Only the articles with the hypertext links are available on line at this time. We will be adding more articles as we get a chance to scan and format them. All the articles are available in printed form from Progressive Labor Party.
The twelve articles included in the present collection reflect the Progressive Labor Party's major contributions to the advancement of revolutionary communist theoretical science over the past quarter-century.
Our Party represents a logical outgrowth of the movement for proletarian dictatorship and egalitarian communism, a struggle that began with the Communist Manifesto of 1848. We could not exist without the monumental contributions of revolutionary leaders and thinkers like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, or without the heroic fight for communism waged by millions of workers and others throughout the world since the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Commune, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the Soviet working class's momentous victory over the Nazi beasts, the Chinese Revolution and its sequel, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as a long history of other battles large and small against imperialism, all prove that working class revolution and egalitarian communism represent the inevitable wave of humanity's future. Sooner or later the international working class will free itself from the murderous economic, cultural, and psychological oppression of the profit system.
However, revolution is not a spontaneous event. It is a process. Like any science, it requires carefully planned, conscious activity. Like all scientists, revolutionaries must formulate a plan, carry out experiments based on it, analyze errors, repeat successes, and strive to rectify failures.
The historical experience of revolutionary communist movements shows that the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into its opposite because of key weaknesses within the old communist parties and their strategic political line. These weaknesses eventually led to the re-establishment of full-blown capitalism in once-socialist countries. The obscene anti-communist, anti-worker lies and actions of a Gorbachev or a Deng have their roots in these weaknesses.
Socialism--the violent seizure of power by the working class and the consolidation of proletarian dictatorship--were epoch-making accomplishments in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. But socialism preserved wages and social inequality. It could not fail to restore capitalism because it was capitalist in essence. Our Party has broken completely with the theory of revolution in "two stages." In Road to Revolution III, we said that communists must fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bottom-line program in all circumstances. In Road to Revolution IV we advanced this concept to the next logical step. The PLP now believes that abolishing wage slavery and building egalitarian communism must become the immediate goal of workers' dictatorship. A new international communist movement must build a base now for this idea among workers and all their potential allies. We are striving to lead such a movement, and we have made modest but significant progress since the publication of Road to Revolution IV in 1982.
Our Party was born in the struggle to raise the red flag high above the slime of opportunism. We want to win the confidence of the working class, to earn the right to lead it to revolution. Throughout our history, we have attempted to learn from the positive contributions to others and to recognize and reject their errors.
Some of the articles in this collection, particularly the earliest ones, reflect lessons we drew from other revolutionary movements. However, the reader will see that as the PLP developed, our line and our own militant political activity had to become the key focus of our analysis and criticism.
Our Party was once tiny. It grew--in both size and quality. It is still small today. It has nonetheless accumulated a wealth of experience in working class struggle on many fronts. As these articles show, we have also made many errors. The articles reflect the inevitable, healthy process or putting revolutionary ideas into practice, committing mistakes, evaluating the work objectively, and starting out again on a higher level. Study and life teach us that weak, small movements can gain strength until they become invincible, provided they represent the interests of the working class and apply dialectical materialism, the science of understanding and transforming reality.
Some of the following articles (Road to Revolution III and IV) reflect primarily the advances the Party has made in its general line. Others (Build a Base in the Working Class, Revolution--Not Reform, What You Do Counts, etc.) represent a self-critical attempt to improve the Party's practice in carrying out its line. Communists are materialists. We understand that correct ideas must reflect reality and that the working class can learn the science of revolution only by engaging in the class struggle.
None of these articles constitutes the last word on anything. Each of them embodies a significant advance in the Party's collective knowledge. We present this pamphlet as a weapon for the working class's arsenal of ideas, in the hope that it will help convince readers to join our Party and dedicate their lives to the fight for communism.