Progressive Labor Party (United States)

Progressive Labor Party (United States)

The Progressive Labor Party (originally the Progressive Labor Movement and often referred to as PL) is a transnational communist party based primarily in the United States. It was formed in the fall of 1961 by members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) who felt that the Soviet Union had betrayed communism and become revisionist and state capitalist. Founders also felt that the CPUSA was adopting unforgivably reformist positions, such as peaceful coexistence, turning to electoral politics and hiding communist politics behind a veneer of reform-oriented causes.

The party advocates a "fight directly for communism" political stance that includes limited aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat but virulently rejects the standard conception of the socialist economic transition-stage as a mistake of the 'old movement'. Its revolution would be followed immediately by a working class-ruled, moneyless society, with policy to be administered by hundreds of millions of workers through Party locals worldwide, coordinated through several tiers of membership meetings and forums. It hopes to recruit these numbers "before the revolution", a phrasing they use to provide contrast to what they say was the habit of past communist parties to recruit the mass of its members during and after their revolutions, the latter of which they consider a failed strategy. The party has also stated numerous times and in numerous contexts, mostly in regards to lesser evil, how "workers must never again share power with class enemies" the way they did during the original movement.

Accordingly, PLP's greatest point of pride is how much it considers itself to have evolved in a positive direction away from the old communist movement. It constantly criticizes many aspects of the history of communism, and also criticizes itself in relation to how closely current policies may resemble past failed ones, which it calls "right opportunism." While still taking cues from the past revolutionaries it admires, the party sees itself as being at the forefront of a new type of working class communist liberation that will truly carry the revolution through to fruition for the first time. It also espouses a unique approach to the issue of the Communist International, saying that instead of separate communist parties in each country, the revolutionary organization should be one monolithic, multiracial, cross-cultural PLP, with branches and collectives all over the globe.

To accomplish its goal of communism, the party feels it first must recapture the power and influence that the 1930s-era CPUSA once had — i.e., being the largest and most politically influential communist party in the country — and to combine that influence with its mix of New Left-tinged communist thinking, thereby making a new "mass party of the working class" that can gain momentum across the entire world.

In spite of this revolutionary fervor however, PLP's most recent self-assessment of its political line is noticeably reflective, and even somewhat sober, stating that "he most significant error our Party made was to underestimate the significance of the old movement’s collapse." The party praises its own 1980s analysis as what enabled them to be 'advanced' enough to survive the dissolution of the Soviet Union, alleging that "these advances were vital ideological contributions to the arsenal of revolutionary communism." But while "we correctly identified the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union and China" (see Chinese economic reform and peaceful coexistence for what is meant here), the party says that through the years its own ranks "failed...to understand the devastating consequences that this development would have on the revolutionary process world wide and the new life it would breathe into U.S. imperialism. In the decade and a half since the Soviet Union’s voluntary break-up, U.S. rulers have received a blank check to wreak murder and mayhem in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The end of socialism, and the...removal of the USSR as a key rival imperialist superpower, also enabled the U.S. rulers to dodge many of capitalism’s inevitable contradictions. Even more critical," the party writes, "it has had a chilling effect on class struggle all over the world." It is perhaps clear via this document that the extent of PL's "long-range view" for communist revolution is much longer now than at any time in the past.