NEW YORK CITY, November 1—“I’m moving at a snail’s pace, but I’m getting stronger.” That’s how one comrade spoke for all of us as our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) club launched our new members’ class. Over the past 18 months, our club has recruited three new members, Black, Latin, and white, women and men, older and younger.
One is an unemployed worker, won out of an antiracist fightback around homelessness. Another is a staff member at a community college, and the third is a full-time professor at City University. Both are involved in our work in the CUNY staff and faculty union, PSC, and all three have been to May Day. They each have strong, long-term personal/political ties with one or more members of our collective.
We launched the class to strengthen our new comrades ideologically, make them more familiar with the main aspects of PLP’s outlook, and thereby strengthen our entire collective and our ability to build a communist world. We started by discussing the front-page CHALLENGE article on the girls’ volleyball team in a Brooklyn H.S. fighting racism (CHALLENGE, Oct.20).
One member quickly pointed out the unequal funding between sports teams that are mainly white students versus those that are mainly Black and Latin students, and how the bosses enforce racist inequality through their state power, in this case the New York City Department of Education. Another showed how this struggle reflected three of the 10 points in the PLP “Our Fight” column; anti-racism, anti-sexism, and collectivity over individualism. The third stressed how PLP’s involvement in mass activity, like the volleyball team or the annual Hoops for Justice event against police terror, allows the Party to raise our politics with a wide range of people in a very concrete way. Everyone focused on “What is winning,” and how struggles like this can literally be “schools for communism.”
We discussed base building, and how PLP has deep, long-standing ties with students, teachers, and parents at this school. The new members didn’t know this and thought that we should make that clear in future articles. They also wanted to know more about the discussions with students, teachers, and parents about PLP because they are trying to have similar conversations. What questions did people raise? How did we answer them?
Over the next few months, we will introduce dialectical materialism (Jailbreak!: Dialectical Materialism), how  PLP operates (On Democratic Centralism), Black workers as a key force for revolution, and why revolutionaries must fight nationalism. The first two texts mentioned can be found under ‘Key Documents’ on plp.org. We are open to suggestions and if there are similar classes, please share your experiences by writing a letter to CHALLENGE.