Progressive Labor Party (United States) - Present-day Activities

Present-day Activities

The party makes a point of celebrating May Day with public marches every year. Historically it held its own marches, on the Saturday closest to the first day of May, to accommodate 5-day-per-week working schedules. This closest-Saturday tradition meant that PL's May Day rally sometimes, but not often, fell on 1 May itself. Today, however, PLP has largely melted itself into the more general immigrants rights-centered International Workers Day marches which claim themselves (since the first such event, in 2006) to be part of a rebirth of an International Workers Day celebration in the United States. PL often marches in these situations the same way they tend to march at rallies they organize themselves — chanting loudly for communist revolution and forming a sea of red flags. Members chiefly claim that involving themselves in the more general marches, rather than hosting their own, gives them more maneuverability, and also more visibility, amongst the larger segments of the working class. Both the historical party-run marches from the 1970s through the early 2000s (decade), and the current marches in which the party now participates as contingents, have always largely been in its most active cities for political activity and recruitment — New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. However, smaller supporting May Day marches sometimes have occurred in less prominent cities and towns. Globally, PLP supporters typically take part in the rest of the world's much larger May Day events as contingents.

In May 2010, the Party claimed to have seeded a study-group club in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories.

It is unknown whether PL has played anywhere near a large enough part in the recent global left-wing Occupy movements to have an impact within that movement under the Party banner; nor is anything similar clear regarding the 2011 Wisconsin protests or the other similar protests responding to parallel initiatives by other US state governors. Their political line would necessitate an assumption on the part of the general public that PL would at least be active enough in the participant unions themselves as members to make some kind of a political impact on the individual or small group level, perhaps recruiting individual union members to participate in and perhaps join the party and/or participate in party marches and rallies; however, despite this strategy being their modus operandi in basebuilding, there is no objective evidence to support any theorized sense of accomplishment.

What is known more solidly is yet-more political theory: In late February 2011 upon the 2011 Egyptian revolution, PL published a fiercely supportive reaction and also called the mainstream media's characterisation of the revolution as nonviolent "lies", asserting instead that revolutionary violence and even a quasi-communistic or at least genuinely populist spirit saturated the entire process. It therefore seems apparent that PL does support the overall people power spirit of the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen etc., even while at the same time (and in characteristic fashion) it qualifies its support somewhat with their classic worry that these revolutions will be quickly co-opted by the forces of the ruling elite and/or that full-fledged capitalism will be inevitably (re)established and popular control and collective self-determination will fade.

The party still vociferously pursues activities opposing racism, some of which are quite militant, even if not all such activities cross the line into violence (which some do). Members who work as teachers, for instance, target policies in the schools that they consider racist, single them out for being so, and sometimes try to launch campaigns involving both teachers and students to oppose those measures (such as metal detectors in schools, or increased police presence in front of or inside school buildings). In society more generally, the party claims that the best way to consistently and tangibly prove its anti-racist nature, given that it does not support ethnic nationalism, is to fight racism physically, through direct action. It led a street battle in Boston in 1975 that broke apart the briefly influential mass anti-desegregation busing group Restore Our Alienated Rights, and repeatedly targeted Arthur Jensen and similar scientific racists through the 1990s, particularly once The Bell Curve came into vogue. The PLP front group International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) at an academic conference in 1977 famously poured a pitcher of water on sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's head while chanting "Wilson, you're all wet". In the 1980s the Ku Klux Klan told the Hartford Courant that "it's because of those commies in InCAR and PLP that our boys are afraid to come out in public wearing their hoods." In 1999, when the KKK tried to hold a rally in Manhattan, a member (misidentified in the media as public school teacher Harvey Mason, but actually public school teacher Derek Pearl) made headlines by infiltrating the Klan members' protest space and using it to punch a Grand Dragon in the face. More recently PLP has also targeted the Minuteman Project and Save Our State.

Today, at least in the United States, the party continues to be most widely known among the general public for its wilfully confrontational and often violent stance of militant anti-fascism against Klan and Nazi groups. Whenever an organized opposition to a racist or fascist rally has not yet been planned, PL will often organize and lead one. The party takes open and intense pride in being the "only organization publicly known for advocating both communism and militancy" in the US. It is also active in anti-police brutality work, public health, public schools, and various types of basic industry, including Boeing. The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 in Washington, D.C. had an open PLP member who was its president for one term and, though he has since retired, for many years exercised substantial leadership and influence in the Local.

Rebuilding in New Orleans has also become a staple of the party yearly "Summer Project" work in the months of July and August, particularly among US East Coast collectives.

PL's biweekly newspaper is Challenge and the parallel Spanish language counterpart Desafío, as well as a semi-annual theoretical magazine, The Communist. In particular, the party's 2005 document Dark Night Shall Have Its End is said to be the most up-to-date representation of overall Party political thought; prior to this, its Road To Revolution documents had acted in that manifesto-type capacity. The party has not published a new Road To Revolution document with party-wide endorsement since Road To Revolution IV in 1982, which marked the start of its pledge to "fight directly for communism" and disown the idea of socialism. There still exists a Road To Revolution 4.5 published in 1996, but support for this document has in recent years been withdrawn by the majority of leading PLP political figures and its contents have been disavowed.