The New Communist Movement: The Early Groups, 1969-1974

Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

U.S. Anti-Revisionism

The New Communist Movement: The Early Groups, 1969-1974

The New Communist Movement emerged in the late 1960’s, as the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements became increasingly radicalized. Students and youth began to reject ’working within the system’ and lost faith in electoral politics and nonviolent tactics. These activists gravitated toward organizing in working class settings: workplaces, particularly factories; neighborhoods; community colleges, and military bases. Though many things helped trigger the emergence of a new movement of communists, four especially significant influences stand out:

– The Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese struggle, and other national liberation movements helped many people see both the imperialist nature of U.S. global actions, and challenged a great deal of anti-communist mythology that had held the stage in the 1950s;
– The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China suddenly made it possible to think about a communist alternative to the model presented by the societies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union;
– The Black liberation struggle in the U.S. relentlessly revealed the crimes of racism and class exploitation built into U.S. society, and tore away many naive notions of an America that was upwardly mobile, inherently just, and generally affluent;
– The radical uprisings of France in May 1968 suggested that revolution might not be for Third World countries alone, and that there were possibilities, in some situations, for large numbers of people to collaborate (even in countries like the U.S.) in a genuinely revolutionary project.

Many of the first recruits to the New Communist Movement came from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest New Left organization of white students in the country from 1965 to 1969. These SDS members discovered Marxism, often through the efforts of the Progressive Labor Party (PL) [for PL’s background and documents, see “Progressive Labor Movement”], or in the course of advancing New Left theory and practice.

As SDS entered a period of crisis in the late 1960’s, two Revolutionary Youth Movement currents (RYM) emerged as alternatives to PL. RYM I (better known as Weatherman) adopted a politics that increasingly saw white people generally as bought off and therefore likely to be in the enemy camp of the ongoing global collisions. A diverse opposing camp, RYM II, identified with working class organizing, disciplined forms of left organization, and Marxism-Leninism, but rejected what it saw as PL’s sectarianism, anti-nationalism, and “more revolutionary than thou” stance toward everyone from the Black Panther Party to the NLF of South Vietnam. RYM II saw in this alternative synthesis the potential for creating a revolutionary sector among white workers and a revolutionary movement rooted in the larger multinational working class. RYM II was the source of some of the first New Communist Movement groups.

But quite a few other recruits to the New Communist Movement came from radical student groups active among Black, Puerto Rican, Asian and Chicano students. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) produced circles of trained organizers who played an important role in the creation of new communist organizations. And a few older veterans of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and earlier anti-revisionist formations like the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC) [for the POC’s background and documents, see “The Second Wave of US Anti-Revisionism, The Provisional Organizing Committee (1956-1962)”], played a mentor role within that process – often hoping to create organizations modeled on earlier stages of the CPUSA, which, in their view had once been more revolutionary, but had been betrayed by political changes over the 1950s.

New Communist Movement groups in the U.S. shared the following characteristics. They:
· identified themselves as coming out of the Marxist-Leninist tradition of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern, and the international Communist movement;
· rejected the Trotskyist strain within that tradition;
· upheld the vanguard role of the proletariat in the fight for socialism, rejecting alternative theories of student or other, non-proletarian vanguards; Cover
· rejected modern revisionism in its theoretical, political, ideological and organizational forms;
· denied the leading role of the CPSU internationally and of the CPUSA nationally as revisionist betrayers of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism;
· They were committed to the creation of a new, non-revisionist, revolutionary Marxist-Leninist communist party, proletarian revolution, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.

The most important of the early New Communist Movement organizations were the Communist League (CL), the Revolutionary Union (RU) and the October League (ML) (OL). Each group had ties to the New Left, but only CL had roots in earlier anti-revisionism: among its founders were expelled members of the POC in California led by Nelson Peery.

RU began as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union in 1968, and closely identified itself with Mao and the People’s Republic of China. Its origins were similar to numerous working-class organizing ’collectives’ that formed in industrial areas across the US in the wake of SDS collapse which later turned to Marxism-Leninism.

