Comrade Bob Leonhardt, one of the early leaders of the Progressive Labor Party, died peacefully on April 6 of complications from amyloidosis. A lifelong, militant, anti-racist fighter, Bob devoted his life to serving the working class in the struggle for communist revolution. He was 72 years old.
Bob seemed destined for a star professorship at an elite ruling-class university. However, his life took a turn in the 1960s at Harvard University where he met the Party and was active in Students For a Democratic Society (SDS). Instead of becoming an ideological weapon of the ruling class, Bob chose the path of communism. He advanced the PLP-led Worker-Student Alliance, bringing campus workers and students together in the fight against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Then he helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass organization affiliated with the Party, which launched battles against the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. INCAR’s history remains an important influence on PL’s practice today.
Battling Racism
Bob understood that the overthrow of the profit system is a long-term process. It means forging unbreakable personal ties with many people and winning them to a revolutionary outlook through class struggle. Bob did so wherever he went. When Boston’s rulers lured white working-class families to racism and away from integrated public schools, Bob helped lead our Party’s Summer Project counterattack, including a violent battle to integrate Carson Beach. Thanks to his work and that of other intrepid comrades, PL grew.
In the 1970s, when academic racists like William Shockley were at large on campuses throughout the U.S., Bob exposed their poisonous ruling-class ideology in debates and articles—and on picket lines attacking their college-sponsored speaking appearances. In a classic debate at Columbia University, he wiped the floor with “free speech” advocate Nat Hentoff. He championed our Party’s firm and enduring position: “No Free Speech for Racists!”
A lifelong teacher, Bob spoke French like a native and headed the French-American School of New York. He showed how PLP teachers could use the classroom, no matter what the subject, to teach communist ideas by revealing the contradictions of capitalism. Most important, he taught countless current Party activists crucial lessons in our theory and practice.
Bob was a prolific writer for PL Magazine, especially about dialectical materialism. In the late 1960s, he became editor of CHALLENGE and continued to write for the paper for decades afterward. Always committed to building PLP, comrade Bob left New York in the mid-‘70s to head the Party and InCAR in the Boston area, leaving his advanced studies to become a public school teacher. There he helped lead the 1975 anti-racist Summer Project that fought the racist organization ROAR, which opposed integrating schools. The result was the demise of ROAR.
Paving the Road to Revolution
As part of a PL collective, Bob played an important role in framing our Party’s core documents, including Road to Revolution IV. More recently, in Dark Night Shall Have Its End, he contributed to a dialectical assessment of our class’s revolutionary prospects after the collapse of the old communist movement. He was relentless in attacking liberal misleaders and in warning against right-wing opportunism.
Even as Bob fought the condition that finally brought him down, he remained alert and thoughtful about the politics that shaped his life. A few days before he died, he emerged from a coma with a list of ideas for articles for Party publications.
PLP has no cult heroes. We do, however, have abiding, guiding principles that Bob Leonhardt honored and upheld throughout his too-short life. We shall serve our class well by following his example.
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‘The Best Thing in My Life…’
CHALLENGE conducted a series of interviews with Bob Leonhardt in the year before his death. Here are some excerpts:
Mao once said, it took a good ten years for an intellectual to become a communist. Throughout my life, I always found myself tempted by the attractions of a bourgeois career. It was nice being the head of a school, but if I had really wanted to be at the top of the heap, whether it was law or academia, there’s a lot of things I could have done.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be both a Nobel Prize-winner and Lenin, right? By having me do certain things, like quitting Columbia when I could have been getting my Ph.D., or sending me to Boston [to become a public school teacher], [PLP co-founder] Milt Rosen in particular was trying to get me to see that my career was really the Party and the work.
Am I sorry I made the choice I made? That’s a question I used to ask myself a lot. Was it right not to have the academic career or be the big shot or make all the money that I probably could have made? When I put it to myself in that way, I never hesitated for a second in thinking it was the right thing to do. The best thing in my life was—and remains—being in the Party. For whatever modest contribution I may have made. The only doubts I had were over whether I would have enough political stamina to stick with it.
Everybody has to face this question at some point. You’ve got a lot of people, including people in your family, or some of your close friends, who may say to you, “You’re wasting your life. You believe in some beautiful ideas, but you’re not going to accomplish anything.” Many of them are people whom we’d like to win, but they don’t understand what winning is. And winning, unfortunately, is not necessarily seeing the promised land. That’s part of what we have to learn to accept; I’ve made my peace with it.
You can always do more, and you have to criticize yourself all the time, and you have to be aware that you’re not god’s gift to anything. And you better realize that what you’re going to accomplish is going to be limited and modest. But you need to keep fighting. And you better keep studying dialectics to keep you on an even keel.
This is a very long, protracted, difficult struggle—a thousand years, Mao said.
When you look at it that way, it’s all the more reason to say that you’re doing the right thing with your life. What you have to hope is that you stay the course and you don’t budge, and that whatever your weaknesses may be, that you get enough help from other people, your comrades, and from just seeing the wonderful things that ordinary people can do to give you inspiration—to give you the strength to go on.