Communist Labor Party of North America

The Communist Labour Party of North America (CLP) was an anti-revisionist communist party which part of the larger New Communist movement in the United States. The party was founded in 1974 and disbanded in 1993. The League of Revolutionaries for a New America was then founded by the remaining cadre of the CLP.

The Communist Labor Party of the United States of North America was a political party based on Marxism-Leninism in the United States. It was founded at a Congress in Chicago, Illinois in September 1974. In the mid 1970s three Communist parties were founded claiming to continue, defend and fight for the principles of the Third International and to oppose the "modern revisionism” led by the Soviet Union. The Communist Party (ML), formerly the October League and the Revolutionary Communist Party, formerly the Revolutionary Union both had their roots in the student movement of the 1960s in general, and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in particular. The leaders of the CP(ML), Mike Klonsky and of the RCP, Bob Avaikian both were young white men who came out of SDS. In contrast, the leader of the Communist Labor Party (CLP), Nelson Peery was a middle aged African American bricklayer who had fought in World War II and had political roots in the Communist Party USA of the 1940s and 50s. The history of the CLP can be traced to a group that split from the CPUSA in 1958, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist–Leninist Party (POC). In 1968, Nelson Peery and his wife, Sue Ying Peery, led a small group out of the POC and formed the California Communist League, which expanded to become a national organization, the Communist League (CL). In California several Mexican American groupings joined the CL. A significant grouping of African American autoworkers in Michigan, from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers merged into the CL.

The CL organized forums with different left groups and individuals to discuss various questions of Marxist theory and political policy to lay the basis for developing a new communist party. Many of these forums attracted hundreds of people and were held in several cities around the country. These forums made it clear that the CL was politically quite advanced and also the most important grouping on the left. The CL had a policy of advancing into leadership women, national minorities and workers and therefore had a leadership grouping different from other groups on the left. The CL was the main grouping behind the founding of the CLP. The newspaper of the CL, the Peoples Tribune/Tribuno del Pueblo, became the newspaper of the CLP. The CL’s theoretical journal, Proletariat, was also continued by the CLP. In addition, the Western Worker, published by the CL was continued by the CLP. The two other new communist parties were organized soon after the CLP.

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