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 19, 2020 at 10:23PM “We’re not cannon fodder!” cried millions across Italy as wildcat strikes erupted in every major industry to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus disease. Workers were protesting government and corporate attempts to force them to keep the factories open, risking their lives in unsafe factories so the bosses could jam them into cramped assembly lines to pump out profits.
Thursday, March 19, 2020 at 10:22PM April 22, 2020, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, one of the greatest revolutionaries who ever lived. He dedicated his life to the exploited and oppressed of the world: workers, peasants, women, and those especially exploited by colonialism and racism. He dedicated his life to the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of an egalitarian world without racism and sexism. As capitalism ravages the world with wars and now a ruthless pandemic let us all make a contribution to the fight for communism.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:36PM The deadly and destructive nature of global capitalism has been on full display in Australia. Years of drought in the country’s eastern states have sparked some of the worst wildfires in history. Since September 2019, at least 30 people have died and more than 14 million acres have burned, an area nearly the size of West Virginia (New York Times, 1/3). Over one billion animals have perished in the carnage (ABC News, 1/8).
The blame for this devastation lies squarely with the capitalist bosses. They like to deflect responsibility by telling workers that we need to make better lifestyle choices to reverse climate change. In reality, however, it is the rulers’ profit system—and especially their dependence on fossil fuels—that is driving environmental collapse.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:35PM It was out of my Jim Crow experiences as a young Negro woman, experiences likewise born of working-class poverty that led me to join the Young Communist League and to choose the philosophy of my life, the science of Marxism-Leninism—that philosophy that not only rejects racist ideas, but is the antithesis of them. - Claudia Jones
One of the biggest lies the capitalists have ever tried to teach generations of working class people is that Black workers did not play a critical role in communist history. This is because the bosses will ALWAYS try to perpetuate the idea that workers should remain divided by race. However, we know in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) that multiracial unity has ALWAYS been the most effective way for workers to overcome the effects of racial exploitation and oppression. Claudia Jones, a Black female leading member of the Communist Party for decades, represents the heroic efforts in fighting racism and sexism from the 1930s to 1960s, just as her politics also point toward the weaknesses embedded in the strategy of international communism many years ago. The main weakness in the old communist movement that is evident through looking at Claudia Jones is that they did not understand the need for one international party LED by women and Black and Latin workers to unite and fight directly to overthrow capitalism and establish a workers’ state.
Formation as a communist
Like thousands of other workers in the early 1900s, Jones and her family emigrated to New York City from Trinidad in the Caribbean. Jones was an avid student and started writing early on. She had dreams of college, but as a daughter of a garment worker who died too young, she started working herself at a young age. The revolutionary vision and struggle of the communist movement appealed to her, and in 1936 she joined the Young Communist League and became active in the movement to defend the Scottsboro 9, a group of Black teenagers, who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.
A multi-racial, communist-led movement, turned the “Scottsboro Boys” into an international cause of millions of workers all over the world to win their freedom. But just as the communist movement was at its sharpest point of winning workers around the world to workers’ revolution, they began to retreat politically into a “popular front against fascism” and Claudia Jones became part of that larger retreat.
Leadership in the Communist Party USA & fascist McCarthyism
In 1937, Jones joined the editorial staff of the communist Daily Worker, rising by 1938 to become editor of the Weekly Review. After WWII, Jones became executive secretary of the Women’s National Commission, secretary for the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In 1953, she took over the editorship of Negro Affairs, a CPUSA journal. However, if antiracism and internationalism had been the central premise of the CP’s strategy, they would not have had the need for a separate journal to address “Negro Affairs,” because all affairs of the working class are touched by racist capitalism and superexploitation.
Despite the shortcomings of the party’s line, Jones organized women workers and gave leadership within the Communist Party USA on the ways superexploitation of women could become central to the party’s theoretical development. She is perhaps best known for her seminal essay appearing in Political Affairs, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” in which she took to task liberals, progressives and her own party for not sufficiently recognizing the super-exploitation of Black women under capitalism and their leadership in working class struggles, writing:
The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced….Viewed in this light, it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.
