The Communist Party USA (Marxist–Leninist) was a small American Maoist group founded in 1965 by Los Angeles members of the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist–Leninist Party (POC) around Michael Laski. Laski stated in a 1968 interview that this split was motivated by dissatisfaction with the POC's response to the Watts riots.^[1][2]

In 1967 Detective James C. Harris of the Los Angeles district attorney's office testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about the group. He stated that the "intent of the CPUSA-ML has been to aggravate" the African-American population in Los Angeles "to the point of civil disobedience and to attempt to condition their minds to respond in a rebellious way in the event of a contact with a police officer." ^[3]

General Secretary Laski was expelled after gambling away nearly all of the party's funds in Nevada in an attempt to raise more funds.^[4] After the expulsion, two groups existed with the name Communist Party USA (Marxist–Leninist), one led by Arnold Hoffman, which continued to publish People's Voice; and one led by Laski, which started a new paper, The New Worker. In 1969, the Laski group merged with the Proletarian Revolutionary Party led by Jonathan Leake.^[5]

Laski was the subject of a 1967 essay by Joan Didion (later collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem), entitled "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)." She described him as having constructed a personal world "of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered."