Progressive Labor Party (United States) - Formation of The Party

Formation of The Party

By 1965 PLP had also attracted sufficient membership that it changed its designation from 'Movement' to 'Party'. Within a few years, the nascent party had become the largest communist faction within SDS and a major player in the student movement's internal politics. Their politics were received with either disgust or admiration within SDS, but no one denied their massed presence and vigorous work in working-class neighborhoods. When a New York City Police Department policeman, Gilligan, killed an unarmed black youth in Harlem, the neighborhood erupted in intense violence, and PLP led these riots and its leaders were arrested and arraigned for this activity. Against that politically polarizing backdrop within the already intense worldwide movement against social injustice, various anti-PLP SDS factions took to developing their own interpretations of communist ideology and formed what it named the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), while PL, in its own right, was busy organizing its supporters into their Worker Student Alliance (WSA) from 1966 to 1969. The competing SDS factions did not get along peacefully; clashes between them were chronic and bitter, and would ultimately result in an irrevocable split of SDS into separate organizations and, shortly thereafter, the expiration of SDS itself.

By the middle of the 1960s the party was arguing that its experiences from the Harlem rebellion onward had slowly convinced them to abandon advocacy of ethnic nationalism as a politically appropriate route to workers seizing state power, but it did not set out this new conviction in official Party doctrine until 1969, when it came out openly with an organization-wide document called Revolutionaries Must Fight Nationalism. This document, immediately controversial, reached the conclusion that all nationalism, both nation-state-based nationalism and ethnic nationalism among oppressed minorities, was ultimately reactionary — that it was akin to identity politics at home, like with the Black Panther Party, and weakened any communist character of national-liberation struggles abroad, like with the Vietnam War.

The new position was greeted with open hostility and even rage among most of the non-PLP-supporting SDS, especially RYM, who interpreted it as anti-working class and even implicitly racist and refused to accept it. RYM thought that PL was categorically rejecting the political right of groups of everyday people to self-determination. PL's attempted explanations that it was the political, not the personal, side of nationalism that it was rejecting were also refused by their opposition. The rage on RYM's end and continued defense of the position on PL's end could not, and did not, hold SDS together for long.

In the end, the PL/WSA wing did indeed win majority support at the 1969 SDS national convention in Chicago. RYM, as it turned out, had teamed with the Black Panther Party to engage in deceptive tactics in the conference which deflated their political reputation and lessened the political impact of the split. However, the Weatherman organization still successfully usurped the SDS name and public face through 1970 despite its defeat at the conference, and retained control of the SDS National Office until it decided to dissolve it, close the headquarters, and break off to become a violently revolutionary organization on its own. PLP alone ultimately did not have the strength to lead the SDS chapters it had successfully kept going, and so its wing buckled and collapsed a few years later — although not before a new group, the Committee Against Racism (CAR), was formed to replace it. CAR was composed at first of mostly WSA student members and the black and Hispanic workers in the off-campus neighborhoods that had been recruited to WSA; over time it expanded somewhat and also founded chapters in other countries.

Even so, the general crisis of the entire United States New Left by 1975 only accelerated the eventual failure of PLP's ability to hold on to the SDS name and orientation. As tensions increased, PLP's remaining campus members and supporters were known to engage in particularly heated shouting matches and even occasional mutually provoked fistfights with Weathermen and Chicano nationalists the Young Lords, as well as other smaller groups that would occasionally try to intimidate them, like the early grouping led by Lyndon LaRouche. Also, the party experienced internal split-offs; several significant PLP collectives left as the 1970s progressed. While not reduced to being inoperable or insignificant, it shrank and became more fractious even as it ratcheted up its work. According to this chronology, "the majority of the Boston chapter had left in 1974" and in April 1977 "70% of the Bay Area chapter of PLP" also left the organization, "just about the only remaining one with significant mass work" (O'Brein, Five Retreats). Meanwhile, some of the party's more widely influential members drifted away as well, including Bill Epton, PLP's vice chairman and Harlem branch leader, who presumably could not reconcile his own politics to that of PLP's rejection of nationalism in 1969.

Though in the 1960s PL was widely regarded as the torch-bearer of Maoism within SDS, it had never really seen itself as a hard-line follower of Mao Zedong; indeed, even early on, PLP's political line differed sharply from Maoism on fundamental points. It was briefly the subsidized fraternal party to China, but broke that relationship in 1967 and reacted particularly harshly to the news of Mao meeting with President Richard Nixon in 1972, denouncing Mao as revisionist. Claims to Maoism in the United States thereafter passed to other groups, most notably the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. Briefly in the early 1970s, PLP continued to offer limited tacit support to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in a fraternal party relationship.