Birth of New Communist Movement — PL Sparks Class War

Since May 6, we have been publishing articles in celebration of PLP’s 50th anniversary. These articles describe the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers and why the fight against racism is of strategic importance in the fight to overthrow capitalism. Here we will review our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba, and the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
PLM Leads the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In the early 1960s, class struggle was heating up. The U.S. bosses embarked on a genocidal war in Vietnam. The leadership shown by the working class in Vietnam after decades of resistance to French imperialism inspired millions of workers worldwide. Black workers led rebellions in almost every major U.S. city and rocked the capitalist class back on its heels. In the midst of intensifying class struggle in March 1964, a Yale University conference on socialism was attended by many pseudo-left organizations, including the “Communist” Party USA and various Trotskyite groups. The conference was geared for a scholarly debate on theory. Only PLM broke through this nonsense to advocate building a militant anti-imperialist movement!
PLM leader Milt Rosen electrified the audience of 500 students and faculty by focusing on opposing U.S. imperialism’s efforts to crush the revolutionary movement in Vietnam. He called for a nation-wide mobilization on May 2 to protest U.S. aggression there. The proposal was approved overwhelmingly and a May 2nd Committee was organized under PLM’s leadership.
On May 2, thousands of workers and students marched and rallied in cities nationwide. In New York City, 1,000 heard PL speeches about the necessity for communist revolution. They broke a police ban on demonstrations in midtown Manhattan, winding their way through Times Square to the United Nations, demanding: “U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!” It was the first national demonstration against the U.S. imperialist invasion and the forerunner of countless protests against U.S. rulers in the years ahead.
The Committee became a national organization called the May 2nd Movement (M2M). Hundreds joined. They played a major role in popularizing the struggle against U.S. imperialism’s war against workers and peasants in Vietnam. They issued hundreds of thousands of leaflets, buttons and pamphlets; initiated numerous university teach-ins; organized rallies and marches; and developed “Free Universities” as an off-campus alternative to the rulers’ educational system.
Following a massive Washington, D.C. anti-war rally of 25,000 organized by Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) in the spring of 1965, PLM’s leadership fought inside M2M to dissolve it and join SDS, a move supported by the overwhelming majority within M2M.
M2M did play a vanguard role in opposing U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam and successfully broke with the old pacifist “peace movement” dominated by the Communist Party USA. That movement was never anti-imperialist but rather championed ruling-class collaboration behind slogans like “Ban the Bomb”; “Peaceful Co-existence”; and “For A Sane Nuclear Policy” — as if the working class could ever make peace with imperialist rulers! PL’s slogan--“U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!”—was eventually adopted by millions.
M2M helped move the emerging anti-war forces to the left and toward anti-imperialism. Many youthful fighters joined PLM, having learned from their mass struggles in the M2M.
Breaking the Cuba Travel Ban
Although Cuba eventually became a state capitalist country, the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960s had great appeal for youth in the U.S., and especially for Black and Latin workers. U.S. imperialist rulers feared the Cuban revolt would spark similar uprisings throughout Latin America and radicalize U.S. workers and students. President Kennedy’s CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion had failed miserably.
Prior to that invasion, PLM distributed tens of thousands of leaflets and held streets rallies warning about Kennedy’s plans. It even unfurled the first “Hands Off Cuba” banner in the galleries of the United Nations during the UN debate over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a crisis that aroused fears of a nuclear war.
After Cuba confiscated a billion dollars worth of U.S corporate property, the Kennedy Administration instituted an economic boycott of Cuba and established a ban on travel there. While other pseudo-left groups merely reprinted Castro’s speeches, PLM boldly announced they would break the travel ban.
Over 500 students applied to the PLM-led Ad Hoc Committee to Travel to Cuba to defy the U.S. State Department. Seventy-five were selected. In the summer of 1963, the Committee outwitted a government plan to block them and flew to Cuba via Czechoslovakia. The trip succeeded; 59 students broke the “Kennedy curtain.” It was reported in headlines nationwide. Attorney General Robert Kennedy condemned the organizers and promised to punish them.
Upon returning to New York, in a showdown at the airport, immigration officials tried to seize the ban-breakers’ passports, mark them “invalid” and refuse their entry back into the U.S., based on a 1918 law to control the travel of spies for Germany’s kaiser during World War I.  The students refused to surrender their passports and sat down in the airport. Hundreds of family members and supporters were waiting nearby, along with newspaper and TV reporters. The standoff lasted two hours. Finally the agents gave in, allowing the students to enter while serving them with letters revoking their passports.
