wikipedia called "Progressive Labor Party," please see Progressive Labor Party (disambiguation).

PLP

The Progressive Labor Party (originally the Progressive Labor Movement, sometimes still referred to simply as PL) is a transnational communist party based in the United States. It was formed in the fall of 1961 by members of the Communist Party USA who felt that the Soviet Union had betrayed communism and become revisionist. Founders also felt that the CPUSA was adopting unforgivably reformist positions, such as turning to electoral politics and hiding communist politics behind a veneer of reform-oriented causes.

Early History of the Party

As it broke away from its parent party, PL made it clear that it wanted to advocate communist revolution openly and aggressively among the working class. At first it was a very small grouping of several score based on the East Coast. But it began to recruit more substantially when, after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, many of its student and ex-student members travelled with dozens of other college students to Havana to break the travel ban. Defiance of the ban resulted in a congressional investigation before the House Un-American Activities Committee at which PL members and other trip participants banged on desks and heckled HUAC, making most of the hearing unmanageable and setting an example for further protests that would ultimately undermine HUAC's ability to hold hearings.

The group also founded the campus-based May 2 Movement, which organized the first significant march against the Vietnam War in New York City in 1964. Once the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came to the fore of the leftist political scene, PL dissolved the M2M and entered SDS. As SDS began to grow rapidly into the primary vehicle for campus protest against the war, PLP rapidly attracted supporters and formed party clubs on many campuses, becoming the largest communist faction within that organization. The various anti-PL factions within SDS subsequently developed their own interpretations of communist ideology and formed the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), while the PLP organized its supporters into the Worker Student Alliance (WSA). Clashes between the RYM and PLP/WSA would soon result in an irrevocable split of SDS into separate organizations.

One major cause of friction between PLP's WSA and other factions within SDS was its criticism of the Black Panther Party. After supporting 'progressive nationalism' during its first few years, in 1969 the party published a document claiming that all nationalism, even among oppressed minorities, was reactionary — that it was akin to identity politics at home and weakened the communist essence of national-liberation struggles abroad, like in Vietnam. This controversial position was to exacerbate the dramatic fights in SDS and hasten the split. Although the PLP/WSA wing is generally considered to have won majority support at the 1969 SDS national convention, PLP was not able to sustain SDS as a mass campus organization under its leadership for long. Meanwhile, by the early to mid-1970s, some of the party's more influential members drifted away, including Bill Epton, the PLP vice chairman and Harlem organizer.

While in the 1960s the party seemed at first to be, and was widely regarded as, the torch-bearer of Maoism within SDS, its leaders had never really seen themselves as followers of Mao Zedong; indeed, even then, the PLP's political line differed sharply from Maoism on fundamental points. It was the subsidized fraternal party to China for a while, but broke that relationship in 1967 and reacted particularly harshly to the news of Mao meeting with Nixon in 1972, denouncing Mao as revisionist. Claims to Maoism in the United States thereafter passed to other groups, most notably the Revolutionary Communist Party USA.

Up through the early 1970s the PLP was only moderately authoritarian in its internal functioning and did not attempt to overly control the lives of its members. Later, the degree of open discussion and dissent in the party declined somewhat, but it never developed a reputation as a political cult and was never accused of "brainwashing" anyone. In the 1960s and 70s its campus members and supporters frequently engaged in mutual provocations and fistfights with members of rival groups like the Weather Underground Organization and the Young Lords.

Changes in Thought, Direction, and Approach

In the early 1980s PL went beyond opposing nationalism and began developing positions that were radically different from any other known version of Marxism-Leninism. Chief among these was the argument that socialism, the historical transition-phase between capitalism and communism in Marxist theory, was the primary reason behind the reversal of workers' power in Russia and China and should be abandoned. Stemming from this is its current belief in the complete and total abolition of money and the wage system immediately upon the seizure of state power by the working class. PLP members argue that differences in wages and retention of a certain amount of competitiveness and elitism under socialism was what led it to turn back into capitalism with time. They see the immediate abolition of money, wages, and other market society elements as an approach that would more easily enable workers to adopt a sense of communist culture, ethics, and morality.

The PLP advocates "basebuilding," meaning that members should get stable jobs that keep them in touch with the working class, marry, raise families, enjoy everyday lives, etc., and should attempt to gradually win their co-workers, friends and family to the party. Members are cautioned not to necessarily expect revolution in their lifetimes, but to build for it anyway. The PLP says it wants to move from the classic "cadre" conception of a communist party to that of a "mass party", meaning that the party should not be an elite of "professional revolutionaries" but should be composed of, by, and for the whole working class, where everyone has full knowledge and appreciation of communist principles and action, so that they do not allow the party to be corrupted.

PL also espouses a unique approach to the issue of the Communist International, saying that instead of separate communist parties in each country, the revolutionary organization should be one monolithic, multi-racial, cross-cultural PLP, with branches and collectives all over the globe. Its goal is to eventually win the majority of the world's working class—hundreds of millions and even billions of people—to join this international party.

In this view can be seen the party's virulent rejection of united front and popular front strategies long used by most communists as a route to revolution. Members say that despite all valiant attempts, these strategies have led to betrayal more often than not, by allying with "lesser-evil" bosses and/or fake-left groups for short-term gains (cited by the Spanish Civil War, the assassination of Salvador Allende, and other examples). Thus, PL prefers to steadily strengthen its own political standing and recruitment via its basebuilding strategy, rather than focus energy on participation in (or creation of) leftist coalitions, as it sees most other groups claiming Marxism doing.