The OL formed from the merger of two collectives led by former leaders of SDS’s RYM II faction. The Georgia Communist League (ML) in Atlanta and the October League in Los Angeles were more focused on studying revolutionary doctrine than the early RU, but shared its determination to become a real force among local workers.

Distinct among early New Communist Movement organizations was the American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist). This group, which had its origins in draft resistance and student activism in Cleveland, early on closely identified itself with an international anti-revisionist tendency organized by Hardial Bains, which had previously created anti-revisionist Communist organizations in Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

All of these groups shared a common commitment to building a new multinational, cadre-based vanguard communist party with deep political ties in the working class and oppressed communities.

At the same time, in Chicago, another collective with Marxist politics, a working-class orientation and national ambitions formed out of RYM II: the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO). The early STO had many points in common with the New Communist Movement, but quickly moved in a more unorthodox direction. It began to identify more with post-1968 European revolutionary groups who advocated self-motivated actions by workers such as wildcat strikes and plant takeovers, and alternative-union formations. STO collaborated with like-minded collectives such as Harper’s Ferry Organization in New York City and Worker Unity Organization in St. Louis.

Index of organizations in this section (by alphabetical order)

American Communist Workers Movement (Marxist-Leninist)

Bay Area Revolutionary Union – Revolutionary Union

Black Workers Congress

Communist League

October League (Marxist-Leninist)

––––Georgia Communist League (Marxist-Leninist)

Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization

SDS and RYM II: Antecedents of the New Communist Movement

Sojourner Truth Organization

Background Materials

General Surveys

A Critical History of the New Communist Movement, 1969-1979 by Paul Costello

Family Tree Chart of U.S. Anti-Revisionism, 1956-1977 by the Communist Workers Group (Marxist-Leninist)

Maoism in the United States by Max Elbaum

Turn to the Working Class: The New Left, Black Liberation, and the U.S. Labor Movement (1967-1981) by Kieran Walsh Taylor

Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution by Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch

“Concrete Analysis of Concrete Conditions”: A Study of the Relationship between the Black Panther Party and Maoism by Chao Ren

What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968? by Max Elbaum

General Primary Materials

American Maoism: Re-emergence and Regroupment by Jon Hillson, Denver Branch, Socialist Workers Party

The History and Present State of the Contemporary Revolutionary Movement in the U.S. by People’s Democracy

Some Lessons from the Family Tree of the New Communist Movement by Dennis O’Neil

Response to Dennis O’Neil by Max Elbaum

Response to Max Elbaum by Dennis O’Neil

Second Response to Dennis O’Neil by Max Elbaum

SDS and RYM II: Antecedents of the New Communist Movement

SDS Split, 1969

PLP: A Critique [published by Old Mole] newspaper

Looking Back and Looking Ahead at Revolutionary Youth Movement by Michael Klonsky

Old Left Orthodoxy – Impediment to Revolutionary Progress? [On PL vs. RYM]

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win! by Bernardine Dohrn, SDS Inter-Organizational Secretary

The White Question by Mike Klonsky, SDS National Secretary

Metamorphosis in S.D.S. The New Left is Showing Its Age by Thomas R. Brooks [New York Times, June 15, 1969]

Black liberation and peace debated by SDS by Lincoln Webster Sheffield

Letter from S.D.S. Leadership

Statement on the Walk-Out [PL Statement on the SDS split]

National Secretary’s Report: RYM Walks Out [PL’s Analysis of the SDS split]

Thoughts on the SDS convention by Lincoln Webster Sheffield

SDS ousts PLP by Jack A. Smith

PL declares split, elects ’SDS’ officers by R.F., Guardian staff correspondent

The ’worker student alliance’ by Randy Furst, Guardian staff correspondent

SDS Deals with the woman question by Margie Stamberg, Guardian staff correspondent

The Real SDS Stands Up by Andrew Kopkind [Hard Times, June 30, 1969]

SDS Convention Split: Three Factions Emerge

The split at the SDS national convention by Mary-Alice Waters

Why SDS Expelled PL by Carl Davidson

Expulsion [Guardian Editorial]

SDS National Convention by Allen Young [Great Speckled Bird]

Education Secretary’s Report: The Boston Strangler: A Paper Tiger by Bill Ayers

The press views SDS at its national convention

SDS and PL differ on the national question by Carl Davidson

SDS [split in Atlanta, Georgia] [Great Speckled Bird, July 21, 1969]

SDS Expels PL [RYM Statement on the SDS split]

Spartacist Special Issue on the SDS Split: New Left’s Death Agony

“You’re Either Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution” [The Movement, Vol. 5 No. 7, August 1969]

Forward or backward? [Guardian Editorial on Weathermen and RYM-2]

SDS and the Movement: Where Do We Go From Here? by Jack Weinberg and Jack Gerson [on the SDS split, PL, RYM II, RU]

The SDS’s Desolation Row by Jack Gerson [On RU, Weatherman, PL, and RYM II]

Two, Three, Many SDS’s by Lenny Glynn

Who Are the Bombers? Often the Rulers! by SDS [PL]

SDS Split, 1969, at the local level – Stanford SDS

Radicals Convene. Views Differ In SDS National by Karen Davidson

SDS Position Clarified by Leonard Siegel

Progressive Labor Party: ’All Nationalism Is Reactionary’ by T. H. Andre

Re-Reassessments: What Is Nationalism? by Ivo Banac

Re-Reassessments: Domestic Capitalism by Ivo Banac

Factions Split SDS Meeting In Vicious Shouting Match by Richard Embry

In Search Of The ’Real S.D.S.’ Favoring A Campus Worker-Student Alliance by Doug Hogan

A Letter In Reply by members of RU

WSA And PLP Repudiate Revisionism by Ivo Banac

’New’ SDS Chapter Formed From Split by Richard Embry

Revolutionary Youth Movement II

Debate within SDS. RYM II vs. Weatherman

5 proposed principles of SDS unity

Take the War to the People

RYM-2 meets

A Call to All Proletarian Youth and Proletarian Organizations

Gettin’ It On! – Call to National Action

October Anti-War Actions: Three Views [The Rag, September 29, 1969]

RYM Conference: Women Unite! by Sally Gabb et al [Great Speckled Bird, December 8, 1969]

Toward Mass Action by Bob Goodman [Great Speckled Bird, December 8, 1969]

Grym Too by Steve Wise [Great Speckled Bird, December 15, 1969]

Women lead founding of RYM by Carl Davidson

Why We Carry the N.L.F. Flag! [RYM II leaflet]

Maoism vs. National Liberation: Where Does RYM II Stand?

Periodical

Revolutionary Youth Movement newspaper [No. 1]

RYM newspaper [No. 2]

The Beginnings of a New Communist Movement

The Movement and the Workers by Clayton Van Lydegraf

The Battle of People’s Park by the Red Guard Caucus, Berkeley SDS

Unite Theory with Practice To Build A Communist Party! by Bill Epton

Which Side Are You On? [on the theory of the “new working class”] by Carl Davidson

The Black Liberation Struggle (within the current world struggle) by Bill Epton

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Bay Area Revolutionary Union – Revolutionary Union

The Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU) began in 1968 as a working class organizing collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area, mainly in the East Bay region which includes Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Jose and Palo Alto. BARU was inspired by the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, whose newspaper, “The Black Panther,” brought Marxist ideas to a larger working class audience than any group since the heyday of the Communist Party USA. BARU identified more strongly with Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought than the Panthers did, and soon developed a separate outlook and strategy.

At its inception, BARU emphasized “building the workers’ movement” over “party building.” It took part in a petroleum workers’ strike in Richmond in 1969, organized working class youth groups, and did campus organizing at Stanford University and other schools. By circulating its “Red Papers” series of collected position papers nationally, it connected with activist collectives in cities across the U.S., as well as influenced the broader developing New Communist Movement.

