The Progressive Labor Party (originally the Progressive Labor Movement, sometimes still referred to simply as PL) is a minor communist political party in the United States. It was formed by members of the Communist Party USA who felt that the Soviet Union had betrayed communism and become revisionist. They also felt that the CPUSA was adopting unforgivably reformist positions, such as turning to electoral solutions by backing John F. Kennedy in the 1960 U.S. presidential race, and generally hiding communist politics behind a veneer of reform-oriented causes. PL wanted to advocate communist revolution openly and aggressively among the working class, but at first it was a very small grouping of several score based on the East Coast with Milton Rosen as its principal leader. It began to recruit more substantially when, after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, several of its members travelled with dozens of 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, the PLP dissolved the M2M and entered SDS. As the latter began to grow rapidly into the primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War, the PLP rapidly recruited members to the party on the campuses and became the largest communist faction within SDS. As factional politics within SDS heated up, the various anti-PL factions increasingly adopted communist vocabulary 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 a disastrous 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' 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 supposed 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, at which its rivals walked out to found what would evolve into the Weather Underground and other groups, PLP was not able to sustain SDS as a mass campus organization for long, and was not able to capture equivalent influence in any other part of U.S. political life thereafter. In the early and mid-1970s, many of the party's most talented members drifted away or were forced out, including Bill Epton, the PLP vice chairman and Harlem organizer. Two of the PLP's younger top leaders left in disillusionment around that time and would become wealthy businessmen.

In the early 1980s the PLP 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 for a one-stage revolutionary meta-strategy (from capitalism directly to the building of communism). 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 distanced itself from some Chinese policies in the late 1960s 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.

The PLP advocates "base-building," meaning that members should get stable jobs that keep them in touch with the working class, marry, raise families, have everyday lives, etc., and should attempt to gradually win their co-workers, friends and family to the party. It cautions its members not to necessarily expect revolution in their lifetimes but to build for it anyway. This sober approach, along with the party's grandiose long-range expectations (see below), have led it to take on the surface characteristics of a small church awaiting Armageddon and the Rapture.

The PLP claims that 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 just be an elite of "professional revolutionaries" but should be deeply integrated into the working class). The PLP 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. PLP members believe in the inevitability of a third world war, which they assert will 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.

One of the PLP's other basic tenets, stemming from its doctrine of 'fighting directly for communism,' is its belief in the complete and total abolition of money and the wage system immediately upon the seizure of state power by the working class. Although critics might see this as a throwback to utopian socialism, PLP members argue that it would more easily enable workers to adopt a sense of communist culture, ethics, and morality.

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, but it never developed a reputation as a political "cult" (like the Revolutionary Communist Party USA or Workers World Party have been criticized as being) and was never accused of "brainwashing" anyone. It operates on the standard Leninist principle of democratic centralism. It has no known history of harassing or threatening ex-members, but its campus members and supporters in the 1960s and 70s frequently engaged in mutual provocations and fistfights with members of rival groups like the Weather Underground Organization and the Young Lords.

The PLP claims to have played a decisive role in setting back the briefly influential mass racist group "Restore Our Alienated Rights" (ROAR) in Boston in 1975. In the early 1970s the PLP's "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 it is best known for its violent tactics at counter-demonstrations against Klan and Nazi types around the country.

Although it is primarily based in the United States, the PLP has tiny sections in various countries, including Colombia, Mexico, and Pakistan. The PLP upholds a purist vision of a mass-based communism, which it claims was the true spirit of the Cultural Revolution sabotaged by Mao's cult of personality. PLP members are quite critical of Stalin's bureaucratism and lack of emphasis on political education of the masses. However, they expressly deny that Stalin was a mass murderer and tyrant, claiming that the numbers killed under his leadership were far fewer than the many millions almost universally accepted by scholars, and blaming the rest on the Russian Civil War and World War II. They also expressly state that the residual number of killings that they concede actually took place were justified to protect Stalin's "dictatorship of the proletariat" against spies, counterrevolutionaries, and other class enemies.

The PLP makes a point of celebrating May Day with public marches every year (though not always on May 1st) in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The party publishes a newspaper, Challenge, and its Spanish counterpart Desafío, as well as an annual theoretical magazine, The Communist.

External links

• Progressive Labor Party Website
• Alternate website with graphics & colors
• Newspaper Challenge-Desafío
• PL pamphlet: "Smash Racism With Communist Revolution"
• Ludo Martens: "Another view of Stalin"
• History of the Progressive Labor Party and Students for a Democratic Society, 1966-1974
• "Revolutionaries Must Fight Nationalism" (1969)

Further reading

• Benin, Leigh David. A Red Thread In Garment: Progressive Labor And New York City’s Industrial Heartland In The 1960s And 1970s. Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1997.

Publications

• Epton, Bill. The Black Liberation Struggle (Within The Current World Struggle). Speech at Old Westbury College, Feb. 26, 1976. 26 pages. Harlem: Black Liberation Press, 1976. Stapled paperback, cover illustrated by Tom Feelings.

• Harlem Defense Council. Police Terror In Harlem. NY: Harlem Defense Council, nd [1964?]. 12 pages. Stapled paperback pamphlet. Photos.