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!
Friday, July 9, 2021 at 5:42PM New York City, June 26—There is an opportunity for growing class consciousness in the fight against anti-gay and anti-trans sexism. The Pride events this year had slogans against “Rainbow Capitalism.” We need to take it one more step further.
Friday, July 9, 2021 at 5:37PM "Whose neck shall I stand on to make me feel superior, and what will I have out of it? I don't want anything lower than I am. I am low enough already. I want to rise and to push everything up with me as I go."
These are the words of Rosaura Quintero, a working-class woman, zinc miner’s wife and one of the central characters in Herbert Bieberman’s film Salt of the Earth (1954). Based on a true story the film, which captures the valiant struggle of zinc miners on strike and the leadership of their wives, contains powerful lessons about the power of anti-sexist and anti-racist class fightback against the exploitive mining industry. However, few know the dramatic struggle that was waged to make the movie and to show it to broader audiences. That relatively unknown struggle is also the subject of Biberman’s book Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film.
The book reveals that Salt of the Earth, finished in 1953,was made by film workers who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era witch hunt due to their pro-communist politics or affiliations. The Hollywood film industry, not content with driving these workers out of jobs, did everything it could to stop Salt of the Earth. Despite the film’s radical working-class politics and the film maker’s ties to communism, both works conceal the most important lesson for the working class: workers need communism in order to rise above the misery of capitalism as Rosaura’s quote poignantly illuminates.
The story of getting this film made is ably told by Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten sentenced to jail for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hollywood began by refusing to give Biberman's Independent Productions Corporation (IPC) a union crew. This was done through Roy Brewer, International Representative of the stage workers union (IATSE). Brewer built his entire career as a professional anticommunist in the labor movement (the Wikipedia article on him makes this crystal clear).
When IPC got a union crew anyway, Hollywood got Congressman Donald Jackson to denounce the filmmaking, starting an intense campaign to stop it. The lab that had developed the film refused to finish the job. In addition, armed vigilantes made their appearance, as Biberman describes:
From the other side of the ranch house a shot was fired. But it was not our guard; it was too far away. We waited. Another shot was heard coming from what seemed to be our side of the gully.
Besides describing the courageous struggle of individual miners and filmmakers at the height of McCarthyism, this book also shows how the rotten politics, infected with reformism and landslides back into capitalism, of the old Communist Party led to the sellout of our class struggle.
For example, the only thing Biberman and the leaders of the miners union could think to do was call in the state police and dissolve in slobbering praise to the independent businessman who stand up to monopoly capitalism, like this:
America's chances for a democratic future were indeed good. America possessed one very meaningful attribute. It was so diverse in the composition of its human inhabitants . . . It also possessed businessmen who believed business was a way of making a living and not a cider-press to squeeze sovereignty out of a people. And it had a few businessmen who were so independently individualist that you attempted to organize them into a conspiracy at the peril of your life.
The main weakness of Salt of the Earth, both the movie and its accompanying book, is that it purposely omits the communist message that workers will lose anything they win unless they fight for and win communism. Reformist politics will never free the working class.
Although the book is riddled with rotten politics it does not negate its good points. In addition to the inspiring struggle just to make the film, the book also explains how the film was made, and this is perhaps the most important thing the modern communist moveщment can learn from it
The script for the movie was written by Michael Wilson, a blacklisted screenwriter. Wilson read the script to the miners, whose lives were laterportrayed in the film, and they made changes in it to make it true to themselves. For example:
Then he discussed another scene in the treatment. Just before the strike began Ramon, with part of his last pay check, knowing it was to be the last in quite a while, bought a bottle of whiskey. The men had no time to comment on the scene before the women objected. 'Our husbands are not drunkards,' they said. 'That goes out too,' said Mike. 'You see,' he said to us, ‘these are perfectly legitimate dramatic scenes and illustrations. In [a] script in which you are after a drama for its own sake, they'd be perfectly able. But we're dealing with something else.’
The miners were also given authority over the shooting of the film. What evolved was а film collective, made of professional Hollywood filmmakers and zinc miners. The collective was made up of Black, Latin, Native American and white workers. Biberman acknowledges the leadership given bу the mostly non-white miners. Speaking of Mrs. Molano, who plays Mrs. Salazar in the film, he writes:
One day, when I was rather beaten with problems, she came to me and said, “When you feel discouraged in your life afterwards, you come to us. We will always give you courage. Because we always have our backs against the walls, we have never а way to go but forward. We cannot afford to be downhearted. You will finish the picture.
In addition to the story of the struggle to make the film, the book also includes the screenplay, and stills from the movie.
