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.
The Proletarian Unity League (PUL) arose as part of the New Communist Movement (NCM) in the early 1970s. 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.
In surveying the proliferation of "self-proclaimed 'communist parties'" in the U.S., 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. As Max Elbaum writes:
Throughout its ten-year span, the PUL differentiated itself from most other Maoist organizations by:
In February 1979, the PUL was one of six U.S. Maoist organizations 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." The delegation held a series of meetings with Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Vice-Premier Geng Biao.
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. Over the next decade, several more groups joined the FRSO, which split in 1999.
In addition to its Forward Motion newsletterâÂÂstarted in 1982 and published 4-6 times a yearâÂÂthe PUL's publications included: