On April 17 Progressive Labor Party (PLP/PL) will celebrate its 59th year of fighting the cancerous system called capitalism, a system which destroys workers’ lives worldwide. PLP arose in the 1960s splitting from the reformist Communist Party of the United States. We began with barely two dozen members. In 2024 we are an international, fighting party organizing in five continents. 

Workers all over the world are currently in a period of low class consciousness and struggle against the world’s capitalists. We call this period Dark Night. It is characterized by inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. imperialists and the alliance of Chinese-Russian imperialists. As this rivalry escalates, the imperialists are resorting to ever-increasing levels of war and fascism to divide, kill and control workers everywhere.The working class desperately needs a fighting, communist party to take us out of this Dark Night and into a victorious fight against the world’s capitalists.

Our line & our vision

Progressive Labor Party struggles for a communist world run by and for workers. Capitalism has caused world wars costing millions of workers’ lives and capitalists are preparing for WorldWar III. In a world run by the working class all goods and resources would be shared according to need. There would be no production for the profit of a few. There would be no need for profiteering wars. The working class need only realize its unlimited potential to fight and rule. PLP has and will continue to struggle alongside fellow workers to help us realize this potential. 

To realize this potential, PL implements a strategy of practice and theory. We get involved in fighting the bosses (practice). We analyze our fightback and the struggles of workers worldwide. We analyze the world situation(theory). Then we implement what we learned in future struggles (practice) and apply it to our line (theory). These lessons and beliefs together make up Progressive Labor Party’s unique political line. Here are some elements of PL’s line gained from 59 years of practice and theory:

Society must be run by and for the working class. That’s communism.

The wage system and money itself must be abolished. Resources must be distributed based on need.

Workers can only gain power through armed struggle. The bosses will not give up peacefully.

We reject the concept of nations; no nationalism, and no borders. We are all workers and a worker in Israel is more like a worker in Gaza than like an Israeli capitalist.  

Multiracial unity: Racism is a product and tool of the ruling capitalist class meant to divide and conquer the working class. A united, multiracial working class is unstoppable. 

Antisexism: The systemic super-exploitation, oppression and objectification of women divides and weakens the working class.

We need to concentrate among industrial workers and soldiers, key to defeating the capitalists.

We struggle to inject these ideas into every struggle and will continue to do so until the working class runs the world. (For more see: Our Fight on page 2)

A legacy of struggle and theory

Ever since its birth in 1965 Progressive Labor Party has been fighting back against the bosses' attacks on workers. We have organized and supported auto workers and striking teachers in Mexico; striking miners in Hazard, Kentucky; fiber workers in India; bank workers in Colombia; sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue Chrysler plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti and New Orleans. More recently the Party has organized with tenants fighting abusive slumlords in Lennox, California, stood with students facing racist school policies in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and struggled alongside a family in Newark, New Jersey physically assaulted by racist police. 

Fighting racism has always been a core tenet of PLP. We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976 we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park, while smashing the Nazi headquarters there. We have led more than 100,000 protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri. 

PLP has led intense fightbacks against the bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations against the U.S. imperialist war Vietnam. We worked both within the military and on the streets to expose the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq as a mass-murdering oil grab. More recently PL has participated in fightbacks against the bosses’ genocidal occupation of Palestine, saying that this attack on workers in Gaza is about profits and won’t be solved by fighting for a Palestinian state ruled by a new group of capitalists.

These ideas, struggles, and victories came directly out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied and continues to study the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement throughout history. In 1917 this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China, two of the largest countries in the world under the red banner of communism! But PL also acknowledges the weaknesses of the past movements. Nationalism, allowing wages and money to persist, and allowing elitism to form within party structures are some of the mistakes of the old movements that led to the rebirth of capitalism. We are committed to not repeating those mistakes.

Celebrate the Party on May Day

Next month is May Day, where every year the Party celebrates communism and the working class. We would be honored if you would join us in these celebrations and join our Party in this fight for a communist world. Let’s all chip in and build a united, multiracial working class capable of winning a communist world. Happy birthday PLP!

BROOKLYN —“I shouldn’t fear for my life to come on campus,” stated a halal cart worker to members of Kingsborough Community College’s antiracist club, Common Ground. For months, the halal cart has been the target of racist attacks, including racist anti-Palestinian graffiti (see CHALLENGE, 3/13). While the racists intended to terrorize workers and students at KCC into fear and silence, they and the capitalist bosses they’re serving made a severe miscalculation. Amidst genocide in Gaza, widening imperialist wars, and sharpening fascism, antiracist students and communists in the Progressive Labor Party are hard at work building a mass, multiracial, antiracist fightback!

Fighting to build unity, solidarity, and collectivity

Since our semester started, Common Ground has regularly met to discuss how best to respond to these racist attacks, with our new women students taking leadership and learning from the experiences of our veteran students. Recently, in addition to tightening rules against student organizing, we were surprised and disgusted to discover two brand-new security cameras installed at either end of our meeting room!

Everyone agreed this felt like quite a violation, and one of our new students stated, “This campus feels more and more like a police state and not a college.” Another student asked, “Why would they bother spying on us, do they think we’re breaking the law?” 
The expression “police state” raises an important question – what is the State? What does KCC’s administration have to do with the State? And what should workers’ attitudes toward the State be?

The capitalist state and communist revolution

States arose when, after about 300,000 years of human societies, divisions of society into classes – between exploiter and exploited – appeared. The state emerged as a special group of people occupied with governing, appearing to stand neutral and outside of society. However, they really enforce a dictatorship of the exploiting class through other special groups granted the legal authority to use violence and imprison whoever the ruling class deems an enemy. Under capitalism, this reality is obscured by layers of appearances like the court system and sophisticated propaganda upheld by the capitalist media, schools, movies, music, and most social media. 

The capitalists will always treat antiracist fighters for multiracial unity as criminals. Racism and sexism, along with nationalism, are the pillars that uphold their entire profit system to keep the working class politically divided, differentially oppressed, and economically exploited. Black workers especially are super-exploited and, through racist police terror, the bosses’ cops intentionally terrorize Black and immigrant workers on the streets, in schools, and in their own homes. 

In this way, the student who observed that KCC seems like a police state is righter than they knew! The capitalist state in the U.S. today includes everyone from Joe Biden to the NYPD, to the administration of every CUNY campus. Arming ourselves with communist politics exposes the dead-end false promises of liberal reforms. Communists fight to arm the entire international working class politically to defend against capitalist attacks in the short term and to organize our entire class to smash this entire genocidal, sexist system with communist revolution and a workers’ state of our own! 

WANTED for racist terror: capitalism

Guided by these politics, PL’ers supported Common Ground’s decision to create a “WANTED FOR RACIST HATE CRIME” poster. The NYPD – who had to be pressured into responding to this racist attack in the first place - only posted two “WANTED'' flyers, on a desolate corner outside campus with mostly empty storefronts. After weeks of discussion, we decided instead of relying on the NYPD, we would copy the images of the racist suspect caught on surveillance and create our own! We also created a petition with a list of demands, including calling out KCC’s refusal to acknowledge this hate crime even happened and raising money to cover the damage to the halal cart.  
Since then, Common Ground members and PL’ers have attended prayers and iftar (when Muslim workers break their fast during the month of Ramadan) at a community mosque multiple times, making friends, distributing the WANTED flyer widely, and sparking outrage and willingness to build a mass movement around fighting back. We are organizing for May Day, and plan to continue discussing the students’ sharp observations about capitalism and even sharper questions about communism in our PLP study group. The struggle continues!

LOS ANGELES, February 19 - The bosses give President's Day off to many workers every year. What better way for communists and their friends to celebrate that long weekend than to plan how to get rid of the bosses' presidents for good! Every year, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Los Angeles organizes a retreat to study our line, evaluate our work, and plan for May Day and other upcoming struggles. This year comrades from Northern California were able to join us for the first time in many years. Most were base members or new members. Their willingness to attend a weekend of long travel while also balancing their life responsibilities demonstrated a commitment to learning and growing with the Party.

We had three study sessions: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, The Trap of Nationalism, and No War but Class War and ended the weekend with a planning session for May Day and beyond. Participants appreciated the engaging nature of the sessions. Small group discussions made room for contradictions to arise and be discussed in a comradely manner. There were many entry points into the content so that newer friends and members felt confident to participate, while also advancing the understanding of veteran members. We were also intentional about connecting theoretical conversations to the work that is happening and the mass struggle among our class (strikes, anti-war protests, etc).

