ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Progressive Labor’s (PL) formative period, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when PL's future leaders were dissident members of the Communist Party USA, to the creation of the loosely organized PL Movement in 1962, and finally to the formation in 1965 of the PL Party, a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party organized along democratic-centralist lines. PL's editors believed in the essential role of a vanguard party, but found themselves in an awkward and, presumably, frustrating position. PL recalled the anticommunist witch hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s, which saw “thousands of progressive and socialist-minded individuals” driven out of the labor movement, “labeled, smeared and vilified” for opposing the labor leadership’s “support for the Cold War abroad and collaboration with big business at home. On PL’s road map of revolutionary politics, one was either traveling toward socialist salvation or heading for capitalist damnation.
