On May 20 we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Milt Rosen, founding chairperson of the Progressive Labor Party, who was born on May 20, 1926. Milt Rosen not only helped found the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), which then became the Progressive Labor Party — he charted a new path away from the dead-end reformism of the old movement and the Communist Party (CPUSA). Most significantly, in 1982 he led the adoption of “Road to Revolution IV,” which formulated the Party’s line to fight directly for communism instead of socialism — a massive and historic shift from the two-stage theory that had defined the international communist movement since Marx. He is the author of the foundational Party text Build a Base in the Working Class.
The words below are excerpted from the tribute in Challenge of August 3, 2011, which can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/miltobit
Milt Rosen, one of the founders and the first chairman of the Progressive Labor Party, was born one hundred years ago, on May 20, 1926.
In the fall of 1961, Milt Rosen convened a small collective that would soon leave the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) to form the Progressive Labor Movement. Four years later, Comrade Milt became the founding chair of the Progressive Labor Party. He served our organization and the working class in that capacity until 1995.
On July 13, 2011, Milt died of Parkinson’s Disease at the age of 85. He is survived by family, friends, and thousands of comrades — and by a revolutionary communist party deeply rooted in the international working class.
After serving in World War II, Milt became a Communist Party organizer in a steel plant in Buffalo, NY. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev attacked Joseph Stalin. By the late 1950s, in retreat from McCarthyism, the CPUSA had abandoned any effort to organize the working class for revolution. It hid its most advanced ideas from workers and plunged into the sewer of electoral politics, running its own candidates and supporting “lesser-evil” liberals for office. Socialism, the CPUSA leaders declared, could be achieved by reforming capitalism. On the international stage, they joined with fellow revisionists in the Soviet Union in calling for “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S. and its capitalist bloc — an impossible strategy, given the fight-to-the-death reality of imperialism.
Doing away with reformists in the ranks
By contrast, Milt (by then the CP’s industrial organizer for New York State) defied the old Party’s directives and openly called for communism and the need for mass, violent revolution to achieve it. He and his comrades saw that the future of communism lay in negating the old movement — in preserving its progressive elements while discarding what had become outworn or harmful. In January 1962, they published the first issue of a monthly magazine called “Progressive Labor.” In June 1964, PLM began publishing CHALLENGE- DESAFIO. At a time when bilingual publications were unheard of, and despite our organization’s small size and limited funds, Milt fought for a paper in both English and Spanish. We had no choice, he said. We had to make communism available to the many New York workers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere who spoke mainly Spanish.
Milt was chosen as the first chairperson of PL because he was unafraid of struggle. He led the internal fight that transformed the Buffalo CP into a red force, in sharp contrast to the CP’s national leadership and its accommodation to capitalism. PLM was born out of that internal struggle, as was Milt’s analysis in “Road to Revolution.” Milt himself had been steeled in class struggle, from his experiences in World War II to his vanguard communist work in Buffalo’s steel industry.
At our 1968 Party convention, Milt gave a speech that was subsequently published as one of the Party’s most durably important statements. “Build a Base in the Working Class” advanced the necessity to develop close ties with industrial workers, on and off the job, and to immerse ourselves in their lives.
In 1982, after a year of discussion within PLP and its base, Milt led the struggle to adopt “Road to Revolution IV” as the political line of the Party. RRIV analyzed the return to capitalism in the Soviet Union and China. It concluded that fighting for socialism as a preliminary stage before communism — a core principle of the international communist movement since Karl Marx — was fatally incorrect. This theory had led inexorably to a reversal of all the gains from the heroic struggles of millions of workers. RRIV, by contrast, called for winning the working class to fight directly for a communist society. This was a qualitative leap for PL and for the international working class.
Leading the fight against racism & sexism
Milt believed that the only way our Party could grow was to constantly train new leaders, especially Black, Latin, and women comrades. Milt believed that fighting both racism and sexism was an integral part of the class struggle, and he ensured that much of the Party leadership would be in the hands of women. One of the Party’s early militant struggles grew out of its organization of mothers on welfare, who united with welfare workers to demand services for their children. As the Party immersed itself in class struggles in the garment districts of New York and Los Angeles, in the grape fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and in the Stella D’oro cookie factory in the Bronx, we learned that unity between men and women workers was essential to building our movement.
After stepping down as Party chair and before becoming too ill to function, Milt continued to make vital contributions to PLP and the international movement. Among his most significant lessons was the need to understand the character of our historical period. Shortly after the events of 9/11, he spoke of how he’d underestimated the impact of the old communist movement’s demise, and how far it has set back the class struggle. This failure, he pointed out, could lead to one of two devastating errors: false optimism or despair over the formidable difficulties in building a mass communist party. Milt’s self-criticism reminded us that the old movement’s defeat may have left us in a “dark night,” but the working class has lived and fought through dark nights before.
With words and by example, Milt taught the vital importance of a long-term outlook. More clearly than most, he knew there were no shortcuts to revolution. He embraced it as the commitment of a lifetime. More than anything, he taught us never to give up.