After a year of helping the comrades of the Workers Party in America with setting up and getting their new (our old) publications going, the Central Committee of the Communist League has decided it’s time we re-start our own publication.

So, with this issue, The Communist Monthly begins again as the voice and Central Organ of the League.

The XV Plenum of the Central Committee had voted to devote our time and resources to helping the WPA with its setup, even if it was at the expense of our own activity. For us, having a public outlet for activity was more important at that time than some formalistic adherence to keeping our own publications going.

A year later, at the League’s XIX Plenum, the C.C. reviewed the work of the last year and came to the conclusion that the WPA was now standing on its own two feet and operating more or less without the direct support of the League (except for the presence of its members). In addition, in the last year, the League had begun to cultivate new writers that were more interested in doing work for us than supplementing the WPA’s press.

The conclusion of the C.C. was that, while the League continues to fully support the WPA as a Charter Organization, and will help it when and where it is needed, the League itself had lost its voice when it handed over editorial control of Working People’s Advocate and Workers’ Republic to the Workers Party.

The solution, then, was simple: Under the direction of the C.C., our remaining journal, The Communist Monthly, would be re-started, beginning in 2010.

Our original hope was to begin in January, but a series of technical blunders, schedule conflicts and a measure of administrative inertia prevented that from being feasible. So, we pushed the launch date back by a month and concentrated on meeting that deadline.

One of the most obviously apparent changes, especially for those who have followed the work of the League in recent years, is that this is the first of our publications where our comrade, Henry Miles, is not listed as Editor or even a member of the editorial collective.

For four years, Miles served as Editor of the League’s Working People’s Advocate. He continues that job now on behalf of the Workers Party. Given that work, both he and the C.C. believed it would be best if he not also attempt to be the Editor of The Communist Monthly.

Editorial work for TCM will be handled by the whole of the Editorial Board, with comrades MacDonald, Macpherson and Wakipajan taking the lead in it.

Finally, a note on the character of The Communist Monthly. Unlike Working People’s Advocate, which quickly evolved into the equivalent of a working-class communist New York Times, the new version of The Communist Monthly will be a more analytical and overtly political newsjournal, with longer articles exploring in greater detail the issues facing working people today.

Gone from our paper now are the more traditional “newspaper” elements, like news in brief, shorter “straight-news” articles, and the weekly weather forecast. Gone also are the by-lines and the datelines.

The League is still an affiliate of the United Communist Press Association, and so articles from The Communist Monthly will make their way to the UCPA website, but they will also be posted on our website too. But our articles, like our publication, will reflect the united, principled voice of the League’s Central Committee.

Finally, speaking of our website, we have finally been able to resolve the issues with the theft of our original Internet domain name, www.communistleague.org. It was as simple as a hyphen. Our new domain name, and the one we’ll use well into the future, will be www.communist-league.org. While the domain we had for the last couple years, www.communistleague.us, served us fairly well, it was still not well-enough known and was never able to “catch on” like our original one did.

The new domain name, with its “.org” ending, will register better on Internet search engines that tend to only emphasize the “big three” domain suffixes. We will continue to have the “.us” domain name bring you to our website, but it will no longer be the main address.

This is a bit of a fresh start for us, so we ask for your patience in this time. And we look forward to you visiting our website and conversing with us as we move forward toward building a communist workers’ party that will overthrow capitalist rule and establish a workers’ republic as the first step toward a communist society.