Altogether we had a multiracial and multigenerational group of over 15, including friends. During the retreat we shared reports of our regional struggles, studied Party literature, built solidarity, and received feedback on our organizing and base building. The result? A more unified plan of communist action across various sectors of labor— higher education, K-12 education, healthcare, and more— from the Party’s critical antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist lens. Exciting plans were made! The Northern California Party concentration has set up a study group planning committee to produce visual aids and vocabulary lists as a support to campus outreach. Comrades from LA started a twice a month study group with education workers and students from across the state. We will use this to continue to study the line of the Party together and share updates about labor struggles and a state-wide strategy for direct action on campuses.

One area for growth was that the content was created and led by our more seasoned Party members and didn’t involve our base and new members in its development. The Northern California contingent was grateful for the leadership of LA and longtime Party members in organizing the meeting and offering valuable historical context for many of the discussions. Simultaneously, NorCal hopes to support more in the organizing process for future retreats so as to spread the labor out more fairly and to lessen the stress of organizing. Going forward, California as a whole will involve our base and new comrades in the content creation and leadership of upcoming events.

After the retreat, two friends officially joined PLP and another friend is joining a club. Our May Day organizing is in full swing and the future of struggle in California is bright.

New York City’s killer kkkops have struck again, murdering 19-year-old Win Rozario in Queens, a youth from Bangladesh who called the kkkops to help him with a mental health episode. The racist kkkops at the New York Police Department's (NYPD) account of the killing says the cops tased Rozario, then his mother accidentally knocked the taser prongs from his body, causing the teen to rush at the officers with scissors, and they had no choice but to fire. This, despite the situation being two cops to one person and Rozario’s brother contradicting their words, saying he was killed while their mother was holding him. 

NYPD kkkops “serve and protect” the bosses

The bosses were all too happy to send trigger happy cops to kill Rozario rather than actual mental health professionals (New York Daily News, 3/31). Capitalism shows us everyday that it is ill equipped to help those suffering from mental illness. Rozario’s death is the latest in a string of racist killings involving mentally ill workers in the city, most of them Black and Latin. It also comes little over a year after cops in Massachusetts killed Arif Sayed Faisai, another youth from Bangladesh suffering from a mental health crisis. From Deborah Danner to Saheel Vassell to countless more lives, this capitalist system has nothing to offer workers but racist police violence and hopelessness. 

The working class must run society - that’s communism!

As conditions for the working class worsen, as police killings continue, and as more and more wars rage around the world, we need to go beyond fighting for reforms. We need to organize for communism, a system that will bring an end to the conditions that foster mental illness, and to all police murders as well. Communism is a system where workers internationally not only produce everything but also distribute all goods based on need.

At a vigil for Rozario in Jackson Heights days after his death, the working class, mostly from Bangladesh, came out to demand justice and the release of the NYPD video footage. The working class anger at this killing was palpable. Rozario’s death comes after decades of built up racism against Southeast Asian workers after 9/11, not to mention the NYPD’s known program of spying on Muslim communities since at least 2002. However, without a communist focus, these workers will be won to identity politics and more “police reform” that will ensure kkkop killings and capitalism continue.

Democratic Mayor Adams: what liberal fascism looks like

Liberal racist Mayor Eric Adams, who had much to say about a recently killed cop in Far Rockaway, was noticeably silent when it came to Rosario, showing his indifference to another Brown worker dying from his death squad. In 2015, when the NYPD began its so-called “de-escalation training” for encounters with mentally ill workers, they killed at least 16 workers experiencing such crisis in succeeding years, with 14 of them Black, Latin and Asian workers (ProPublica, 12/4/20). Rather than give these workers the housing and assistance they truly need, Adams instead opened a useless hotline as a guide for his Nazis in blue for forcibly hospitalizing  any worker who “appears” mentally ill (The Guardian, 7/13/23). Giving the NYPD even broader authority to detain anyone they wish is another sign of rising fascism.

Join the Progressive Labor Party

Progressive Labor Party has been at the forefront of several anti-racist protests and fightbacks against racist cop terror in NYC. There is only one way out of this capitalist hellhole, and that’s uniting with other workers to overthrow it once and for all! For Win, and too many other names, join PLP to shut this racist system down!