PLP@Columbia

French bosses fear "civil war"

2007-12-06T17:44:00.000-05:00

From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Wed, 2007-12-05 11:21

A quote from the French judge, Jean de Maillard (Vice-president of the Superior Court of Orléans, and a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Paris), 28 November 2007 [here is an English translation]:

"When two schools, a library, a police station, a garage and several other buildings on a list already forgotten are set on fire, not to mention dozens of vehicles each day, we are used to it. It has become almost a routine.

"However, the second night of Villiers-le-Bel marks an escalation that the media and the government would probably prefer to hush up, but which may be the start of a new stage: the use of firearms. In truth, the surprise is not that the rioters began to use them, but first, that they hadn't done it sooner [...] and second, that they are still confining themselves to hunting rifles and lead shot. The suburbs however have been armed for a long time with caches of quality war weapons, lethal weapons, against which the bullet-proof vests will be useless.

"In other words the situation is explosive in both meanings of the word. It seems that from one riot to the next the techniques harden, the methods become more professional and the police and gendarmes will soon have to confront, if they have not already, experts in urban guerilla warfare [...]

"I am convinced that up until now we have been lucky that the thugs and future murderers in the suburbs have not yet dared to use their fire power. I hope that the public authorities will become aware of the imminence of calamity and especially that they will finally seek solutions. I would not like to be in their shoes, for the margin of maneuverability, if there is one, will be very narrow. Yes, the perpetrators must be mercilessly punished. But repression, in the long term, solves nothing.

"And people must stop dreaming, those on the Left and the others: neighborhood police are not a panacea either. You cannot graft an ethnic police force ["police communautaire"] on a society that is this sick and torn apart, in which the members are in open rebellion against society. Police are a means, not a solution. Educators will not be useful either: you cannot cure cancer with a placebo. To shower the caids [a type of governorship, originally found in North Africa and Moorish Spain] with subsidies to buy armed peace will be the chosen way: it will provide only a short respite. Is there another solution? I don't know, and I am very happy not to be in government."

NY Daily News article on anniversary of Sean Bell's murder by NYPD

2007-12-06T17:39:00.000-05:00

A year of pain for little girl Sean Bell barely got to know
BY NICOLE BODE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, November 24th 2007, 2:25 PM

Anderson/News
Jada Bell, 4, with her mom, Nicole Paultre Bell, and sister, Jordyn, looking on, shows picture she drew of her father, Sean Bell.

Sean Bell
Sean Bell's eldest daughter leans over a piece of paper, her crayons churning out white, puffy clouds with her father floating among them.
In the year since her dad was shot down in a hail of 50 police bullets, 4-year-old Jada Bell has drawn countless portraits of her father in heaven, each of them a heartbreaking insight into a child's grief.
"She draws him just like he was in real life," said her mom, Nicole Paultre Bell. "Every day, we talk about him. I couldn't .really tell you how many times - at any time, she'll bring him up. She misses her dad a lot."
In one drawing, a smiling Bell stands alongside his family as if he were still alive. Other Crayola sketches show him floating in the sky, looking down on his family below.
The idyllic pictures help shield the kindergartner from her father's last moments - a chaotic shootout as he left his bachelor party at a Queens nightclub a year ago Sunday.
Bell was killed and his friends Trent Benefield, 24, and Joseph Guzman, 32, were wounded by NYPD officers who mistakenly believed they had a gun.
Three detectives indicted in the shooting - Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper - are set to go on trial Feb. 4. Oliver and Isnora are charged with manslaughter; Cooper is charged with reckless endangerment.
Jada's dreamlike pictures also belie a deeper sadness that has cloaked Paultre Bell, 23; Jada, and 1-year-old Jordyn ever since Bell's death.
In school, Jada grows silent each time her teacher leads the class in sing-alongs about moms and dads - shrinking away as classmates pipe up about their parents, Paultre Bell found out at a recent parent-teacher conference.
"I had to tell her, just because you don't see Daddy every day doesn't mean that you don't have a father. You always have a father," Paultre Bell said. "He's watching out from up in the sky. You just can't see him."
On Father's Day, Jada's class painted little wooden jewelry boxes. She wrote on the back of hers, "I love you Daddy," and left it at Bell's grave.
The toll is harder to measure with little Jordyn - who's too young to remember or appear in many of the photos and home movies that Paultre Bell relies on to help Jordyn learn about her missing father.
"It's just hard knowing that she'll never know her father. She'll only know him from the home videos that I show her and the pictures," Paultre Bell said.
The grief underlies everything Paultre Bell has had to deal with in the past year - including the sudden transition to single motherhood and the highly contentious court case in which she has attended every hearing and spoken out publicly about each development.
"She knows nothing can bring Sean back. But she hopes that if justice is done, other families will not have to suffer the way hers has and continues to," said Paultre Bell's lawyer Sanford Rubenstein.
Bell's family and friends plan to hold a candlelight vigil in his memory from 11 tonight until 5 a.m. tomorrow on Liverpool St. between 94th and 95th Aves. in Jamaica, where the shooting erupted.
Paultre Bell has relied heavily on the support of her relatives and Bell's parents, William and Valerie Bell.
"I've seen them grow - that's the good thing," William Bell said. "You see a life grow before you, instead of \[being\] taken away.
Still, Paultre Bell struggles with the pain.
"I just keep asking myself, 'Why does it have to be my children? Why me? Why do we have to be the ones to go through this?' " she said. "I have to try to make it better for [them]. . . . I pray all the time, 'God give me the strength to get through this.' "

UK tightens racist immigration/labor policy

2007-12-06T17:37:00.000-05:00

BBC -- UK bans non-EU unskilled workers

Unskilled workers from non-EU countries will be banned from taking jobs in the UK for the "foreseeable future", the government has said.

Foreign nationals who want to marry a British person and come to the UK may also have to sit an English test.

The moves come as ministers unveil details of their new points-based system for migrants.

About 12,000 unskilled migrants from non-EU countries in Africa, America and Asia came to work in the UK last year.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith set out the proposals, which come into force in 100 days' time, in a speech at the London School of Economics.

She said that immigration policy should not just be about economics but should also take into account the wider impact on society.

Italian politician urges Nazi anti-immigrant policies

2007-12-06T17:35:00.000-05:00

Italy: Local politician urges SS-style policies against immigrants

Treviso, 5 Dec. (AKI) - A local councillor in the northern city of Treviso has called for "10 immigrants to be punished for every crime against our citizens", reviving harrowing memories of a World War II Nazi atrocity in Italy.

During a council meeting earlier this week, Giorgio Bettio said: "With immigrants, we should use the same system the [Nazi] SS used, punish 10 of them for every crime committed against an Italian citizen."

Bettio was elected as a councillor for Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League, but the party says Bettio is no longer a member.

Politicians from across the political spectrum, commentators and representatives of Italy's Jewish community have condemned Bettio's remarks. The remarks evoked memories of the notorious 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre in Rome when Adolf Hitler ordered 10 Italians to be killed for each of 33 German soldiers killed in a partisan attack.

Parliamentarians accused Betttio of fomenting racism and asked the Italian government to formally censure him. A leader of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici described Bettio's comments as "abhorrent."

Italy's social solidarity minister Paolo Ferrero attacked the Northern League saying Bettio's remarks had shown what the party "really thinks."

"Just as the Nazis used Jews as scapegoats for the social problems of the era, there are people in Italy today who are blaming immigrants for every ill, and exploiting social fears that have a thousand causes," said Ferrero.

Treviso's mayor, Gianpaolo Gobbo said Bettio's words had been an "an absurd provocation worthy of severe reproach."

Gobbo's comments followed a request from the Italian parliament's deputy speaker, centre-left MP Pierluigi Castagnetti to Northern League's leadership to condemn Bettio's comments.

Immigration is a major issue in Italy's northeastern Veneto region, where Treviso is located, and anti-foreigner sentiment has been increasing in Veneto and elsewhere, in response to growing immigration, much of it from eastern Europe.

Some 40 towns in Veneto have recently introduced measures to keep out poor, homeless or unemployed migrants. Foreigners may only apply for residency if they have a regular job, earn at least 5,000 euros per year, have "adequate" housing and are not "socially dangerous".

More widely, many Italians would like a crackdown on immigrants, which they blame for worrying increases in crime rates as well as unemployment.

The government last month issued a decree making it easier to expel immigrants deemed a threat to public safety.

Monday Demo Against Expansion

2007-11-25T20:59:00.000-05:00

To Coalition to Preserve Community members and others interested: 11/24/07

ALL OUT THIS MONDAY (11/26/07) TO PROTEST THE CITY PLANNING VOTE WHICH WILL
BE HELD AT 1:00PM AT 22 READE STREET. IT WILL BE HELD IN SPECTER HALL, A SMALL
ROOM WHICH COLUMBIA ALWAYS FILLS WITH ALL ITS EMPLOYEES TO KEEP THE COMMUNITY
OUT. PLEASE COME OUT BY 11:30AM TO GET A SEAT. THE COALITION TO PRESERVE
COMMUNITY WILL HOLD A PRESS CONFERENCE AFTER THE VOTE. READ CHAIR BURDEN'S
COMMENTS BELOW, AND OUR COMMENTS AND COME OUT AND SPEAK UP.

(1) This Monday, Nov. 26th, at 1:00PM, the City Planning Commissioners will
cast their votes against the Harlem community in favor of powerful Columbia.
Even before the Final Environmental Impact Statement had been released, Chair
Amanda Burden announced the Commission's (and the Mayor's) position as she read
the Department Recommendations Opening Statement at the CPC Review Session if
the CB 9 197-a Plan and Columbia University Proposal held on11/13/07. We
have pasted in the entire statement at bottom of this E-mail, and have excerpted
and commented on some of it a directly below:

From Burden's 11/13/07 statement:
"The Commission has been guided by the principle that both should be reviewed

simultaneously and that each should be afforded equal treatment in the
process."

Coalition to Preserve Community comment:
Saying Harlem got "equal treatment" in this process is like telling us that
BP Stringer did not sell out the community when he failed to support the
Community Board's 32 to 2 vote against Columbia and cut his deal to support its
eviction plan. They are paving the way for displacement, eminent domain,
environmental hazards from the bathtub to bio-level #3 labs, and the elimination of a
diverse community.

Burden:
"It is important to note that at the end of its ULURP review period,

Community Board 9 significantly revised its plan by increasing the

community facility FAR to the same FAR as proposed by Columbia, and by

eliminating the ground floor requirement for manufacturing uses. As

discussed at our October 29 Review Session that development under the

revised 197-a plan would therefore result in an area predominantly

devoted to Columbia University. As a result, we no longer have before

us two radically different visions of land use in Manhattanville, but

instead two different visions of how Columbia can, and should grow in

Manhattanville."

Coalition to Preserve Community comment:
So even with all the compromises that CB 9 offered in the last few weeks, the
City only supports the all or nothing concept. Burden and the Commission give
lip service to the 197A Community Plan, and then think that the peasants up
in the low income, "minority" neighborhood will sit back and accept their
double talk!

Burden:
"The 197a plan, on the other hand, would not permit this concentration

of uses, missing an important opportunity to transform and activate

125th Street as a connector between the upland neighborhoods and the

waterfront and precluding the range and scale of open spaces made

possible by the Columbia plan."

Coalition to Preserve Community comment:
Well the conflicts of interest of City Planning Commissioners are clear so it
is no wonder why the Commission is handing over 17 plus acres to Columbia. We
have called for Cantor, Knuckles and Williams to recuse themselves from
voting on Manhattanville issues, but the fact is that the whole system is rigged
in favor of the real estate industry and that means Columbia. Burden literally
did not even wait for the final impact statement to be released before she
announced that the fix was in! The nerve of Burden to make claims that the
Columbia plan allows for an integration of uses. This is an all or nothing, eminent
domain driven, eviction plan which will cause massive displacement. Columbia
wants to use eminent domain against other entities besides the private property
owners so it can avoid other lengthy processes which could occur with the MTA
and other corporate owners. City Planning is not planning, it is
participating in evicting.

Burden:
"On balance, the two plans before us are very strong but as I said earlier,
differ fundamentally in their visions of how Columbia can and should grow in
Manhattanville."

Coalition to Preserve Community comment:
And the priority always is the entity with the power and the millions spent
on lobbying has certainly paid off for Columbia. At its heart this is a
decision based on race and class, and no amount of spinning by Burden, the Mayor, all
Columbia's politicians and lobbyists, or other compromisers can avoid the
ugly racism and classism behind this land grab. They all want to avoid the issue
of eminent domain, but it is not going to go away, and neither are the folks
who will be sitting in front of the bulldozers after this "equal treatment"
ULURP process reaches its conclusion.

WE KNOW MONDAY IS A WORK DAY, BUT DO YOUR BEST TO COME OUT THIS MONDAY.

The hunger strike is over, but the struggle continues

2007-11-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

The hunger strike was a critical stage of student resistance to racist CU policies and extracted important concessions from the university administration. However, these concessions are primarily important not because the reforms themselves, but because they demonstrated the power of students united. They showed that the way to wage a sharp struggle is through unity, strength, and rising militancy.

To take on the university's anti-worker expansion into Harlem, the end of the hunger strike must signal the beginning of a qualitatively new phase of the struggle. It is time to simultaneously broaden and sharpen the attack. Most critically, now we must demonstrate not just the power of student unity, but that of worker-student unity, between Harlem's working masses and CU's student body.

The student resistance, like the most basic laws of motion, is driven forward by contradictions both external (the students vs. the university) and internal (student reformism vs. radicalism/revolutionism). The more advanced the struggle becomes, the more workers and students unite in camaraderie and action, the harsher the university will react. This is to be expected, and will be a good sign that we are finally moving forward and doing something right.

Internally, as well, the divide between reform and revolution, between the demand for superficial vs. structural change, will continue to become increasingly polarized. This, like the intensification of the external contradictions, is to be welcomed. Progress is only made through the intensification of contradiction.

The situation with the university was like a pot of water. The hunger strike provided heat, and slowly but surely, and eventually faster and more rapidly, small bubbles of resistance and struggle began to form, rising to the surface. The end of the strike leaves us open to two directions: turning off the heat, or letting it bring the water to a new qualitative form: boiling, turning it to steam.

The important thing is to rally the student body and the Harlem working class around the radical, revolutionary pole by continuing (but again, a newer, bigger way) what the hunger strikers made an truly amazing start of: Harlem/community worker-Columbia student unity.

