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

This is part six of a series about Black communists in the Spanish Civil War. In the early 1930s the urban bourgeoisie (capitalists) of Spain, supported by most workers and many peasants, overthrew the violent, repressive monarchy to form a republic. In July 1936 the Spanish army, eventually commanded by Francisco Franco, later the fascist dictator, rebelled to reestablish the repressive monarchy. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy gave Franco massive military aid.
In 1936 the International Communist Movement, called the Comintern, headquartered in the Soviet Union and led by Joseph Stalin, organized volunteers, mainly workers from more than 60 countries into the International Brigades (IBs) to go to Spain to defend the Republic. Black workers, especially Black communists, emphasized the importance of fighting racism to win anything for the working class. And they brought this antiracist fightback with them when they returned to the United States.
This movement was the most advanced political movement at the time. They were building a movement they hoped would lead to communist revolution around the world. They succeeded in organizing millions around communist ideas and practices. But the movement believed that uniting with liberal bosses to defend the Republic in Spain would further the fight for communism. This was part of the united front against fascism, where communists united with so-called liberal capitalists against the fascist capitalists. This ended up not working but the struggles they led inspire us today both in practice and in the political lessons learned.
In the Progressive Labor Party we are against any unity with capitalists. They all have to go and the working class must rule: that’s communism.
If the working class is to seize and hold state power throughout the world, Black workers and their leadership is essential. Our class cannot destroy racism—the lifeblood of capitalism—without their leadership. The following continues that story:

 Mack Coad was born in 1894 in Blackstock, South Carolina to a Black working class family. As a young adult, he worked as a railroad firefighter and crane operator. He lost his railroad position at the onset of the Great Depression. In 1929, after attending a meeting of a Communist led unemployed group, Coad joined the Communist Party. Because of his leadership capabilities, Coad was selected to be a student at the Lenin School in the Soviet Union. In 1931, after his return to the United States, Coad was assigned as a union organizer in the South. He worked with steelworkers in Birmingham and was an organizer of the Alabama Sharecropper's Union.
When local farmers asked the Communist Party to send organizers to help them build a union,the Party sent several people, among them Mack Coad, who at the time was working as a steelworker.
In March 1931, he was sent to Tallapoosa County, Alabama, to organize the Communist-led Share Croppers' Union (SCU). In the abandoned houses of rural Alabama, Coad discovered local militants who were quite comfortable combining communist and folk cultures. These grass-roots leaders had established a tradition of singing before and after gatherings, which grew out of the rural church services after which they had patterned their meetings. In addition to adopting standards such as the ‘Internationale’ and ‘Solidarity Forever,’ rural Black workers in and around the Party transformed popular spirituals into political songs with new messages. ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and the ever-popular ‘Give Me That Old-Time Religion’ were stock musical forms used to create new Party songs. In the latter, the verse was changed to ‘Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,’ and Party members closed each stanza with ‘It was good enough for Lenin, and it's good enough for me.’
The Black and white sharecroppers involved in organizing the union were under constant threat of attack from the police who organized local racists to attack the union. At one point Coad was part of a group defending the home of a Black leader of the movement and as the racists closed in, workers in the union decided to get Coad out of the area, secretly getting him to Atlanta. Coad played an important role in Southern U.S. communist history in the 1930s as he worked in Chattanooga, Birmingham, and was involved in a 1934 attempt to organize a Memphis Communist Party unit. The Communist Party called Coad “our best southern organizer.” Coad was also active in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina. In Chattanooga, he was jailed at least twice for organizing unemployment demonstrations and running for judge.
Coad went to fight in Spain in October 1937, where he proved himself an exemplary communist and soldier. He was severely wounded in the right eye in an attack near Gandesa on August 1, 1938, during the Ebro Offensive and spent the rest of the war in the hospital. In an interview in the Daily Worker of February 11, 1939, Coad recalled that he volunteered ‘to help wake the Negro up on the international field.’ Coad died in May 1967, still working as a coal miner at the age of 69.
Mack Coad was a leader of the international communist movement that grew out of battles like the struggle against racism in the South and the fight against fascism in Europe. Coad, like millions of workers worldwide, built the old communist movement while leading the class struggle. They put building the Party in the midst of the struggle for reforms into practice and helped shape our movement and set examples that led to the formation of Progressive Labor Party and the building of a communist movement with Black workers in the lead.

Sources: Lisa A Kirschenbaum: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suscpicion. Harry Haywood: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Robin D.G. Kelley: Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.