Marxist-Leninist Party, USA

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Marxist-Leninist Party (MLP) was a communist anti-revisionist and Marxist-Leninist group in the United States that published the paper Workers Advocate. During its history, it became a Hoxhaist group, before turning away from backing Albania and attempting to advance a distinctive anti-revisionist trend in Marxism-Leninism. It was founded as the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1960s as a Maoist organization allied with the Canadian Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), CPC (M-L), and led by Hardial Bains.

In about 1973 the group was renamed the Central Organization of US Marxist-Leninists and militantly opposed the police and fascism, as well as socialists and communists they considered "revisionist". The group continued to move with the CPC (M-L) from Maoism to Hoxhaism until in 1980 they adopted the name Marxist-Leninist Party USA and split with the Canadian group the following year, with those remaining loyal to the CPC (M-L) becoming the U.S. Marxist-Leninist Organization.

The break with the CPC (M-L) led to the MLP beginning a reassessment of its politics, partially in an attempt to draw other anti-revisionists towards it, as many groups claiming anti-revisionism were moving to the right-wing. By the late 1980s the MLP had come to the conclusion that anti-revisionism meant that they had to reject the traditional support of the communist movement's positions from the time of the 1935 Congress of the Comintern onwards. This decision, however, led to an ideological impasse in the MLP, and at its fifth Congress in November 1993 it voted to dissolve itself. A number of activists in the MLP have continued work as the Communist Voice Organization. Also, some of the theoretical work of the MLP, directed at understanding how a modern society will function when it is run by the working class, has been continued by Ben Seattle.