Interesting 1957 US news documentary on China in revolution

2007-11-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

It's not just Columbia, it's capitalism!

2007-11-16T13:49:00.000-05:00

Now that students have won the bulk of their immediate curricular reforms, it's time to turn the tide of struggle and get it behind Harlem's working class to fight back against Columbia's racist, anti-worker expansion. We must broaden and sharpen the struggle on all fronts!

In order to do this, students must continue to get a better grasp of the nature of the expansion. This first means understanding Columbia's history of working-class displacement. Additionally, students must go into this battle with the understanding that no matter what concessions we manage to wrestle from Columbia about curriculum or expansion are at best a temporary fix, not a solution. Our struggle will be in vain if we fail to see that no reforms or concessions will fundamentally alter Columbia's racist, imperialist nature. Beyond Columbia, and US colleges in general, such reforms will not change the racist, imperialist nature of the US or the capitalist class its government and universities serve. Indeed, to give the struggle meaning, it must be always growing. Not just numerically, but in the scope of its demands, and even more importantly, the scope of its political outlook.

At the end of the day, the problem's not just Columbia, it's capitalism! Capitalism, not CU's administration, is the system that encourages, supports, allows, and legally protects Columbia's "right" to push working-class residents out of their homes and neighborhoods. Capitalism, not CU's administration, is the monstrosity that systematically devalues the lives of all workers, especially "national" or "racial" minorities. Capitalism, not CU's administration, is what makes the dollar and profits all-mighty; and capitalism, not CU's administration, is what makes one dollar or a million of them worth more than a "lowly" worker's life.

Imagine you are a doctor. An HIV-positive patient comes in with a case of pneumonia. Now, which is the real root problem--the HIV or the pneumonia? Sure, the penumonia's bad, but the HIV is what systematically disarmed the patient's immune system, opening the door to a whole host of diseases; diseases that, while normally are highly treatable, in a patient with HIV can be life-threatening. Capitalism is the disease. Columbia is merely an outgrowth of it. Poverty, unemployment, war, racism, sexism, workfare, racist cops, and Columbia's expansion effort are only the symptoms.

Of course, we want to alleviate the symptoms (in this case, displacement of 5,000 residents, mass job loss, etc.). But we won't be doing the patient much good if that's the only thing on which our efforts are focused; if we're not attacking the disease itself. The difference between HIV and capitalism is that right now, both could be prevented, but only one of them can be cured. Sure, we have to fight Columbia's expansion, even if it's only a stop-gap measure. But we need to broaden and use this reform struggle as a school for communism, to raise the political and class consciousness of students and workers. Then we can make sure the struggle doesn't end in vain, and build our strength, unity, and organization to wipe away the entire profit system.

Events

2007-11-15T17:29:00.000-05:00

Upcoming:

12/1/07 @ 11:00AM
Day of Action in Harlem
For health care, Against Columbia's expansion plan!
Build on the momentum of the Columbia student hunger strike! Join students, the Coalition to Preserve Community, World Aids Day celebrants, Congregations for Justice and Peace and others in a speak-out and march in Harlem.
St. Mary's Church, 126th St. between Amsterdam and Old Broadway. For more information call 212-864-4013.

Past...

11/15/07 @ 5:30PM
Protest the racist cop murder of Khiel Coppin!
Boys & Girls High School, 1700 Fulton St., Brooklyn.
Take A or C train downtown to Utica Ave stop, then head west on Fulton towards Stuyvesant.

Students march to Hamilton in support of hunger strike demands

2007-11-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

Video courtesy of the CU hunger strike support site.

11/14/07 -- One word can describe the feeling from the outset of tonight's rally: tension. Under a cloudy night sky that threatened rain at any moment, hundreds of students gathered in the largest hunger strike vigil yet on Columbia's main campus tonight. For the past few days, nightly vigils have been held at 9:00PM, typically drawing crowds ranging from 50-150, however tonight's vigil was easily double the size of any prior. At the same time, negotiations between representatives of the hunger strikers and university bosses continued inside Hamilton.

Word had come out that the university's negotiators had threatened to unilaterally withdraw from all negotiations and take back any concessions they had agreed to, in negotiations, so far. Tomorrow (11/15/07), the university and it's president, Lee Bollinger, would be hosting a number of dignitaries, including Kofi Anon, and did not want the tents and other signs of strike support to be visible to "important" outsiders. Students were threatened that if the tents and other signs of protest were not removed by midnight, police would forcibly remove them. Additionally, the administration said, two of the hunger strikers were facing expulsion.

Negotiators for the strikers refused to remove the tents and other visible signs of protest. To put further pressure on the administration, those gathered at the spirited vigil marched to Hamilton, where negotiations were taking place, and began chanting loudly outside. "The students united will never be defeated," they shouted. Various workers, students, and faculty from Columbia, City College, and the Harlem community then took their turns on the steps of the building (see video above).

Eventually, the march returned to the sundial to continue its regular vigil. Attendees gathered in clusters small and large to discuss the current situation, the students demands as represented by the brave hunger strikers, listen to music, and speak to the press.

Finally, word came: the university would place no academic penalties on the strikers. The tents would remain undisturbed. And not least of all, the massive show of student support tonight had an impact: university negotiators largely bent to all of the demands of the hunger strikers--except on its racist Harlem expansion. Then, the call was made. The hunger strike would go on. In fact, today two more students joined.

Amidst the flurry of excitement and relief, a student reportedly from City College took the platform to remind the crowd: "There are still fire trucks and police cars all up and down the streets outside," and that "just because the university says they're gonna do something doesn't mean they're gonna do it." At that moment, not a face in the crowd should even an ounce of doubt that he was absolutely right. Immediately, the crowd regained its more militant composure, issuing a loud cheer of defiance to the university.

Some students lingered, others left to catch up on some much-needed and well-earned rest, ready to return tomorrow to the sundial at noon.

The university acquiesced to most of the student demands for a number of reasons. For one, they realized that giving the student body too many bones to pick with the university was more trouble than it was worth. For another, they have simply been slower to accept what other university's realized long ago: diversity sells. More ethnic, race, and cultural studies simply means more funding from broader sources and better public relations--especially as CU continues to push its racist expansion into Harlem, expected to displace at least 5,000 working-class residents in the process.

It is doubtful if university negotiators thought it could buy-off student protesters on the Harlem issue--or at least soften them up--by bending to its other demands. But, we shouldn't put such a motivation past them, either.

Now is the time to up the ante. The hunger strikes have played an enormously important role in this campaign. These brave and bold students have accomplished much by putting their lives on the line for the demands of the students and faculty they represent. However, it may very well be that one of the inherent limits of the strike is that, while it is able to influence internal school policy and core curriculum, it is not enough--tactically speaking--to sway the university from its imperialist escapades in Harlem.

We in PL commend and fully support the hunger strikers, but we believe it is time to sharpen the struggle, to push it to achieve a qualitatively new form. This is something that could not have happened without the hunger strikers. Now that even much of the previously silent and unaware graduate student body has been brought back to earth by these undergard students and faculty, now that the hunger strikers have played the pivotal role in forging a significantly stronger alliance between students and faculty activists and the Harlem community, waging a pitched mass struggle around the expansion is our best shot at halting it.

To do this, we need to continue to build the existing momentum, tighten our links to the Harlem community even more, and most importantly: just as students lead on the issues of university curriculum, the workers and activists of Harlem must now take their turn in leading the students against CU.

These inspiring students have made some great and important leaps. Prior to the hunger strike, the campus was, with scant exception, awash in a sea of not apathy, but anti-activist sentiment. The hunger strikers themselves have shown a remarkable resilience and a filled a much-needed vacancy of committed student activist leadership. In turn, it is not difficult to observe a real, tangible change on campus. More and more students are rapidly getting involved in the struggle as word spreads. The hunger strikers may have actually succeeded in not only getting the university to bend on some issues, but much more critically, arousing the broader student and faculty body.

It was an important step to include the university's expansion on the list of the strike demands, but not because the university would ever change this particular agenda as a result of the strike. It was important because it helped forge a much deeper comradely connection between the student body and the Harlem community, an alliance that must cause Bollinger and his bosses many a sleepless night. On their own, it's easy for the university to smash the working class of Harlem and student resistance. But when the two are united, the university is suddenly facing a formidable, and likely unplanned, foe.

In fact, by addressing only the academic demands tonight, it is quite likely the university hopes to return to fighting on its own terms: dealing with student demands and demands about the expansion separately. But, while the unity of demands has been critical up to this point, Bollinger and his pals don't realize it's too late to split the demands apart again. That's because the real threat was never that the demands would be met or negotiated as a whole, but that if they were allowed to grow together for too long, the a Harlem worker-Columbia student alliance would arise--and now it already has. At this point, it no longer matters if the demands are met as one or not.

However, as stated, there was no way the university was ever going to bow to hunger striker demands about the expansion. It is possible that the best tactic now, rather than necessarily to continue the hunger strike, would be to build on the critical alliance it has brokered between students and workers in Harlem. Then, with Harlem workers at the helm and masses of students at their side, will have a much better shot (although still a far-from-inevitable one) at halting the expansion or at least modifying its terms.

Ultimately, one of the greatest accomplishments of the strikers, aside from this worker-student alliance, has been helping to clear the way for a more radical movement. With these demands met and the university, if only in certain respects, in retreat, now is the time to hit CU for the racist war-funder and -profiteer that it is; to attack its racist research, etc. More importantly, to attack CU as an inherently racist institution and servant of the capitalist class.

When workers and students unite they can be a nearly unstoppable force. All students and Harlem workers owe the hunger strikers an enormous debt for helping to bring these two groups together. We've seen what the students are made of when they've got Harlem behind them--now let's see what happens when the students get behind the working class of Harlem.

Frequently Asked Questions

2007-11-14T19:52:00.000-05:00

So, what or who is Progressive Labor Party?
PLP was started in the early 1960s by several ex-Communist Party (CP) members who were expelled from the CP for refusing to go along with the program of its revisionist leadership. It began as the Progressive Labor Movement and, after reaching a larger size, became the Progressive Labor Party. In its early days, PLP became the first organization to defy the US ban on travel to then-revolutionary Cuba (and did so repeatedly), played a large role in the Harlem Rebellion, was the official US fraternal party of the Chinese CP until we broke with them in the late 1960s upon the reversal of workers' power in China, staged the first anti-Vietnam war protests in the US, revolutionized SDS, violently opposed Nazis and Klansmen everywhere, organized NYC garment workers, played a large role in the famous miner's strike in Hazard, Kentucky, and a whole slew of other things. For more information, see the Wikipedia page on PL. We are an international party not only in word and spirit, but in reality as well--we have chapters all over the world including, but not limited to, El Salvador, Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, and Pakistan.

Revisionism?..
Revisionism put simply means fake-leftism or pseudo-Marxism. More specifically, it could be described adequately as revolutionary phrase-mongering by a group to mask its essentially tame, reformist, un-revolutionary political ideology. Even though some of their ideologies were the most radical thing out there a century ago, a lot of stuff has changed. Many groups have responded by either toning down the radical speech, theory, and practice, or by being dogmatic and mechanical. Essentially, their leadership believe that, like alchemy, if they keep repeating what every past revolutionary movement has done then eventually they'll magically get it right where they left off. Some day, the lead will turn into gold. There were definitely a lot of external problems that caused past Marxist revolutionaries to fail, some more miserably than others. But an even more important lesson to learn is what internal errors they made, and to correct them. This is the science of dialectical and historical materialism (more on this later).

"Fake"? That sounds a little harsh...
Sure, so let's be clear: we don't spend our time bashing other so-called Marxist-Leninist organizations on the left because it's generally an unproductive waste of time and energy. There is a lot to be done that is far more important. While we do disagree with most of these other groups on a huge variety of what we consider to be critical points, we've got nothing against their rank-and-file. It's not as if we see someone selling a copy of Revolution (paper of the RCP) or Liberation (paper of the PSL) and say to ourselves, "Oh, man, what a bunch of frauds." These rank-and-file members are sincerely committed to big social change, and that's something we'd never denigrate. On an ideological level, we're just saying their particular brand of "Marxism" simply isn't the real deal--for a variety of reasons--but it's not as some kind of smug personal thing. With few notable exceptions, think of it as comradely criticism. It doesn't mean we look down their members or go around thinking "we're so right and everyone else is so wrong."

Okay. But there are a ton of groups on my campus and at all these anti-war rallies. Don't you all believe pretty much the same thing? What makes PL different?
Good question. Yes, there is alphabet soup of parties and organizations on the "radical" left. And yes, in fact many of them do say basically the same thing. Some of them have more major differences than others, but for the most part they all cling to the old formula of first socialism, then communism. Beyond that, their major differences tend to revolve around matters of policy, not ideology: should we run our own candidates or just campaign for the Democrats? Do we support Castro a lot or a little? Is Venezuela under Chavez awesome, stupendous or spectacular? Do we support one doomed "national liberation" struggle or another? Do we give our leader a "cult of the personality" or a "culture of appreciation"? etc.

Other times the differences revolve around pretty much pointless stances on largely irrelevant history. One party might have supported "socialist" Albania, while another might have historically supported "socialist" Yugoslavia. One might be more forgiving or openly-endorsing of Slobodan Milosevic while the other might lean a bit more towards Saddam Hussein. Was Mao correct or incorrect when he said that Stalin was 70% correct in his analysis, but prone to being too subjective?

Ultimately, these somewhat silly divides are really only masking the fact that each group has its own leader, and each of those leaders wants to be king after the revolution.

Then there are the Trotskyists, but here we're talking about groups that are at least slightly left-leaning.

Here, then, are some items that make PL not slightly, but enormously, different from other organizations you've encountered.

1. PL does not believe in "revolutionary" versus "reactionary" nationalism. Since 1969, PL's line has been that all nationalism is inherently counter-revolutionary.

2. PL--most significantly of all, perhaps--does not believe in the old two-stage theory of first socialism, then communism. It made sense at the time, but unlike the Russians, Chinese, and many others, we in this time period have the benefit of hindsight. As stated earlier, there's no doubt that all of these countries suffered under an enormous amount of pressure from other imperialist powers. But the real problem, the real reason none of them ever even came close to communism, was ultimately because socialism itself maintains far too many aspects of capitalism, from wages to privileges and a whole host of other things. PL's slogan is "fight directly for communism" (or simply "fight for communism"). This can be somewhat misleading in a theoretical sense, because we recognize that no such transition is always smooth and even. But setting up some kind of mechanical "stage" system is worthless. Our main point is that while revolutionaries must smash the state and build a dictatorship of the working class, we still need to move rapidly to communist economic relations. In other words, from each according to their ability (or as we say more now, their commitment), to each according to their need.