In the summer of 1970, the BARU followed up on the connections it had made through Red Papers with a national tour which helped it cement relations with some of these collectives. In the wake of this national tour, new RU collectives developed in a number of areas and the national office was moved to Chicago.

The RU underwent a major internal split in 1970-71 with a section (which became the Venceremos Organization) that had advocated more openly violent tactics and a pan-Third World emphasis. In the ensuing polemic the RU moved away from the view that a paramilitary uprising was imminent – the stance of the early Black Panther Party – and toward a more traditional communist approach of long-term organizing with the goals of building a new revolutionary party and eventually a mass revolutionary working class.

Socialist Election Campaign in Berkeley by Brian Shannon [Young Socialist, February-March 1967]

Berkeley Barb Editorial: To Vote Right, Tip Left

Right Wins Listless Battle

Lauds Gunrunning as Valid Alliance

Berkeleyans on Way to NCNP Convention

FSM Funds May Help Black Rebel Groups

Mea Culpa Mea Culpa

New Politics: Meanwhile, Back at the Boondocks... by Lee Felsenten

Factions Forming in New Peace Party?

Caucus Calculations on Cleaver and Rubin

Critiques and Polemics

Letter to RU Executive Committee by the Los Angeles RYM II

1969 Richmond Oil Strike–An Analysis [from Progressive Labor magazine]

How the Revolutionary Union Renders Lenin More Profound While Aiding the CPUSA [from the Communist League’s Proletariat]

The United Front against Imperialism? by the Sojourner Truth Organization

A Critique of the United Front against Imperialism as a Strategy for Revolution within the U.S. by the Commentator Collective

The national question in the U.S. today [review of Red Papers 5] by Carl Davidson

Debate on the national question [reply to Davidson’s review of Red Papers 5] by the Revolutionary Union

The Revolutionary Union by Workers Vanguard

SLA Action: Some People Jump Under The Bed by the Revolutionary Union

Which Side Are You On? [on RU and the SLA] by Carl Davidson

International Women’s Day Sparks Two Line Struggle by the Revolutionary Union

Which Side Are You On? [on RU and women’s emancipation] by Carl Davidson

Revolutionary Union: Opportunism in a “Super-Revolutionary” Disguise by the October League (M-L)

Marxism or American Pragmatism? The Right Opportunist Line of the R.U. by Workers Viewpoint Organization

RU’s Errors: “Leftism”

Some Notes on the Revolutionary Union by Gordon Fox [Young Socialist Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 8, December 1974]

The Struggle Within: A Critique of the Role of the Revolutionary Union within the USCPFA by the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association of Detroit

Red Papers 7: Revolutionary Union’s “United Front” with NATO by Young Spartacus

Critique of Red Papers 7: Metaphysics Cannot Defeat Revisionism by Martin Nicolaus

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

Red Papers

Red Papers 1

Red Papers 2

Red Papers 3: Women Fight for Liberation

Red Papers 4: Proletarian Revolution vs. Revolutionary Adventurism: Major documents from an ideological struggle in the Revolutionary Union

Red Papers 5: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.

Red Papers 6: Build the Leadership of the Proletariat and Its Party

Red Papers 7: How Capitalism has been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle

Work Among Students and Youth

Build the Anti-Imperialist Student Movement

Capitalism in Crisis – Fight for a Decent Education!

Audio Recording of Tim Devine and Shelly Bogen at Illinois State University on the work of the Revolutionary Union and the Attica Brigade [part 1], [part 2], [part 3: questions from the audience] (1973)

Transcript of Tim Devine and Shelly Bogen presentation at Illinois State University on the work of the Revolutionary Union and the Attica Brigade [part 1], [part 2], [part 3: questions from the audience] (1973)

Attica Brigade

200 Attend Regional Meeting of Attica Brigade on Campus

The Time is Now.... [call to a National Convention]

The Time is Now.... [letter to Guardian subscribers about the upcoming National Convention]

Editorial: The Road Ahead

Revolutionary Student Brigade

’Revolutionary Student Brigade’ formed in Iowa by Ben Bedell

Opinion: Revolutionary Students by Members of the Revolutionary Student Brigade

Surreally Political by Arn Passman, [Berkeley Barb, August 16-22, 1974]

National Convention Launches RSB

The Bums Are On the Run – Kick ’Em While They’re Down!

