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PL History: Building the Party with Industrial Workers
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- 07 May 2015 149 hits
In our May 6 issue, we published an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. In addition to describing the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — we noted four main principles for organizing a communist movement: a concentration among industrial workers; the fight against racism and sexism; internationalism, with one international party leading the international working class; and the necessity of armed struggle, since the bosses will never cede state power peacefully.
Beginning with this issue, we will revisit specific struggles that helped PLP grow to our current presence in 27 countries on five continents. We begin with our concentration among industrial workers.
The Hazard Miners Solidarity Campaign
In the winter of 1962-63, Black and white miners in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia went on a bitter wildcat strike, rebelling against inhuman working conditions and starvation wages. (Average weekly pay was $25.) The mine owners, police and local officials launched a campaign of terror and scabbing to break the strike. Organizing out of their base in Hazard, Kentucky, five hundred rank-and-file miners armed themselves to prepare for class war. They dynamited bridges and blew up scab mines.
Led by one of our railroad comrades, a local union official, PLM formed the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC) to Back the Hazard Miners. TUSC organized in unions and working-class communities across the country, and workers responded enthusiastically. Truckloads of food, clothing and holiday gifts for miners’ children were shipped to Hazard, along with PL magazines that brought communist ideas to the strikers. A mass meeting in New York drew nearly a thousand workers and students in zero-degree weather to hear the miners’ rank-and-file leader, Berman Gibson.
The bosses went crazy. In a front-page banner outline, the Hazard Herald, screamed: “Communism Comes to the Mountains!” The liberals around President John Kennedy understood the hazard in Hazard: a multiracial group of armed miners uniting with communists to fight the bosses. They responded with a well-funded redbaiting campaign, and sent their anti-communist liberals to take over the Solidarity Committee.
Initially, the miners resisted the anti-communist attack. But as it mounted, Gibson and others retreated and turned to the liberals. After many months, the strike petered out. PLM learned vital lessons from this campaign:
• Workers will arm themselves to defend their class interests when it’s clear to them that armed struggle is necessary;
• Striking workers will respond enthusiastically to bold leadership;
• While the bosses won’t hesitate to use violence to break a strike or rebellion, their most powerful weapon is anti-communism;
• Red-baiting can be defeated only through protracted class struggle where communists give active leadership.
The 1964-65 Longshore Strike
On October 1, 1964, 60,000 members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) struck all ports from Maine to Texas to fight the shipowners’ demand to cut half their jobs. The strike’s impact on U.S. trade impelled President Lyndon Johnson to use a Taft-Hartley injunction to force the strikers temporarily back to work. The government demanded a settlement “within the national interest.” The resulting contract undermined workers’ job security. Anthony Scotto, head of the Brooklyn local (and a “made” member of the Mafia’s Gambino family), called it the “best contract ever.”
All eight New York City daily papers lauded the contract. Only CHALLENGE, PLM’s newspaper, exposed the sellout and called on workers to reject it. The paper was distributed up and down the docks. Many workers asked for extra copies to distribute, despite their union’s anti-communist leadership.
A worker told CHALLENGE that the federal government had been ready to indict the ILA’s gangster-ridden leadership for racketeering, but offered to quash the indictments if the leadership persuaded the rank and file to ratify the sellout contract. When CHALLENGE exposed this deal on its front page, Scotto denounced the paper’s “red lies” at a meeting of over 2,000 longshoremen in Brooklyn. He read the entire flyer out loud. But the workers, hearing the contract detail for the first time, were so enraged that they voted overwhelmingly to reject the contract and go back on strike.
‘Reds Under Their Beds?’
The bosses’ press reported that “communist influence was swaying” the dockers to oppose the contract. ILA president Teddy Gleason blamed “communists” for the rank-and-file rebellion. Scotto pointed to “outside agitators.” The World-Telegram’s front page declared: “Red Hand Seen on the Waterfront.” Victor Reisel, a notorious anti-labor columnist, ranted that “Chinese revolutionaries” were “spreading unrest on the docks” and warned that Mao Tse-Tung was “taking over our great urban centers.”
CHALLENGE ran its own headline: “Dockers Resist Sellout, Bosses See Red!”
Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor ordered the FBI to “investigate communist influence on the New York and Baltimore docks.” A new contract added a few crumbs for workers. A majority of the working longshoremen voted it down, but the misleaders used other trades in the union and retired workers to get it passed, ending a four-month struggle. Containerization was ushered in, and thousands of jobs were lost in the years that followed.
PL’ers learned that workers are less likely to fall for red-baiting or be intimidated by mobsters when they are consciously engaged in class struggle. We also witnessed the importance of multi-racial unity. With Black and white longshoremen working together on the job and in the strike, the bosses were unable to use racism to split and weaken them.
