Progressive Labor Party's reformist-nationalist political economy

This is to return to the Sheila thread, which I have broadened to 
look at PLP generally. On the "Marxism Space" we see many 
concrete examples of how intellectualism leads to idealism which 
leads to nihilism.

Intellectuals seem to avoid science these days, partly as a matter of 
trendy post-modernism, but also as a matter of their class position. 
Science is accessible to anyone and practiced by anyone, especially 
in application. That fact undercuts the self-interest of bourgeois 
intellectuals as a group.

What we end up seeing is intellectuals who remove themselves 
into their own worlds or who come down from the mountain only 
to criticize everything. "Marxism Space" is worse, but PLP also 
has this problem.

Their latest theory statement talks about a series of breaks they 
made in line. They are bragging about breaking with things that 
don't work, but they are not promoting things that do work. That is 
the hallmark of the intellectual. Applied-side scientists, engineers 
and workers don't just criticize the Ford Pinto. They 
re-engineer the car and don't brag until after they've fixed the 
problem (the gas tank used to cause the car to blow up). It is 
preening intellectuals who are going to talk like line breaks 
separating them from everyone else in the world and everything in 
prior history are something to brag about instead of something 
more like religion. It's almost pure salespersynship under 
capitalism.

This is also the reason that PLP no longer belongs to the tradition 
of Mao. They even say it somewhere that the next revolution 
cannot be inspired by old revolutions and they have to come up 
with something "new." It reminds me of people who have to 
publish papers, come up with inventions or write songs to make a 
living. Those professions are the original petty-bourgeois 
professions and they have disproportionate influence in circles 
claiming to be Marxist. The problem is that the science of 
revolution is not like coming up with another poem. Originality is 
not so necessary as application of science.

X, you need to go look at www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext and see the 
Black Panther part of the special project section. Go figure out if 
the Black Panthers were as bad as PLP claimed. It was at the time 
the Black Panthers hit their height that PLP figured it had to 
"break" with Mao and go for something original -- 
something idealist. Naturally, they didn't really find anything 
original; they only discovered the reformist 
politics of Martin Luther King.

Let me prove it to you based on a forthcoming review in MIM 
Theory that I read:

"In their issue "Racism and Sociobiology," Vol. 13, no. 2, PLP 
included an argument that says white workers lose income when 
racism increases. (See page 45). The same thing appeared in 
"Racism, Intelligence and the Working Class," another informative 
magazine of the PLP. (p. 3)"

There you have the references to why integration is good for the 
class struggle according to PLP. Too bad it is wrong on both 
counts. One is that it is wrong because it's reformism (economism). 
We Marxists do not care what increases income for the petty-
bourgeoisie but what brings about socialism. Two it's wrong 
because it does not start from the Marxist point of view of surplus-
value. PLP did not EVER total up discrimination profits, 
repatriated profits and the transfer of surplus-value from the 
productive sector in the Third World to the unproductive sector in 
the U$A. If it did, it would already know that Lenin was right 
about what would happen if there was no socialist revolution this 
century-- big time buy-out of the imperialist country workers. 
PLP's and MLK's political economy are both based in the interests 
of the oppressor nation of U.$. imperialism.

Some people who challenged PLP got answered with stuff like the 
following that PLP pointed to: Michael Reich, "White Workers 
Are Hurt by Racism," Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic 
Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). They 
think they are rebutting the MIM line (which unfortunately was not 
well expressed back in the 1960s) with this work.

Do you know what this work boils down to? It actually says 
NOTHING about the struggle for socialism. It says that WITHIN 
the U$A and its diversity, white workers do better where 
integration is further along. Last I checked there is no 
revolutionary region of the U$A, so PLP is saying that liberal, 
reformist, Northerners are better off than nasty, 
conservative racists. Could Martin Luther King have had better 
friends than PLP?