Proletarian Unity League
Template:TOCnestleft Proletarian Unity League arose ideologically out of Students for a Democratic Society and the later Revolutionary Youth Movement II experience. In the early ’70s, a number of local collectives emerged in different U.S. cities out of one section of the white student movement: the RYM II grouping within Students for a Democratic Society. These collectives shared two things in common. First, in an uneven way, they carried forward the struggle within SDS against the Progressive Labor Party line, particularly its social chauvinist attacks on socialist countries and national liberation struggles abroad and on the struggles of the oppressed nationalities at home. Second, these collectives expressed a practical commitment to working class organizing: they recognized the revolutionary mission of the working class and sought to bring communism to its struggles. At the same time, struggle continued within this section of the movement between those who saw the central importance of constructing a new Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and more anarcho-syndicalist perspectives.
PUL began to build a small group about in the late 1970s. When it formed, the PUL was relatively inexperienced, organizationally weak, and all white. Its members were mainly from petit-bourgeois ex-student backgrounds, with experience in the anti-war, student, women’s and (to a lesser extent) trade union movements. The group grew and consolidated itself over the next few years through a process of merger of several small collectives.
The group was formed in Boston in 1975 by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members who had been associated with the Revolutionary Youth Movement II.
FRSO
In 1985 Proletarian Unity League merged with the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters to form the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Publications by The Proletarian Unity League
Publications by the Proletarian Unity League include:
- Roxanne Mitchell and Frank Weiss. Two, Three, Many Parties of a New Type? Against the Ultra-Left Line. Publisher: United Labor Press (1977).
- Roxanne Mitchell & Frank Weiss. A house divided: Labor and white supremacy United Labor Press, NY. A 1981 publication of the Proletarian Unity League, includes a Preface, seven chapters, an Appendix on superseniority, Noteworthy is a comment by Harry Haywood.
- Proletarian Unity League. On the October League's call for a new communist party. A response. United Labor Press. New York. 1976.
- Forward Motion magazine.