ABSTRACT
Progressive Labor’s (PL) organizing in New York City’s garment industry, as well as everything else PL did, was a function of the party’s antirevisionist politics. PL’s leaders were politically trained in the Foster-led Communist Party USA of the late 1940s and early 1950s. PL attempted to break out of its political isolation by supporting Kentucky miners, sending students to Cuba, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and supporting the Harlem Rebellion. PL’s revolutionary optimism, energy, willingness to defy authority, and aggressiveness were evident. PL’s vision had become increasingly utopian as America and the world became increasingly conservative from the mid-1970s onward, and the prospects for revolution receded. PL’s Hispanic organizers were socially and ethnically similar to the workers whom PL believed had the greatest revolutionary potential. PL’s organizers in the garment industry were able to initiate a surprising number of struggles.