Finally, our experience with the ILA helped PL understand the absolute necessity of being embedded in the working class, rather than working from the outside. While our literature played a big role in the strike, our lack of members on the docks hindered our ability to recruit longshoremen and build our organization. The bedrock principle remains: To win workers to revolution, communists must build a base in the working class.
PLP Leads Washington, DC’s Transit Workers
For 40 years, PLP has been a leading force among thousands of transit workers in the Metro system in Washington, DC. In the 1970s, local government took over the private bus companies as the workforce changed from mostly white to mostly African-American. In 1978, the new public transit authority attacked workers by attempting to deny them a cost-of-living increase in a period of high inflation. PLP members and friends led a six-day wildcat strike that defeated the attack. The bosses’ attempt to fire the strike leaders failed.
In the early 1990s, Metro attacked again, threatening to privatize the bus fleet unless workers accepted wage and benefit concessions. The Party and militant workers led hundreds in fights against cuts in bus service and jobs. Meanwhile, the union misleadership agreed to a cap on wage-step increases, lower starting salaries for new workers, and a slower wage progression. During these battles, a PLP’er was elected to the union’s executive board.
In 1998, the union leadership agreed to further givebacks in wage progression, along with limited health insurance benefits for new workers and defunding of the pension system. The PL’er was the only executive board member to oppose this sellout. In 2004, he won the local presidency. The overwhelmingly Black membership refused to succumb to anti-communist attacks and to a nationalist appeal by the incumbent Black president. They followed their class interests in uniting behind the white PLP member.
In the 2004 contract, the wage progression was reduced, and Metro was required to contribute to the pension fund. A new wave of anti-communism was aimed at the Party member, who returned to driving a bus. By that time, however, hundreds of workers had been influenced by PLP and CHALLENGE. A number of them joined the Party. The fight against privatization and anti-worker discipline has been waged by a new generation of Party members at Metro.
Currently, the Party is leading an anti-racist fight against background checks that would bar employment for workers convicted by the bosses’ criminal injustice system. A disproportionate number of these workers are Black; the background checks would cut off one of their few avenues to higher-paying jobs.
The struggle to fight the bosses and to build the Party continues.
(To be continued)
MARCH ON MAY DAY
SATURDAY, MAY 2ND IN NEW YORK CITY
WITH PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
50 YEARS OF FIGHTING FOR COMMUNISM
Bus transportation leaves Baltimore at 6:45AM sharp from 33rd Street YMCA lot.
NYC: Nostrand & Flatbush junction (2 to Brooklyn College) at 11 AM this Saturday, May 2
click here to download
First Ferguson. Now Baltimore. It was a rebellion. Not a riot. Politicians, preachers, cops and the media all labeled the militant youth everything but what they are — rebels that have lead a powerful and inspiring uprising. On the whole, the youth targeted the racist bosses and their goons.
The anti-racist rebellion shows us that when push comes to shove, the racist police are no match for a united and fighting working class. Youth are fighting against tear gas, The National Guard, and over 7,000 kkkops, all while defying the orders of the mayor and other capitalist officials. We have a lot to learn from them.
The cold-blooded racist police murder of Freddie Gray was not an isolated event; the cops killed him, and continue to target Black workers and youth because the vicious racist ruling class needs to terrorize us into accepting a future of poverty and imperialist war. We refuse to accept it!
We don’t accept a life where being Black means you can be gunned down at any moment with little to no consequence. We don’t accept a system where the lives of Tyrone West, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston, Kimani Gray, and Ramarley Graham mean nothing to these killer kkkops! There are too many names! This system doesn’t deserve to exist! The bosses call for “bringing order” and “life back to normal.” This “normal” is racism in our schools, in hospitals, and in the streets! A rebellion was long coming! To anti-racists everywhere — protest in solidarity with the rebellion started in Baltimore at your schools, at work, in your churches, unions, and in your neighborhoods.
The rebels broke capitalist laws, the same laws that protect mass murderers that are responsible for millions of deaths from racist profit wars, global drug cartels, mass poverty, and unemployment. These gangsters in suits walk free, run businesses, command armies, and hold government power. The ruling class tries to paint Blacks, Latinos and the immigrant working-class as criminals. The real criminal is this racist system. The bosses close hospitals, schools, and keep people unemployed. They also murder workers and children in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan for oil.
