The U.S. ruling class is imploding. The leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling to destroy a fundamental part of women’s healthcare—access to abortion—reveals a deeply divided ruling class. In the desperate battle between the Big Fascists of multinational finance capital and the domestically oriented Small Fascists, the U.S. bosses are ready and willing to destroy trust in their most sacred institution.
The Big Fascist media typically describe the fight over abortion as one between compassionate “pro-choice” liberals and heartless “pro-life” reactionaries. But this framing ignores the longstanding sexism and racism that bars working-class women from life-saving access to healthcare. It also minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses as they move toward a bloody global conflict and the vicious destruction of working-class lives around the world.
Antisexists, let’s not fall into the trap of voting for the liberal rulers who oppress us. They are the greatest der, not the lesser evil. The international Progressive Labor Party seeks to win our class to understand that the capitalist profit system is fundamentally incompatible with our health and development as working people. Working women’s access to decent healthcare can be won only when a mass party destroys the profit system with communist revolution.
Supreme Court rooted in slavery, in interest of exploiters
Before we can talk about the intensification of sexism in an already oppressive system, let’s dispel the myth that the Supreme Court—and all the lower courts that follow it--were ever neutral bodies. Far from it! The courts are where the ruling class can resolve its differences and create a legal justification for its racist and sexist oppression—all of it justified by having “the national interest” at heart.
The U.S. Constitution, the bedrock for every Supreme Court ruling, was written by enslavers to protect slavery (news.Berkeley.edu, 9/17/19). Built on the blood and mass murder of our class sisters and brothers, slavery generated huge accumulations of wealth. It was the foundation for U.S. capitalism and, eventually, the U.S. empire. The Constitution was essential in legalizing the exploitation and dehumanization of our class. Consider the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that Black people were “beings of an inferior order,” or Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racist Jim Crow laws as “separate but equal.” In the 1900s, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the forced sterilization of disabled workers, the imprisonment of ethnic Japanese families in concentration camps, and the criminalization of same-sex relationships. Under capitalism, there is only one absolute law: the law of profit. (For a look at how the bosses have used their legal apparatus to control reproduction, see page 7.)
Fascist dogs tear down their own myths
As liberal capitalist mouthpiece Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times (5/6), the Supreme Court is “acting on behalf of the Republican Party and its allies. Whatever legitimacy it had retained was sacrificed in the drive to…overturn Roe v. Wade.” But why would the Big Fascists call the Supreme Court an “instrument of oppression” (New York Times, 5/8)? It’s because they need more unity from both bosses and workers as they move toward World War III—and they can’t get it without intensifying their attack on the isolationist Small Fascists. But regardless of which side disclosed the Court’s intention to eliminate Roe v. Wade and abandon nearly 50 years of precedent, it’s a clear sign of weakness for the Big Fascist liberals. When rulers expose their naked infighting, it can only alienate the people they must enlist for the next patriotic war.
The Small Fascists have already destroyed the U.S. Congress by ignoring the “rules” to keep differences within limits. Now the Big Fascists are taking down the Supreme Court. Without trusted institutions that can manage the two factions’ disagreements, the situation becomes increasingly volatile--which spells more attacks on workers. The move to outlaw abortion could be a precursor for attacks on other sections of the working class, from undocumented workers hoping to be legalized to LGBTQ workers planning to get married. Clearly, any reforms won under capitalism can be revoked.
Racist, sexist healthcare kills
Of course, sexist attacks on our class are nothing new. The U.S., which markets itself as a beacon of freedom and civil rights, has no guaranteed paid parental leave or universal childcare or healthcare. But it does have:
- an outrageously racist maternal death rate! Black women are three times more likely to die in pregnancy and postpartum than their white counterparts (PRB, 12/6/21)
- a racist, sexist prototype for medical research: the single white male (The Hastings Center Report)
- women in the U.S. are more likely to die from preventable causes than in other industrialized countries(Axios, 4/5)
- OB/GYNs in only half of all counties, a fraction that is projected to decline (Medicine.net, 5/8)
- doctors, regardless of gender, who refuse to believe women’s pain symptoms (Medical News Today, 10/25/21)
In reality, capitalism is the main obstacle to healthy childrearing—and the primary driver of abortion. Most women getting abortions already have at least one child. About 75 percent of abortion patients are “poor or low income” (Romper, 5/3), a big problem in a country where raising just one child costs over a quarter-million dollars (USDA, 2/18). Worldwide, these are the same women who most often get shortchanged on prenatal care and quality maternity and neonatal care (Pubmed, 7/17/19). Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this racist, sexist inequality has only grown worse.