3. PL does not have a lot of various "fraternal" parties in other countries which may or may not be linked as some sort of broader "International." We did use to do this, but haven't for quite some time. Instead, PLP is now an truly international party, existing in many countries.

4. PL does not believe in the possibility of a "peaceful" transition of state power.

5. PL no longer holds the old idea of being a "vanguard" party, at least in the classic sense of the word--we are a mass party.

6. PL does not build its own coalitions. You may be aware that a lot of big coalitions were founded by other "socialist" parties. That's true. We've done the same thing in the past with InCAR (International Committee Against Racism). Ultimately, we found it more productive and useful to work within existing mass organizations, as maintaining something like InCAR tended to sap our time and energy desperately needed to work toward our revolutionary aims.

7. PL does not take sides in bosses' battles. We support the human rights of Palestinians, for instance, but our line is that workers have no stake in some internecine ruling-class dogfight between Hamas, Fatah, and the Israeli government. Instead, working class Palestinians and Israelis need to unite in solidarity and smash all of these gangs of bosses. Same deal with Iraq. Many, many groups talk a great deal about supporting "the Iraqi resistance." What you never hear is about supporting the Iraqi working class who is undergoing wholesale slaughter not only by US and allied imperialists, but by various "resistance" factions and religious extremists.

8. Unlike pretty much all of the rest of the anti-war movement and other groups, PL's membership is incredibly multiracial and overwhelmingly non-white. This isn't to say the "color" or "racial makeup" of a group means that its politics are necessarily right or wrong, just that we've proven in practice that fighting racism and capitalism are best done through multiracial working-class unity--not separate "caucuses," nationalist groups, or identity politics. This was popular in the 60s and 70s, and is very popular again today.

9. PL does not participate in capitalist elections, run candidates, endorse other candidates, or generally buy into the illusion that playing politics with the capitalists will ever change anything for the good of working people. We don't care if you vote or not, but that you realize that real change is only going to come by organizing to smash the system.

10. No personality cults, no signatures. If you've gotten a copy of our paper, Challenge, then you've likely noticed we don't sign any articles. While this certainly helps as a security measure, it's mainly to emphasize a focus on ideas, not personalities. One of the big errors of the international communist movement, historically, has been personality cults around "the leader." This is an idealist (anti-materialist) phenomenon because it disempowers the Party and the working class as a whole. It retards the development of rank-and-file leaders (and ultimately, we would love for all workers to become communist organizers and leaders). Personality cults exalt the individual over the collective. They are also anti-dialectical, in that they make leaders "all good" or "all bad," ignoring the contradictory aspects within each one of us. Personality cults reflect a lack of faith in the working class. They set up a situation where, should the party become corrupt and begin to maintain or re-introduce capitalist ideas, the working class is too imbued with the god-like qualities of "the leader" to overthrow the Party.

11. May Day. PL revived the May Day march in the 1970s. We mention this because while some other organizations occasionally have dinners or meetings on May Day, PL carries out openly communist, militant, mass marches in working class neighborhoods where we have built a base. They occur on the weekend closest to May 1, and usually happen simultaneously in New York City and Los Angeles in the US. PL in other countries tend to coordinate as contingents in larger May Day marches, as they never lapsed as an event in other countries.

In the end, none of these points are necessarily going to convince you of anything. Like all other things in life, the proof is in the pudding whenever you're ready to look at it. And, theory and ideology means little without practice to verify, test, and change it.

Wow, that was a really long answer. And I'm not sure what half of it meant.
It seems like a lot, but then, this is a FAQ! Contact us and come to one of our events, or go up and talk to a Challenge-seller when you see one. There can be a lot of history and lingo internal to the communist movement that, to folks not as familiar with it, can seem very daunting. But don't let this throw you off. We don't expect you to know anything about that stuff already; you may have never had a reason to.

Speaking of papers, is that all you guys do? I get a little sick of people trying to sell me papers all the time, especially at anti-war marches.
Anyone that sells a paper can be perceived as pushy sometimes. However, a lot of this is simply anti-communism. Every day people get on the subway there are usually at least two people, one handing out the Metro, the other handing out AM New York. They talk, they hold them out in front of you--its very clear they want you to take one. Yet it doesn't seem to bother anyone. However, when it's a communist paper, suddenly some people at anti-war protests seem to get very upset. The bottom line is, if someone just offering you a paper--that at least, unlike AM New York or the Metro, contain important information and ideas--is enough to get your goat, that's a good sign it's probably because you don't like what the paper says. Plus, Challenge is by-donation. That means you can have it for free if you really don't want to pay the 50 cent suggested donation for it.

PLP members and friends are engaged in a wide variety of groups and activities, but the paper is the primary way we spread and discuss our ideas. It is a critical tool for base building. Imagine how far any idea would get without some cohesive way to spread it! Ultimately, the purpose of a paper for a communist organization is to serve as an ideological weapon in the hands of the working class, a tool to wage class war.

Are you guys Stalinists?
No. We are Marxist-Leninists. While we uphold the gains of the Bolsheviks under Stalin, we are also highly critical of their errors. If Stalin had made any revelatory contributions to Marxist-Leninist theory, then sure, we'd probably jump all over the categorization of "Stalinists." But he didn't; he just upheld Leninism.

Are you guys Maoists?
Nope. This stems back to the '60s, when PL was the fraternal party of the Chinese CP. But even then, we were just plain-old Marxist-Leninists. Again, we defend the Chinese masses' gains under Mao, but are also very critical. That's how dialectics works. And, again, we don't think Mao--who granted, made more important theoretical contributions to Marxism than Stalin--added so much to Leninism to warrant a qualitatively new form of it called "Maoism."

Still, that whole Stalin thing...
If you really are that hung up on it, let's get together and talk. But if that's what's stopping you from getting involved in the movement, then you're missing the bigger picture. And while you think about that, note that, for better or worse, most people don't say "I would become Christian, but that whole Crusades thing..." Many of us, of course, aren't religious people. But all of us can recognize, again, that such a statement misses the point. We're not out to convince you of anything and most of us couldn't care less about hashing out age-old debates--we're interested in getting things done now. The past matters in so much as we can learn from it and apply it--or not--to the future. But we have limited time and resources, and they need to be spent building for a revolution!

I head you guys told people to vote for Obama's senatorial campaign, hate gays, and said [insert incredibly obscure and equally absurd claim here] once.
No, no, and [no]. And stop talking to Spartacists/the FBI.

To find out more about PL's line and practice, check out "the twelve articles"--the closest thing we have to what might be called a party programme. Feel free to contact us with questions at cd188@juno.com, plp@plp.org, or (for the Columbia-specific) plpcolumbia@gmail.com.

Rally against killer cops tomorrow!

2007-11-14T14:26:00.000-05:00

Click here for a full-size JPG of the leaflet.

Join the international, revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party in Brooklyn on Thursday, 10/15/07, 5:30 pm at Boys & Girls High School, 1700 Fulton St. Come and stand up against Khiel Coppin’s racist murderers. We’re not begging for breadcrumbs from his assassins, we’re fighting for a better world--one without bosses, racism, or killer cops!

[Note: The leaflet was made on incredibly short notice and still meant skipping some class. As such, please forgive any glaring typos. If more editing is done later, this post will be changed to include a revised version.]

No justice without state power

2007-11-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

Police are working hard to spin their way out of being called out as the murderers they are after Monday's shooting of 18 year old black Brooklyn resident, Khiel Coppin. Their story of events has been altered more times over the past two days than the Bible has in the past 1,000 years. However, more members of his working-class community continue to step forward with a more consistent--not to mention tragically believable--narrative: Coppin dropped from his window, put his hands up in the air, dropping the hair brush, and was then executed by five fascist pigs who let loose twenty rounds.

A common reaction from the press, police, and sections of the public has been to blame the mother of the victim: "it's her fault; she told the police he had a gun." But as of yesterday afternoon, we know that's a flat-out lie. The mother never said the son had a gun. Yesterday police played audio tape of the mother's initial conversation with a 911 dispatcher, whom she had called to get help for her son. These fascist killers said that they were "justified" in their actions because the son can be heard yelling that he had a gun in the background of the call. But the mother never says it's true, as the police initially said.

Not only that, but after massive public outcry, the police finally released the transcript of the previously unreported second phone call, made from the 911 dispatcher to the mother to "get a more accurate physical description" of her son. In this call, the mother specifically stated that Khiel did not have a gun. But mysteriously, the call from 911 still went out coded as a "family dispute" involving "a firearm."

Additionally, when police arrived and evacuated the mother from the building, she again told them that regardless of what her mentally ill son claimed, he did not have a gun.

The capitalist press have repeatedly insinuated that, regardless of whether or not the killers thought he was armed, the son "wanted to die," aiding the police's bigoted "suicide-by-cop" scenario. However, it is clearly evident from even a cursory reading of the situation that Khiel Coppin was having some kind of manic or psychotic episode. Now the cops and press aren't just blaming the victim of being guilty of being black, but also of needing mental help. How much more outrageously disgusting can you get? It doesn't take a scholar to figure out that if this had taken place in an affluent white community, not a single shot would have been fired. Strangely, it's only when the victim's hand is black that everyday objects like a wallet or a hairbrush turn into a firearm.

Now the real danger is having the mass outrage over Khiel Coppin's cold-blooded murder derailed into meaningless reforms. The working class youth will be told by their Bantustan Chief misleaders to beg for reform from the killers, to ask the murderous system to make itself slightly less murderous. This would be like if Germany's Jews had petitioned Himmler to make the Ghettos more comfy or to add a few more orchestras on the way to the gas chambers! Asking the system to "fix" itself is absurd--especially because, from its point of view, there's nothing to fix: it's working just like it should. Misleaders like Sharpton who always insert themselves into situations like this should be recognized as the collaborators they are. They are worse than the killer kkkops, because their job is to help maintain this blood-soaked capitalist system by delivering the working class of all "races" to their executioners on a silver platter.

It is time to stop begging for a gentler kind of slavery from the plantation's overseers. The only solution is worldwide communist revolution. This is the only path to create a truly egalitarian society, where no one is murdered for being the wrong color or suffering, through no fault of their own, from a mental illness. Not only that, but in a communist world, no worker who seeks mental health treatment for themselves or a member of their family, as Coppin's mother had even earlier that day and in the past, will be ignored or turned away.

It is right and just for the multiracial masses of workers in Brooklyn and everywhere else to rebel in the streets over this shooting; indeed, open rebellion is part of a real solution, instead of sucking up and praying to the ruling class for change. However, rebellion is just that: part of the solution. Disorganized, spontaneous rebellion is not enough, and it can be put down quickly. Mao was in a way correct when he said that political power grow from the barrel of a gun--but even more critical is the ideology the masses holding the guns are mentally armed with. Without a real plan to seize power and smash the state, mass rebellion and violence is adventurism, and will at best lead to more violent repression from the state and its occupying army on our streets: the police.

However, if we help ideologically arm the masses with communist theory--the science of class struggle--then we can pave the way for real change; a change that will see these racist killer pigs and their masters get what's coming to them. If we really want justice then we, the international working class, cannot depend on anyone but ourselves to make it a reality. And only when we take power into our own hands, can we start shooting back. And then, we can hang these fascists from their own racist courthouse steps. It may be a fate much better than they deserve, but it's a better start than the absurdity of begging our masters to use a lighter whip.

DREAM Act is racist nightmare for immigrant youth

2007-11-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

Many immigrant rights groups have correctly opposed various conservative and liberal legislation to "reform" immigration, unlike other nationalist and liberal reform misleaders. As one Lucha member pointed out at the candlelight vigil on Monday night, immigrant workers are sick and tired of having their loved ones used as a political football for various politicians to score points with their constituencies. However, many of these same groups have made an error: organizing support for the DREAM Act, which they see as a valuable tool to create a pathway to citizenship.

The DREAM Act is a ruling-class Trojan Horse. Immigrant rights groups say that it provides a path for immigrant youth to higher education and citizenship. This is one more valuable lesson in a key aspect of dialectical materialism (the scientific Communist understanding of the world): how essence is more important than appearance!

In appearance, the DREAM Act does indeed provide aid for undocumented immigrant youth to go to college and get their citizenship. However, in essence this worthless piece of proposed legislation is nothing but a racist back-door draft for hundreds of thousands of these working-class youth. As Fernando Suarez, whose son Jesus Suarez del Solar died in Iraq trying to gain citizenship, points out, "I see it as sort of a draft. . . . It's immoral."

The DREAM Act has been carefully constructed to ensure that out of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth covered by it, only about 1 in 20 would be able to use it for a college education. The rest would be funneled into the military.

This would be great news for the bosses--which is why even Bush rallied to revive the bill before its most recent defeat--because it would help relieve an enormously over-stretched army. Challenge-Desafio in July, 2007, reported:

Stalled by the rulers' bickering, Bush made a special visit to the Senate to get them to resurrect the bill. But anyone acquainted with it, and its many last-minute amendments introduced by both parties, would conclude that the chances of the bill passing in this session of the Senate are very slim, if not impossible. Then why resurrect it?

The reason is war. The Pentagon and the liberal imperialists hope that the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, one of the bill's provisions, could pass. They are counting on it to help boost badly-needed military recruitment for wider war. Even as Bush was on his way to Washington to help revive the bill, Bill Carr, Pentagon acting deputy Undersecretary of Defense, said, "Talk is already taking place to see if at least the DREAM provision of the stalled bill can proceed." (American Forces Press Service, 6/11/07) "He said the measure should become law because it would be `good for readiness' -- especially at a time when the military...is struggling to attract high-quality recruits." (Boston Globe, 6/16)

This provision from its very inception was hailed by the rulers, their politicians like Obama, Clinton, and McCain, spokesmen like Michael O'Hanlon and Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations, and leaders in the pro-immigrant organizations like MAPA, Lulac and the National Council of La Raza as a "humanitarian" bill enabling "non-privileged" undocumented students to go to college, who otherwise, (because of their immigration status) would be unable to. They all ignore or downplay the bill's military aspect.