Only a revolutionary communist society where the working class has power can rid the world of racist killer kkkops. The capitalist courts encourage and tolerate cops who murder Black, Latin and immigrant workers. Meanwhile, five million Black and Latin workers and youth are forced into the criminal injustice system, either imprisoned, on probation or on parole. Seventy percent of the 2.4 million in U.S. prisons are Black and Latin. And if cops do get punished, the punishment is a slap on the wrist.
Join and build the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and build an international multi-racial movement to crush racism from New York City to Ferguson to Gaza with armed revolution! Progressive Labor Party is a revolutionary communist party dedicated to eliminating capitalism with communist revolution as the only way to end imperialism, terrorism, racism, sexism, and class inequality.
The growth of a fighting PLP is the only way to guarantee that the bosses won’t get away with racist police murder. PLP fights to lead the working class to smash the bosses’ cops and courts and establish a communist society worthy of every worker struck down by capitalism worldwide.
Join us as we march on May 2 against this racist system and celebrate the militancy of the rebels in Baltimore and Ferguson. Celebrate the working class’s history to overcome divisions the bosses put in our way, to fight back, and our potential to win the war against capitalism! March for a communist world!
Join us at the Nostrand & Flatbush junction (2 to Brooklyn College) at 11 AM this Saturday, May 2.
Smash Capitalism and Racist Police Murders with Communist Revolution!
For more information, see www.plp.org or email:
Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) represents a major step toward war between capitalists in the U.S. and China. With the two imperialist powers locked in an escalating competition for global dominance, the TPP is more than a trade deal that will heighten exploitation and destroy jobs for U.S. workers. It’s a sign that U.S. bosses are preparing to square off against their ascending rival.
The international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is fighting to unite workers worldwide to smash imperialism at its source: the capitalist system. We call on all workers to march with us on May Day and fight for our class, not the bosses’ country. Join PLP and the fight to turn imperialist war into class war for communism!
TPP: A Provocation to China
In late March, the liberal Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank, bankrolled by ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase, published a special report: “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China.” The bloodthirsty authors Robert D. Blackwill and Ashley J. Tellis previously planned strategy and tactics for the National Security Council during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their preamble sets a warlike tone:
Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power….[I]t must involve crucial changes to the current policy in order to limit the dangers that China’s economic and military expansion pose to U.S. interests in Asia and globally….[P]reserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the twenty-first century.
According to Blackwill and Tellis, the TPP is an essential step toward squaring off with China. Framed as a regulatory and investment treaty, it projects an anti-China trading and military bloc consisting of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S. and Vietnam, and, prospectively, South Korea and Taiwan.
For the past four decades, U.S. capitalists have raked in trillions by exploiting cheap labor and vast markets in China’s booming economy. While voicing concern over the gradual rise in China’s worldwide might, U.S. rulers have yet to formulate a coherent plan for countering it. Obama followed up his “pivot-to-Asia” policy with a chaotic series of half-measures, among them the stationing of 2,500 Marines in Australia and four Navy ships in Singapore. But the TPP represents an explicit confrontation with China — economically, politically, militarily. If the Exxon/Chase forces — the dominant faction of U.S. capitalism — hold sway, an armed conflict will be closer than ever.
Capitalist ‘Peace’ = Preparation for War
While “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China” is not quite a declaration of war, it points in that direction. Its authors warn, “No nation in Asia, least of all China, will take seriously U.S. military enhancement in Asia unless the United States takes the following vigorous and comprehensive steps”:
A substantial increase in the U.S. military budget and military aid to pro-U.S. regimes in Asia;
Maintenance of the current nuclear weapon balance between the U.S. and China;
An even greater U.S. advantage in long-range stealth unmanned drones and undersea war capability;
More ballistic missiles (fast-traveling weapons that fly out of the atmosphere) to back U.S. allies in the Pacific;
An intensive naval and air presence in the South and East China Seas.
In addition, the U.S. bosses want their junior partners in Japan and Australia to accelerate their remilitarization and military cooperation. In India, the U.S. capitalist butchers hope to use a 1.25-billion-strong working class as cannon fodder in the possible imperialist war with China. To keep India’s bosses in the U.S. imperialist camp, Blackwell and Tells argue that the U.S. should ease restraints on military technology transfer to India, increase military cooperation (especially between the two countries’ navies), and regard India’s nuclear weapons arsenal as an asset.
On behalf of their ruling-class masters, Blackwill and Tellis argue that it’s a mistake to view China as a potential ally or partner. They understand that all alliances among capitalists are temporary, and the current illusion of China-U.S. harmony is no different. The two imperialist powers may seem to be cooperating for the moment, but their interests are rapidly diverging:
That self-defeating preoccupation by the United States based on a long-term goal of U.S.-China strategic partnership...should end. It is unrealistic to imagine that China’s grand strategy toward the United States will...accept American power and influence as linchpins of Asian peace and security. The central question concerning the future of Asia is whether the United States will have...the right grand strategy to deal with China to protect vital U.S. national interests.