For working-class women, capitalism makes pregnancy undesirable by turning a wonderful thing, a new life, into an impoverishing or even fatal development.
Big Fascists are big dangers
During his election campaign, U.S. President Jim Crow Biden tweeted that “as president, I will codify Roe into law” (10/5/19 at 11:35 AM). What Biden failed to mention is that he and his vice president, Top KKKop Kamala Harris. and the rest of the Democrats did nothing to protect working-class women’s access to abortion when they controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch during the Barack Obama administration. It would be a grave mistake to let the liberal bosses turn abortion into a “vote or die”campaign where they force our class to choose among our exploiters.
Here is how much the Big Fascist liberals care about our health: As they seek to spend $40 billion more on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine (abcnews, 5/9), they are cutting the measly $3,000 child tax credit to help working-class families withstand Covid-19, which still rages. Workers must reject these rulers who smile in your face and stab you in your back, again and again.
What must be done?
If we want to win the fight for the working class to have access to abortions and other healthcare, we must learn the lessons of the George Floyd movement. Any reform fightback can be co-opted by the bosses and steered toward the dead end of the voting booth., Everymember of the working class needs to make revolution primary over reform and join PLP to burn this capitalist system down. What does that mean today?
We must free class struggles from the grips of the fascists, Big or Small. We must build a large base of fightback where we are deepening relationships with workers, sharing CHALLENGE, and recruiting to PLP. That is how we will lay the foundation for a communist revolution and a new and healthier world for every child who’s brought into it.
- Information
Le Pen vs Macron: Two toxic brands of fascism, same rotten racism
- Information
- 01 May 2022 106 hits
The old U.S.-led liberal world order weakens by the day: the openly fascist and anti-NATO Marine Le Pen won 41 percent of the vote in the French presidential election while anti-France, pro-Russia forces rise in former French colonies in Africa. As rival imperialists China and Russia battle the declining imperialists (Ukraine is just the beginning), it’s our class that will pay the price. We workers cannot afford to walk into the traps of nationalism and liberal democracy. The alternative vision is evident—internationalism and communist revolution.
Celebrate this vision on May Day with Progressive Labor Party (see page 1)! As you wave your red flag of internationalism and chant, “Whose day? Our day!” remember how the might of the working class under communist leadership had produced revolutions out of the rulers’ world wars. Experience the revolutionary potential by joining our march for workers’ power as we fight to build an international communist movement. One day, the wretched of the earth will become its rulers. Need and commitment, not exploitation and profit, will be the driving force of society.
Tale of two fascists
France, as well the rest of the European Union and NATO, is part of the now-floundering U.S. world order established after World War II. In competition with the former state capitalist countries China and Russia, U.S. dominance is under siege, and the E.U. can no longer be counted on for automatic support. Liberal Big Fascists are doing their best to stem the tide of the collapse of the liberal global order but they are beset on all sides (see glossary, page 6). One reflection of this decline and disarray is in the French elections.
As is the case in all elections, workers were given the choice between two oppressors. Like his Big Fascist brethren Barack Obama and Jim Crow Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron uses liberal rhetoric while unleashing state terror and committing imperialist atrocities. He has even instituted a Clinton-esque slave labor program, which forces workers to only work for less than $8 per hour to keep government welfare (Le Monde, 4/19). Mimicking his U.S. imperialist counterpart’s readiness to slaughter workers, France launched airstrikes against a wedding in Mali, killing 22 people just last year. Macron is a blood-soaked liberal fascist, and workers are no fools: just before the election, thousands protested racist police terror (France 24, 3/19) and the double rate of unemployment among immigrant workers.
