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, March 18, 2010 at 4:21PM BROOKLYN, NY, February 23 — Over 200 students, staff and community members from Long Island University participated today in a conference on the situation in Haiti, organized by faculty members. Reports were given by several people who had gone to Haiti since the earthquake, including an LIU student who works as an EMT.
Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 4:20PM It appears that capitalism’s Great Recession has created such long-term unemployment that it is leading to “a crisis of historic proportions,” says the policy director of the National Employment Law Project. (NY Times, 2/21)
Of the 15 million “officially” unemployed, 6.3 million have been out of work for more than six months, the highest total since such numbers have been tracked (1948). It is already double the amount of the previous worst record, in the 1980s.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:15PM March 8 is International Women’s Day (IWD), symbolized by the 1908 New York City march of 15,000 women demanding better pay and shorter hours. In 1910 the Socialist Second International held the first International Women’s Conference and established International Women’s Day. It has since celebrated many women’s struggles — including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the women’s march to the municipal Duma (council) in Czarist Russia in early 1917, which helped spark the Bolshevik Revolution.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:14PM CALIFORNIA, February 17 — University campuses in this state have erupted against the racism sparked by a racist “Compton cookout party” that mocked black history month. The so-called “Cookout” urged all participants to wear chains, cheap clothes and speak very loudly. Female participants were encouraged to be “ghetto chicks.”
Students at UC San Diego led the way with a series of protests and walkouts condemning the “cookout.” Days later a noose was hung in the school library and more protests erupted.
Thus far, the anti-racist campaign has spread to other colleges in the UC system. At UC Irvine demonstrating students were arrested after a sit-in at the Chancellor’s office against racism and the budget cuts that face the entire California system. Students at UC Berkeley rebelled against the budget cuts. Many other campuses experienced racist incidents and students have responded with mass protests and related actions.
Many students are linking the racist “cookout” to the decreasing number of black students enrolled each year in the California university system, now down to 2% — victimized by the ending of affirmative action and the lower income resulting from racist unemployment and skyrocketing
tuition costs.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:14PM In office just over a year, Obama has achieved mixed results for his beleaguered U.S. ruling-class masters. On the home front, Obama still struggles to pass heath care “reforms” which they need both for cost-cutting as well as for putting the system under tighter government control to deal with all the competing capitalists in this industry. Globally, however, he works wonders for the billionaire owners of J.P. Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, and allied U.S. imperialists.
For their benefit, liberal Obama has extended the deadly reach of the U.S. war machine in ways right-winger Bush, Jr., could never achieve. He’s added Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Haiti to the ruling class’s ever-expanding theaters of operation. Israel may soon contain U.S. combat units joining forces with its military to deal forcefully with the Middle-East tinderbox (see below). Obama’s Afghan surge is brutally “securing” towns along the route of the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:13PM SAN FRANCISCO, March 1 — Operators in the MUNI transit system, members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 250a, bucked the national trend of accepting concessions negotiated by union mis-leaders. Almost 60% rejected a union leadership demand that we give back $14 million over two years. The TWU leadership’s newsletter boasted, “We are part of the solution” while admitting to “have already given up over $4.5 million in salary savings due to service cuts and other give-backs.” Momentarily, the TWU leadership has lost its ability to sell “deals” with the ideology of fear, as it collaborates with the city’s ruling class to justify cutbacks.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:12PM NEW YORK, NY, February 28 — The MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) is threatening a wave of racist attacks on the city’s transit riders and workers. The agency claims an $800 million budget deficit and is demanding cuts to student metro-cards, layoffs and a possible fare hike in 2011. The MTA also appealed a legally binding arbitration award for city bus and subway workers, denying them raises.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:12PM BOSTON, MA, February 3 — Two weeks after the earthquake in Haiti, it was standing room only at a meeting of the student club, Pizza and Politics, on our community college campus. The initial comments students made showed very little political consciousness. In response to the first discussion question, “Who or what is to blame for the social catastrophe, besides mother nature?” students thought it was ridiculous to introduce a political analysis of the role of imperialism and capitalism in the catastrophe. Many, including Haitian-Americans, reflected the same racism in their comments that are implied by TV and radio announcers; “Haitians are crazy,” meaning that in the face of chaos, Haitians will resort to a dog-eat-dog mentality.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:11PM Obama invaded Haiti to secure U.S. capitalists’ access to energy supplies, not to aid the working class there, as token relief efforts show. (See CHALLENGE, 3/3.) Haiti may itself possess significant oil and gas reserves. Bloomberg News (2/26) reports, “The January 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface….
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5:11PM NEW YORK CITY, February 19 — More than 180 CUNY professors, staff members and students packed the union hall tonight for an “Evening of Solidarity with the People of Haiti.” The event kicked off with a delicious dinner of Haitian food, and continued with traditional Haitian folk music performed by a classical guitarist. Members of the union’s International Committee distributed a sheet of brief commentaries on Haiti from radical historians and novelists like Jacques Stephen Alexis.
;)