The pro-fascist New York Daily News ran a front-page photo of the students cheering as they came through immigration barriers, along with a headline scorecard: “PUNKS 1, STATE DEPARTMENT 0!”
Within weeks, more than 50 students were either cited for contempt or indicted for conspiracy to break the ban. Some faced 20-year prison terms, but the government’s attack failed miserably. A national defense campaign won widespread support. Most of the young PLM comrades and friends held firm and grew stronger in their commitment to fight the rulers. They announced they were organizing another trip to Cuba! The following year, almost a thousand students applied; 84 were selected and again broke the ban.
Afterward, four student committee leaders were indicted for illegal travel to Cuba. After a two-year fight, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, the charges were dropped. The ban had been beaten. Many students who had participated in the trips or supported them joined PLM, which emerged as a vigorous force in the emerging New Left in the U.S. The Cuba trips were a decisive turning point for PLM. As a head-on challenge to President Kennedy’s State Department travel ban, as well as a demonstration of solidarity with the working class in Cuba, they were a huge success — groundbreaking events in the development of student radicalism in the 1960s.  
Wiping Out HUAC
In 1963, when the first group of students returned from Cuba after breaking the travel ban, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched an anti-communist attack by summoning many of them to hearings in Washington in an attempt to intimidate and possibly jail them. Until then, the Committee had focused on asking Hollywood stars, Communist Party USA leaders and others if they were communists. Virtually all took refuge in the 5th Amendment, citing their constitutional right to refuse to answer. HUAC’s strategy was to cite them for contempt and threaten jail terms. The famous “Hollywood Ten” were imprisoned for up to a year.
CPUSA leaders “took the 5th,” posing as “defenders of the Constitution and of democracy.” No one ever answered the question directly. If they said “no,” the Committee would haul in some stoolpigeon to testify that they were communists. If they said that they once had been communists but had quit, the Committee would then ask them to name others they knew to be communists. It was a lose-lose proposition, but PLM changed the game.
While hundreds picketed outside, PL’ers took the stand and answered by declaring: “Yes, we are communists and proud of it!” This set HUAC members back on their heels; they weren’t prepared for that answer. It represented PL’s principle of openly advocating socialism, the term used prior to PLP’s proclaiming a direct goal of communism.
In April 1964, HUAC descended on Buffalo, where PLM had established an industrial and campus base. The Committed prattled on about a “threat of a new communist movement” that “needed to be dealt with.” A Buffalo Courier-Express headline clarified HUAC’s aim: “New Communist Operation Here A Prime Target.”
But in sharp contrast to the CPUSA’s defensive stance, PLM launched an all-out offensive; 1,500 pickets greeted the anti-communist red-baiters. The University of Buffalo Student Senate appropriated funds to support the protest. The entire city was in an uproar. Front-page headlines screamed: “Red Probers in Buffalo Hear the Sound of Fury”; “Witnesses Spark Uproar, Grapple With Marshals”; “UB Instructor Ridicules HUAC”; “Rain-Soaked Pickets’ Chants Echo Outside HUAC Session.” The demonstrators were supported by various mass groups, some printing full-page ads in the Buffalo paper. Clerics joined the picket line.
The hearings were completely disrupted. HUAC fled town. PL’s principle of confronting anti-communism directly and organizing mass support, rather than hiding behind the bosses’ Constitution, proved decisive.
In 1966, HUAC launched an investigation of “subversive activities” in the anti-war movement, subpoenaing many, including five student members of PL. The Party mobilized 800 protestors to pack the Washington, D.C. hearing room to disrupt the proceedings while also demonstrating outside Congress. They exposed the racist HUAC as Nazis, turning the hearings into an attack on capitalism and on the liberal Johnson Administration, accusing it of mass murder in Vietnam and racist policies in the U.S.
That was the last straw. Three years of bold  PL actions led to HUAC’s demise as an official Congressional committee.
From our beginning, PL has stood at the forefront of attacking racism and imperialism, fighting back against every attack the bosses can throw at it. The lessons of all these struggles are that it’s necessary to anticipate ruling-class attacks and develop alternative plans to defeat them. <any different avenues of struggle must be employed to smash the bosses. Dare to struggle! Dare to win! Be bold! Always be guided by the principle of acting in the best interests of the working class. Grow stronger through struggle. Ruling-class terror will never destroy the communist movement.