If Macron is to Biden, then Marine Le Pen is to former president Donald Trump. Driven by a “French First” anti-immigrant racism, Madame Fasciste is more the same than different from Monsieur Fasciste who “cut housing benefits for the poor but slashed wealth taxes…earning him the moniker ‘the president of the rich’” his first year in charge (France 24, 4/22). Since then, he has ratcheted anti-Muslim racism: increased survellience, expanded the power of the state to shut down mosques, and terrorized girls and women who wore headscarves (TIME, 5/19/21). Moving forward, Macron also plans to create a ‘rapid reaction’ gestapo at EU borders against refugees (Euronews, 3/2). Is a liberal the lesser-evil? Hell no!
Clearly both fascists are perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of workers. So, what is the difference? The primary difference between Macron and Le Pen is the extent of their commitment to the project of maintaining the global U.S.-led hegemony. Le Pen, admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin, dreamt of blocking European sanctions on Russian oil and gas and withdrawing France from NATO (France 24, 04/20). That’s a failing plan for an imperialist bloc fighting to maintain their dwindling grip on the world. Le Pen’s high votes further confirms U.S. weakness.
Too much is at stake for Macron and the French Big Fascists who desperately need workers willing to fight and die in coming wars against arch rivals Russia and China. This is why they represent such a great danger to our class: for all of Macron’s apologies for French colonialism, for all of his support for universal preschool, he, like liberal Big Fascists around the world, will sacrifice millions of workers at the altar of profit and imperialist control.
The question for workers worldwide is not which of these blood-soaked capitalist servants to support; ask how we can build a worldwide communist movement that can destroy them and their profit system.
French Empire’s bloody crimes against working class
While French capitalism festers in its crisis, its former colonies are striking back. France has dominated more than 20 countries in western, northern Africa since 1524. From Haiti to Mali to Vietnam, workers were subject to the vicious racism and genocidal nature of the French imperialist machine. In Algeria alone, they slaughtered at least 5 million (The New Arab, 10/4/21). In Haiti, workers are still punished with crippling debt for the Haitian Revolution that abolished French rule.
After “independence,” the bloody grip of French imperialism didn’t really loosen. Take the 1994 Rwandan Genocide for example. France had supplied the weapons and intelligence information to the Hutus regime that butchered 800,000 people (Anadolu Agency, 12/4/19).
The racist history of French colonialism, combined with ongoing brutality, has sparked workers in Senegal, Niger, and more to shout, “Down with France!” As they should. Still, these protests come with their own dangers.
Dangers ahead: nationalism and war
As U.S. and French imperialist control deteriorates in Africa, Russia and China fill the vacuum, signaling greater war plans ahead. The West’s growing weakness is evident: six months after the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan, Macron is set to withdraw 5,000 troops in his “forever war” in Mali. “Africa [is again] a crucial battleground in the confrontation between the West and its rivals…In economic affairs, China’s influence in Africa [via the Belt Road Initiative in 39 countries] far outweighs Russia’s. But…Moscow…directly contributed to the collapse of the French [imperialist] mission in the Sahel [African region]” (Foreign Affairs, 3/10).
Russia and local capitalists have won many workers to trade Western imperialists with a Russian one. One demonstrator was “ready to make a pact with Satan to drive out France” (Reuters, 2/5). In Burkina Faso, “tailors tore up French flags and pieced the tricolors back [to]…make Russian ones” (New York Times, 4/18). All flags, no matter how we cut it up, are made with workers’ blood. Why? National flags are markers of racist borders and an effort to shift workers’ loyalty from their own class interests to “their” local oppressor. The Pan-African nationalist movement failed workers once and will do so again. Nationalism is a deadly poison that can only be countered with communist internationalism. Our class can break our chains when we unite—from Francophone Africa to Russia to Haiti—to defeat ALL bosses.
PLP continues to advance our message: for workers in Mali and France, in the streets of Port-Au-Prince, in Kyiv basements and Russian factories, unite under the red flag of communism! We have a world to win.
The Power of the Party
The following is an excerpt from a speech from the Progressive Labor Party’s annual May Day celebration in Brooklyn, NY.
Today is the workers’ day. Our holiday is rooted in the fight for the eight-hour work day in Chicago in the 1880s. But almost 150 years later workers all over recognize the power of May Day, setting aside time to commemorate our victories as a working class against the thieving system of capitalism. We call upon working people everywhere to stand up, join our Party, and commit to communist struggle, the only struggle that will truly free the human race from the misery that our class is forced to shoulder.
