The PLP effort to orient SDS toward the working class centered at first on a Student Labor Action Project (SLAP). According to the PLP newspaper Challenge, at the time, “SLAP argued that SDS must organize masses of students who can be reached because Imperialism screws them. They must be won to clear, anti-imperialist politics and a pro-working class outlook. We must try to ally students with working people in the struggle. Fights around ‘purely’ student demands must be made pro—not anti-working class. Student and worker demands should be linked (e.g., oppose flunkout; demand more working class—especially Black—admissions; oppose expansion by eviction in working class communities, all in the same fight.)”[30]
The denouement of PLP penetration of SDS was sketched by Harvey Klehr. He wrote that “Its ‘old-left’ style contrasted sharply with the cultural radicalism of many in SDS, but its Leninist discipline and coherent doctrine enabled it to recruit numerous students. … At SDS’s tumultuous 1969 convention, when it appeared that PLP might win control of the organization, a split took place, leading to its splintering into the Weathermen, the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the PLP-controlled SDS.”[31]
For several years after the 1969 SDS convention, the PLP kept alive what it called the SDS. Typical of the line of reasoning of the PLP-controlled SDS was an article entitled “Crush the Bosses’ Colleges,” which appeared in Challenge in September 1970. It said, “More and more students are beginning to realize that the colleges and their administrators aren’t any good to anyone but the big bosses and politicians who run this country and are responsible for the war and racism which most students hate. And many students have learned that the problem isn’t faulty individuals, but the system of capitalism.”
The article concluded that “The essence of the college is to serve the capitalists who own and control them. As long as the bosses control the colleges with their cops, court injunctions, and guns, workers and students cannot gain control of the schools. And just like all other capitalist institutions, the bourgeois colleges must be smashed by a revolution.”[32]
The PLP and Organized Labor
From its inception, the Progressive Labor Party had yearned to gain a foothold in organized labor. One of its earliest frustrated efforts to do so took place in 1963, when it sent a delegation to Hazard, Kentucky, for long a center of conflict between the miners’ union and the mine owners. The delegation brought with it arms and a printing press, and proceeded to set up a “revolutionary newspaper” in Hazard. However, the local miners soon sent them on their way.[33]
Then, as an official document of the PLP itself said many years later, “From ‘65 and the establishment of PLP to around ‘68 we attempted to move members to work and into the unions, mostly to try to establish a base within the working class at the point of production and secondarily to get some stability. Since most of our members were students or ex-students, these were the people who ‘entered’ the working class to carry out the line. … We were going to try to build a rank-and-file movement, caucuses, a Left-Center Coalition, learn trade union and strike tactics and organize struggle so ‘Marxist-Leninist’ conclusions could come out of the struggle.”
However, as this party document noted, “As we began to see that putting students in the ‘front lines’ wouldn’t work and that they either left the Party or they buried themselves at work (and left the Party behind), we pulled many of them out of the industrial working class and put them in situations more related to their backgrounds, some still in unions, others in situations where they could more naturally win their peers to a pro-working class stance. This period, from ’69 to ’71 was characterized by the more mass putting forward of the Party, especially through the mass sale of C-D. Members were encouraged to sell the paper in front of their plants, to tell workers about the Party at the beginning. Sales of the monthly C-D reached 100,000 in the summer of 1970.”[34] (C-D is Challenge-Desafio, the PLP bilingual newspaper.)
The PLP and the Vietnam War
The PLP was one of the first groups to organize protests against U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. However, as the massive war protests grew in the late 1960s, the Progressive Labor Party played little role in them.
Milorad Popov noted in 1971 that “Having failed to gain any significant influence in the movement of opposition to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, whose demonstrations resulted in a certain degree of collaboration between extreme-left groups of differing orientation, the PLP continued, as in previous years, to portray most participants in ‘anti-war’ activity as direct or indirect ‘collaborators’. The party’s own policy over issues such as the U.S. military intervention in Cambodia was to focus its attention on what it perceived as the underlying working class problems arising from such an action. Thus in the demonstrations in Washington that were organized in response to the Cambodian events, its participation was limited to a rally in front of the Labor Department building, where PLP speakers demanded that no campus workers be laid off during the strikes which were in progress on a number of college campuses.”[35]
On at least one occasion, members of the PLP and its SDS group sought to gain entrance by force at a meeting of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. They were turned back by a “defense” guard hastily mobilized for the meeting. The PLP and SDS had each been given credentials for one such delegate, but claimed the right to bring as many people as they wished.[36]
Certainly one reason for the PLP’s failure to influence the anti-war movement after 1968 was their vehement attacks on the North Vietnamese agreement to enter into formal negotiations about ending the war. Typical of the PLP position was an article entitled “Viet Deaclass="underline" Setback for Revolutionaries,” published in Challenge in November 1968, which stated, “By abandoning their correct position of U.S. Get Out of Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese are simply reduced to haggling over the terms of their surrender.”
Schisms within the PLP
There was a certain degree of dissidence and factionalism in the PLP during the years that it was a Maoist organization. At various times, leaders were expelled and vilified. The first important defection took place in 1965, even before the conversion of the PLM into the PLP. Others occurred in 1969 and 1970.
The first major figure in the Progressive Labor leadership to defect was Phillip Abbott Luce. He had helped organize and participated in the parry’s 1963 trip to Cuba, and upon joining the party had quickly become editor of Progressive Labor. When called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, he defied them, and was subsequently indicted for his role in the Cuban trips. However, early in 1965 he decided to resign from the PLM.
When the PLM announced the “expulsion” of Luce, it blamed his defection on fears of imprisonment. It wrote that “Luce first tried to escape from his fears of imprisonment by smoking marijuana. When this didn’t work, he turned to heroin. This led him to steal money and eventually bare (sic) false witness against his former friends in order to support his habit.”[37]
35
Milorad Popov, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., 1971, page 357.