There are some 350,000 undocumented minor immigrants who according to Carr, would serve in the short run, with "the bill applicable for an estimated 750,000." (Boston Globe, 6/16) "If you have been in the U.S. school system for a number of years, then you could be eligible to enlist. And at the end of that enlistment, then you would be eligible to become a citizen" (which may very well require residency first).

To earn citizenship these youth would have to serve two years in the military or complete at least two years of college. However, "amendments to the bill would render such students ineligible for some federal aid, including Pell Grants, and require colleges to enter undocumented immigrants into the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System." (Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/30/04) To entice legal residents and (if DREAM passes) undocumented youth to join the military, Bush has issued an executive order allowing non-citizens to apply for citizenship after only one day of active duty military service. But getting it takes a lot longer. Some soldiers, forced to do more than two tours in Iraq, are still waiting for their citizenship.

Challenge-Desafio reported later in October of this year,

The Migra (Immigration Customs Enforcement — ICE) and local police have been carrying out raids against immigrant workers and their families across the U.S. Under the pretext of "deporting criminals," these agents of terror break down doors of homes at 4:00 AM with guns drawn. They also search, arrest and deport workers at their jobs. In many U.S. counties, the open racists try to pass anti-immigrant laws to force immigrants to leave. This racist attack aims to divide and terrorize our class, laying the basis for sharper future attacks on citizens and immigrants.

Meanwhile, representatives of the racist liberal bosses are "defending" their wage-slaves. Recently a Federal Judge in San Francisco temporarily halted the sending of letters to bosses telling them to fire workers with non-matching social security numbers. New York’s Governor is proposing drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants. All bosses want to exploit and oppress all workers. The liberals want loyalty to U.S. rulers.

The top bosses need low-paid, patriotic workers in the U.S., especially for war production. They also need soldiers willing to kill and die in U.S. imperialist wars. The Pentagon is pushing the Dream Act. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) plans to introduce it as part of upcoming military appropriations bills. He said, "This [Hispanic immigrants] is a potentially very recruitable group….The Dream Act will help solve the recruitment crisis we face today." (Wall Street Journal, 9/21) Only one in 20 undocumented youth are able to attend college, so the Act is primarily a military recruitment bill with a "humanitarian" cover.

In other words, the US rulers need the DREAM Act to win immigrant workers and youth to their agenda of increasing war and fascism. This includes, not least of all, the need to avoid the open reinstatement of the draft by tapping into a population of immigrant youth, ostensibly eager to gain citizenship even if it means proving their "loyalty" to the US by putting their lives on the line in its imperialist war machine. And Iraq isn't their only potential destination--they could also wind up patrolling the US-Mexico border, helping the military, Minutemen, and immigration services murder thousands of nameless "illegal immigrants" just like them.

It is perfectly understandable to see why there is such temptation to find a short-term solutions like the DREAM Act, even if it has plenty of problems. Immigrant workers, especially the undocumented, are under increasingly vicious, racist attacks by the bosses and their thugs in law enforcement. When you are trapped in a jail cell, it appears easier to fight for a bigger cell and more comfortable conditions when compared to the struggle to unite and destroy the whole prison. But this is again a matter of appearances.

It may look less difficult, but even the hardest-won reforms can be taken away again by the bosses faster than you can blink. Just like revolution, they take a lot of hard work and commitment, but unlike revolution, they don't produce the same end result. And in the meantime, while we fight for these dead-end reforms, how many more working-class lives ("immigrant" or "citizen") will be wasted in the process? In reality, the faster workers are won to understand that there is only solution to the life-and-death problems of the international working class, the faster we can halt this racist terror. That solution is to crush capitalism under the heel of international workers' power with communist revolution.

All workers and youth must fight anti-immigrant racism

2007-11-13T10:38:00.001-05:00

Smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!
Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!

While immigration has always been a life and death struggle for the world's workers, over the past few years the US bosses have made immigration reform a major issue. Currently, it is uncertain whether any immigration legislation will see continued debate until after the 2008 presidential election circus. However, workers and youth cannot afford to have any illusions about the racist legislation being brought to the table by both conservatives and liberals. There is no "lesser evil" when it comes to these bills. All current immigration "reform" proposals represent one side or another of the same racist, capitalist coin.

Racism has always been the cutting edge of the capitalist attack on the working class all over the world, since the conquest of the Americas and black slavery to the immigration "debates" of today. It keeps wages down and workers fighting each other for breadcrumbs. And this isn't all just in the US--in France, anti-immigrant raids and violence are sky-rocketing; the economies of Germany, Spain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries rely heavily on super-exploited "guest worker" immigrants to perform everything from menial house keeping jobs to back-breaking agricultural and industrial slave-labor. The racist bills and deportations, anti-Muslim round-ups, Minuteklan thugs, and the mass murder of immigrants on the US-Mexico border are just one manifestation of increasing anti-worker fascism around the globe.

The various immigration "reform" bills don't represent the interests of any workers, "American" or "immigrant"--only the financial and military interests of different sections of the US ruling class. Republican legislation represents the openly racist capitalists whose investments are primarily national. The liberals' proposals, like the McCain-Kennedy bill, represent the liberal racist bosses who have trillions invested abroad and a worldwide empire to rule.

But this empire is in serious trouble. As shown by Iraq, US imperialists are losing their grip on Middle Eastern oil, the lifeblood that has propped up their domination of the world for the last 40 years, both economically and militarily. Also, rival imperialists in China, Europe, Russia and Japan are challenging them for greater market share and control of oil and other strategic resources.

To stem the demise of their blood-soaked empire, the US rulers are preparing for bigger and bigger wars. That's why next year's military budget is $663 billion. But they need more than money and weapons to fight their wars--they need millions of our working class youth to fight and die to keep their profits and empire afloat, and millions more to slave for low wages and no benefits in their war industries.

That's why immigration reform ahs been such a hot issue. With the McCain-Kennedy bill, the DREAM Act, and similar legislation, the liberal US imperialists want to win immigrant workers and their 3.5 million American-born children to show their "gratitude" for this country. How? By "patriotically" working under racist conditions and joining the military to kill, and be killed by, their working-class brothers and sisters in other countries to protect the profits of the rich.

We the working class--workers, students and soldiers, "immigrants" and "citizens" the world over--have no stake in the imperialists' genocidal wars, or their source: capitalist exploitation. We, and only we, who produce all value, have the power to change the world--not by voting for capitalist politicians, or supporting one racist law over another, but by organizing. Organizing workers in the factories, students in the schools and soldiers in the bosses' armies; uniting women and men, black, white, Latino, Arab, Asian and workers of all "race" to smash the racist profit system with communist revolution.

The bosses hate communism and tell us that it was a "failure" from Russia to China. But the real failure is capitalism, the murderous economic system that continues to enslave workers and youth around the world. Communism--a system that has never before existed--will eliminate these bosses, along with their racism, sexism, wages, markets, and profit wars. Then we will share the fruits of our labor, giving from each according to our commitment, to each according to our need.

Under communism, their will be no nations, borders or races to divide us. The capitalists, in their schools and media, will tell you it's only a dream. But we already know that for billions of workers everywhere, capitalism is worse than a dream--it's a nightmare! We owe it to ourselves, our forbearers and our children to fight for a world far better than this one. You're already part of the strongest army in the world: the giant red army of the international working class. Join your brothers and sisters around the world in Progressive Labor Party and fight for communist revolution! Help us make that better world a reality!

Fascist pigs murder unarmed, mentally-ill Brooklyn teen

2007-11-13T09:34:00.000-05:00

(Pictured: Killer KKKops mark spent bullet shells at the site of Khiel Coppin's murder.) Last night five killer cops unloaded 20 rounds on an unarmed mentally-ill Brooklyn teen, 13 of the shots hitting their mark. Khiel Coppin, 18, was even handcuffed after being gunned down, his lifeless body dragged away by the NYPD assassins and taken to Woodhull Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Coppin was carrying a hairbrush, which eyewitnesses said he dropped when raising his hands in the air in front of the police, before being cut down in a hail of bullets. Several witnesses reported that the police fired so many rounds that one officer began yelling, “Stop, stop, stop shooting — he’s down,” but that cops kept firing like they were "playing with a toy.”

Coppin's mother had tried to have her son admitted for psychiatric treatment leading up to the event. After a dispute last night, she called 911 in an effort to have him removed to get help for his mental illness. The cops' story has changed drastically several times already between last night and this morning in an effort to keep up with what everyone else present at the shooting witnessed, but all of their stories hinge on the claim that his mother had warned the 911 dispatcher that her son had a gun--a charge the mother denies. Additionally, police are trying to wash the youth's blood from their hands by speculating that Coppin was attempting "suicide by cop," a bigoted charge commonly leveled upon mentally-ill victims of cop murder.

In one police story, Coppin has a knife, in others he doesn't. In one he drops from a window with the hairbrush under his shirt (hence their "believing" it to be a gun), and charges at the police while reaching under his shirt for the hairbrush, ignoring orders to halt--but in a different version of the police narrative, he walks across the sidewalk to them. But all witnesses state clearly that he lowered himself from his window to the ground, stood and immediately raised his hands up in the air, dropping the hairbrush to the ground. Then, police opened fire, murdering another working-class urban youth.

In the coming days, as always happens, liberal misleaders and reformers will try to contain the righteous anger of the working class, funneling it instead into their reform efforts like "community policing" and "police oversight," and their election campaigns. But if we want to stop police murder, we can't fall into this trap! The only way to smash the klan in blue is to smash the racist system--capitalism--that uses them to terrorize urban working-class communities. Communism--the system of workers' power, a society run for need, not profit--will sweep away these new night riders and their politician-masters, crushing them like the cockroaches they are. But for this, we must organize! Now, more than ever, is the time direct our anger where it belongs: not into more dead-end reform campaigns designed solely to keep angry workers and youth under control, but into the streets!

Lucha organizes "Immigration Week" on campus

2007-11-12T23:55:00.000-05:00

11/12/07 -- Lucha, one of the groups central to taking on the Minuteklan last year on campus, kicked off its Immigration Week events tonight with a candlelight vigil at 9pm. The event, scheduled to coincide with the nightly 9pm vigils in support of the student hunger strikers, drew a sizable crowd of at least 100 people, despite the cold and rain.

Many students, faculty and others spoke, make demands ranging from reform of core curriculum to include more ethnic studies, to more radical calls to oppose conservative and liberal immigration policies alike. One young speaker identified himself as an undocumented immigrant, and told the crowd of how he learned just recently that after repeated appeals, his remaining immediate family in the US was now going to be deported.

PLP handed out leaflets about opposing anti-immigrant racism, and copies of Challenge-Desafio. One PLer also took a turn on the microphone, introduced himself as a student, member of PL and the international working class, and a proud Communist, stating that "the capitalists, conservative and liberal, want to pave the way to wider wars, bigger profits, and increasing fascism--and they're going to do it with the dead bodies of thousands of immigrant workers and their children."

He stressed that workers of all "races" need to unite to smash the whole rotten, capitalist system. "How long will we wait [until we finally get rid of the entire system] while we fight for breadcrumbs from these capitalist parasites?" After saluting Lucha for organizing the event, as well as the hunger strikers whose tents were close by, the comrade ended with the chant, "smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!"

While the politics at the event ranged from the predictably nationalist--there were several invocations of the Young Lords, as well as one former member present--to the more openly revolutionary, PLP raised sharp political points and the event energetic and moving.

Lucha will be hosting a series of events throughout the course of the week, including speakers and film showings. A particularly important event, on Wednesday from 12-4pm at Low Plaza, will be about the DREAM Act--which Lucha supports in their literature. PLP believes it is critical that all working people oppose this proposed legislation designed to stave off a real return of the draft by creating a back-door draft for undocumented immigrant youth wishing to gain US citizenship. The act offers a college education track to citizenship as well, however, only 1 in 20 youth would be eligible for the higher education option. The rest would simply be sent to fight and die in oil war after oil war. Supporting the DREAM Act is a fatal error and plays directly into the hands of reactionary forces of war and developing fascism.

Harlem workers, college students march against Columbia's racist expansion

2007-11-12T17:00:00.001-05:00

(Pictured: Students speak out against Columbia's racist expansion and core curriculum in front of university president Lee Bollinger's residence.) 11/10/07 -- "Harlem: not for sale! Hunger strikers: not for sale! Our homes: not for sale! Our jobs: not for sale!" These were a few of the chants that filled the air as a multiracial crowd of 250 angry community members, students, faculty, and organizers marched on Columbia's main campus and Lee Bollinger's house.

By 12:30 in the afternoon, a throng of protesters had gathered on the steps to Low Library. One speaker after another, ranging from community organizers to student hunger strikers, spoke out in rage and indignation at Columbia's racist effort to expand northward into Harlem, displacing 5,000 black, Latin, and white working-class residents. Students in particular were also protesting Columbia's Eurocentric core curriculum and demanding more ethnic studies programs. The speeches were in English and Spanish, and a palpable energy filled the crowd.

After rallying for perhaps 30 minutes, everyone marched from the Columbia campus over to the house of its president, Lee Bollinger, to the rhythm of a radical marching band from Brooklyn. Unfortunately it was reported that Bollinger was not home, but the crowd rallied for another 30 minute in front of his residence and heard the demands of community members not to be displaced or to have a hazardous biological agent research facility near their homes. More student organizers and hunger strikers raised their voices on the megaphone about Columbia's broader place within a long history of brutal American imperialism and exploitation, even drawing connections to the manifest destiny policy responsible for the displacement and genocide of millions of American Indians. One pointed out it was the very nature of the profit system that made Columbia not give a rat's ass about workers and students.

PLP members and friends took part in the march, made several new contacts from Columbia, Hunter, and City College, and distributed every single copy of Challenge/Desafio we had with us. Unfortunately, we had a limited supply to begin with and did not anticipate the large size of the demonstration, so this only amounted to 50 copies. However, black and Latin workers eagerly grabbed copies out of our hands faster than we could keep up. Some other marchers remarked they had not seen PL in 40 years. One said "Hey, is that Challenge? Give me a copy!" and went on to explain that PL was one of the first political groups he had ever become involved with when, in 1968, he was a Columbia student taking part in the big strike.

We also helped distribute leaflets from various community organizers PL Columbia students have begun working with, that pointed out the utterly racist nature of Columbia's actions and of its very nature as an institution.