Today, and every day, PLP salutes—
- the decades long struggle here in Brooklyn where our Party has led students and teachers in the fight against the racist under-education of the working class, especially Black and Latin students;
- the militant women-led garment strike in Haiti for a living wage which has gathered support from workers across the country;
- the Alabama coal miners who are leading one of the longest strikes in U.S. history for a contract and back pay;
- the farmer-led movement of 50 million workers in India who fought through the devastation of Covid to overturn brutal laws that left people starving;
- and the recent unionization of Amazon
- workers in Staten Island!
We fight to support the most radical demands coming from our class AND build a base for workers to see that only the fight for a world without money, without capitalist borders, without fictional races, without backward gender norms—a system of communism, led by PLP—will have the power to smash once and for all this system of exploitation and replace it with the leadership of our class.
Pols take orders from profiteers
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) doesn’t have a crystal ball, but our Party can see–and many workers agree—the general direction of history is increased capitalist rivalry that will only explode into world war sooner or later. The current imperialist war in Ukraine reveals how rapidly the tensions between the major capitalist rivals, led by a declining U.S. imperialism on one hand and rising Russian and Chinese imperialist aggression on the other, can play out in these smaller-scale, but no less deadly atrocities.
As in every war before this, the bosses drag our class into fighting these wars for them. Millions of workers were killed in World War I on land and sea. Tens of millions more were killed on land, sea and in the air during World War II. Now the bosses have found a new arena–space and its attendant cyberwarfare and satellite-guided missiles–that has been tested already on workers to include in their deadly arsenal. Our class has been and continues to be the only casualty in this increasingly volatile world of capitalist competition for profits, and yet the working class led by the PLP is the ONLY force, not the bosses’ politicians, that has the power to change the course of history.
Bourgeois politicians—Eric Adams in NYC and Ras Baraka in Newark, Biden and Harris in DC, Jovenel Moise of Haiti, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, Xi Jin Ping of China, Vladmir Putin of Russia, and Volydmyr Zelensky of Ukraine—have dedicated their lives to serving the interests of bankers, thugs and billionaires. Most of the time they take orders from them, and sometimes these misleader politicians give orders to the capitalists themselves.
PLP takes orders from workers
But who does PLP take our orders from? Who is PLP’s Bloc, our base of support and foundation for revolution? We take our orders from the sharpest struggles and the bravest fighters for our class wherever in the world they may be. Who is our base? Millions of workers in Colombia, South America, took to the streets in the summer of 2021 in the face of police arrests and people being disappeared to call out the racist abandonment of the working class in that country, investing millions on weapons and tanks in the midst of the pandemic.
The bosses’ traps
But in every part of the world where the working class stands up to the bosses, we have seen how our demands get turned on their heads and the bosses try to take control of our anger, our struggles, controlling the reform movements themselves. Look at the worldwide protests in the wake of Covid-19’s outbreak in 2020. Workers from Minneapolis to Paris, Johannasburg and Palestine took to the streets to combat racist police terror. Two years later, the bosses have tried to turn our anger into an escapist politics of “self care.” No meditation, no yoga, no herbal formula, no medical marijuana, can cure the depression that our class experiences after years of social isolation from a pandemic that the bosses allowed to spiral out of control. Through social media, the bosses injected self-centered politics of individualism into our youth culture to immobilize the struggle of 2020, manifesting most brutally in that Astroworld festival last November 2021 where a dozen young people were crushed to death at a Travis Scott concert celebrating drug use and mosh pit anarchism in the midst of a pandemic.
But this is nothing new. Back in 2008, I personally witnessed how the soldiers and veterans movement led by Iraq Veterans Against the War was handed over by liberal reformers to government agents and provocateurs, replacing our efforts to push anti-imperialism, anti-racism and anti-sexism with a politics of personal care and individualism. We witnessed dozens of soldiers and veterans active in our anti-war movement take their own lives, and all the bosses-led reform organizations could promote were vigils when the true cause of their PTSD and alienation was U.S.-led imperialist war for control of the world’s oil. Individual frustrations are, in reality, only resolved in the larger social context. As communists we say self care requires building communist social relations—we don’t quit our base and we don’t lose political morale.
