The League of Revolutionaries for a New America was formed in 1995, but its political and organizational roots reach back through earlier revolutionary movements that confronted capitalism, exploitation, racism, national oppression and gender oppression.
The founders of the League understood the spread of digital production as more than another technological upgrade. As computers, robotics and automation displaced workers, the economic relationship that had stabilized much of industrial society began to break apart. At the same time, ecological destruction and the inability of millions to secure basic necessities made the need for a new social organization increasingly urgent.
Our organizational journey
Nelson Peery, a founder of the League and a revolutionary organizer for more than seven decades, left the Communist Party USA in the 1950s. By the time of the Watts Rebellion in 1965 he was living in Los Angeles, where a new grouping of revolutionaries developed into the California Communist League.
That organization brought together Marxist study groups, organizers connected to Students for a Democratic Society, and workers from the Harbor industries. Its first newspaper appeared in 1968. In the early 1970s, revolutionaries connected to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit joined this developing formation, deepening both its working-class base and its theoretical work.
In 1972, the California Communist League and allied organizations merged into the Communist League and moved the center of their work from California to Chicago. In 1974, the Communist League and other organizations formed the Communist Labor Party.
Forming the League in 1995
By the early 1990s, the spread of robotic and digital production had changed the conditions that earlier revolutionary organizations had been built to address. Nelson Peery’s 1992 report Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution argued that the transition from industrial production toward increasingly labor-replacing technology was creating a new objective basis for social revolution.
The Communist Labor Party dissolved in 1995 and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America was formed. The new organization emphasized dispersing revolutionaries into practical struggles while maintaining political education, common analysis and a shared program.
The League’s continuing task is to help unite workers across race, ethnicity, gender, region, nation, ability and generation, connect immediate struggles to a vision of a cooperative society, and develop the political consciousness needed to defeat fascism and reconstruct society around human need.
Further reading
Entering an Epoch of Social Revolution
Nelson Peery’s report on the economic and social transformation underlying the modern revolutionary process.
Strategy, Mission and the Way Forward
A collection of League political reports and study materials.