Featured

 Progressive Labor Party on Race & Racism

OUR FIGHT

 

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture —  maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.

While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.

Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens. 

Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.

Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.

Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.

Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.

  Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!

 

 

 

 

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:pk4eMMf3x0AJ:progressivelabor.890m.com/+http://progressivelabor.890m.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
« J.E.B Stuart High School: Multiracial Youth Battle Racist Legacy | Main | Turkey: Battleground for U.S., Russian Bosses »
Friday
Aug122016

Phyllis Scheer, Lifelong Warrior

Comrade Phyllis Scheer died on July 25 peacefully in her sleep near her family in Houston, Texas. She was 86.
Phyllis will long be remembered as an anti-racist fighter who lived all aspects of her life as a communist, reflected in her relations within her family, with all those around her and in her unceasing struggle for a communist world. She was part of the group of men and women who founded the Progressive Labor Party. She remained active in the party throughout her life.
Building the Party
In the 1940s and 1950s, Phyllis was a member of the old Communist Party (CP) and showed her commitment to the working class when, in the early ’50s, she left Brooklyn with her family to settle in Buffalo, N.Y., then the largest manufacturing center in the state. She, along with her husband Morty — who went to work in a factory — became part of the CP’s concentration among industrial workers. There she raised her two sons, Ben and Sammy, and joined working-class struggles in the schools and in the community in which they lived.
Soon it became evident to the group of comrades engaged in this concentration that the old CP was abandoning many revolutionary principles, accommodating itself to capitalism, its electoral circuses and its exploitations. Phyllis joined most of this group in quitting the moribund CP and in 1962 organized the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM).

In Buffalo, Phyllis became part of the fights against the ruling class’s anti-communist attacks, especially in routing the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was attempting to oust the communists from the factories. She was part of the drive to collect food and clothing for the heroic miners of Hazard, Kentucky, who were on a wildcat strike against the coal barons. By 1965, this group of comrades led like-minded workers and youth to form a new revolutionary party, the Progressive Labor Party, whose founding convention Phyllis attended. The group from Buffalo was a central part of the core of the new PLP.
Phyllis again demonstrated her commitment to building the Party by responding to its aim to build nation-wide by moving with her husband Morty — then a vice-chairperson of PLP—to establish the Party in San Francisco, where it remains today. It was there that Morty suffered two heart attacks and, after having helped organize the Party in the Bay Area, the family returned to Brooklyn and settled in the Flatbush neighborhood. There, Phyllis participated in militant community struggles, including fighting profit-hungry landlords. By now she had also become a teacher and was active in the teachers’ union.
Model of a Family Collective
In September, 1986, the first of a series of tragedies struck Phyllis: her beloved husband Morty suffered a fatal heart attack and died while he was giving a report to a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee. As Phyllis remarked, “Mort was stricken among the people and the Party he loved.”
Phyllis’s and Morty’s apartment had become a setting for young people in and out of the Party, many of whom were teenagers “in rebellion” against their parents.  There they learned from the positive example of the closeness existing between Phyllis’s sons and their parents. Her hospitality made its mark on many visitors, illustrating how a communist family lives out its principles every day.
As her sons grew older and eventually left the home, Phyllis continued her activities in the community and the union. She proudly marched in the May Days organized by the Party in Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
Then, having survived the sudden death of her husband, two more tragedies struck Phyllis — both her sons, Sammy and Ben, died of heart attacks in their fifties. Not many families could endure such adversity but Phyllis’s strengths won out. With the help of her comrades and her devotion to fighting the evils of capitalism, a life-long struggle, Phyllis continued her life as a communist. She now had two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law in Texas who she visited as often as she could.
Honor Phyllis, Build Communism
In her final years, Phyllis participated in a series of Party study-action groups, lending her experiences to younger people who were influenced to join PLP by the understanding she brought them from her life of struggle. Sometimes she would express to them her feeling that because of her physical inability to join militant actions with them, maybe she should withdraw from the group. But they cried, “No! No! We need you and your insights on how to react to all the ups and downs of political and personal struggle.” She was convinced and remained as long as physically possible.
Phyllis’s ability to interact with the workers and youth around her, as well as within her family, is a lesson of how to influence all those we know to fight for a society in which the working class will rule. Phyllis’s life stands as an outstanding example of why communism will win. We can honor her by building and funding the Party she loved.

PrintView Printer Friendly Version

EmailEmail Article to Friend

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>