Revolutionary optimism
This is why we are revolutionary optimists. It means that in every element of the bosses’ efforts to outcompete, outsmart and outdominate one another, we find their achilles heel and magnify it, exposing capitalism in its ugly nakedness for our class to see. The bosses have the biggest weapons and control the media, weaponizing our minds for impending world war and deeper conflict, but PLP has CHALLENGE! The bosses worldwide control thousands of newspapers and media outlets, music, television, film and social media, but in this one paper, CHALLENGE, we have the sharpest analysis of world-defining current events. Who else is saying workers don’t have a stake in the Russia-Ukraine war and that there are no good imperialists; that workers from Russia to Ukraine to Yemen, China and Newark are suffering at the hands of the same profit-hungry capitalist class? No one! Our PAPER is the power of the Party.
We’ve been talking about power, so how has our Party, the PLP, been tested? We have not held state power in any part of the world yet, but we have learned some of the most critical lessons: 1) the fight for communism begins NOW, not in some future time; 2) reforms won today will be taken away tomorrow; 3) working people have no nations. Our Party exposes the facade of identity politics because it purports to challenge the racist and sexist core of capitalism when in reality it creates “representatives” in the capitalist class who keep this inequality more alive than ever. But our Party, Progressive Labor Party, is RUN by women and men, Black and white, young and not-so-young, from around the world who have embraced these lessons with a vengeance.
This makes each person here, each new person who joins this organization today on May Day, crucial to our effort to understand where, when and how our class is fighting this capitalist monster. Each new member increases the power of the Party because you bring with us new insights and experiences that allow us to collectively sharpen our struggle. To the young people: fight against your personal illusions, and recognize that nothing truly meaningful is accomplished by you and you alone. The bosses create these career goals for us and then tell us to choose one. These aren’t our dreams! The strength of each of us as an individual can only be truly realized once we join this larger collective of workers committed to smashing the conditions that we all face.
The best way to predict the future is to make it
As we march down Flatbush Avenue again this year, as we have done for the past 20 years, watch the faces of the pedestrians, people looking out of apartment windows, and people driving past us. We won’t see cynicism. We will see appreciation, validation of our fight, and we will see love from our class brothers and sisters for sticking to the same analysis–“Asian, Latin, Black and White, to Smash Imperialism we Must Unite!” We will see respect in their faces as we shout “Who are we? PLP!” to the beats of dancehall, reggaeton, and hip hop. There is strength in numbers, so our job is to help PLP become a party of millions worldwide.
There is no crystal ball, but the best way to predict the future is to make it! We may be small now, but our confidence in the working class is unmatched and our commitment to fighting alongside and for our comrades can’t be swayed—not by political instigators, not by payoffs, not by visa denials, not by gang-inflicted kidnappings and assassinations, not by poverty, not by previous felony convictions, not by nation, race, creed….we are One Party, One World, One Fight….That is something the bosses can’t defeat. AND THAT’S THE POWER OF THE PARTY. JOIN US!
April 17 marked the 57th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). From a meeting of barely two dozen members of the old U.S. communist movement, PLP has grown into an international party now organizing in five continents. Even as our class faces a dark night and growing inter imperialist-rivalry and fascism (see editorial, page 2) we continue our fightback because this is just the beginning of a worthy struggle towards an international communist revolution.
Over our first half-century, PLP has propelled the march to communism—first by leading antiracist, working-class struggle, and then through that struggle advancing communist ideas. This two-pronged strategy—practice and theory—is the basis for winning masses of workers to fight for communism.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine society’s future. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into constant unemployment and poverty. It will stop the racism that drags down all workers. It will terminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill workers, especially our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will end for all time the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A communist world
Here is our vision for a communist world (also see May Day speech, page 1):
- A society run by workers and for workers. After all, the working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
- Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the parasitic bosses who steal most of the value of our labor through wage slavery.
- Multiracial unity and death to the racism that divides the working class. Racism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses rely on it to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide. Fighting racism is part of the lifeblood of PLP.