In 1948, Jones, along with several other leaders of the Communist Party USA, was charged for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. Over the next seven years, the federal government convicted, imprisoned in Ellis Island and ultimately deported Jones—but not without an international movement launched to free her and thousands of other communist and progressive working class organizers imprisoned during the fascism of the McCarthy period.
Fighting British racism & imperialism
Following WWII, Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom increased and Black and Asian immigrant workers faced brutal racism upon arrival. Signs reading “No Irish, No Coloured, No Dogs” littered the streets of London businesses and apartment buildings for rent. Attacks on Black youth by white mobs and police officers were common. Working in London in the 1950’s and 60’s, Jones, a lifelong communist and self-described Marxist-Leninist, tirelessly organized several antiracist, anti-imperialist campaigns.
Realizing the importance of celebrating working class culture, Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, a popular newspaper that built a base among Caribbean diaspora workers in Britain and back home, with a circulation of 15,000. In 1958, following the killings of Black youths and riots instigated by racist white mobs in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, Jones and others organized a carnival in response to the violence as a means of unifying the Black Caribbean community.
Claudia Jones died in December 1964, her health gutted by the years of political persecution and incarceration in the U.S. Her legacy was immediately felt by working class communities around the world and condolences poured in, from W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and Amy Ashwood Garvey to Mao Zedong, whom Jones had met on a delegation to China. Claudia Jones remains an example of how the leadership of Black workers, especially Black women, is key to the future of building a communist society. Paul Robeson expressed his admiration for Jones thusly:
“It was a great privilege to have known Claudia Jones. She was a vigorous and courageous leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and was very active in the work for the unity of white and coloured peoples and for dignity and equality, especially for the Negro people and for women.” It is fitting that Jones is buried next to Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in London. Following her deportation, Jones wrote:
I was deported from the USA because as a Negro woman communist of West Indian descent, I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans in the United States, in my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights...
As communists we should all be that thorn in the side of capitalism—so sharp as to make it bleed.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:34PM SAN FRANCISCO, CA, February 14—This past Valentine’s Day, a multiracial group of 60 tenants, antiracists, and members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) disrupted the capitalists’ love affair with their latest profit schemes by invading a dinner at the Keystone Social House. The Keystone is a fancy restaurant in a building owned by Mosser Capital, a racist, profiteering real estate developer.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:33PM NEWARK, NJ, March 3—After months of working-class struggle for clean water, the City will provide residents with replacements to lead service lines. The water fight is an important lesson in understanding the difference between reform and revolution. As members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continue to organize workers and youth, it is evident that revolutionary organizing is needed more than ever.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:32PM In the liberal mainstream world, International Women’s Day is hailed as a day for all women to celebrate women’s innate strength, nurturing ability, power to sway legislators, give birth, and challenge sexism by moving into positions of power in the capitalist system.
All these sexist lies conceal the key contributions of militant, communist, working class, women leaders who understood that you can only fight sexism with a multiracial, multi-generational, and most of all, a working-class movement.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:31PM Comrade Joan Heymont died on February 26, surrounded by her family and comrades who had become her family, after a valiant battle against interstitial lung disease. A lifelong communist, Joan was an anchor of the New York City Progressive Labor Party collective and a leader of the Party’s education work around the world.
Joan grew up in Rockaway, Queens, the child of two former Communist Party members. She learned strong working-class values and a fighting spirit from her parents, who helped organize the Rockaway community against displacement of Black communities by the city and support for workers harmed by unsafe working conditions.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:30PM MEXICO, March 3—We live under the capitalist system, where a minority of profit thirsty multi-billonaires steal the wealth socially generated by the majority of the exploited and impoverished working class. In Mexico the Fourth Transformation Government (4T), of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) campaign, and its promise to end corrpution, and massive income disparity plaguing Mexico, is continuing this viscious cycle rather than eradicating it.
Saturday, March 7, 2020 at 4:29PM Washington, D.C., February 6—Progressive Labor Party members have joined a number of rallies and struggles against racist immigration policies, including a recent rally in Washington, D.C. Our goal: show medical professionals that only a strategy with the end goal of communism and revolution can alter the vicious capitalist attacks on workers who are divided from each other by capitalist-formed borders. Our class has no borders, and revolution will abolish them!
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