“Revolutionary” Student Brigade Holds Conference: Maoists Exhume New Left by Young Spartacus

R.S.B. Internal Newsletter, No. 1

R.S.B. Internal Newsletter, No. 2

Revolutionary Student Brigade Tour Through the Southwest

Seize the Times! Internal Newsletter of the Revolutionary Student Brigade, #10, February 25, 1975]

US and USSR Grab for Angola

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The October League (Marxist-Leninist)

The October League (Marxist-Leninist) originated directly out of the three-way debate that ended Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969. The SDS faction RYM II opposed Progressive Labor and the Weatherman faction with a pro-worker organizing approach (unlike Weatherman) while supporting the Black Panther Party and other left-wing nationalist movements in communities of color (unlike PL). From the start, RYM II took a strong pro-China position, which had been PL’s hallmark until the latter group broke its ties to China in 1970. After the SDS break-up, RYM II became a national organization, Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), but it soon disintegrated.

The Georgia Communist League (ML) (GCL) and the October League (Marxist-Leninist) (OL) developed out of the Atlanta and Los Angeles RYM collectives respectively. The Atlanta SDS-RYM collective had significant roots in a pro-RYM faction that had developed in SDS’s sister organization in the South, the Southern Student Organizing Committee, whose leader was Lyn Wells.

The OL and the GCL merged in 1971, and the national October League (ML) became the second largest group in the New Communist Movement, after the Revolutionary Union. The direction and strength of OL was shaped in part by their competition with RU over recruits and positioning in the broader left and progressive movements.

At first OL set a more orthodox course than RU – stressing party-building and opposing reforms like the feminist movement’s Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Their literature bristled with hammers and sickles. They also hewed more literally to the CPUSA’s Stalin-era “Afro-American nation in the Black Belt” theory, which held that self-determination in the historic plantation area of the Deep South remained at the heart of African American people’s struggle for liberation.

In this period, OL saw ’ultra-leftism’ as the main danger in the party building process, which reflected its own efforts to tone down some of the rather alienating jargon and over-the-top symbolism that had been part of the culture of its founding collectives. OL soon found itself in a strategic position in a local wildcat strike at Mead Packaging in Atlanta. From that experience they toured the country arguing that an openly Marxist-Leninist group could offer leadership to militant workers.

By 1973, OL took on a more moderate persona, emphasizing accessibility to other left groups and a greater openness to popular reforms; for example, it reversed itself on ERA as the RU turned to a more hardcore ‘workerist’ position. OL absorbed several local collectives and fielded cadres into industrial jobs. In Detroit, it gained influence in the UAW Brotherhood Caucus. Within the burgeoning New Communist Movement, in this period, OL attempted to mark off a political space that combined loyalty to China with a stance reminiscent of the Comintern’s early Popular Front period.

Historical Works

Building Revolution in the South: The Southern Conference Educational Fund and the New Communist Movement, 1968-1981 by Doug Michel

Strike Fever: Labor Unrest, Civil Rights and the Left in Atlanta 1972 by Monica Waugh-Benton

Primary Background Documents

The family: obsolete or revolutionary? by Michael Klonsky

Communists meet to discuss labor by Rod Such

The Relationship Between the Struggle for Democracy and the Struggle for Socialism by Barry Litt

Critiques and Polemics

The October League by the Spartacist League

Iranian Communist Hits OL

The Struggle of Small and Medium-sized Nations by the October League

CL Replies to Attack by the Communist League

Primary Documents

Georgia Communist League (Marxist-Leninist)

An Introduction to the Red Worker

Attica: Tragic or Heroic

PL Launches Cowardly Attack [Nixon in China]

Georgia Communist League Statement on the Bombing of the Great Speckled Bird [Great Speckled Bird, May 15, 1972]

New Coalition [Great Speckled Bird, May 22, 1972]

California and Georgia Communists Merge