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.
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Kentucky Speech - Remember: one struggle, many fronts
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- 08 May 2026 332 hits
The following is a speech given by a PL’er in Kentucky at the first ever May Day action.
Comrades
Today is International Workers’ Day—a global holiday of struggle, born from the blood of workers in the U.S. and carried across borders, turning one struggle into an international movement of rebellion.
A day to remember the martyrs of the Haymarket affair, murdered by the bosses’ state for daring to fight for the 8-hour day. Railroaded by bogus sham trials in the bosses’ courts. Their crime - daring to fight back. Their legacy: struggle
Declared a global day of action by the Second International, its history extends to every corner of the globe. From Chicago to Berlin, from the Russian and German revolutions to the 1968 uprisings in France. From the fight against fascism in Italy and Spain to the U.S. anti-war movement
- May Day proves one thing: the workers’ fight has no borders
Remember 1890
The first International May Day saw coordinated general strikes across Europe and beyond—millions of workers acting together across borders as one class birthed modern proletarian internationalism in practice.
The next year was the May Day massacre of 1891, when French troops opened fire on striking workers demanding the 8-hour day. Early proof: the bosses’ state answers worker unity with bullets.
We remember 1917—the Soviets taking power. The first state made truly by and for the working class turned May Day into a weapon of revolution.
Hell, we’ll remember Appalachia. Not just the battles, but all the May Days where miners organized, linked up with the world, and built the force that exploded against coal bosses in the largest labor uprising in the country’s history.
Where the first Civil War between states confronted chattel slavery, this second one between the social classes confronted wage slavery with unity between former slaves, immigrant, and white workers
(1933)
After allowing a state-controlled May Day, the Nazis immediately smashed unions the next day. Shows how seriously fascists fear independent working-class organization—and how they try to co-opt it before destroying it.
(Rings a bell don’t it?)
Remember Spain 1936—workers arming themselves, fighting fascism, and running factories.
How could we forget May Days shaped by the Cultural Revolution in China—millions of workers and youth rising to challenge old revisionist ideas and a new rising bourgeoisie. Fighting for mass participation inspired by the spirit of the Paris Commune.
Remember 1967 in Hong Kong, where workers rebelled against colonial rule—linking anti-imperialist struggle and class struggle and igniting a wave of uprisings in May 1968 France, where millions of workers walked off the job and shook the foundations of capitalism.
Under apartheid South Africa, May Day became a site of illegal strikes and multiracial worker resistance—directly linking class struggle and the fight against racist rule.
Remember the 70’s - the Progressive Labor Party being a major force behind the revival of militant May Day mobilizations through the broader anti–Vietnam War struggle and worker–student–soldier unity
In the 80’s workers used it to organize against Augusto Pinochet—mass protests, strikes, and repression. Even under terror, workers regrouped and fought back.
Remember 2006-
Immigrant worker May Day
Millions of immigrant workers shut it down in the U.S. and showed the power of multiracial working-class unity
On this day, Soviet workers and soldiers raised the red flag over Berlin in the final days of the Battle of Berlin.
A reminder of the necessity, courage, and strength of workers organized under communist politics and practice fascism and world war were crushed by revolutionary movements rooted in the working class—guided by a commitment to ending exploitation & inequality, to smashing this rotten profit system built on racism, imperialism, and war.
That lesson is urgent today as capitalism continues to produce war, fascism, and genocide. The same system that starves and displaces millions - bombs workers abroad.
The same bosses who preach “democracy” build prisons, deport immigrant workers, and divide us with racism, sexism, nationalism.
May Day is about rejecting those divisions.
They don’t just crush resistance—they domesticate it.
They smother struggle in their institutions & NGO’s, try to misdirect anger into ballots,
To maintain rule they fund and channel the fight into fragmented, issue-by-issue struggles—separating each battle from the whole.
