Progressive Labor Party (United States) - Changes in Thought, Direction, and Approach

Changes in Thought, Direction, and Approach

In the early 1980s the party went beyond opposing nationalism and began to more aggressively develop new political positions that were radically different from any other known version of Marxism-Leninism. Chief among these was the argument that socialism, the accepted transition-phase between capitalism and communism in Marxist theory, was the primary reason behind the reversal of workers' power in the Soviet Union and China and should be abandoned. While seeming excessively radical to some, this position in fact flowed logically from the party's prior rejection of Mao's concept of New Democracy, dismissed by the party as a reactionary "three-stage theory" of first New Democracy, then socialism, then communism. With PLP's subsequent rejection of the socialist stage as equally unnecessary and reactionary, PL's proletarian struggle was reframed as a "fight directly for communism" wherein these intermediate stages would be shunned in favor of widespread understanding and acceptance of fully communist ideology among the masses from the outset.

To PLP, such a strategy of mass participation in communist politics necessitates that current party members build true, deep, honest friendships with workers, rather than viewing such workers simply as potential recruits. In this vein, it advocates "basebuilding," meaning that members should get stable jobs that keep them in touch with the working class — teaching in public school as opposed to private, for example, or working in a welfare office as opposed to a day spa — and should enjoy everyday lives while gradually attempting to win their co-workers, friends and family to respect and join the party.

In terms of its organization, the party has replaced the classic "cadre" conception of a communist party with that of a "mass party", by which it means that the party should not be an elite of "professional revolutionaries" but should be composed of, by, and for the whole working class, where everyone has full knowledge and appreciation of communist principles and action so that they do not allow the party leadership structure to become corrupt. It is one of only a few US-based communist parties to both explicitly struggle towards (in speech and writing) and contain (in its membership and leadership ranks) a multiracial and even majority-nonwhite membership. PL says it believes that revolutionaries cannot claim anti-racism without putting it into explicit practice in their own ranks. Its recruitment strategies within the US typically tend to focus on impoverished and semi-impoverished working-class neighborhoods with majority black and Hispanic inhabitants. In general, very little attention is paid to recruiting members out of general conglomerations like anti-war or G20 demonstrations and the like— while it is true that PLP politically has no particular opposition to recruiting from within the activist community, many of its members and leaders seem to dislike it and to refer to it as, at best, not very fruitful, and at worst as a total waste of time much better spent on working full-time with inner-city workers and youth.

Members are cautioned not to necessarily expect revolution in their lifetimes, but to build for it anyway, so that the working class has the largest and deepest collective participation in revolutionary communist activity and ideas by the time circumstances for such a revolution are ripe. The party still sees the need for a Red Army and an armed populace to defend the new communist society they envision from attack by resurgent ruling classes, and they utilize the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" to refer to this necessity. But since it rejects the socialism stage of communist "struggle", PLP's usage of the term today differs starkly from usage by other communist groups, who generally consider the dictatorship of the proletariat to be synonymous with the classic conception of socialism.

Other than its fight directly for a communist political and economic system, perhaps the biggest change to come from its steep changes in political line is PLP's current belief in a complete and total abolition of money and the wage system immediately upon the seizure of state power by the working class. After PLP's revolution, cash and credit money and all forms of market-based and profit-based exchanges of all types would immediately cease (or if the world were already in shambles due to world war, would simply not be restarted). Members argue that wage differences based on type of work and the retention of a certain amount of competitiveness and elitism under socialism was what led it to turn back into capitalism with time. They see the immediate abolition of money, wages, and other market society elements as an approach that would more easily enable workers to adopt a sense of communist culture, ethics, and morality. Meanwhile, PL fiercely opposes the Theory of Productive Forces espoused by past communists, which it points out placed more emphasis on achieving abundance in socialist societies than it did on actually winning the working class to communist ideology and practice, particularly in the cases of the Great Leap Forward and the Five Year Plans. PLP argues that communism should have been the glue that held these societies together, rather than abundance. In part, the party states:

Who is to say what "abundance" really is? Many working-class people in the U.S. probably live at a higher standard of living than Marx might have predicted -- better health care, longer life span, shorter workday, indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, etc. All of those material things constitute "abundance" on one level, yet we know that it is not enough, because we know of the potential for a better world. We also know that most of the world doesn't even have a fraction of what many U.S. workers have. But even if the whole world lived at this relatively "abundant" level, we would still be fighting to smash the system. The "abundance" by itself does not, and cannot, eliminate selfishness and class divisions.

— Communist Economics, Communist Power (1982)

PLP thinks of itself as having been born out of "the struggle against revisionism" and from that mindset takes several interesting positions regarding the 20th-century communist movement. They believe that the political and economic choices of Joseph Stalin extend back to Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy and were ultimately endemic to the Soviet Union's entire history — i.e., the history of socialism and its concessions to capitalism, which in PLP's view cannot lead to communism. Therefore, they say, regardless of the leader in question, and regardless of whether or not s/he made good political advances in the country or towards the communist movement as a whole (which they believe Stalin did, especially against the Nazis), mistakes were made that were common to all of those leaders, because the faulty theory of socialism was common to all of them. PLP attacks the cult of personality and any "Great Leader" status as anti-working class, and pledges that the elimination of the socialist stage, the retention of the armed dictatorship of the working class to defend against a comeback by the ruling classes, and "confidence in the working class" from the beginning that they can fully understand and utilize openly communist ideas collectively, without having to look to a great figure (or figures) for guidance, will signal much deeper and more profound strides towards communism than socialism could ever have hoped to achieve.

Like virtually all groups descended from Maoism, however, the party supports a positive interpretation of Stalin's legacy. Most members, while allowing that "errors" were made, expressly deny the view of him by mainstream scholars as mass murderer and tyrant, claiming that his leadership helped defeat fascism, that the numbers killed by the policies in his era were far fewer than the many millions widely accepted, and that the rest resulted from a combination of the Russian Civil War, famine, and World War II. Typically, PLP also defends killings unrelated to these factors as ultimately justified to protect the Soviet Union's proletarian dictatorship against spies, Fifth column elements, counterrevolutionaries, and other class enemies. It should again be noted, though, that PLP sees the "lessons" it takes from the past (and the past itself) as only a general blueprint from which to construct a revolution in the future, not as a political safety-net in which to take refuge. In keeping with their Maoist roots, PLP emphasizes action over theory, with study of the latter being education for the former. In this way, they claim to be 'forward-thinking' in ways that other communist groups with similar roots, in their opinion, are not.