The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League): Uniting Labor and Social Movement Forces across 50+ Years of Working Class Struggle

We share analysis and lessons from the League oral history project documenting our personal and political journey from our southern roots and radicalization, to the point of production in Detroit in 1968, to 50+ years of Marxist study and struggle. League comrades were UAW members fighting class exploitation, white supremacy, and racism in the corporations and in the UAW. We were community and welfare rights organizers, and high school students – bringing together labor union forces and social movement forces. The League split in 1971 and we’re still traveling our collective path to power – from being revolutionary black workers to becoming part of today’s multiracial, multigendered, multigenerational, and multinational working class in revolutionary struggle.

Among key lessons for today is the significance of political education and Marxism, in particular, in becoming proletarian intellectuals and lifelong revolutionaries. From the beginning, we understood that the broad labor struggle was inclusive of social movement forces – together fighting all expressions of exploitation, oppression, poverty, and ecological destruction. We were and are all part of the working class struggle for transformation and the abolition of capitalism, for the reconstruction of society in the interests of people and the planet.

What is different today is the urgency of now. The labor replacing digital revolution – automation, robotics, AI – has driven down the wages of labor and eliminated whole categories of jobs. Capital is driven to privatization, financialization, and extractivism. Working class forces rising up are met with ruling class motion toward war and fascist rule. Essential is developing working class unity and clarity about our strategy and tactics, about our class enemy through study and practice across fronts of struggle, time, and place, and our embrace of today’s revolutionary possibilities for winning the class war for survival of humanity and the earth.