Why Proletarian Socialism?
Progressive Labor members have often argued that SDS should support workers struggles because workers are the most oppressed section of American society. This is not true. Groups such as welfare recipients, sharecroppers, convicts, and reservation Indians are poorer and more degraded than the typical factory worker. Workers struggles are decisive not because workers are “worse off” than other groups, but because private property and the exploitation of labor is the central axis on which this society rests. Social power depends on control of productive resources. Only the working class is capable of destroying the power of the capitalist class and reconstructing society for the benefit of all of humanity. If one speaks of being “pro-working-class”, one should want the working class to have power and not simply endlessly fight their exploiters. Workers power, whatever one may call it, is socialism. To describe oneself as “pro-working-class”, without having a socialist perspective, is, at