Flashpoint for Armed Conflict
The Pacific region represents one of several possible imperialist flashpoints for a massive armed confrontation. Vital U.S. capitalist interests are also at risk in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, among other potential hot spots.
The capitalists’ maneuvers toward broader wars will affect every worker on the planet. In the U.S., Black, Latin, and immigrant workers will be hit the hardest. These workers are already suffering from racist mass incarceration, mass unemployment — and, for Black workers in particular — a recent upswing in murders and assaults by the kkkops.
The bosses arrogantly assume that the working class will continue to spill its blood indefinitely for their imperialist holocausts. They are wrong. The international working class, led by PLP, will be their undoing. Our Party is growing as it unites workers under the red flag.
May Day means that ALL workers stand together as a single class and fight for their class interests. This May Day, PLP will march in 27 countries. We are calling on all workers to join us in building a mass movement of millions for communist revolution!
BOX:
Obama Seeks to Secure U.S. Backyard
U.S. President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Latin America represents another step in the bid to out-do U.S. imperialist rivals, China and Russia. Obama seemed to be right at home, shouting colloquial greetings at a cheering crowd in Jamaica and touting the economic and diplomatic possibilities that would result from renewed relations with Latin America at the summit in Panama. For Obama and the capitalists he serves, the trip was crucial in securing relations in a region where rivals China and Russia are gaining influence. Chinese banks’ investments, for example, in Latin America increased by 71 percent last year (CNN, 03/04/15) and Russia has outlined plans to build military bases in Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela (CSIS, 03/24/15). Obama and his capitalist bosses thus have many reasons to be worried about Russia’s and China’s activities in their “backyard.”
Workers should be leery however at Obama’s attempt to attract support. The U.S., after all, has never acted in the favor of workers in Latin America. Countries like Jamaica are in utter debt because of the U.S. policies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the imperialist bank led by the U.S. and other world powers, imposes harsh austerity measures on Jamaica in order to collect an insurmountable debt that continues to stifle its fragile economy. Workers have no stake in this fight between imperialist rivals.
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50 Years of PLP: The Fight for Communism Needs YOU!
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- 23 April 2015 168 hits
April 17 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Progressive Labor Party. From a meeting of barely two dozen members of the old U.S. communist movement, PLP has grown into an international Party now organizing in 27 countries.
Over our first half-century, PLP has propelled the march to communism — first by leading anti-racist, working-class struggle, and through that struggle advancing communist ideas. This two-pronged strategy — practice and theory — is the basis for winning masses of workers to fight for communism.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine the future of society. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into constant unemployment and poverty. It will stop the racism and sexism that drags down all workers. It will smash the racist cops who break our strikes and kill our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will put an end to the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A Communist World
Here is our vision for a communist world:
A society run by workers and for workers. After all, the working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the parasitic bosses who steal most of the value of our labor through wage slavery.
Multi-racial unity with women and men workers and an end to the racism and sexism that divides the working class. Racism and sexism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses rely on it to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide.
Elimination of all borders, artificial lines drawn by the bosses to make even more profits from workers they call “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor. It also enables them to make war on other workers. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.
This is the world PLP has fought for from the start. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle — for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Struggle and Theory
From our earliest beginnings in the 1960s, PLP has fought tooth and nail against attacks by the ruling class. We have organized and supported Ford workers and striking teachers in Mexico; wildcatting miners in Hazard, Kentucky; longshore workers in New York City; jute workers in India; miners in Britain; garment workers in Los Angeles; bank workers in Colombia; transit workers in Washington, DC; Chrysler sit-down strikers at Detroit’s Mack Avenue plant; farm workers in California, and bakery workers at Stella D’Oro in the Bronx. We have stood with evicted workers in Palestine-Israel, earthquake victims in Pakistan, and hurricane victims in Haiti, New Orleans, and New York City. We have led anti-imperialist struggles against the UN in Haiti. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
Anti-racism is a hallmark of PLP. We backed Black workers and youth in the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, and fought off racist school segregationists in Boston in 1975. In 1976, we integrated Chicago’s Marquette Park. Throughout our existence, we have led more than a hundred thousand protesters against the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis across the United States. We have mobilized against racist killer cops from Brooklyn, New York, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Ferguson, Missouri.
