Build International PLP — SMASH BOSSES’ BORDERS

Beginning with our May 6 issue, CHALLENGE has run a series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. These articles have described the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers; the fight against racism; our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement; the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba; the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Here we will review the Party’s championing of internationalism.
Progressive Labor Party advanced a tradition of communist internationalism that began with the First International and the Paris Commune of 1871. We have carried the torch of internationalism to its logical and necessary conclusion: one world, one class, one Party fighting directly for communism. No retreats along nationalist lines!
PLP is an international communist party because the working class is one class everywhere, with a universal class interest. Since workers produce everything of value, we can collectively determine how to share it according to need. We don’t need bosses, a class that steals most of that value through wage slavery. We stand for the abolition of capitalism; we fight to eliminate racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Our internationalism means working-class unity that follows the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
It means a united working class led by one mass, international Party containing hundreds of millions of communist workers. We reject the call by various national “communist” parties for nationalist “roads to socialism.” This formulation is drawn from capitalist-created countries that divide the international working class and negate its universal class character.
Unlike the old communist movement, PLP does not separate along nationalist lines. Though our circumstances and tactics may differ in the U.S. and East Africa, our political line for communist revolution is the same everywhere. We oppose nationalism, which leads to workers uniting behind “their” capitalist bosses and fighting “foreign” or immigrant workers. The concept of two opposing, worldwide classes — workers against bosses — is fundamental to destroying capitalism and establishing communism.
PLP Grows Worldwide
The following are just some of the struggles that reflect the Party’s internationalist practice:
In 1964, in solidarity with the workers and youth of Vietnam, PLP formed the May 2nd Movement to oppose the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam. We organized the first mass demonstration against the war under the slogan, “U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Vietnam!” This slogan eventually was adopted by millions, challenging the calls by liberals and phony leftists to “Stop the Bombing” and “Negotiate,” neither of which indicted U.S. imperialism (see CHALLENGE, 8/12).
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, PL’ers joined the military to win soldiers to refuse to kill their sisters and brothers in Vietnam and instead to turn the guns against the U.S. ruling class.
During the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, PLP organized support campaigns, bringing miners to the U.S. to speak at rallies and on campuses. They exposed the brutal policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who ordered police attacks on strikers and laid off tens of thousands.
In El Salvador, PLP recruited from among former fighters for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, after the FMLN became an electoral party that betrayed the revolution.
In Palestine-Israel, PLP joined mass demonstrations against Israeli rulers’ demolition of Palestinian villages. We fought sub-standard wages enforced by slave traders and exposed the rulers’ racism perpetrated against immigrants from Africa.
In Mexico, PLP members in the teachers’ union fought government attacks to break their strikes and cripple the schools through privatization.
In East Africa, PLP is organizing among students and teachers and waging anti-sexist struggles.
In Colombia, PLP mobilized striking workers, from refrigerator factories to beer factories. PLP’s revolutionary line was so threatening to revisionists [fake leftists] and bosses alike that death threats to our comrades were common.
In Haiti, we grew from a club of trade unionists and students to one embedding itself into the agricultural working class. PLP fought against MINUSTAH, the UN occupation force that triggered the spread of cholera, as well as racist deportations and inadequate sewage and plumbing systems.
In Pakistan, PL’ers organized aid for workers devastated by an earthquake, while the government abandoned the victims. We are fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks, especially on super-exploited women working in subhuman conditions and earning little or no pay.
With the advent of U.S. imperialist assaults on the working class in Afghanistan and Iraq, PL launched campaigns attacking the murders of millions by U.S. rulers, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Pickets were organized at embassies in U.S. cities. PL’ers enlisted in the military to spread the Party’s ideas among soldiers in Iraq and to oppose attacks on working-class families there.
Spreading Solidarity and Ideology
PLP has organized international solidarity for local struggles. Comrades in Haiti wrote letters of solidarity to City University of New York students during the campaign to oust war criminal David Petraeus from campus. In Brooklyn, PLP rallied in immigrant neighborhoods in response to racist deportations in the Dominican Republic.
Word of PLP’s actions and communist ideology have spread across the world, both through immigrant workers from Latin America and through CHALLENGE on the internet. Today, CHALLENGE is printed in English, Spanish, French, Creole, Arabic, Hebrew, Dari, Urdu, and more.
One Class, One Fight for Communism
The world we fight for is one where workers’ power will reign supreme. A communist world will wipe out borders created by the bosses to reap more profits from exploiting those they call “foreigners.” It will eradicate imperialist wars, which the rulers launch to grab resources and cheap labor. In a communist world, there will be no foreigners, no “illegal” migrants, no refugees from war or poverty.
While the reformists continue to fragment themselves with the identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, or national loyalties, PLP unites ALL workers, based on class consciousness. Over the last 50 years, our staunch internationalism made has helped us grow from an organization with a handful of workers in New York to a Party that spans 27 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. That is no small victory! Forward to another 50 years of communist organizing that puts the international working class above the individual.
Workers in Senegal has the same interest as workers in China or Chile or the U.S.: a society that will meet their class’s needs. An egalitarian, communist world. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for yourselves, for your children and for future generations.
We have a Party to organize and a world to win!