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!
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:05AM The Progressive Labor Party’s growing membership in Pakistan was very active organizing for May Day. We struggled hard to bring all the trade union and student organizations to a single political platform and a large and united demonstration, a goal strongly supported by most workers and students. To some extent, we succeeded.
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:04AM NEW YORK CITY, June 24 — Today members of UAW Local 2320 the Legal Services Staff Association voted to end their six-week strike and return to work. With the deck stacked against them, and knowing that this offer was “as good as it’s going to get” for now, the 270 lawyers, para-legals and clericals accepted a concession contract and resumed representing their poor, mostly black, Latino and immigrant clients. During the strike, PLP was welcomed on the picket lines and dozens of workers were introduced to CHALLENGE.
The workers waged a militant fight. All strikers participated on local strike committees, and the local established a Hardship Fund to cover strikers’ rent, utility and other bills in an emergency. Women played a leading role in the strike. T
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:04AM OUISVILLE, KY, June 20 — The Progressive Labor Party brought ideas of revolutionary change and communism to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), attended by 3,500 people from across the U.S. The weekend’s highlight was an open Party forum that drew several dozen people who’d received a PL leaflet. Their thoughts on the need for communism and a mass party ranged from hostile to curious and receptive. A few thought that real change could come through the capitalists’ “democratic” process.
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:03AM New York City, June 28 — A group of determined protestors, immigrant and citizen workers united and led by PLP, picketed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center today. Chanting “Smash racist deportations, working people have no nations” and “Familias, si, deportaciones, no” we blocked the main entrance and distributed 400 leaflets to supportive passersby. We have recently experienced deportations of our students and friends and we are outraged!
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:02AM BOSTON, June 12 — President Obama campaigned in Roxbury today for liberal Ed Markey, candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The campaign rally was held in Boston’s main black neighborhood in order to take advantage of Obama’s appeal among black workers. Of the many thousands who lined up to hear Obama speak, more than half were black, Latino and/or immigrant. In a silent vigil, a small group of environmentalists held up signs protesting the Keystone oil pipeline, but it was left to a small but bold group of PL’ ers and friends to directly attack Obama as the manager of racist U.S. capitalism.
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:01AM NEW YORK CITY, June 28 — The working class in this city has endured 11 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s racist, anti-student education reform. These policies have accompanied a massive escalation of brutal police tactics against black and Latino youth, anotably stop-and-frisk, and a wholesale assault on the mainly black and Latino unionized city work force. (For the first time in history, every municipal union is without a contract.)
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:01AM PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 28 — If anyone needs a clearer picture of the murderous attacks by U.S. bosses on workers — and the need for a worker-run communist society — two recent events here highlight them.
This month, school bosses said they’re closing 23 public schools (10 percent of the total) and will fire nearly 4,000 teachers and other workers. This assault on workers and students raises the toll of firings since 2011 to more than one-third of the workforce!
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:00AM DETROIT, MI — On June 22, more than 50,000 workers and youth marched here to begin celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. The speech was written at UAW headquarters and first delivered in June 1963, at a march in Detroit to begin building for the August march. Likewise, today’s march kicked off a mass mobilization for Washington, DC on Saturday, August 24. While thousands of marchers came from outside of Michigan, the vast majority were from the Detroit area, brought by the UAW, NAACP and many churches and community organizations.
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:00AM SAN FRANCISCO, July 1 — Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) workers struck today and shut the rail system tight. They’re demanding a 23 percent wage hike while the bosses want workers to pay more for their healthcare and pensions. Oakland City workers also had a one-day strike, shutting Oakland’s downtown (see photo). Bart carries over 400,000 people daily and mainly serves to bring the workforce from outlying areas to Wall Street West — corporations, banks, government offices, retail stores and education buildings concentrated in downtown San Francisco.
Bart is part of eight major unionized transit systems in the Bay Area. Its workers belong to Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555. AC transit workers’ contract (East Bay bus system, ATU Local 192) expired the same day as Bart. So far the leadership of Local 192 and the ATU International have succeeded in dampening the sentiment of many AC workers to strike in solidarity and for their own issues.
Corporate think tanks let the cat out of the bag when they estimated the strike would cost $73 million a day in lost worker productivity. PLP members point to this as a real example of the potential of workers’ power and the bosses’ need of workers’ labor for their profits.
PLP members are building transit solidarity, particularity at AC Transit and MUNI (San Francisco public transit), where we have a long history of organizing. We’re circulating a solidarity pledge for passengers and workers.
Some workers, have taken matters into their own hands by calling in sick, refusing to do extra service or overtime. In contrast, the union leadership has refused to organize anything, leaving members to their own individual decisions. Some passenger groups and non-profits have come forward to unite with transit workers against fare hikes and service cuts. (More next issue.)
Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 2:59AM SAO PAULO, BRAZIL, June 30 — Since mid-June hundreds of thousands of workers have marched in Brazil’s main streets, many inspired by the recent rebellions in Turkey and Egypt. The trigger was a bus and metro fare hike of US25¢ but (as in Turkey) the overall causes are the ever-growing worldwide capitalist crisis. A third of the population of this “emergent world power” lives in extreme poverty.
Feeding the flames of the rebellion, the government is wasting more than 12 million dollars on the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. “We don’t need the World Cup,” reads a banner in a Sao Paulo march. “We need money for hospitals and education.”
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