PLP has stood in the forefront of opposition to the bosses’ wars. In the 1960s, we were the first to organize mass demonstrations for the U.S. to “Get Out of Vietnam!” We formed the Worker-Student Alliance in the anti-war Students for A Democratic Society. PLP broke the U.S. travel ban to Cuba and undermined the rulers’ House Un-American Activities Committee to the point of collapse. More recently, working both within the military and on the streets, we exposed the U.S. rulers’ invasions of Iraq as a murderous oil grab.
None of these developments came out of thin air. They grew out of our Party’s analysis of past class struggles and the achievements of millions of workers. PLP studied the strengths and weaknesses of the communist movement led by — among many others — Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. In 1917, this movement created a revolution in Russia; In 1949, a revolution in China. It defeated the Nazis in Europe and the fascists in Japan in World War II. It reached its highest point in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which attempted to push back a growing elitism in the party leadership and put the masses in charge of society.
PLP is the only group to point out what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China. We are the only organization to analyze how socialism in those countries led back to the unvarnished profit system, where all workers are now mired.
A communist society will have no bosses or profits. It will be led by the working class through its Progressive Labor Party.
Marxism: An Evolving Idea
The history of the Progressive Labor Party began in 1962. A small group of communists left the Communist Party USA and organized the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM). They rejected the CPUSA’s capitulation to capitalism and its abandonment of the open advocacy of communist revolution. The old communist movement proposed that the bosses would peacefully relinquish control of society and allow what the CP called “socialism” to be “voted into existence.” The communists who formed PLM refused to mislead workers and broke away from the old guard.
In the course of PLP’s history, we have rejected some traditional Marxist concepts and advanced a number of new ones, all based on our practice and our examination of world events and the decay of the old communist movement. These new principles are expressed in a series of documents, including Road to Revolution I, II, III and IV; Revolution Not Reform; and “Dark Night Shall Have Its End.” (These are all available on plp.org or in pamphlet form.)
Above all, Progressive Labor Party stands for the principle that the working class must fight directly for communism rather than moving first through a transitional phase of socialism. We reject this two-stage theory because events have shown that socialism inevitably leads back to full-blown capitalism. In both Russia and China, socialism preserved capitalist features such as money and the wage system, leading to inequalities that divided the working class. In both of these countries, the communist party became a new ruling class where privileges were attained through party membership. We believe the working class can and will be won before the revolution to fight directly for communism — to abolish the wage system, the cult of the individual and other capitalist relics.
Core Principles
PLP’s main principles are:
Internationalism, under the slogan “Smash All Borders,” where workers’ class unity is represented by a single mass, international Party;
The fight against racism, a strategic necessity in the struggle to overthrow capitalism;
The fight against the special oppression of women — sexism — another critical component in uniting the working class, a prerequisite for revolution;
A concentration among industrial workers, who produce the capitalists’ profits and the weapons for the bosses’ imperialist wars;
Workers’ power through armed struggle, since the rulers constantly use their armed state power to violently suppress the working class.
Throughout its existence, PLP has fought for these principles in unceasing class struggle. We have learned that building the Party is the first order of business for communists. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Whatever gains workers make in reform struggles are limited and temporary; sooner or later, the bosses always use their state power to take them back. Communists strive to turn reform struggles into schools for communism, into vehicles for building the Party. Winning workers to PLP is the one and only victory the ruling class can never take back. We therefore urge all workers and youth to join us now for the next half-century in this historic task: to organize a communist revolution.
May Day is the international holiday celebrated by tens of millions of workers worldwide. It was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. This launched general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.
In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours “a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Workers were forced to labor “from sun-up to sundown,” up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to demand the 8-hour day.
On that day, Chicago stood still as “Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” reported one paper.
On May 3, the cops murdered six strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers were wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.
Nine demonstration leaders were framed for “instigating a riot.” Four were hung. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive after the government admitted the frame-up.
The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle. The Association decided “to organize a great international demonstration, so that...on one appointed day the [world’s] toiling masses shall demand” the 8-hour day. “Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor....this day is adopted for the international demonstration.” This kind of international solidarity is vitally needed today.
As it progressed, the international communist movement took up the struggle and organized May 1st celebrations every year. In the U.S., it was championed for many years by the old Communist Party, with 250,000 marching in New York City in the 1940s. But when that party abandoned any communist principles, May Day was resurrected by the Progressive Labor Party in 1971 which advanced more revolutionary ideas. May Day marches have been organized by the PLP for the past 44 years, in many cities — Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Delano, California and others, as well as PLP contingents in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
In the U.S., bosses try to smear May Day as being “imported from Soviet Russia,” it remains as a significant contribution born in the actions of those Chicago strikers over a century ago. Today we march for the universal demands of all workers, regardless of capitalist-created borders: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.
How prophetic were the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies as the hangman’s noose was tied around his neck and he declared, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!”
