PL’ers in the mass orgaization Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregations are attending the UU General Assembly in Louisville, KY. At last June’s General Assembly, in Phoenix, 3,000 UUs demonstrated outside racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigrant detention center, chanting “Tear it down!”
The progressive aspirations of Unitarian Universalists are codified in seven principles. They are achievable — but not under capitalism. Take these four principles as an example.
The inherent worth and dignity of every person. Despite endless heroic struggles to reform it, capitalism has been destroying the lives of working people for five centuries. Often this takes the form of mass murder, as it did this spring in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In their relentless push for profit, garment factory owners forced employees, mainly women, to work in a dangerous building by threatening to withhold their ($37 a month!) paychecks. The building collapsed, killing 1,127 workers.
Capitalists use both racism and sexism to divide workers and reap even higher profits. The same sexism used to sell women’s fashions abetted the mass murder of women in Bangladesh. For the European and U.S. corporations that were the ultimate employers of these women, racism also played a role in justifying below-poverty wages and deadly working conditions.
To stay competitive, the capitalists impose wage, pension, and health benefit cuts. They resort to layoffs, speedups, unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, and outsourcing — whatever it takes to keep them profitable. Democrats are no better than Republicans in this regard. When the Obama administration took over General Motors, it slashed the base pay of new hires in half, from $28 to $14 per hour.
UUs often attribute low wages and unhealthy or unsafe working conditions to the greed of individual bosses. But it’s the laws of capitalist development that undermine the worth and dignity of working people. Companies that maximize profits can expand their operations and gain more access to capital from banks. As a result, they capture market share from less profitable companies, which eventually get taken over or run out of business.
Justice, equity and compassion in human relations. In the 17th Century, John Locke claimed that society was the product of a “social contract” among isolated individuals. This incorrect idea is implicit in the UU principles. In fact, human beings evolved through cooperation in production, beginning with hunting and gathering. In today’s capitalist society, every individual is a member of one of two classes: the small group of people who own and control the means of production (factories, mines, oil fields, transport), and the much larger group who creates value through their work. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans worked together to produce food and shelter for all. No one tried to “get ahead.” This was primitive communism. PLP’s goal is to nurture humans’ nature to work collectively and build communism based on a scientific understanding and practice.
For capitalists, “justice” means the right to exploit workers and profit from their labor. It’s the right to benefit from racist and sexist wage differentials. It’s the right to stay in power by dividing workers with racist, sexist, and nationalist ideas — and through religion. Capitalist justice is enforced by the apparatus of the state: armies, cops, courts, laws, and prisons. Government may take the form of electoral democracy (the U.S. or Bangladesh), or monarchy (Saudi Arabia), or rule by a single party (the state capitalist rulers of China). But the content in each case is the dictatorship of the ruling class.
As for “equity,” capitalists believe it is equitable for the richest 1 percent of the world’s population to own 40 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns 1 percent. They believe it is equitable for hundreds of millions to suffer from unemployment, despite the desperate need for education, health care, home construction, infrastructure repair, and pollution abatement.   
Do capitalists feel “compassion” for workers? Even as they announce layoffs or pay cuts, they are busy importing cheap products from starvation-wage countries and exporting capital to exploit workers in those countries. Their exploitation forces workers to emigrate to the U.S. and Europe, where they are both criminalized and forced to accept substandard pay and working conditions. “Justice, equity and compassion” are under siege by capitalist social relations.
The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all. No matter your age, you have not lived one day of your life in a world without war. Since around 1900, the beginning of the era of monopoly capitalism, the imperialist powers have fought endless wars to seize territory, markets, resources and access to labor. At least 160 million people have been killed in these conflicts. (For death tolls, see www.war-memorial.net.) From the 1860s to 1975, peasants and workers in one small country, Vietnam, fought against imperialist occupiers — first France, then the Japanese, then the French again, then the U.S. and its puppet regimes. In the war against U.S. imperialism alone, three million Vietnamese were killed. A recent book about U.S. military policy in Vietnam takes its title from what many soldiers were ordered to do: Kill Anything That Moves.
The murderous tradition of U.S. imperialism is alive and well today. With the U.S. wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan maintaining smaller numbers of troops, the Obama administration is presiding over a “pivot to Asia,” a move to line up allies and prepare for conflict with their main imperialist rival, China. Cyberwarfare between the two rivals is already underway. If an all-out war erupted between the U.S. and China, it would undoubtedly involve nuclear weapons and result in tens of millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of fatalities.
War is the ultimate expression of capitalist competition. It’s also the ultimate solution to capitalist crises of overproduction, known as depressions. Through war, capitalist governments destroy excess productive capacity — including “excess” workers — and rebuild.
To achieve “world community with peace,” we must fight to end capitalist rule.
Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. Most UUs try to some extent to “live green.” Meanwhile, the world’s capitalists pour over a million pounds of carbon per second into the atmosphere, mainly through unnecessarily dirty power plants, factories, cement production, and ships. The stated goal of the 2012 UN Climate Change Conference was not to reverse global warming, but merely to slow it down – and it failed to reach agreement even on that. Why? Because the attendees all represented a capitalist class that places profits over the health of the atmosphere, water, or forests — or of people like us. 
We live in a capitalist world. The only cars, bicycles, or walking shoes we can buy are products of capitalism. So are church pews, and the paper in hymnals. Most of us must work for capitalist institutions. We cannot achieve dignity, justice, or peace on UU islands in a sea of capitalism.
But we have an alternative. We must work together to fight for a world based on production for use, not for profit; on equality, not privilege; on cooperation, not “getting ahead.” In other words, we must fight for communism. “What we fight for” on page 2 of CHALLENGE, outlines the goals of the Progressive Labor Party and the need for mass, armed revolution to achieve them. Road to Revolution IV, available at www.plp.org , explains why the working class has to fight directly for communism rather than socialism, which inevitably leads back to capitalism. Join us to turn the aspirations in the UU Principles into reality.