League of Revolutionaries for a New America

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The League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA) is a communist party in the United States founded by a group in California around Nelson Peery who split from the Communist Party USA in 1958. It was part of Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist Leninist Party (POC), which felt the Communist Party USA was supporting revisionism in the Soviet Union.

The activists around Nelson Peery appeared as the California Communist League in 1968 and shortly began publishing its newspaper "The Peoples Tribune," having attracting some activists involved in the Chicano Moritorium. Max Elbaum's "Revolution In the Air" states the following on page 103: "The POC quickly went through a series of damaging splits and by the mid-1960s had lost most of its initial few hundred members. Peery, a charismatic African American who had stuck with the group through many twists and turns and had succeeded in building a small base in South Central Los Angeles, was expelled in 1967. A year later he led fomartion of the CCL."

According to the book "Detroit, I Do Mind Dying" by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, the split within the Detroit based League of Revolutionary Workers became public on June 12, 1971. "By the first of the year, those who remained in the League were making plans to affiliate what was left of the organization with a group called the Communist League. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers had become history." (page 164).

With the merging of the Communist League and a section of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Communist League acquired a large grouping of black industrial workers familiar with the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. Elbaum speculates that the Communist League may have had more blacks, Chicanos and women in its leadership than perhaps any communist group in American history. (page 103)

In Detroit the Communist League formed a working relations with the Motor City Labor League (MCLL), which had also experienced a political split similar to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, with one section combining with the Communist League in launching itself nationally as the Communist Labor Party in 1974. Interestingly, one section of the MCLL merged with the Communist League and another sector merged with the grouping spilt from the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). The former was expressed as activists like the anti-war veteran Frank Joyce and the later by Shelia Murphy who would later win numerous elections as Councilperson in Detroit and marry Kenneth Cockrel, a leader of the faction within the LRBW than did not join the Communist League.

The Communist League and then the Communist Labor Party viewed its distinguishing political and theoritical feature as its presentation of what it called "The Negro National Colonial Question," by Nelson Peery, first edition published by the Communist League, 1972. In 1976 and again in 1978 the Communist Labor Party conducted "Vote Communist" campaigns running General Baker Jr. for State Representative in the Michigan House. They continued to work with the CPUSA, while opposing much of their ideology, until 1993 when they disbanded and refounded their group as the LRNA.

Now based in Chicago, they supported Ralph Nader in the 2000 US Presidential election and are significantly smaller and less active than in the past.

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[edit] Further reading

  • Communist Labor Party. Documents, first (founding) congress of the Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America, September, 1974. Workers Press, Chicago. 1975.
  • Communist Labor Party. Documents Second Party Congress of the Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America, November, 1975. Workers Press, Chicago. 1975.
  • Communist Labor Party . The road to socialism: Documents, Third Party Congress, Communist Labor Party, November 1980. Workers Press, Chicago. 1980.
  • Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America. Leaders Unite! a study guide for new members. Workers Press, Chicago. 1987
  • Keller, Jim. A veteran Communist speaks. With a preface by the Political Bureau of the Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America. Workers Press, Chicago. 1975.
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