There will be another mass protest on December 1st, and we have been busy working with other student organizers on campus as well to provide support to the hunger strikers. We are also struggling to raise these issues in the graduate schools, which for the most part are less involved or aware of a lot of the issues surrounding the hunger strike than the undergraduate students. There is a lot of work to be done, and a long road ahead regardless of the final outcome of the hunger strike itself.

We are dedicated to supporting the masses of students and community members in their demands, and to struggling with them in a comradely fashion over the internal contradictions between reform and revolution--and the necessity of the latter. The students at Columbia are doing big and bold things worthy of much praise, especially the hunger strikers who are putting their health, wellbeing, and lives on the line. But students in PL must help forge and understanding amongst the broader student body that without this developing movement receiving leadership from the multiracial masses of workers in Harlem--and not vice-versa--student activists will ultimately set themselves up for failure.

The fate of the student demands and the Harlem community are bound up together, but only when the student body unites behind Harlem's working class, rather than in front of it, will victory in the immediate struggle be a possibility. And more importantly, only when the students of the world unite behind the workers and soldiers of the world can we smash this whole brutal racist profit system and replace it with one where we give according to our commitment, and receive according to our need: the bright future of communism!

PL joins Pakistan martial law protesters

2007-11-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

11/5/07 -- About 50 protesters showed up in front of the Pakistan embassy in New York City today, including two members of Progressive Labor Party who have been working closely with Pakistani students at Columbia University. The police moved the protesters into a pen on nearby 5th Ave, after falsely claiming they were "blocking sidewalk traffic." Nevertheless, the protest continued and garnered a significant amount of media attention. One PL member was even interviewed for New Delhi TV, holding a sign that read "From Jena to Pakistan, Smash Fascist Terror!" and was photographed by a BBC reporter. The crowd maintained a high degree of enthusiasm for around an hour, chanting in Urdu and English. The content of the event was contradictory. Much of the protest was of a highly nationalist character. However, instead of writing off the event in a sectarian manner, the two PL members present advanced an internationalist line to the greatest extent possible, and will continue to provide logistical support to our Pakistani comrades at Columbia. We recognize that this means helping draw the connection that workers from the U.S. to Pakistan will only really be free when they abandon the poison of nationalism for the weapon of revolutionary working-class internationalism. Then we can get rid of the world's Bushes and Musharrafs for good! Until then, what is happening in Pakistan is just a taste of what is bound to happen in the U.S. too, as rising inter-imperialist conflicts and an increasingly volatile global economy build inevitably towards a new world war and growing fascism.

No surprise here: oil lurks behind the current crisis in Pakistan

2007-11-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

What makes the case of Musharraf's negative press [following the declaration of martial law in Pakistan] so interesting is precisely how universal it has been. The liberal wing of the ruling class here and in Pakistan is hopping mad that Musharraf has jumped the gun in imposing fascist repression--in other words, the present elements of bourgeois democracy were working just fine for the vast majority of the Pakistani ruling class, as well as the U.S. The Bush gang of conservative bosses could not care less about even bourgeois democracy in Pakistan, but they are outraged that this situation is hampering their broader imperial efforts and taking time, money, and attention away from prosecuting their "war on terror." Basically, they think Mush's current move has been more trouble than it's worth. This is especially the case while they were already having to juggle the additional ball of Turkey, another U.S. "ally" whose ruling class is overstepping its bounds by placing its own "national interest" in combating the Kurds over the U.S.'s interests of a more smoothly prosecuting a highly unpopular series of wars. This convergence of Rockefeller-liberal and conservative ruling class interests is actually pretty stunning--not the fact that there is one, per se, but rather its degree.

The Bush regime will likely continue to push openly and behind the scenes for a return to Pakistan's pre-militarized state, but cutting funding or weapons shipments will be an absolute last resort. In fact, given the U.S.'s traditional track record, there is a significantly higher likelihood that, if Musharraf fails to fall into line, the CIA will simply fund or directly stage a coup to depose him.

The U.S. bosses already have enough of a contradiction to deal with in Pakistan. It is a highly valuable asset to them because of its strategic geopolitical location, its endorsement of the "war on terror" garbage, etc. However, an unstable nuclear power is considerably dangerous to them, and they are thoroughly unhappy about Pakistan's increasingly threatening business relationship with China--one of the U.S.'s primary enemies in the war for control of oil. China is being allowed to develop a seaport there at Gwadar, is developing a massive railway network to refine, transport, and distribute petrol over land (thus circumventing US-controlled sea choke-points, control, and tariffs), and is also being allowed to set up a naval base in the area for its "blue water" navy. This is a HUGE threat to U.S. imperialists, especially given their current quagmire in Iraq. They went in to gain increasing control over a massive portion of the world's oil reserves (over imperialist rivals like Germany, France, Russia, and China) but have not been able to really even keep the oil flowing. The military occupation needed to keep this control is failing miserably and costing enormous amounts of money. This is not to mention the spiraling chaos in Afghanistan, the other "forgotten" U.S. occupation. For U.S. rulers, conservative or liberal, Musharraf is ruining their plans. In the end it may cost them big--and they'll be damned if some tin-pot dictator is going to get in their way, no matter how valuable he is--or may once have been.

Hit Columbia University's Racism

2007-11-04T14:44:00.000-05:00

NEW YORK CITY, October 26 -- Over 50 Columbia University students, alumni and others protested the appearance of racist Columbia alumnus, David Horowitz. His presence followed a week of anti-Muslim rhetoric and speakers, hosted by the College Republicans -- "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" (IFAW).

It also followed weeks of hate crimes, including a noose hanging, swastika graffiti and a message threatening Muslims left in one building stating "AMERICA is for WHITE EUROPEANS." Numerous organizations planned several events throughout the week, including the main protest before Horowitz's speech, joined by a number of Muslim students and a PLP member. The Muslim Student Association didn't participate, believing the protest would "legitimize" Horowitz's message.

Students gathered in the center of the campus to listen to various speakers denounce Horowitz. A PLP member who spoke linked this anti-racist struggle to the fight against Columbia's expansion, racist research and war funding. He said Horowitz represents one wing of the ruling class that wants to use racist terror to whip up support for the war, but was also dangerous because he obscured the danger posed by the rulers' liberal wing that wants to build nationalist and patriotic loyalty to the bosses.

Another PL'er received a big round of applause when stating he was there from City College along with other students outside Columbia who stood in solidarity with them. He also urged the crowd to check out the latest issue of CHALLENGE containing an article about the noose-hanging at Teacher's College.

Many important political points arose during the organizing weeks, including the necessity to place IFAW within the broader racist attacks occurring recently at Columbia. It was also stated that IFAW was an attack on ALL students, not just Muslims; therefore it required a united, multi-racial response.

There was a debate on how best to confront racist, ruling-class mouthpieces like Horowitz. PLP and many Muslim students favored direct action to shut down all the IFAW's events. Others felt this would give Horowitz "what he wanted" and create "bad publicity." Agreement was reached to protest outside the event, not inside.

When Horowitz was scheduled to speak the crowd moved to the student center. The cops barred many trying to enter "because they were not Columbia students." The handful of Columbia students who did gain entry were forced out because they "did not have invitations"!

The crowd outside continued rallying and chanting, despite the rain and cold weather. PLP'ers leafleted, sold CHALLENGE and made some contacts and new friends. In the end Horowitz's racist pro-American garbage was not heard by many people because the College Republicans' poorly-advertised RSVP system for the event effectively shut out not only protesters but a much broader audience.

Now we will follow up our contacts as well as other students involved in organizing the event so that we can build a more sustained movement to fight not only racism at Columbia, but the racism of Columbia.

Horowitz leaflet

2007-10-23T23:00:00.000-04:00

The leaflet for "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" is now on the PLP homepage and can be downloaded/printed as a PDF.

Smash Growing Fascism On Campus!

2007-10-20T17:21:00.000-04:00

Shut down "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week"

Are you ready to be drafted? Ready to die in the Middle East so some oil boss can keep on living in the lap of luxury? No? Then you must come out to oppose and protest the racist events of "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" (starting 10/22) on our campus. This appalling act represents a deliberate effort to incite hatred against our Muslim and Arab sisters here and brothers across the globe, while shoring up support for the enormously unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the guise of "fighting terror," these hatemongers want to win students and workers to anti-Arab racism to justify more imperialist profit wars in the Middle East.
The racists sponsoring this "Awareness Week" are the same College Republicans that brought the anti-immigrant Minutemen fascists to campus last year. The man behind the week is David Horowitz, a well-known right-wing ideologue and racist. A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center points out that Horowitz blamed slavery on Africans and Arabs, and "attacked minority 'demands for special treatment' as 'only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others.’”
Now Horowitz & Co. want to use the magic of smoke and mirrors to convince you the "war on terror" is about some bogus “clash of civilizations” between the “civilized West” and the “barbarian Muslim hordes.” That hides the reality that the “war on terror” is just another war of terror against the whole working class. Of course the oil companies behind the Iraq war have performed an even greater trick: turning working-class blood into record-breaking profits.
This is the prime motivation behind the war: tightening the U.S.’s control over its rivals’ access to Mid-East oil reserves. But since “oil profits” doesn’t exactly sell a war, the section of the ruling class Horowitz serves uses anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism to provide a simpler “justification.” "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" is the same old anti-Arab racism repackaged to make you believe these profit wars are in your interest, when they really only benefit a handful of fat, greedy millionaires who couldn’t care less about you.
Horowitz’s masters aren’t stupid. These racist scumbags are on tour here because they know the public support left for their bloodbath in Iraq is quickly eroding. The rulers have always been able to use racism to split the working class. Aside from the profits it generates by paying one section of the working class less than another, it also ensures we’re too busy fighting each other to fight our common oppressor.
Which is more dangerous: a wolf, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing? There’s no question Horowitz and his neo-con capitalist handlers are dangerous. In fact, part of what makes him so dangerous is the way his open campaign for an American Thousand Year Reich obscures a much deadlier threat: the one posed by the liberal wing of the ruling class, who know they’ve got to do something to get military recruitment back up. This is the only way to get more boots on the ground in Iraq to “stabilize” it. They know the Bush regime is trying to build fascism and empire on the cheap at the expense of the long-term interests of a huge section of the ruling class.
By contrast, liberal rulers hope they can avoid re-instating the draft, but know the only way to do this is to replace the naked fascism of Horowitz and the right with a more seductive, disguised fascism dressed in “melting pot” patriotism and commitment to “national service.” The liberals’ proposed “DREAM Act” would offer immigrants citizenship if they served two years in the military--or deportation. But, at a time when the liberals are trying to win workers and students to this deadlier nationalism and patriotism, Horowitz and the Bush gang are ruining it by reminding everyone that this country is just as racist as ever!
The same racist logic of capitalism is being used to justify Columbia’s expansion in Harlem; mass murder in Iraq; the CIA-run torture chambers of Guantanamo; the secretive mass-roundup and deportation of thousands of Muslim workers; the open mass-deportations of Hispanic workers; a sweeping government surveillance network that spies on us for “our own safety”--all aspects not of “Islamo-fascism,” but actual fascism.
But there is an alternative to capitalist oppression and its rotten culture of racist, sexist violence: a society that produces for need, not profit; a society where the working class of all “races” can determine their own destiny; where we can stamp out capitalism with its selfishness, racism, sexism, killer cops, “workfare,” profit wars, prisons, deportations and national borders; where people like Horowitz will be ground into the dust under the feet of millions of united workers and students. That society is communism, and Progressive Labor Party is serious about organizing to make that world a reality--but we need your help!
Remember: the real enemies aren’t Arabs, Muslims, or any other part of the international working class--it’s the filthy-rich ruling class, both liberal and conservative. It’s them, not Muslims, who want to march you off to fight and die in Iraq for their oil profits without a second thought. Stand together and shut down Horowtiz’s racist attack--but when it’s over, join the bigger fight against capitalism, the system at the root of racism and war. We can’t end it without you! Join us and help smash the anti-worker terror, poverty, and racist oppression of the capitalist system once and for all! Same enemy, same fight--workers of the world unite!

Contact plpcolumbia@gmail.com for more information.

PLP, SDS, Columbia '68, and the anti-war movement: A history

2007-10-20T17:07:00.000-04:00

While you won’t find it in the bosses’ media, it was the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — forerunner of the PLP — that initiated the anti-Vietnam War movement as a mass phenomenon. At a conference at Yale University in the spring of 1964, which discussed ways of opposing the war, the PLM’s chairperson called for mass anti-war marches on May 2 of that year. The Conference approved the resolution and on that date, thousands marched against the war in New York City, while smaller gatherings were held in San Francisco, Seattle, Madison, Miami, San Juan, Puerto Rico and other cities.

The outdoor protest rally at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan that kicked off the day was the largest single demonstration against the U.S. invasion held in the U.S. up to that point. Five hundred then marched five miles down to Times Square and over to the UN. Soon May 2nd Committees were springing up on many campuses throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the Student League for Industrial Democracy — the youth section of a right-wing social democratic group, the League for Industrial Democracy — had drawn up a manifesto in Michigan putting forward ideas on "democratizing" capitalism while denouncing the Soviet Union. From this, the SDS (Students for A Democratic Society) was born. Soon it called for a mass march on Washington opposing the Vietnam War. To everyone’s surprise, on April 17, 1965, 25,000 protesters descended on the nation’s capital. It was the beginning of a series of mass protests that eventually were to reach a million students and workers rallying in Washington.

As PLM and later PLP saw this growing response, it called on its members to leave the May 2nd Movement and join and build SDS, despite the fact that the organization’s leadership was, in effect, pro-capitalist. Some of the leaders of M2M opposed that idea, saying that SDS was not as "pure" as M2M. But PL felt there were thousands of students that could be influenced in a leftward direction over the issue of the war. PL helped organize chapters on scores of campuses across the country and became part of the leadership in many. As the movement grew, hundreds of students joined PL to fight for revolution, not just against this particular war.

While much of the movement advocated slogans like, "Stop the War in Vietnam" and "Bring the Troops Home" — and later, "Stop the Bombing" — PL’ers fought for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, pro-working class program, calling for "U.S. Imperialism to Get Out of Vietnam Now!" Gradually PL’ers began to win over a majority of the SDS membership to a Worker-Student Alliance outlook, based on fighting racism and imperialism. PL’s anti-racist platform enabled it to play a role in many of the black rebellions that occurred in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.

