The History of The League

The League was formed in 1995. Still, it traces its roots to the first revolutionary movements of the 19th century: Movements that rose in opposition to the developing capitalist system of the exploitation and oppression based in class, nation, race, and gender.  Throughout the arc of the rise and decline of capitalism, working class organizations have struggled nationally and globally to transform society through socialism toward communism. The revolutionaries who founded the League recognized that a qualitatively new stage of irreversible capitalist crisis spawned a new form of the revolutionary process. Once again classes were facing off against each other, digital technology was ravaging workplaces, replacing and dispossessing workers, workers could no longer secure the basic necessities of life. The destruction of nature itself threatened the survival of humanity and the Earth.



Nelson Peery, a League founder and revolutionary leader for more than 70 years until his death in 2015, left the Communist Party USA after they ordered the disbanding of the Negro Labor Councils in 1956.  By the Watts Rebellion in 1965, Peery and a few comrades had settled in Los Angeles and took part in the uprising.  In the wake of the suppressed rebellion,  they gathered revolutionaries fighting in Watts and others from the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas into the California Communist League (CCL). This included folks who were in various Marxist study groups, some of whom were former SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) members, some were active in the industries in the Los Angeles Harbor area. In 1968, the CCL published the first issue of its newspaper – The People’s Tribune. The CCL connected with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), who were based in the Detroit auto plants and communities, as the LRBW was going through its own internal split in 1971. The LRBW brought a critical working class base to the process, and together they embarked upon a period of intense theoretical study. 

The CCL and the LRBW, along with members of La Colectiva (a  Los Angeles Chicano/a organization) and of the Motor City Labor League (a Marxist organization of primarily white working class folks) merged to form the Communist League (CL)  in 1972, and moved their organizational center from California to Chicago. The CL and a number of organizations joined together in 1974 to form the Communist Labor Party (CLP).  Despite the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, the CLP emerged in a period of relative class peace, which required understanding and preparing for the period when the class struggle between labor and capital would reassert itself.



New objective conditions in the economy in the 1990s were bringing forth new necessities and revolutionary possibilities.  Peery captured these qualitatively new realities in a 1992 political report for the CLP entitled Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution. The shift from an industrial means of production to a robotic means of production was changing the very nature of wage-labor and capital, of social and political institutions, and was intensifying ecological destruction in the United States and globally. Capital, unable to meet the needs of workers, was compelled to abandon bourgeois democracy, to find new ways to maintain control of society and protect their private property, to move toward fascist rule. Workers were increasingly compelled to fight for the reorganization of society with the means of producing wealth owned in common, and the social product distributed according to need.  The era of class peace was ending. The CLP determined that a different form of organization was necessary. 

In 1995, the CLP dissolved and formed the League. The League took up the task of becoming that different form of organization – of dispersing among revolutionaries to participate in the practical battle for the distribution of the abundance of goods and services according to need and to protect the Earth. We recognized that robotic production – now exacerbated by the introduction of “artificial intelligence,” called into existence a class unable to survive without abolishing private property, a class that is the basis for a practical communist party. The League grasps the need for revolutionary education in relation to the day-to-day class struggle, that uniting the sections of the working class who can be united across race, ethnicity, gender, region, nation, ability, and generations is essential, and that taking the offensive to defeat fascism and reconstruct society is existential and urgent. The creation of a cooperative communist society is, for the first time in history, a practical possibility and absolute necessity.  The League strives to unite with other revolutionaries around the demands of the working class, especially the class of displaced workers, and participate in creating the cooperative, communist society, where social wealth is owned in common and distributed according to need.



Links for further reading:

1. “The Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League”
2. NNCQ
3. Epoch + essays included: “Dialectics of the Leap and the Destruction of Capitalism” and “Polarization in U.S. — Basis For A Workers Party” 
4. League Program+ full documents