About 10 years ago, I discovered The Workers Advocate, an almost unreadable newspaper produced by the Central Committee of the Marxist-Leninist Party USA. If ever a journal were written by committee, it was the Advocate. Articles were unsigned. They seemed to have been written with a set of quotas in mind -- so many quotations from Lenin per page, so many denunciations of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-fascism per issue. Each issue bore, next to the title, a bold red star, into which was inscribed the hammer and sickle. The party also sponsored a theoretical journal, Proletarian Internationalism, which ran an endless series of translations from the memoirs of Enver Hoxha, general secretary of the Party of Labor of Albania. Then there were the pamphlets, the titles of which, such as "Build the Marxist-Leninist Party Without the Social Chauvinists and Against the Social Chauvinists," doubled as slogans.

One doubts that many people outside the Marxist-Leninist Party USA ever read these publications from start to finish. But I tried, for a few months, anyway. Those were the darkest years of the Reagan onslaught. And for reasons, which do not admit of strictly rational analysis, I became very fond of the MLP press. It was never a matter of accepting their politics. I just acquired a taste for the MLP style: the wooden prose, the humorlessness, the impersonal militancy. Here was bombast equal to Reagan's own.

But now The Workers Advocate is no more. After the traditional pattern, splinters have formed in recent years, taking members and energy out of the MLP. The vanguard faced the lonely responsibility of figuring out what went wrong in Albania (which, like the rest of Eastern Europe, has gone toward market capitalism). Then, late last year, the Marxist-Leninist Party USA dissolved itself.

It will not be missed. The MLP's demise, like its existence, belongs to the sorriest chapter of the history of the American left: the experience, repeated throughout this century, of fetishizing distant revolutions or glorifying 'progressive' dictators. The MLP was an especially absurd instance of this. How could anyone refer to Albania as the 'bright red bastion of proletarian internationalism' and keep a straight face?

But that is not the whole story. For there is some nobility to the party's decision to liquidate.

The group first emerged from the anti-war movement in 1969, beginning life with the grand title of the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist). An organization having more initials than member, probably. After changing its name to the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist Leninists, it eventually shifted loyalties from Mao's China to Hoxha's Albania. By 1980, the group had grown by leaps and bounds -- into the very low hundreds. On January 1, 1980, it changed its name once again, now to the Marxist-Leninist Party, USA. "Let the ruling class tremble," proclaimed its founding manifesto, ever confident.

Not everything about the party was so deserving of parody. Most of the MLP cadres were factory workers -- not during a vacation from school, but for years and decades. And their publications always drove home, however stridently, two points worth making: that workers and bosses have no interests in common and that workers have to fight for themselves, relying on nothing but their own capacity for making trouble.

As the '80s wore on, the MLP even became critical of Albania, and admitted, at last, that Stalin had made lots of mistakes.

These might seem like modest concessions to reality. But one must try to imagine the seriousness with which these people reviewed the past, rethought their dogma, questioned it, and changed their minds. The language of the document announcing the party's demise is a bit stilted, as ever. But there are no slogans. There is even the hint of a personal tone to it.

"Our forces have slowly eroded," the MLP Central Committee wrote, "while the pressures on us have mounted. Our industrial concentration has been nearly extinguished, while our capacity for intervening in the social movements has by and large become marginal. Outstanding theoretical problems have multiplied beyond our ability to satisfactorily address them. . . . No amount of tinkering, adjustments, or reorganization can patch things back together. We no longer are what we once were."

It is remarkable for a radical group, no matter how small, to make such an admission. Reading the MLP's statement, I recalled an essay in Dwight Macdonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist. "I have always had a sneaking admiration for the editors of a tiny mimeographed journal called Proletarian Outlook," Macdonald confessed. Posing the tradition question, "What is to be done?" the group had answered it, simply and astonishingly: "Nothing. Absolutely nothing." And they closed up shop.

More than half a century separates the fate of Proletarian Outlook from that of The Workers Advocate. Historic moments on this order come but once in a lifetime. Now I regret never having purchased the MLP hymnal, "Down With Ronald Reagan, Chieftain of Capitalist Reaction" and Other Songs of Revolutionary Struggle and Socialism. It would make a fitting momento of days gone by; and it embodies everything that fascinated me about the group: the stridency, the tin ear for language, and the intransigence towards people and things, which merit the hostility. There are livelier denunciations of Reagan than "chieftain of capitalist reaction." But are they more accurate?

"Rather than endure further drift," writes the MLP in its adieu, "rather than permit our organization to become a mockery of its past, the Central Committee prefers to recognize that the end has come, and make a clean break of things, the better to clear the way for whatever the future will bring." It has to be the most emotionally charged sentence in the party's voluminous literature. I read it over and over again, a little stunned. Rare is such honesty, with its own quiet honor. And rarer still, such hope.