Progressive Labor Party

PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY. An avowed Marxist-Leninist organization, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) had a short-lived but significant role in the youth movements of the 1960s.

Formed in 1962 by Communist Party(CP) members expelled for supporting China’s attack on the USSR’s new theory of peaceful coexistence with capitalism, the new sectarian grouping epitomized the current of “anti-revisionism.” In July, 1962, Milt Rosen, a prominent labor figure within the badly reduced CP, presided over an organizational meeting of a few dozen like-minded CP dissidents. Rosen wanted to form a new, anti-revisionist, Marxist-Leninist party. Others argued such a step was premature. As a compromise, the group formed the Progressive Labor Movement (PL). From its inception, PL distinguished itself by its public call for communist revolution, its action-oriented program, and its strident attacks on revisionism. Together, these earned it early support from the Chinese Communist Party.

Shortly after its founding, PL organized a public campaign supporting a wildcat strike of armed miners in Hazard, Kentucky. Next, PL organized two student trips to Cuba in defiance of the US Government’s travel ban. Despite being threatened with five years in jail and a $2,000 fine, PL was able to recruit almost 200 students to travel to Cuba and evaluate the revolution for themselves. Upon returning to the United States, the trip organizers were subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities HCUA, but successfully turned the hearings into a platform to express their admiration for the Cuban Revolution. Many of the Cuba travelers became leaders in PL and other left organizations.

PL soon turned its attention to the Vietnam War. Denouncing the war as imperialist, PL organized a national antiwar demonstration on May 2, 1964, arguably the first of later, vastly larger such events. In the aftermath, PL formed the May 2nd Movement (M2M), a youth group that published Free Student newspaper, which fostered anti-imperialist arguments among the growing antiwar movement. Despite its initial success, M2M membership remained small, and PL declared its dissolution in 1965, sending its student cadres into Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which had become the leading student antiwar organization.

In the summer of 1964, a New York cop shot and killed a Black teenager and Harlem erupted. PL printed thousands of flyers with the banner “Wanted for Murder: Gilligan The Cop.” The flyer became the flag of the resulting Harlem neighborhood uprising. Bill Epton, the leader of PL’s Harlem club, was arrested and charged with sedition, and a campaign of repression followed. PL members were hauled before a grand jury and jailed when they refused to testify. Epton himself was tried and sentenced to a year in jail for “criminal anarchy.” PL printed a pamphlet with his speech, We Accuse: Bill Epton Speaks to the Court, circulating it widely. These government attacks elevated PL’s reputation among African American radicals and the broader left.

At a founding convention in 1965, PL officially became a Marxist-Leninist party with a magazine, PL, and a bilingual newspaper, Challenge/Desafio. Rosen was elected chair, and Epton vice chair, along with a twenty-member National Committee. PL’s transition into an orthodox Marxist-Leninist party proved rocky, with some members leaving over doubts about the model of a Marxist-Leninist party and others troubled by PL’s increasingly strident polemical attacks on other sections of the Left, at home and abroad. PL Magazine attacked Cuba as revisionist for taking aid from the Soviets and siding with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet schism. Soon after, it lambasted the North Vietnamese as revisionist for opening negotiations with the United States and aligning with the USSR.

PL’s mass work, meanwhile, was based on clubs in unions, communities, and college campuses. The labor clubs participated in campaigns around wages, working conditions, and union democracy with an emphasis on combating racist practices by management or union leadership. The community clubs organized around police brutality, housing, welfare reform, and schools. PL’s first major trade union concentration was in the New York City’s garment trades, where PL members led wildcat strikes, including a seven-day strike of 800 workers at Figure Flattery in 1967. PL also had caucuses around the country in several unions, including hospital workers, teachers, warehouse, and auto where they led a two-week sit-down strike at the Mack Avenue Stamping Plant in Detroit. PL members were elected as shop stewards and officers in local unions, but never gained a significant foothold in the national labor movement.

PL’s goal in SDS was to win members to a pro-working class, anti-imperialist analysis of the Vietnam War, build militant SDS chapters, and recruit students to the party. To that end, PLers formed the Worker Student Alliance Caucus (WSA) and played a significant role in campus actions, including those at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and San Francisco State. Within two years, PL had recruited hundreds of students to WSA and had become a major force within SDS.

PL’s anti-revisionist polemics meanwhile continued unabated. During the Cultural Revolution, PL even denounced the Chinese Communist Party as revisionist! Since its founding, PL had supported revolutionary nationalism, as exemplified by SNCC and the Black Panther Party. By early 1968, however, PL’s leadership abruptly declared that this had been an error and that all nationalism was reactionary because it emphasized national identity over class. This shift proved devastating for PL’s standing within the revolutionary Black movement and the broader Left.

The instigation of factional wars within SDS chapters, meanwhile, hurt SDS badly, as contrary factions formed, each seeking to best each other in revolutionary rhetoric. SDS’s growth within smaller and religious-based campuses not yet reached by the antiwar movement slowed or stopped entirely, while radicalized students unconvinced by doctrinaire language fell aside. Among those eager to continue the internecine battle, PL was assailed as racist, i.e, unsupportive of Black nationalist groups and especially the Black Panthers.

Factional opponents on each side lined up supporters for what was widely feared to be a disastrous SDS convention in May, 1969, with the larger membership of the organization little represented by any factional group. At the convention, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), by this time in control of the SDS national office, moved to expel PL/WSA. Unable to win a majority on the floor, RYM leaders simply declared PL expelled, and in a group, walked out of the convention. Perhaps a majority of delegates remained behind, with PL the new, de facto leadership of SDS. This result was worse than a pyrrhic victory. The leaders of PL had no interest in sharing power with any broader forces and limited themselves determinedly to the hard core of loyalists.

The collapse of Chicago SDS into the Weatherman faction and the abandonment of the Chicago office in the Fall, 1969 gave PL/WSA an apparent claim to being the real SDS. A new leadership led by John Pennington took office in Boston, but made no headway recovering the membership. Within two years, WSA/SDS had all but disappeared. PL itself meanwhile underwent a precipitous decline. Vice-Chair Bill Epton and others had already resigned over the attack on revolutionary nationalism. Major splits in Boston and California followed. From a few thousand members at its peak, PL diminished rapidly.

One project remained. The remnants of WSA reorganized themselves in 1973 as the Committee Against Racism (CAR). With success on a handful of campuses and communities, CAR chapters attacked false theories of white race superiority then emerging among conservative intellectuals, and called for demonstrations against outright racist movements, most successfully against the anti-busing initiatives in early 1970s Boston. Best known for street confrontations with neo-Nazi and other far right groups, CAR changed its name to the International Committee Against Racism (ICAR) and published Arrow, thereafter waning and finally dissolving in 1996.

The leadership of PL had long since adopted a unique theory that socialism in any form, rather than leading to communism, was, in reality, “the road back to capitalism.” PL’s strategy would be to build a mass communist party of millions of workers who would eventually lead an armed revolution to destroy capitalism and move directly to a communist society. The tabloid Challenge, continued as thin evidence of the group’s existence. In 2020, sources estimate membership at approximately one hundred.

Leigh, David Benin. The New Labor Radicalism and New York City’s Garment Industry: Progressive Labor Insurgents During the 1960s. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.

Revolution Today: A Look at the Progressive Labor Movement and the Progressive Labor Party. New York: Exposition Press, 1970.

Sumner, D.S. and R.S. Butler (Jim Dann and Hari Dillon). The Five Retreats: A History of the Failure of the Progressive Labor Party. New York: Reconstruction Press, 1977.

You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance. Edited by John F. Levin and Earl Silber. San Francisco: 1741 Press, 2019.