Today the Progressive Labor Party continues to bring May Day back to the working class in the United States as a day of struggle. In the streets, in schools, on the job. Organizing to fight racism, and to build a mass communist movement connected to workers worldwide.
Because ultimately this system cannot be reformed to serve our class as a whole, nor can it be smashed alone. May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win and we can join together with our class brothers and sisters to fight to achieve that goal.
One struggle, many fronts—one working class, worldwide
U.S. replenishes weapons for Israel
Jerusalem Post, 4/30–The United States recently shipped 6,500 tons of munitions and materiel to Israel within 24 hours, using two large sea vessels and multiple cargo aircraft…In a large-scale global logistics operation, the two cargo ships docked at the ports of Ashdod and Haifa, carrying thousands of air and ground munitions, military trucks, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs), and additional military equipment…“Since the launch of Operation Roaring Lion, Israel has received more than 115,600 tons of military equipment in 403 airlifts and 10 sealifts”...At any given moment, cargo aircraft and ships are en route to Israel, carrying thousands of tons of munitions and military equipment.
U.S. runs low on weapons used against Iran
NY Times, 4/23–Since the Iran war began…the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year. The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles…the drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China…
Fight in Iran is connected to petrodollar
Fortune, 4/20–The United Arab Emirates apparently dropped a hint the dollar’s dominance isn’t assured in the global oil trade…UAE officials…pointed out the U.S. started the Iran war and said they may be forced to use China’s yuan or other currencies for oil transactions if the availability of dollars gets tight…Any pivot away from the dollar by a top oil producer would represent a major threat to the currency’s supremacy. Saudi Arabia’s decision in 1974 to price its exports in dollars helped establish the dollar as the standard across the global oil trade…the Iran war could worsen some cracks that had already been forming in the so-called petrodollar regime, analysts at Deutsche Bank warned…
Israeli navy used to capture aid workers
MSN, 4/30–Activists on a flotilla of boats seeking to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza said Thursday that Israel forces intercepted the vessels overnight, smashing engines and detaining some of those onboard while they were sailing in international waters near Greece, hundreds of miles from Gaza and Israel. The Global Sumud Flotilla set sail earlier this month from Barcelona. Organizers have said more than 70 boats and 1,000 people from around the world would be participating, with more vessels joining the original boats as the flotilla sailed east across the Mediterranean…
U.S. Supreme Court ready to accelerate ethnic cleansing
NPR, 4/29–The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States. Until now these individuals have been accorded temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries…Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration’s review as “a sham.” “The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president’s racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular”...
Genocide in Sudan shows the horrors of capitalist competition
DW, 4/30–Her fingers are emaciated down to the bone…Hassaina…is deeply scarred, both mentally and physically. It has been about six months since she and her four children survived the massacre in their hometown of el-Fasher in the embattled Darfur region of Sudan…”I saw genocide with my own eyes and experienced it firsthand”...The violence reached a peak last October: The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, which is fighting against the government army and allied militias, captured el-Fasher, the largest city in the Darfur region, after a long siege and carried out a massacre of immense proportions against the civilian population…”The atrocities have a hallmark of genocide,” concludes UN chief investigator Mohamed Chande Othman…
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Editorial: Hungary - workers’ power needed, not elections
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- 26 April 2026 476 hits
On April 12, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his small fascist ruling party Fidesz were ousted in an election landslide. The outcome represents a win for the big fascists of the European Union (EU), the big multinational banks, and other finance capital bosses with the trans-Atlantic military alliance of NATO and the EU. These liberal rulers are determined to keep Western imperialism top dog on the world stage—and to push back the upstart European “alternative finance” capitalists, whose wealth is tied to hedge funds and private equity (Irish Times, 4/15).