It was out of these activities that PL grew and eventually began recruiting workers as well as students. Very little of this would have occurred had PL’ers stayed within the narrow confines of the May 2nd Movement. (Future articles will discuss PL’s activities in SDS, including organizing a Worker-Student Alliance and opposing student draft deferments in order to work within the military.)

By the fall of 1967, SDS chapters had sprung up on hundreds of U.S. college campuses. Vigorous debate ensued on the tactics of anti-war activity. PLP members advocated the principle that tactics flowed from politics, and that class allegiance held the key to politics.

From the very beginning, PLP stood alone in fighting for a "Worker-Student Alliance." This position had several practical consequences:

* U.S. bosses got their cannon fodder for the Vietnam War through a military draft. However, college students could enjoy a "2-S" student deferment. PLP argued that a principled anti-war position required refusing this class privilege. PLP'ers rejected it individually and as a mass position. As a result, numbers of PLP members were drafted. The military brass deemed some unfit for military service for "political reasons." Others entered the military and organized against the war on the inside. PLP's principled position against the 2-S deferment won widespread respect throughout the movement, including the grudging admiration of the Party's rightwing opponents within SDS.

* From the start, PLP also vigorously opposed the position of the "official" leadership of the anti-war movement, that "Stop the bombing and negotiate" was the only mass line that could mobilize large numbers of people within the U.S. PLP argued that as an imperialist invader, the U.S. ruling class had no right to negotiate a blade of grass in Vietnam; that the only viable demand was "U.S. out NOW!" This struggle around this principle -- correct as far as it went -- was to have significant consequences several years later, when the Vietnamese "communist" leadership began negotiations with the Nixon administration.

* During the late 1960's, spontaneous working-class militancy was mushrooming, with industrial strikes, inner-city uprisings, and rebellion within the imperialist military. PLP took the lead in arguing that students should support these struggles, particularly with concrete action.

* PLP organized summer "Work-in" projects in 1967, '68 and '69, with two main goals: first to educate anti-war students about the true nature of the working class and the need to unite with workers; second, to bring anti-war, anti-imperialist politics to the working class. In a limited way, the "Work-ins" were quite successful. The student participants shed many reactionary illusions about workers, not the least of which was the boss-promoted slander that workers were racist, reactionary "oafs" incapable of understanding their class interests. Workers who met Work-in participants saw the potential for uniting with anti-war students and communists. The bosses went nuts, releasing several official documents revealing their panic at the prospect of workers and students uniting massively to oppose the war. PLP argued that this panic alone indicated we were on the right track.

* Within SDS, increasingly sharp debate began to emerge around this issue. PLP argued for unity with workers in industry, transportation and communications, and to concretize this unity by supporting strikes in auto, other heavy industries, telephone (the computer was still two decades away as a mass item), hospitals, etc. SDS's "right wing" (as we called it) opposed this position, arguing that the "traditional" working class had become obsolete, that it was hopelessly reactionary, and that "the real hope for revolution" lay in the "new working class" of alienated intellectuals and professionals. The main spokesperson for this nonsense was Herbert Marcuse, a former German social-democrat who had emigrated to the U.S. and become a professor in California. The bosses happily anointed him the ideologue of the "New Left." They promoted his ideas and his book "One-Dimensional Man," even featuring him on the cover of Time Magazine. PLP continued to fight for the Worker-Student Alliance and to organize militant action that reflected this class position.

A key example of this activity was the 1968 Columbia University strike. PLP had argued consistently throughout 1967 and the fall of 1968 for fighting Columbia’s racist plan to build a gymnasium in Harlem while ignoring the community’s needs, particularly since Columbia owned hundreds of apartments that it preferred to leave vacant rather than rent to Harlem residents. A second key element of PLP’s Columbia organizing was the campaign against the university’s collaboration with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a partnership that flagrantly exposed the university’s concrete contribution to U.S. imperialist genocide in Vietnam.

On both fronts, PLP faced an uphill battle. The right-wing leadership of the Columbia SDS chapter found repeated excuses to oppose this militant activity. PLP continued to fight, frequently organizing small, sharp demonstrations, believing the moment for mass upsurge would eventually arrive. This estimate proved correct. In April 1968, several hundred Columbia students launched a sit-in. The administration summoned New York cops, who cracked scores of heads and made hundreds of arrests. The bosses’ brutality engendered mass outrage. Thousands of Columbia students and faculty went on strike. The university ground to a halt.

A crucial political debate ensued. The advocates of the "New Working Class" took a strike-breaking "shut-it-down-to-open-it-up" position, arguing that the strike was an opportunity to hold "liberation classes" and reinvent Columbia as a progressive institution. PLP stuck to its class position, arguing that under capitalism, universities could serve only the rulers, who, after all, owned them and controlled state power.

Instead of the dead-end "liberation" illusion proposed by the SDS leadership and others, PLP called for maintaining picket lines at Columbia, stopping scabs and spreading the strike. We didn’t win tactically but our principled position and insistence on militant struggle won many students at Columbia and elsewhere to join the PLP-led Worker-Student Alliance Caucus of SDS and, eventually, the PLP.

The ideological battle between PLP’s communist view of the working class versus the reactionary politics of Marcuse’s groupies — that industrial workers were "obsolete" — came to a head in June 1968 at the SDS national convention in East Lansing, Michigan. Three international developments set the tone for the looming internal struggle.

First, the Vietnam War — and the rebelliousness of U.S. GIs and sailors — had reached fever pitch. Second, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was raging in China and forcing the question of "revisionism" (capitalist ideas and politics within the communist movement) to the forefront of every honest communist’s agenda. Third, in May 1968, the vicious suppression of a protest by university students outside Paris quickly led to uprisings and strikes throughout France. Within days, a general strike had shut down the country.

Students had set the spark, but the real fire bore the unmistakable signature of the working class. In one bold stroke, France’s working class had demonstrated the bankruptcy of Marcuse and his ilk. But his disciples within SDS were far from convinced, and at the 1968 convention, they mounted a challenge to PLP’s continued existence within the organization.

The ideological struggle within SDS sharpened after PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance Caucus had defeated the right-wing's attempt to expel PL at the June 1968 national convention.

The debate over the identity and role of the working class became an argument over the issue of nationalism. The right-wing followed the old communist movement's line that nationalism could be progressive or reactionary, depending on the identity of the nationalist. This view says the nationalism of the oppressor (U.S. imperialism, French colonialism, etc.) was obviously reactionary; however, the nationalism of the oppressed (the Vietnamese people, or victims of racism in the U.S.) could serve the cause of revolution.

Until the mid-Sixties, PLP had endorsed this position. However, an analysis of international class struggle and a self-critical examination of our own practice (including the 1966 NYC transit strike and other union struggles) led us to conclude that even the most militant anti-imperialist nationalism was a thin disguise for all-class unity behind a boss, and that revolutionaries must therefore reject it.

The struggle was far from purely theoretical. In November 1968, students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) launched a strike that was to last five months, the longest in the history of the U.S. student movement. Thousands participated. In purely tactical terms, it involved some of the most violent struggle of the period, often pitting the strikers in pitched battles against the fascistic San Francisco Police Department. PLP members were among the courageous strikers and strike leaders during these confrontations.

However, the political content of the strike was fatally flawed. Rather than organize around a program of anti-racist, anti-imperialist demands, which could have clarified the class content of the university and moved the strike leftward, the SFSU Third World Liberation Front and Black Students Union called for an "Ethnic Studies Department."

In a different form, this was the same anti-working class content that the right-wing had pushed in demanding "liberation classes" at Columbia in the spring of 1968. SFSU was and remains a capitalist institution; with or without an ethnic studies department, it would continue to serve the bosses. In fact, such a department could only hurt the movement by promoting illusions about the system's ability to reform itself.

At first, the PLP club at SFSU endorsed the strike's bad demands. The Party's new line on nationalism hadn't yet been fully discussed and understood, and in the heat of battle, the comrades on the front lines thought that they were acting correctly in merely giving bold tactical leadership.

PLP's chairperson in New York, recovering from major surgery, heard about the SFSU struggle and talked to the PLP student organizer, telling him: "This Party's not going to capitulate to nationalism. Go to San Francisco and try to win the club and leadership to a better line." The student organizer did so, and, in the heat of the strike, carried out a successful political struggle within the club.

The SFSU PLP club demonstrated great determination and courage in the face of attempted intimidation, threats and physical violence, some of it from cops and some from ruling-class agents within the strike. The bosses recognized that even the most militant struggle could be tamed and brought under control if it was led by nationalist politics. The only real danger was PLP's line. When the Party began opposing both the ethnic studies demand and nationalism in general, the right-wingers and ruling class forces within the movement intensified the anti-PL red-baiting and intimidation.

Nonetheless, the Party stuck to its guns. We didn't win on the issue; the strike ended in March 1969, after the SFSU administration had agreed to create an Ethnic Studies Department, which exists to this day. Two of PLP's main leaders received prison sentences of several months for their strike activity.

But the Worker-Student Alliance and the Party grew both numerically and qualitatively in the wake of this struggle. Student strikers joined PLP. Most importantly, the Party had moved to the left on the crucial question of nationalism and learned to advance under attack. The ideological struggle within SDS was about to sharpen still further, and this political baptism of fire had toughened the Party and would serve it well in the year ahead.

The ideological struggle within SDS over nationalism peaked during the San Francisco State strike. It sharpened further over the negotiations U.S. imperialism was conducting with North Vietnamese government representatives.

From the start PL had opposed U.S. imperialism's "right" to negotiate anything in Vietnam, upholding this position once the negotiations began in 1968. It was a difficult, unpopular principle to defend, because the mass heroism of the Vietnamese struggle had justly captured the admiration of hundreds of millions of anti-imperialist workers and students, and because SDS's right-wing leadership pandered to nationalism. But despite threats and intimidation, PLP continued to maintain that negotiating with U.S. bosses would inevitably lead to betraying everything Vietnamese workers and peasants were fighting and dying to win - most notably, a life free from imperialist oppression. Events were to prove the Party correct.

As at SF State, PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus of SDS organized militant action as well as principled debate. The action followed the logic of PLP's anti-nationalist, pro-working class line. The April 1969 Harvard strike soon provided a stunning affirmation of this marriage between theory and practice.

By 1969, liberal U.S. university presidents were falling over each other to mislead the anti-war movement. They sponsored pacifist teach-ins, day-long "moratoriums" and other diversions from militancy. Many had backed the 1968 presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, a Wisconsin Democratic senator, who had entered the campaign with the explicit purpose of channeling student dissent into a pro-boss electoral dead-end.

PLP argued that capitalist universities were an inseparable part of U.S. imperialism's Vietnam butchery and that the student movement should take clear action against this relationship rather than promote illusions about it. Harvard provided a leading example. For several years, PLP'ers within the Harvard SDS chapter had led militant struggle against Harvard's collaboration with the war. In 1967, Harvard students confronted Defense Secretary McNamara. Later that year, a militant sit-in temporarily blocked recruiters for Dow Chemical - which produced the horrific weapon napalm - demonstrating inside the chemistry building when the Harvard professor who had invented napalm was in his office there. PLP and its base within SDS consistently exposed Harvard fascists like Samuel Huntington, who had helped develop the infamous "strategic hamlet" plan to turn Vietnamese villages into concentration camps.

Throughout 1968-69, PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance Caucus had campaigned against the presence of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) on the Harvard campus. Other demands included ending Harvard's plans for expansion in a Cambridge working-class neighborhood. The pro-nationalist right-wing within SDS opposed ROTC with lip-service but always found ways to resist taking militant action against it.

After losing a close vote to seize University Hall, a key administration building in Harvard Yard, nonetheless PLP and the WSA estimated that enough students were prepared to take this bold action and that it should proceed regardless of the vote. This decision was crucial in exposing the limitation of "parliamentary democracy" as an obstacle to revolutionary anti-imperialist action.

On April 9, scores of PLP-led SDS'ers seized University Hall, ejecting the administrators in the building. Crowds gathered outside to support or debate the sit-in. By nightfall, 500 protesters were occupying University Hall. The next day at 3 AM, Harvard President Pusey called in 400 state and city cops, who maced and beat the protestors, arresting more than 100.

The cops' brutality boomeranged. Thousands protested by boycotting classes. More than 10,000 attended a four-hour meeting in Harvard Stadium to discuss the demands and tactics of an action that had become a strike. The country's most prestigious university, a crucial resource for imperialism and the war effort, was essentially paralyzed for the remainder of the academic year.

PLP had compellingly demonstrated that far from watering down class struggle against imperialist genocide, an anti-nationalist line sharpens it. On the other hand, the all-class unity of nationalism inevitably leads to collaboration with the enemy and turns even the most militant struggle into its opposite.

As the annual convention of SDS approached, the '69 Harvard Strike swelled the ranks of the Worker-Student Alliance caucus and brought many new recruits into PLP.

The 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Convention (June 18-22) in the Chicago Coliseum brought to a head the internal battle between left- and right-wings that had been seething within the organization for several years.

The left was represented by PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus. Invigorated by the practical experience gained in leading sharp on-campus struggles against racism and the bosses' Vietnam genocide, the PLP-WSA contingent arrived at the Convention with a proposal entitled "Less Talk-More Action-Fight Racism!"

The right-wing (which shortly spawned the terrorist Weathermen) was led by outgoing SDS National Secretary Mike Klonsky and Inter-organizational Secretary Bernadine Dohrn. It included Mark Rudd, a former Columbia SDS chapter chair, whom the rulers had turned into a media star after the 1968 Columbia strike. Throughout the period leading up to the strike, Rudd had consistently opposed the campaign over its main issues: Columbia's ties to the Institute for Defense Analyses and the university's racist expansion into Harlem.

The national SDS right-wing had named itself the "Revolutionary Youth Movement" (RYM). During the pre-Convention period, RYM leaders had focused on two goals: in-fighting for political control within SDS and uniting to "get" PL by smashing the growing Worker-Student Alliance Caucus. Expelling PLP from SDS had replaced the struggle against racism and imperialist war as RYM's priority.

The bait was two-pronged: first, the time-worn anti-communist cliché about PLP as "external cadre" bent on manipulating the SDS rank and file, and second, pseudo-revolutionary nationalism, backed by RYM's unprincipled alliance with the Black Panther Party. (See next issue for an analysis of this alliance.)

