Proletarian Unity League
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Proletarian Unity League | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | PUL |
| Founded | 1975 |
| Dissolved | 1985 |
| Merged into | Freedom Road Socialist Organization |
| Headquarters | Boston |
| Ideology | Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Anti-racism |
The Proletarian Unity League was a Boston-based Maoist organization formed in 1975. Its founders were ex-Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members who had been associated with the Revolutionary Youth Movement II: one of three factions (the others being Progressive Labor and the Weathermen) to emerge from the split in SDS that occurred at its June 1969 National Convention.[1][2]
The Proletarian Unity League (PUL) arose as part of the New Communist Movement (NCM) in the early 1970s.[3] The PUL members rejected the Communist Party USA for its alleged revisionism; they also rejected the Socialist Workers Party and other Trotskyist sects for their opposition to Maoism and Chinese foreign policy.[4]
In surveying the proliferation of "self-proclaimed 'communist parties'" in the U.S.,[5] the PUL criticized what it saw as a tendency toward ultra-leftism, a critique articulated in its 1977 book Two, Three, Many Parties of a New Type? Against the Ultra-Left Line.[6] As Max Elbaum writes:
Two, Three, Many Parties went on to provide numerous examples of how sectarianism and infantile left tactics had afflicted the movement since its earliest days. Further, the book offered a comprehensive analysis of the roots of these problems in the voluntarist and semi-anarchist ideas prevalent in the late-1960s movements, and in the attraction of those ideas to the students and former students who disproportionately made up the Marxist-Leninist ranks.[7]
Throughout its ten-year span, the PUL differentiated itself from most other Maoist organizations by:
- Battling what it characterized as white supremacy in the American labor movement and its damaging effects on the development of class consciousness.[8]
- Advocating an anti-sectarian approach and arguing that there is not "one true party".[9][10]
- Supporting gays and lesbians,[11] in contrast to the homophobia found in some NCM groups.[12][13]
In February 1979, the PUL was one of six U.S. Maoist organizations[14] to send a representative in a delegation to China. The visit's stated purpose was to "strengthen the unity between the U.S. Marxist-Leninists and the Communist Party of China" and to "promote the prospects for unity among the U.S. Marxist-Leninists."[15] The delegation held a series of meetings with Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Vice-Premier Geng Biao.[15]
In 1985 the PUL merged with the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters (RWH) to form the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). The FRSO vowed to avoid the dogmatism that had been a defining feature of Maoism in the U.S.[16] Over the next decade, several more groups joined the FRSO, which split in 1999.
