Progressive Labor Party

Progressive Labor came out of a split in the Communist Party USA and became a party in its own right in 1965, siding with Peking against Moscow. Unlike most of the New Left it was a disciplined cadre organisation with a line. It held the classical position: the industrial working class makes the revolution, students do not, and a student movement earns its place only by serving one.

It entered SDS on purpose and built the Worker-Student Alliance caucus. By 1969 the caucus was strong enough to contest control of the organisation. Its opponents inside SDS saw it as an outside body colonising theirs. That description is fair. It is also what people would soon accuse those same opponents of doing to everything else.

The archive keeps this file because Progressive Labor is the control case. It held the orthodox Marxist answer to who makes the revolution at the exact moment the rest of the American left abandoned it. That abandonment is the subject of this record.