Two thousand people attended the Convention, by far the largest turnout in SDS history. The first major fight concerned workshops. PLP and the WSA supported them as the best vehicle for discussing the tactics and politics of struggle and the important ideological differences within the organization. Klonsky & Co. opposed such discussion, offering the lame excuse that there was "no room in the vast Coliseum." When that was exposed as a hoax, Klonsky offered the absurd argument that workshops were PLP's "hunting ground for young people." Another RYM leader called supporting workshops "anti-communist" because it showed the SDS rank and file didn't trust a few leaders to settle matters on the floor.

The membership voted down this nonsense in favor of the workshops, but the RYM "national collective" offered speakers and panels to replace slots of workshop time. This tactic was cleverer, the "national collective" using it to block the workshops.

Most people had come to the Convention expecting to discuss different political approaches to the practical task of building an anti-imperialist, anti-racist movement. PLP's anti-nationalist position, which by now had been published in PL Magazine ("Revolutionaries Must Fight Nationalism"), could be understood only in this context. But the opportunist RYM crowd avoided all discussion of practice, smearing PL as "racist" and "opposed to struggle."

The RYM leadership never showed how the WSA's supposedly "reactionary" ideas undermined its practice during militant campus fights from San Francisco State to Harvard, in which the PLP and WSA had played key roles. When the RYM leaders' own practice was criticized, as at Columbia and Berkeley, they had no response except more red-baiting.

The racism panel exposed the total bankruptcy of the "national collective."

The PLP and WSA (Worker-Student Alliance) contingent had come to the Convention proposing a multi-pronged fight against racism. Entitled "Less Talk-More Action-Fight Racism!" it called for intensifying the fight against university complicity with the Vietnam War and broadening it to include campaigns against racist courses and racist university expansion into working class-communities. The proposal also called for allying with campus workers.

Key to its practical program was the political analysis that racism is a class question. PLP vigorously argued that workers of all backgrounds and nationalities have common interests and enemies, and that therefore the all-class unity promoted by nationalism undermines anti-racist struggle. These were the principles PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance hoped to debate during workshop time at the 1969 SDS Convention.

As noted previously, the SDS "national collective" had managed to block workshops. The debate about the fight against racism would now move to a plenary session. Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) speakers offered no program, defended no practice, proposed no self-criticism. Their main approach, represented by Mike Klonsky, was to bait PLP for "not believing in the self-determination of oppressed peoples." PLP countered with examples of PLP-WSA practice and struggle in anti-racist campaigns on many campuses and by offering points from the "Less Talk-More Action" proposal as suggestions for moving forward.

Many had come to the Convention with no particular ideological commitment, either to RYM or the WSA. They wanted leadership that would advance the fight against the war and racism. By the end of the racism panel, it had become clear that the "national collective" at best provided no leadership at all or, worse yet, acted against workers’ interests, as it had at Columbia, by blocking the anti-expansion fight in favor of reactionary "student power" demands.

By the Convention’s second day, the "national collective" was getting wobbly; its leaders began squabbling among themselves.

In an ultimate act of racist opportunism, they used the Black Panther Party (BPP) to bail them out. The BPP was a complex phenomenon. PLP supported its militancy and courage. PLP also unequivocally opposed the racist attacks, including murder, which the bosses, the cops and the FBI had launched against Panthers. But the BPP made two deadly errors, which had to be criticized. They supported nationalism, which had proved deadly to working-class movements. They also engaged in suicidal adventurism, rejecting a base-building approach to mass organizing. PLP made its position clear on these questions, adding that the best way to oppose racist attacks on the Panthers was to organize growing, militant struggles against racism, outlined in its "Less Talk-More Action" proposal.

RYM leaders wanted no frank, honest debate. Instead, they called on Panther officials, who then addressed the Convention again, with an "urgent message." It lasted nearly an hour and attacked PLP, including threats. It also included a disgusting pro-capitalist reference to women, that "their position in the movement is prone," which appalled the Convention. Essentially, Klonsky, Dohrn, & Co. were using the BPP as a shield for their own opportunism and political bankruptcy.

Backed by a well-prepared — and necessary — security squad, the PLP student organizer took the mike to explain PL’s position on issues, including "community control" of police, nationalism, imperialism and, most importantly, the way forward for struggle against the rulers. He attacked RYM leaders’ gross opportunism, asserting that their politics had been defeated.

Someone suggested resuming the discussion about how to fight racism. Bernadine Dohrn took the podium. Refusing to answer PLP’s arguments or discuss the fight against racism, she declared: "It’s clear we can’t work in the same group as an organization that hates the Black Panthers and opposes self-determination." Amidst a thunderous chant of "NO SPLIT, NO SPLIT" from most of the room, Dohrn, Klonsky, & Co. led about one-third of the plenary into an adjoining room.

While RYM met in closed session, whipping up support for the idea of ousting PLP, the Convention continued, finally holding workshops and discussing "Less Talk-More Action," as well as the war and the fight against male chauvinism.

Finally, RYM returned. Dohrn launched into a lengthy, incoherent diatribe culminating with the announcement that PLP and its supporters were "expelled" from SDS. The absurdity of this performance turned initial intimidation into its opposite. People began laughing at her. No more than one-third of the room walked out with her. RYM’s ploy had fallen flat.

The next day, the Convention continued in the Coliseum, passing resolutions about fighting racism and male chauvinism, as well as a statement on the walkout and a pledge to continue sharpening on-campus struggle. RYM, meeting in a church under tightly-controlled security, passed no on-campus programs at all. Its first major post-walkout achievement was a faction fight that quickly turned the SDS split into yet another split, this time between one group that allied with the Chinese "Communist" Party that was then hopping into bed with racist murderer Nixon, and another, that would soon become the petty terrorist "Weathermen."

Objectively, the splitting of SDS sabotaged the movement against imperialist war and racism. Consciously or otherwise, the RYM factionalists were helping the U.S. ruling class. But the struggle against the war and racism had to continue. The fall term of the 1969-70 school year would challenge PLP, the WSA and the remainder of SDS to advance under increasing political hardship.

The right-wingers who split from SDS after the June 1969 convention had only anti-communist opposition to PLP as a basis of unity. Their unholy alliance quickly degenerated into faction fighting.

One gang joined the "Weather Underground," preaching a bizarre ideological gospel that blended liberal politics, drugs, petty terrorism and infantile individualism. A few eventually managed to blow themselves up by playing with explosives in a Greenwich Village, NY, town house. Their major action was a ludicrous rampage in the fall of 1969 through a wealthy Chicago neighborhood. They broke windows in stores and parked cars, giving the FBI a good excuse to put a few of the "Weather" leaders on the "most wanted" list and to discredit the millions of young people still sincerely searching for effective militant leadership against U.S. imperialism's ongoing Vietnam slaughter.

The other crowd organized sects based on the idolatry of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong and their own chairmen, respectively Mike Klonsky and Bob Avakian. The Klonsky crowd distinguished itself through gross personal corruption and the opportunistic justification of every right-wing move made by the Chinese leadership. The Avakian faction was built around a similar recipe of leader worship and opportunism. They disguised it in a simple-minded pre-hiphop aping of the slang Avakian's followers condescendingly attributed to urban youth.

PLP and its pro-working class base within SDS set out to build a worker-student alliance in fact as well as in name. The campus movement had many militant actions to its credit, including battles with police, mass anti-war mobilizations, and campus strikes. But as history and the 1968 general strike in France had proved many times, students may serve as an important catalyst, but they cannot change history or seize power without leadership from the working class.

To launch the alliance in flesh and blood, PLP proposed a program of unity with campus workers. The Party fully understood that workers in heavy industry (particularly war-related industry), transportation and communications occupied a strategically more crucial position than campus workers. However, campus workers were the ones with whom anti-war students came into daily contact -- in the dormitories, on the grounds, in the lecture halls, laboratories and libraries, and in the cafeterias and dining halls. Without them, the universities couldn't function. Furthermore, campus workers were -- and remain -- brutally exploited by university bosses. A large number were black and Latin, and many of the worst-paid were women. The campus was therefore an obvious place for SDS chapters to make the "Less Talk-More Action-Fight Racism" proposal a concrete reality.

In the fall of 1969, the remaining pro-PLP SDS chapters set about launching the Campus-Worker-Student Alliance (CWSA) on several dozen campuses. The climate appeared favorable in some respects. Although the campuses were quieter in October 1969 than they had been a year earlier, the fighting in Vietnam and mass outrage about it continued, along with the militancy of U.S. industrial workers emerging in a significant strike wave. Building unity between the strikers and the anti-war movement became an urgent task. The massive "peace" demonstration scheduled for November 15 in Washington, D.C., quickly symbolized this challenge.

By 1968, every faction within the U.S. ruling class knew they had to find a way to leave Vietnam. The student anti-war protests were troublesome, but the real problem was the refusal of working-class GIs and sailors to fight this bosses’ war. This took many forms: desertion, defection, anti-war organizing — including publishing 144 underground papers — inside the military and outright mutiny, for which a special term, "fragging" (enlisted men killing their own officers), was coined.

But U.S. rulers had two important political trumps. First, the North Vietnamese leadership had agreed to sit down at the bargaining table with Kissinger, Nixon, & Co. even though it was winning the war. So anti-imperialism and revolutionary struggle had been reduced to a bloody caricature: all the fighting and the heroism of Vietnamese workers were being cynically manipulated as negotiating ploys. Second, the betrayal of communism by North Vietnamese nationalists gave a shot in the arm to U.S. liberal imperialists and their allies within the pacifist movement.

This was the context for the November 15, 1969, anti-war mobilization in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, 147,000 General Electric workers had just gone on strike. GE was and remains one of the rulers’ largest military contractors. The PLP leadership saw the strike as an opportunity to take a principled class position in the face of liberal imperialist politicians’ pacifism and North Vietnamese leaders’ criminal opportunism. The idea was to encourage the anti-war demonstrators to rally at the Department of Labor on November 15, to back the GE strikers.

To do so legally meant getting approval from the D.C. cops. The latter said their approval depended on getting a green light from the Student Mobilization Committee, the main march’s official organizer. The Committee was a sordid alliance of the anti-war movement’s worst elements: the U.S. "Communist" Party, the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party, the liberal politicians and media stars (Jane Fonda, et al.) for whom the "C"P and the Trots fronted. PLP had frequently exposed the rotten politics of this "troika," and the troika had no intention of authorizing a pro-working class action with revolutionary implications.

So PLP and its allies decided to organize the Labor Department rally as an illegal breakaway. The anti-war demonstration was the largest in U.S. history, probably involving 500,000 participants. Under PLP’s leadership, several hundred students and others circulated among the crowd to distribute leaflets and make bullhorn speeches calling for the Labor Department rally. The March leadership worked feverishly to prevent the rally, attempting to intimidate potential demonstrators with threats that the cops would attack it and otherwise baiting it.

But their tactics didn’t work. By mid-afternoon, 7,000 people had massed before the Labor Department. The rally took place as planned. The chant: "Warmaker, Strikebreaker, Smash GE!" thundered throughout parts of downtown Washington. Speeches called for unity with GE strikers, the deepening of the Campus Worker-Student alliance and, most importantly, for continuing to build on-campus struggles against the war with this perspective.

As the PLP leadership was ending the rally, a tall, bearded man in the crowd, obviously a police provocateur, threw a rock through a window in the Labor Department building. Hundreds of heavily armed and armored D.C. cops swarmed out, trying to push the demonstrators away. Simultaneously, a stream of Yippies, druggies and anarchists came running down Constitution Avenue, giving the cops an excuse to tear-gas the entire downtown area.

But the pro-working class demonstrators didn’t panic. Their politics gave them a sense of clarity and purpose, enabling them to make an orderly retreat, find their busses and return home to fight another day.

The March Committee’s political attack and the cops’ physical provocation had failed abysmally. PLP and its allies had managed to flout the U.S. ruling class, its liberal agents and its police by organizing a significant, illegal pro-working class action with minimal casualties. This spirit of defiance is more relevant than ever today, in the face of the rulers’ growing police state.

During the 1969-70 academic year, the war in Vietnam raged on. Massive student protest, much of it militant, continued at campuses across the U.S. Desertion and outright defection rose to unprecedented heights within the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, beneath this surface of mounting class struggle, the betrayal of people's war in Vietnam was already under way. As early as 1968, Vietnamese leaders had begun negotiating a deal that would allow U.S. imperialism to re-gain at the bargaining table much of its battlefield losses. However, the deadly fruit of this class collaboration had yet to ripen.

After the split at the June 1969 convention, SDS chapters began building the campus worker-student alliance (CWSA) under PLP's leadership. Despite many political weaknesses, it launched important, useful political struggles over the next few years. In November 1969, when the Harvard administration was still reeling from the previous spring's student strike, SDS members there organized a sit-in protesting the university's racist hiring and pay policies.

The Columbia SDS chapter organized a significant struggle to demand funeral benefits for the family of a campus worker decapitated during a preventable elevator-shaft accident. After initially attempting to avoid all responsibility and after a disciplinary hearing intended to punish student protestors -- which the protestors turned into a trial of the university's racism -- the Columbia administration eventually caved in. Important struggles uniting students and campus workers erupted at Yale, UCLA and many other campuses.

Under PLP's leadership, SDS held a successful convention at Yale and, in the fall of 1970, organized more than 1,000 workers and students to march through Detroit and picket the General Motors headquarters to support striking GM workers. The Party continued to grow and to improve its political line, further distancing itself from revisionism -- the old communist movement's betrayal of Marxism-Leninism, allowing rulers' ideology within the ranks of the working class -- with the publication in 1971 of Road to Revolution III.

However, amid these generally positive developments, events exposed a glaring political weakness within the CWSA and the PLP student leadership. On March 17, 1970, a wildcat strike began in Branch 36 of the New York Post Office. Within days, it had become a national strike, involving more than 200,000 workers at nearly 700 locations.

The strike was essentially "illegal," but because other government workers threatened to join it if President Nixon prosecuted the strikers, he limited his attack to impotent efforts at scabbing, including use of the National Guards and Reserves of all the major military services. This proved completely ineffective. Many of the Guardsmen and Reservists were workers themselves, who carried out acts of sabotage in sympathy with the strikers. The U.S. mail system was absolutely crippled. Wall Street and the normal functioning of business were severely affected. (E-mail and the internet did not exist then.)