- The destruction of sexism and the systemic exploitation, oppression, and cultural degradation of women workers. Sexism is a pillar of class society, and capitalism has only furthered this lethal weapon against our class. Women and men must unite to smash sexist ideas and practices. PLP emphasizes working-class women’s leadership in making revolution, particularly Black women’s leadership.
- Eliminating all borders, artificial lines the bosses draw to make even more profits from workers they call “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.
This is the world the PLP has fought for from the start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Struggle and theory
From our earliest beginnings in the 1960s, PLP has fought tooth and nail against attacks by the ruling class. We have organized and supported Ford workers and striking teachers in Mexico; wildcatting miners in Hazard, Kentucky; longshore workers in New York City; jute (fiber) workers in India; miners in Britain; garment workers in Los Angeles; bank workers in Colombia; transit workers in Washington, DC; Chrysler sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue 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.
Antiracism is a hallmark 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, and have led more than a hundred thousand protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.
PLP has led fierce fightbacks opposing the bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations for the U.S. to “Get Out of Vietnam!” We formed the Worker-Student Alliance in the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society. PLP broke the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and undermined the rulers’ House Un-American Activities Committee to the point of collapse. More recently, working both within the military and on the streets, we exposed the U.S. rulers’ invasions of Iraq as a murderous oil grab.
None of these developments came out of thin air. They grew out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement led by—among many others—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In 1917, this movement created a revolution in Russia; in 1949, a revolution in China. It defeated the Nazis in Europe and fascists in Japan in World War II. It reached its highest point in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which attempted to push back a growing elitism in the Communist Party leadership and put the masses in charge of society.
PLP is the only group on the left to point out what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China. We are the only organization to analyze how socialism in those countries led back to the unvarnished profit system, where all workers are now mired.
A communist society will have no bosses or profits. It will be led by the working class through its Progressive Labor Party.
Marxism: An evolving idea
The history of the Progressive Labor Party began in 1962. A small group of communists left the Communist Party USA and organized the Progressive Labor Movement. They rejected the CPUSA’s capitulation to capitalism and its abandonment of the open advocacy of communist revolution. The old communist movement proposed that the bosses would peacefully relinquish control of society and allow what the CPUSA called “socialism” to be “voted into existence.” The communists who formed PLM refused to mislead workers and broke away from the old guard.
In the course of PLP’s history, we have rejected some traditional Marxist concepts and advanced a number of new ones, all based on our practice and our examination of world events and the decay of the old communist movement. These new principles are expressed in a series of documents, including Road to Revolution I, II, III and IV; Revolution Not Reform; and “Dark Night Shall Have Its End.” (These are all available on PL’s website or in pamphlet form.)
Above all, Progressive Labor Party stands for the principle that the working class must fight directly for communism rather than moving first through a transitional phase of socialism. We reject this two-stage theory, a central premise of classical Marxism, because events have shown that socialism inevitably leads back to full-blown capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialism preserved capitalist features like money and the wage system, leading to inequalities that divided the working class. In both of these countries, the communist party became a new ruling class where privileges were attained through party membership. We believe the working class can be won before the revolution to fight directly for communism—to abolish the wage system, the cult of the individual and other capitalist relics.
Core principles
PLP’s main principles are:
- Internationalism, under the slogan “Smash All Borders,” where workers’ class unity is represented by a single mass, international Party;
- The fight against racism, a strategic necessity in the struggle to overthrow capitalism;
- The fight against the special oppression of women, another critical component in uniting the working class, a prerequisite for revolution;
- A concentration among industrial workers, who produce the capitalists’ profits and the weapons for the bosses’ imperialist wars;
- Workers’ power through armed struggle, since the rulers will use their armed state power to violently suppress the working class.
Throughout its existence, PLP has fought for these principles in unceasing class struggle. We have learned that building the Party is the first order of business for communists. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Whatever gains workers make in reform struggles are limited and temporary; sooner or later, the bosses always use their state power to take them back. Communists strive to turn reform struggles into schools for communism and building the Party. Winning workers to PLP is the one and only victory the ruling class can never take back. We therefore urge all workers and youth to join us in the next half-century in this historic task: to organize a communist revolution.