By dethroning Orban, a loyal ally of both the Russian imperialists and U.S. State-Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump, the liberal mass murderers have removed one obstacle to their clash with Russia in the ongoing bloodbath in Ukraine. They’ll also have freer rein to expand the EU’s military buildup and prepare for wider wars. Hungary has now pledged to not block a EU-funded $105 billion loan mainly for military aid to Ukraine (Bloomberg.com, 419). As winning candidate Peter Magyar and his new Tisza party are signaling a renewal of close ties with the EU, the liberal bosses are rejoicing. An editorial in the New York Times gushed, “Hungary now has a golden opportunity… [to] become a lighthouse of democracy” (New York Times, 4/13).
Workers everywhere have good reason to reject the likes of the racist, sexist, incompetent, and corrupt Orban. But electing some other capitalist stooge will never meet the needs and aspirations of the international working class. The growth of fascism goes deeper than an Orban or a Trump or a Giorgia Meloni. It reflects an acute crisis of the worldwide profit system as it lurches toward world war.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rejects voting and all bosses in favor of armed struggle and workers’ power. When we unite with millions of other working people, we are on the path to transforming society. On this coming May Day, the international workers’ holiday, let’s take to the streets and raise the red flag of communism. Let’s defy the bosses’ racist, sexist attacks, their misleader politicians, and their imperialist wars!
New Hungarian PM a racist enemy to workers
As a longtime agent of the Hungarian ruling class, the opportunist Magyar is no friend of the working class. He went to elite private schools and joined Orban’s Fidesz party in 2002, while still in university (BBC, 4/12). Magyar left Fidesz barely two years ago. His ex-wife, the country’s former justice minister, was at the center of a cover-up of child molestation (Forbes, 4/13).
Magyar has promised to tackle corruption, improve the economy, and defend Romani workers who have long faced racist repression (BBC 4/1).
Yet for over two decades, as Orban’s staunch political ally, he helped lead an administration that scapegoated Romani and immigrant workers and did nothing to address their high poverty rate and low life expectancy (The Guardian, 1/31).
Magyar’s stated resolve to pivot on Ukraine is a complicated story. Like much of the EU, Hungary remains dependent on Russian gas and oil. The incoming prime minister has signaled that his future support for Ukraine could be contingent on that country’s repair of a damaged pipeline to keep Russian fuel flowing (The Independent, 4/18).
Liberal rulers build for world war
For the battered pro-EU and NATO rulers across Europe and North America, Orban’s removal could be very helpful. Over the decades following the carnage of World War II, ascendant U.S. imperialism projected global power through a “rules-based” order through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on the one hand and U.S. military bases on the other—the carrot and the stick . NATO was conceived as an instrument to contain the Soviet Union and later post-Soviet Russia.
But the rise of go-it-alone small fascist factions in the U.S. and Europe have threatened to hollow NATO out. Trump has repeatedly derided the coalition as dead weight. He most recently took it to task for failing to join his brutal massacre across Iran and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and the Strait of Hormuz (Reuters, 4/13).
For the mainstream liberal European bosses, the existential threat is a resurgent Russian imperialism, abetted by loose cannon Trump and open European fascists. The Russian bosses are in fact coming out ahead in Trump’s war on Iran. Relaxed sanctions on Russian oil have netted them $9 billion to keep slaughtering workers across Ukraine (CNN, 3/27). Meanwhile, Magyar’s allies in Brussels are aiming to expand the conflict with their Russian rivals, at the cost of even more workers’ lives.
At the end of 2025, EU nations within NATO pledged to more than double their military spending to 5 percent of their gross domestic product by 2035, to over $4 trillion (SIPRI, 6/27/25). To reach that target, the liberal EU bosses will need to further gut social benefits for millions of workers already suffering under vicious austerity measures (NYT, 3/31).
Don’t vote – fight for communist revolution!
The enthusiasm over Magyar, like all electoral reform movements, reflects the extreme inequality of capitalism and its failure to meet workers’ most basic needs. Class struggle is the antidote to attacks on our class. Our task is to fight in the muck and mire of the reform struggle while at the same time rejecting reformist misleaders and their anti-worker ideology. But unless reform struggles are injected with communist ideas and used to build the revolutionary PLP, they are destined to fail.