The PLP believes that the primary contradiction in the world today is—unfortunately—between various groups of competing imperialists for world domination, or "inter-imperialist rivalry," rather than between workers and bosses, or (as Maoists claim) between imperialism and national-liberation movements. It recognizes the weakness of the Radical Left at the present stage in history and notes that nationalism has presently replaced communism as the driving force in the worldwide popular left. But the PLP simultaneously sees an inexorable economic and political decline of the U.S. versus other capitalist powers, like China and the E.U., and dwindling of necessary imperial resources around the world like oil. The party thinks that cutthroat competition over such resources will inevitably lead to a third world war. They assert that such a war, while it will bring much suffering and death for workers, will also be the catalyst for a great new communist revolution, provided enough people are won to the party's ideas before and during such a conflict.

The party operates on the standard Leninist principle of democratic centralism; it has no known history of harassing or threatening ex-members.

PLP members are critical of Stalin's bureaucratism and lack of emphasis on political education of the masses. However, they expressly deny the view of Stalin as mass murderer and tyrant, claiming that his leadership helped defeat fascism, that the numbers killed by the policies in his era were far fewer than the many millions accepted by scholars, and that the rest resulted from a combination of the Russian Civil War and World War II. They also state that the killings they concede actually took place were justified to protect the Soviet Union's proletarian dictatorship against spies, Fifth Column elements, counterrevolutionaries, and other class enemies.

However, additionally, PL members are of the opinion that what they term Stalin's "errors," both politically and economically, extended back to Lenin's missteps with the New Economic Policy and were ultimately endemic to the Soviet Union's entire history — i.e., the history of socialism's concessions to capitalism, which in PL's view cannot lead to communism. Therefore, they say, regardless of the leader in question, and regardless of whether or not s/he made good political advances in the country or towards the communist movement as a whole (which they believe Stalin did, especially against the Nazis), mistakes were made that were common to all of those leaders, because the faulty theory of socialism was common to all of them. PL attacks the cult of personality and any "Great Leader" status as anti-working class, and pledges that the elimination of the socialist stage, the retention of the armed dictatorship of the working class to defend against a comeback by the ruling classes, and "confidence in the working class" from the beginning that they can fully understand and utilize openly communist ideas collectively, without having to look to a great figure (or figures) for guidance, will signal much deeper and more profound strides towards communism than socialism could ever have hoped to achieve.

Present-Day Struggles

PLP says it was decisive in breaking apart the briefly-influential mass racist group "Restore Our Alienated Rights" (ROAR) in Boston in 1975. In the late 1960s and early 1970s its "academic" target was Arthur Jensen, and through the 1990s it continued in that vein by repeatedly and forcefully disrupting speakers and conferences promoting scientific racism, which was coming back into vogue at that time with books like The Bell Curve.

Today, the party is best known for its violent tactics at Klan and Nazi counter-demonstrations around the country. It has also been active in anti-police brutality work in individual communities, as well as in public health and public schools. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 in Washington, D.C. has an open PLP member as its president.

In June 2005, several PLP members were injured and arrested by police in New Jersey while protesting the Minutemen. In July, four more were arrested in Farmingville, NY opposing Minuteman sympathizers who had attacked immigrant laborers after promising them work. In California, several PLers face charges related to a counterdemonstration against the Minuteman sympathizers "Save Our State" (SOS). But on December 14 2005, the Bridgewater defendants all had their misdemeanor charges dismissed, found only in violation of a municipal ordinance for "unreasonable loudness in public". The party says its comrades in that area may now pursue a civil suit against the police for use of excessive force, since officers had reportedly fractured an elderly militant anti-racist's shoulder cuff during PL's scuffle with the Minutemen.

In September, PL released its immediate reaction to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. There is also a November 2005 piece dealing with the rebellions in France. In December, the party issued a call to Katrina demonstrators in New Orleans. Once the 2005 transit strike in New York started, the party issued a leaflet for that, as well, with several members subsequently attending picket lines in solidarity with the striking workers.

In line with its anti-nationalist politics, while firmly denouncing the "fascist" policies of the State of Israel, PLP also criticizes both the Palestinian intifada and the Iraqi insurgency because of what it sees as these movements' reactionary nature; that the most they will do is put another capitalist government in power and establish new domination by local bosses, and dependency on non-US imperialists such as the European Union.

The PLP upholds a purist vision of a mass-based communism that it claims was the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution sabotaged by Mao's cult of personality and reactionary elements within the CPC, as well as Mao's own political weaknesses. It believes it "stands on the shoulders of giants" but can also learn a lot from their mistakes, "to get it right the next time." Although it is primarily based in the United States, the PLP has small sections in various countries, including Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, and Pakistan.

The party makes a point of celebrating May Day with public marches every year (on the Saturday closest to May 1) in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It publishes a newspaper, Challenge, and its Spanish counterpart Desafío, as well as an annual theoretical magazine, The Communist.

Progressive Labor Party (United States)

Contents

Early History of the Party

Changes in Thought, Direction, and Approach

Present-Day Struggles

External links

Further reading

Navigation menu

Progressive Labor Party (United States)

Early History of the Party

Changes in Thought, Direction, and Approach

Present-Day Struggles

External links

Further reading

Navigation menu

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