CHICAGO, April 25—Today marked the first full week of an ongoing strike of over one thousand multiracial graduate workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), who are boldly fighting capitalism’s racist and sexist miseducation system. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active on the picket lines and rallies, distributing CHALLENGE, helping lead chants and chatting with the strikers.
The union representing the workers, the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO), was set to strike on April 1, after 97 percent of workers voted in favor. They are pushing back against the UIC bosses’ attacks of poverty wages, exploitative fees, and hostile and retaliatory work environments. Despite the university’s $2 billion endowment and the chancellors’ six figure salaries, graduate workers here earn as low as $20k a year (Chicago Sun Times, 4/18).
Graduate workers help keep the university’s miseducation and profit system running, putting in long hours of instruction time, grading, and research while often mentoring other students. Under capitalist education, workers and students are constantly degraded. While workers' physical bodies, mental capacity and morale are crushed, bosses get raises and praise from fellow soul-crushing capitalists for how well they exploit our class.
To build a world that serves our interests, we’ll have to organize to smash capitalism with communist revolution. PLP invites GEO strikers and workers everywhere to join the Party and fight for an egalitarian world without borders, racism, or exploitation.
Rally against racist exploitation!
Despite unpredictable Chicago spring weather, the grad workers and their supporters have remained steadfast in their spirited strike. Moving pickets weaved their way throughout the east campus, with pro-worker and pro-student chants reverberating off the building walls. Students sitting in class are called to walk out and support the fight for improved learning conditions.
Many chants blasted the predatory fees. For the “right” to be exploited by the university bosses, graduate workers are forced to pay over $2,000 in fees every year, over 10 percent of their income. Skyrocketing fees levied against international students—blatantly racist and divisive—have ballooned by over 60 percent since 2013 (ABC7 Chicago, 4/20). GEO’s strike demands rightfully call for an immediate end to such fees in any new contract.
In the campus quad, mass numbers of strikers gave daily updates on negotiations and supporters gave speeches in solidarity with the strike. Many former grad workers and members of various unions shared experiences from their past fights, inspiring the GEO workers to remain strong. A PLP member proudly shared a statement of solidarity from education workers from the City University of New York, which was received to wide applause. When the working class is under attack, it is our role as communists to build a fight back. In PLP, we raise the line that the sharpest way to fight is dialectically, connecting one moment in history to another and struggles in one area to the other.
Throughout it all the Party has distributed hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE, demonstrating that workers and students are definitely hungry for communist ideas. To prepare for May Day, we also have been pushing hard to invite the friends of PLP to our local march and connecting their fight at UIC to the international struggle against the bosses and capitalism.
From the classroom to the streets – the profit system has got to go!
Reformist demands vs revolutionary solutions
Revolutionary communist politics appeal to the working class because unions in and of themselves cannot get us off this treadmill of reformism, much less put an end to the endemic crises of capitalism. As we fight tooth and nail to obtain our basic needs, we must always be ready to expand the limits of the class struggle at hand.
Any appeals for the bosses to give us workers a “fair” wage or contract is itself a contradiction, as under capitalism the bosses will never compensate us for the complete value of our labor. This exploitation is at the core of their system, and it’s where they get their profits. Our fight should be to smash the wage system entirely. We create all value; and the value of our labor should belong to our class!
What’s more, calls to “defend” the institutions of public education ignore the role of schools and universities in ideologically maintaining capitalism and all its rotten nationalism and extreme competition. Yes, education must be free and equitable for all workers and youth but only under communism, with workers running it would it be grounded in science, collectivity, antiracism, antisexism, and class consciousness.
The bosses, by virtue of their control of the state and economy, are able to roll back even the most hard-fought reform gains. They increase our wages while simultaneously raising the cost of living, and more. The victory that the bosses can’t easily take away is a more unified multiracial working class, steeled in class struggle and ready to make a clean break with capitalism in favor of revolution.
Fight to learn, learn to fight
Many of life’s most lasting lessons aren’t learned in the classroom, but through working people organizing class struggle against the murderous ruling class. A raised fist to the GEO strikers for bringing the fight back to the racist UIC bosses! PLP is with you in this fight!
To write a letter of solidarity to the strikers: https://bit.ly/3vjsHxW To donate to their strike fund: https://bit.ly/3KkPOMT J