Side-by-side with our class sisters and brothers, from the U.S. and Europe to Iran and Sudan, we can transform dead-end election campaigns into fightback against imperialist war and rising fascism. Ultimately, we can destroy the bosses’ rotten system once and for all. March on May Day and join PLP!
Last summer I joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). I attended the Party’s school for CHALLENGE called the Summer Project, which we host in a different location around the world every year. We study, we rally, and we exchange lessons with our comrades about fighting this racist capitalist system. Learning how the Party puts their, anti sexist, multiracial, internationalist political line into practice during the Project ultimately won me to taking the leap and joining the fight, so here are three key takeaways from that experience.
The first key reason I joined the Party is the opportunity to build class consciousness amongst the masses with communist ideas. In Boston during the week long school for communism, we had comrades from Colombia, Kentucky, Baltimore, LA, Newark, and NYC come together to learn about the antiracist organizing done by our PLP comrades in 1975. Fifty years ago communists from Progressive Labor Party fought against the racist agenda of the Boston ruling class, which sought to continue segregation between Black and white students in Boston public schools.
Our comrades organized Freedom Schools during the summer to offer children the education, resources, and care that the racist capitalist bosses in Boston denied them.
Learning about the Party’s history of fight back and mutual aid taught me that we must both break bread with people and take that collectivity to a higher level by showing people why we deserve more than just bandaids to our collective wounds caused by this racist capitalist system in crisis. Mutual aid is necessary during these trying times, but only communism : an international economic system where workers run society in a way that serves our class and the planet can guarantee us what we need.
That is building class consciousness and that is the first key reason I joined the Party. The second reason I joined the Party is to agitate the masses with communist ideas. In Boston during the school for CHALLENGE we do every summer in different locations, we sold CHALLENGE, our newspaper, in various working class neighborhoods. We started rallies in areas full of workers quietly struggling their way through the various crises we face in this for-profit system.
What I learned from rallying and selling CHALLENGE during the Summer project is that if we do not agitate the masses with communist ideas like multiracial unity, awareness of imperialist war and genocide; if we stay silent about the need for a revolutionary organization to end this system and build a new one, then some workers will never get the opportunity to join this fight to change the world, to wake up from their capitalist-induced pacifism.. I was surprised by how receptive people were to the paper, which taught me that we should not be afraid to tell the truth and stand up for what is right. .
The third reason I joined the Party is to organize on an internationalist line. The Party showed me many examples of what this looks like in practice. During the summer project I learned about the militant fightback our comrades in Kentucky took up against the Proud Boys, knocking neo-nazi to the ground when they tried to intimidate workers during a protest. One of our LA comrades worked together with her fellow workers and students to rip a racist banner at her school in half and put it in front of her principal’s office. One of our comrades delivered an empowering speech about capitalism in decay in Creole when we were rallying in a Haitian neighborhood in Massachusetts to bridge the gap between English and Creole speaking workers. The real-life application of the Party’s line showed me that this is what workers taking ownership of their lives and the world looks like: It means standing up for one another against neonazis, collectively defying a racist school culture, and pushing our fightback to transcend the limits of language and borders.
Hearing our Party’s line in action ultimately inspired me to join. Learning how my comrades took ownership of their languages, workplaces, and environments along with their fellow workers inspired me to want to do the same. Now that I’ve joined the Party we are working to build a tenant union, hosting gatherings to bring our neighbors together who come from all parts of the world, some who speak Spanish and are afraid of ICE, and some who are older and are isolated in their homes. We are building a foundation with these workers through social events to eventually challenge the neglect of the slumlords owning our homes.
It is only when we come together by the tens, thousands, and millions that we can destroy capitalism and win the world to communism. I know y’all have some fight in you, so Join us! No seriously. I want you to ask the person who brought you how you can learn more and join the Progressive Labor Party!
