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, April 13, 2023 at 5:12PM NEWARK, NJ, April 12—For the first time in its 250-year history, a coalition of Rutgers workers— 9,000 graduate workers, adjuncts, and part-time lecturers (PTL)— called a strike on what would have been communist Paul Robeson’s 125th birthday.
Saturday, February 18, 2023 at 7:37PM NEW JERSEY, February 7—“I know we should try to stop police brutality, but it seems like all these revolutions we are learning about show us we need a more revolutionary approach.” This was the conclusion a college student in New Jersey shared while summarizing an event featuring multiracial women and men student leaders from Kingsborough Community College (KCC) in Brooklyn, New York. KCC students gave a presentation and a skit reenacting the racist attacks on students by college public safety officers (see article in 11/17/22 CHALLENGE) and participated in discussions with over 50 New Jersey college students. One thing became clear: students are eager to challenge the racist and sexist system. Antiracist fightback is spreading, and the more it spreads, the more this racist, sexist, imperialist capitalist system is doomed.
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 5:18PM
NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK CITY, June 4—The Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Languages Association) organized a session, “’Democracy’ in a Time of War,” in recognition of the fact that workers worldwide are becoming more aware of the deadly nature of capitalist democracy and open to ideas of communist revolution. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) emphasized and supported the most internationalist, pro-working class ideas of this discussion, while putting forward the idea that a workers’ communist party is the only way to advance the cause of workers’ democracy. This session took place as part of the “Keywords project,” which regularly brings MLA people together to critically examine concepts important to antiracist- and anti-capitalist struggle.
break mental vs manual labor—all workers use philosophy
Three progressive scholars briefly analyzed the term from different points of view—how Karl Marx thought about democracy, what W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction, and how the term “democracy” is weaponized in U.S. war propaganda today. PLP was there with our MLA Radical Caucus friends as co-organizers and co-questioners. Our base at the event included professors, a K-12 teacher, a group from the PSC/CUNY left, a philosopher of art in Berlin, and a comrade who called this in from the tow-truck he was driving on Route 80: “Most working people I know are totally cynical about democracy. They, in a completely organic way, find it to be a tool of elites.” This was one of the most significant statements made at the entire conference, and it set the stage for PLP to help put forward the call for organizing a party and not leaving these conversations in the realm of the purely academic.
The first presenter said that Marx doesn’t discuss democracy much but does focus on the closely related keywords freedom and equality, “key features of capital’s self-image” and ideology. Marx sees freedom dialectically: more of humanity is formally free under capitalism than in serfdom or slavery—which is why progressives including Marx fought against slavery and for universal suffrage. Liberal democracy does not liberate workers, the speaker continued, because capital first “frees” or separates workers from their own means of production. A “Marxist conception of democracy” must attack the impersonal economic domination of capital, which operates as Marx often said “behind our backs,” behind the appearances of political democracy in the state. But, the speaker concluded, our project of workers’ liberation from capitalism cannot avoid the terms freedom, equality, and democracy: “We must struggle to supersede capital from within capital” and reclaim the promise of democracy from its capitalist distortion and for the immense majority.
Du Bois, for his part, decried the loss of power by workers freed from slavery as Northern capitalists and former enslavers took all political power from them and smashed the Reconstruction of the South. The presenter said that what Du Bois revealed about Northern capital’s racist power grab in the South was the start of U.S. imperialist racism moving to do the same thing to workers globally, across the “Global Color Line.” “Abolition democracy” to Du Bois meant that any real democracy was impossible without the abolition of “property relations,” that is, really, capitalism, though he didn’t join the Communist Party till near the end of his life.
He ascribed the destruction of workers’ power in Reconstruction to bourgeois panic at the idea of the freed enslaved people and the proletariat banding together with real power. So much for democracy when it threatens the right to own and exploit labor. The direct, personal power of the enslaver was replaced “behind our backs'' by the economic domination of the owner of capital.
Workers need democratic centralism
The lively Chat brought up Mao Zedong’s theory of “New Democracy,” or “People’s Democracy,” which PLP sees as one of the roots of revisionism (abandoning communism) in the Chinese Communist Party, combated in the Cultural Revolution by views taken from the 1871 Paris Commune.
Democratic centralism needs to be explained in greater depth. What is the dialectic between mass participation and the local, on the one hand, and synthesizing leadership at the center, on the other? Here’s an excerpt from a key PL document, “For Communist Economics and Communist Power”
For the “democratic” part, one meaning is that there should be full discussion of a proposal before a decision is made. Another meaning is that decisions should be made in the interests of the working class, and in a way that not only will benefit the working class, but also train more and more working-class people to contribute to the running of the society….The word "centralist" means that after a decision is made, everyone should work to carry it out, whether or not they agreed with the decision. all centralism is for the purpose of building a society free of privilege and exploitation, based on "from each according to his ability, to each according to need." and developing the consciousness of the people to be able to implement that.
See www.plp.org for the full version. There is much writing about this which we did not take up here.
We ended by noting that armed imperialist democracy turning the world into its battlefield is a living refutation of the lies and illusions widespread about democracy under capitalism. The presenter on Du Bois spoke for us all, sick of the slaughter in Yemen and Ukraine and Buffalo and Uvalde, when he said: “When people in the Global South hear the word democracy, they shudder, because they know what is about to be dropped on them is not leaflets.” The work of questioning brought us together in a powerful way. It strengthened us for the fights ahead as democracy shades into fascism.
The discussion maybe brought some friends closer to seeing the need to join and build PLP. When campuses return in-person, Radical Caucus members can carry some of these insights into work on campus, such as teach-ins on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, where “democracy” means Javelins and Stingers and heavy artillery. A communist democracy means the working class running society based on need and commitment.
democracy, higher education, mla 
;)