When read with a critical eye—with a willingness to learn from an important struggle by communists of the past, to learn from their mistakes but also from their courage, antiracism, and perseverance—it is an inspiring story.
Herbert Biberman. “Salt of the Earth”, The Story of a Film. Illustrated edition. Harbor Electronic Publishing, 2003 (originally Beacon Press)
Friday, July 9, 2021 at 5:34PM As CHALLENGE goes to press on July 7, President Jovenel Moïse of Haïti was assassinated. At this time very little is known about the killers or why they took that action. The rumor mill has postulated that it was the U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) that carried out the killing, with armed agents speaking English and Spanish demanding that Moïse go into exile and when he refused, opened fire. Or maybe it was paid mercenaries by the opposition politicians. What we do think is that this seems to be a dogfight
Friday, July 9, 2021 at 5:29PM New Jersey, July 6–What’s in a name?” asks Juliet in Shakespeare’s famous play Romeo and Juliet. Well, actually, quite a lot. What you call something has a lot to do with how you think about it.
Some words, like racist or sexist slurs, do not encourage thought but simply harden the dehumanizing psychological categories that enable the bosses to divide and rule. Other words we use, though, can open up new ways of thinking about the world—or, conversely, set limits to our understanding. While a phrase like “great power conflict” obscures the causes of wars, for instance, the word “imperialism” encourages us to analyze the root economic causes of the violence causing mass impoverishment, uprooting, starvation, and murder.
Friday, July 9, 2021 at 5:20PM They showed the horror and yet provided hope from their experiences and knowledge. It was a beautifully powerful example of
Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 7:21AM Top imperialist gangsters recently gathered at their annual Group of 7 (G7) summit in Cornwall, England in hopes of reasserting the declining U.S.-led liberal world order. The U.S. Big Fascist servant Joe Biden scrambled to slow the rise of arch imperialist rival China.
When the world’s greatest thieves make future plans, workers must remain vigilant. The G7 global gangsters’ planning meeting is a small window into the savage nature of global imperialists. When the U.S. rulers advertise their toxic reunion as an effort to defend “democracy” and “renewed cooperation” to “solving the world’s problems,” they are negotiating war plans. That is the only way exploiters can resolve their imperialist contradictions.
Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 7:20AM Upper Marlboro, MD, June 14—Over 40 people rallied at the Upper Marlboro courthouse with the Archie Elliott III Coalition for Justice to fight racist police terror and fire corrupt cops. Many protesters correctly realize that the police are enforcers of the exploitative racist capitalist system. The cops can’t be reformed short of smashing the entire capitalist system with communist revolution. All of us antiracist fighters are determined to continue to mobilize workers and students against the brutal police.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are longstanding partners in the fight against racist police brutality. We were there as usual to help establish the picket line and share CHALLENGE with many of the protesters. We also got contacts from passersby to grow the Coalition and the fight for communist revolution. This rally is a kickoff for monthly “Moral Monday'' actions.
Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 7:18AM One year ago, at the height of 2020’s summer of struggle, celebrations of Juneteenth were embraced amidst an unprecedented global antiracist uprising in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. From New York City (NYC) to California integrated protests erupted, and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined workers chanting “the only solution is a communist revolution.”
While the U.S. ruling class was reeling from this spontaneous, but coordinated and powerful movement, they were also plotting ways to keep the working class in chains. Fast forward to June, 2021 and U.S. President Joe Biden has called to make Juneteenth the first federal holiday since Martin Luther King, Jr. day was added in 1983.
Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 7:17AM NEW YORK CITY, May 28—“Our safety will never come through ethnic cleansing. It will never come through apartheid” said the president of the Jewish Law Students Association of the City University of New York (CUNY) to a militant rally of 300 students and faculty in front of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This rally comes on the heels of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) racist terror-bombing of Gaza, which killed more than 275 people (one-third of them children) and displaced tens of thousands. (SEE CHALLENGE editorial from 6/9)John Jay was targeted because its criminal justice program collaborates with the NYPD and the IDF, and protestors demanded that CUNY cut all ties with Israel.
Saturday, June 26, 2021 at 7:16AM We are here today because of all the hard work we have done through one of the most unconventional and difficult high school experiences in history.
But the truth is, our celebration goes far beyond making it through the past 16 months of covid.
As students in a predominantly Black and Latin school in a racist education system, our high school adversity started four years ago. We have undergone four years of oppressive metal detectors, four years of being told “put your metal items in your bag,” four years of being treated like criminals. Despite the DOE [Department of Education] trying to infect our brains with the false idea that we are not meant to succeed, we’ve fought and won. Our diplomas are our trophies. We are all here proving them wrong.
However, today we are not
;)