The postal strike provided the newly pro-working class SDS with an unmatched opportunity to organize solidarity demonstrations and actions, particularly on campuses where it had chapters. Yet, except for a few small, perfunctory actions of this type and a small demonstration in downtown Manhattan, we did little to support this historic strike.

With 37 years of hindsight, we can make a sober, balanced self-criticism of our inability to rise to this occasion. Part of the problem was objective. SDS was primarily a single-issue organization, whose dramatic rise was tied to protesting the Vietnam War. Vietnamese workers and peasants were being sold out, and the anti-war movement was dying at the time of the postal strike, although it had not yet become conscious of its demise. Leading massive solidarity actions commensurate with the postal strike's importance may therefore not have been in the cards.

But attributing our dismal performance to "objective conditions" would be foolish and irresponsible. The truth is that the PLP student leadership failed to grasp the postal strike's profound significance, took a business-as-usual approach to a situation that called for extraordinary aggressiveness, and in so doing, revealed its own significant weakness on the crucial question of class consciousness.

The Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong once said that a minimum of ten years' practice, struggle and criticism-self-criticism were necessary to turn an intellectual into a good communist. At the very least, our feeble response to the postal strike proved him right on this score. The main lesson here, as in so many other cases, is that we could have done more -- a lot more. However, reiterating this self-criticism after so many years can enable our young comrades and friends to absorb this lesson and to act accordingly when future opportunities of this type arise, as they inevitably will.

In the spring of 1970, the anti-war movement seemed to be gaining in vigor, numbers and militancy. Campus demonstrations continued, many of them sharp. Less publicized but even more significant, rebellion within the military, including desertion, "fragging" (GI killings of officers) and outright defection to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, gave the bosses and brass fits.

However, this appearance of strength belied a fundamental political weakness, which was to prove decisive in the movement’s unraveling. The class consciousness that would have supplied the only antidote to the treacherous negotiations between U.S. imperialism and North Vietnamese nationalists never gained the force necessary to turn the movement in a revolutionary direction. This was due to the strength and influence of revisionism (the presence of ruler’s ideology within the ranks fof the working class) in the former Soviet Union, China and Vietnam, and also to our Party’s numerical and political weakness. This weakness manifested itself in a number of ways, none sharper than our failure to mobilize significant support for the national strike of U.S. postal workers in March (see CHALLENGE, 7/4).

By the 1968 U.S. presidential election, every candidate, even the openly racist George Wallace, had promised to stop the war. Nixon won narrowly against the Democrat Humphrey, promising that he had a "secret plan" to do so. To press for tactical advantage at the negotiating table, he announced on April 30 that the U.S. had invaded Cambodia, thereby widening a conflict he had sworn to end. Mass outrage was swift and widespread. Millions demonstrated on campuses throughout the U.S, many violently.

Kent State University was one. By May 3, 1,000 National Guardsmen occupied the campus. On May 4, the Guardsmen attempted to break up a large anti-war demonstration. The protesters refused to leave. The Guardsmen opened fire, killing four students — two participants and two bystanders — and wounding nine others.

Five days later, between 100,000 and 150,000 demonstrators marched on Washington to protest Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State murders, a fraction of the half million who had marched on the U.S. capital less than a half-year earlier. PLP and the Worker-Student Alliance remnants of SDS organized another "Warmaker-Strikebreaker" demonstration at the Department of Labor, to break away from liberal politicians and attempt to turn the movement toward the working class. Fifteen thousand people participated in this illegal action, twice as many as those who attended the break-away action in support of General Electric strikers at the same site the previous November.

A nationwide student strike ensued, involving over four million students at more than 900 U.S. colleges and universities.

But this was the anti-war movement’s last great gasp. The negotiations and revisionism had disarmed the movement politically. Outrage and anger at the bosses’ limitless talent for atrocity, while necessary, were not sufficient to maintain the offensive. Only PLP stood in the way of a fatal marriage between the movement and the liberal wing of the ruling class, and PLP was not strong enough to reverse the process. By 1968, for all intents and purposes, this marriage had already been consummated. The war and the movement would continue until 1974, but, thanks to the class treachery of the Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese leadership, the U.S. ruling class had managed to maneuver its way out of the most colossal military defeat in its history.

Racist Media Play Down Cops’ Murders at Black Colleges

The massacre at Kent State quickly gained international notoriety, with photographs of the dead and wounded sparking worldwide indignation. All the victims were white. This was not, however, the first time that the bosses’ state apparatus had murdered young people on a college campus.

On February 8, 1968, cops opened fire on an anti-segregation demonstration at the historically black South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, killing three young men and wounding 27 others, all African-American. None of the cops was convicted of anything. This was the first incident of its type on a U.S. campus, and because of racism, it received little media coverage. The PLP organized protests and solidarity actions on campuses where it had a presence throughout the U.S.

In the wake of Kent State, another murderously racist police action occurred at an historically black campus, this time Jackson State, when on May14-15 cops fired 460 rounds at student protestors in less than a minute, killing two and injuring 12. Again, there was significantly less publicity than at Kent State 10 days earlier, and again, despite "hearings," inquests and "commissions," there were no arrests, mush less convictions.

One of the anti-war movement’s main shortcomings was its weakness in fighting racism. The PLP-led Worker-Student Alliance’s "Less Talk - More Action" proposal at the 1969 SDS convention was proving prophetic. The time had long since come for the PLP and its allies to address this vital strategic question.

SDS was essentially a single-issue reform organization. It rose to prominence over the war in Vietnam and declined as revisionism (abandonment of communist principles) transformed People's War into armed struggle for tactical advantage through U.S.-North Vietnam negotiations.

Throughout the war, the Progressive Labor Party, which had launched the first mass demonstration against the war in 1964, played a crucial ideological, political and practical role within SDS and the anti-war movement in general. PLP gained experience, advanced its political line and recruited large numbers of students and others to its ranks. Many remain Party members and leaders nearly four decades later. Most importantly, the primary lessons emerging from this historic period of struggle are as valid today as in the 1960's and 1970's, despite many changed circumstances:

*Wars waged by the profit system, whether in Vietnam or Iraq, are neither "mistakes" nor "aberrations" but rather the inevitable products of imperialism at a certain stage of its development. They will rage as long as we allow the profit system to survive.

*The main danger to working-class interests is political and comes from within. Revisionism and nationalism killed People's War in Vietnam, as they destroyed the once-mighty working-class rule in the Soviet Union and China. The only antidote to revisionism is a revolutionary communist perspective, on both long-range goals and issues of the moment. PLP did not fully understand this point during the Vietnam period (we retained an erroneous belief in fighting for socialism instead of directly for communism until the early 1980's). But the experience gained from political and practical struggle during the Vietnam years enabled us to break with nationalism and many important aspects of revisionism and to set the stage for further political advances, notably the document "Road to Revolution IV" a decade later.

*Students can start a movement and can play a vital role within it. However, only the working class has the potential power and the need to transform and lead society. Winning students to ally with workers is thus paramount at every stage of the process.

*A revolutionary communist, pro-working-class perspective requires the constant application of Marxist-Leninist analysis and dialectics, as well as the courageous determination to take initially unpopular positions. Communists are trail-blazers, not camp-followers.

PLP had to fight very hard for aspects of its line during the Vietnam period. Events later proved these ideas to be correct on every major question: opposing the war in the first place, calling for the U.S. to get out of Vietnam rather than to "end the bombing" and "negotiate," identifying Ho Chi Minh and his cronies as revisionists, attacking nationalism, condemning the Paris "peace" negotiations as a betrayal of People's War, etc. This lesson is as important as ever today, symbolized by the current presence of Nike, Ford & Co., invited into Vietnam to profit from the exploitation of Vietnamese workers.

*Class struggle and militancy are inseparable from the battle over correct ideas and politics. As this series has shown, PLP's ideological credibility and strength varied directly with the tactical leadership it provided in scores of battles on campuses from Harvard to San Francisco State. Our success in fighting for our line accompanied our determination to fight the ruling class.

*Liberal politicians and ideologues were then, and remain today, the primary external threat to workers, pro-working class students, and revolutionary communists. The liberal JFK started the Vietnam War. The liberal LBJ prolonged it. Like Bush today, the Republican Nixon justifiably emerged as the politician everyone loved to hate, but the liberal Democrat, "Clean Gene" McCarthy, administered the main body blow to the anti-war movement by successfully channeling student militancy into a dead-end electoral trap. Democratic Party politicians and the bosses for whom they front are setting a similar trap for millions opposed to today's oil war in Iraq. One of PLP's major tasks will be to win large numbers of the war's opponents to break away from Clinton, Obama, Edwards, et al. No capitalist politician is for peace: scratch a liberal and you'll uncover an imperialist butcher.

*Fighting hard over ideas also requires the skill to work with people with whom we have serious disagreements. Everyone, including us, has reformist ideas to a greater or lesser extent. People with bad ideas aren't necessarily enemies. We didn't adequately grasp this concept during the Vietnam period. Fighting the corrupt, right-wing leadership of the SDS National Office was necessary, but in the process, we managed to alienate a significant number of people we could have neutralized if not won over. This may seem like ancient history, but it really isn't. Work in mass organizations is more difficult and complex today than ever, in a period when success is measured by recruits in the single digits. Revolutionary work demands that we perfect the art of struggling over principle while at the same time giving as many people as possible the opportunity to embrace communist ideas and PLP.

*Less talk, more action: FIGHT RACISM!

EPILOGUE

MARK RUDD: FBI's Little Helper

(Excerpts from a Feb. 17 speech to the "Movement for A Democratic Society" by Mark Rudd, former leader of the SDS's right-wing, on "The Death of SDS," exposing the anti-communist lie that "PLP wrecked SDS." Actually PL'ers fought for a mass Worker-Student Alliance-based SDS while facing physical and ideological attacks from the terrorist Weathermen and other right-wingers.)

I [was]...one of the principal authors, almost forty years ago, of a totally failed strategy.... My little faction seized control of the SDS national office and several of the regional offices. We then made the tragic decision -- in 1969, at the height of the [Vietnam] war -- to kill off SDS because it wasn't revolutionary enough for us....

I remember a certain meeting with no more than ten people present -- out of a national membership of 12,000 and perhaps ten times that many chapter members -- at which we in the Weatherman clique running the NO [National Office -- Ed.] decided to scuttle SDS. I remember driving a VW van with Teddy Gold from the NY Regional Office...[in NYC -- Ed.] to the Sanitation Dept. pier at the end of W. 14th Street...and dumping the addressograph mailing stencils and other records from the Regional Office onto a barge. These...decisions...I and my comrades made unilaterally....

We could have... fought to keep SDS in existence...to unite as many people as possible against the war (which is what the Vietnamese had asked us to do) while at the same time educating around imperialism. I often wonder, had we done so, where we would have been a few months later, in May, 1970, when the biggest student protests in American history jumped off?....

The Weatherman faction, by killing off SDS, did the work of the FBI for them. Assuming we weren't in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.

Mass outrage vs. noose hanging, racist Columbia U.

2007-10-20T16:55:00.001-04:00

NEW YORK CITY, October 10 — Mimicking the racism in Jena, Louisiana, racists hung a noose symbolizing lynching on the door of a black faculty member, Madonna G. Constantine, at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Today, a couple hundred students, faculty and members of the Harlem community demonstrated on the steps of Teachers College to protest this racist act. After several speeches, the demonstration turned into a march around the campus that culminated in a forum of about 600 inside the college. PLP’ers joined the march, sold CHALLENGES and distributed leaflets. Many of the marchers carried signs linking the racism of this incident to that of the attack on the Jena Six.

Although students and professors were outraged and surprised at this noose hanging, there should be no surprise. This incident followed anti-Arab graffiti found in Columbia’s SIPA building, stating that "AMERICA is for WHITE EUROPEANS!" That was swept under the rug. Since the noose hanging, anti-Semitic graffiti was found in a university bathroom. President Lee Bollinger’s e-mail about it said we should just ignore such racist terror. But the noose incident was too blatant to ignore.

Columbia has a long racist history. Its faculty included W. H. Sheldon, who "theorized" that "Negro intelligence . . . [comes to a] standstill at about the 10th year," and that "Mexican intelligence" stops at age 12. It also included Henry Garrett, who wrote pro-segregation literature for the White Citizens Councils in the South. During the Vietnam War, Columbia’s racist weapons research helped slaughter Indochinese peasants. It seized part of a park in a black working-class neighborhood to build a gym for Columbia students. Current Columbia child psychiatrist Gail Wasserman carried out a variety of racist "violence-in-the-genes" research on black and Latin youth to "predict anti-social behavior."

Today, Columbia pushes its racist eminent domain expansion into Harlem. It sponsors anti-Arab speakers, including David Horowitz, Sean Hannity, Phyllis Chesler, and Ibn Warraq as part of their so-called "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week." It used the invitation to Iran’s president to provoke blatant anti-Muslim racism. The latest string of hate crimes simply flows from this racist history.

Meanwhile, the university tries to diffuse anti-racist action. It hides other racist incidents, requires multicultural "sensitivity" training and pushes "dialogue" to bury united militant action.

"White skin privilege" is pushed on white students while black and Latino students are saturated with divisive identity politics. Racism is portrayed as simply an "aberration" that can be "undone" if people are just "educated" enough. There’s no mention of racism being a means to class exploitation. Racism is a major weapon against the whole working class.

Columbia’s divisive propaganda is reflected in one discussion of the noose hanging when an Arab student complained about a lack of concern regarding anti-Arab racism. A black student countered that "foreigners" just don’t "get it" — "we must address anti-black white racism first and deal with all the rest later." But this simply hands power to the same racists who hung the noose in Teachers College. The bosses love nothing more than working-class people fighting amongst themselves and focusing on their supposed "differences" instead of uniting to smash their common oppressor. Historically black workers and students have been in the forefront of fighting racism that has won victories for the entire working class.

Racism can’t be ignored, reformed or discussed away. Columbia students need multi-racial unity and mass militant action to answer these racist scum, not more talking and internal division.

The capitalist system that creates a culture like the noose incidents is the same one dropping cluster bombs on Iraqi children and gunning down immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border. Racism is the tool of a system that is an enemy to all workers, students, teachers and soldiers. Uniting to end this blood-drenched profit system and its imperialist wars through workers power — communism — will mean the bosses’ days are numbered.