The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists[1] and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions.[2] This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution.[3] The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.[4]
History
Origins
Until the 1960s the largest and most influential organization to the left of the Democratic Party within the United States was the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), which achieved peak influence during the Great Depression and World War II, before declining in the post war years due to a number of factors, including state-repression (McCarthyism, the Smith Act, the Rosenberg Trial, etc.), as well as internal ideological schisms within the party. Members were often disillusioned by the party-leadership's official subordination to the USSR ideologically, with the party defending the numerous controversial actions by the Soviet state.
This would be a key moment in the Marxist movement in the United States and the world, with numerous ranking party members leaving the organization due to Krushchev's perceived revisionism in pursuing the policy of peaceful coexistence with the Capitalist West, which was perceived as a fundamental departure from the revolutionary socialism and anti-imperialist elements of Marxism–Leninism. The New Communist Movement was influenced by world events of the time, specifically the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, The French May-Day Uprising, and the Black Power Movement.[5] Many of the early participants in the NCM were former members of the New Left student organization Students for a Democratic Society. The NCM emerged from numerous distinct movements in the United States during the late 1960s, with historian Max Elbaum, identifying Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Progressive Labor Party.[6]
Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party
One of the most prominent groups of the New Communist Movement was the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (later, shortened to Revolutionary Union), formed by activists led by Bob Avakian which gained most of its membership from the Students for a Democratic Society. Its anti-revisionist line emphasized the Black liberation struggle and the liberation of colonized peoples within and outside the United States.[7][8] They became active in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War after it opened its membership to non-veterans[9] and temporarily gained control when the national office voted to expel non RU chapters and members and voted to integrate into the Revolutionary Union although non Marxist members of the VVAW filed and won a lawsuit prohibiting the RU dominated group from using the VVAW name, logos and materials.[10] Deep animosity still exists between the two organizations.[9] In September 1975 the RU officially voted to dissolve and reestablish itself into the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.[11]
October League
The Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist)'s predecessor organization, the October League (Marxist–Leninist), was founded in 1971 by several local groups, many of which had grown out of the radical student organization Students for a Democratic Society when SDS split apart in 1969. Michael Klonsky, who had been a national leader in SDS in the late 1960s, was the main leader of the CP(M-L).
The October League came out of the Revolutionary Youth Movement II grouping in the SDS split. During the early 1970s the OL took positions that were at odds with most of the US Left, including opposition to gay liberation and support of the Shah of Iran, whose regime they saw as a bulwark against Soviet social-imperialism.
On November 3, 1979, four members of the Communist Workers' Party (CWP) and a male protester were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) during a Death to the Klan march, organized by the CWP. The event had been preceded by inflammatory rhetoric from both sides. The CWP had originally come to Greensboro to support workers' rights activism among mostly black textile industry workers in the area. The march was a part of that larger effort. The Greensboro city police department had an informant within the KKK and ANP group who notified them that the Klan was prepared for armed violence.
As one of its last initiatives, SDS had begun to leave its campus base and organize in working-class neighborhoods. Radical militant groups such as Weather Underground are recognized as participants in the movement. Some former members subsequently developed local organizations that continued the trend, and they attempted to find theoretical backing for their work in the writings of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. Maoism was then highly regarded as more actively revolutionary than the brand of communism supported by the post-Stalin Soviet Union (seeNew Left: New Left in the United States). As a result, most NCM organizations referred to their ideology as Marxism–Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and rejected what they saw as the devolution of socialism in the contemporary Soviet Union.
Similar to the New Left's general direction in the late 1960s, these new organizations rejected the post-1956 Communist Party USA as revisionist, or anti-revolutionary, and also rejected Trotskyism and the Socialist Workers Party for its theoretical opposition to Maoism.
The groups, formed of ex-students, attempted to establish links with the working class through finding work in factories and heavy industry, but they also tended toward Third-worldism, supporting National Liberation Fronts of various kinds, including the Black Panther Party (then on the decline), the Cuban Revolution, and the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam. The New Communist Movement organizations supported national self-determination for most ethnic groups, especially blacks and those of Latino origin, in the United States. These organizations addressed problems of sexism and racism, partly by voicing adamant support for self-determination and identity politics, and felt that they were dealing with problems they were of the opinion had not been addressed in the groups of the 1960s. However, different NCM groups came to this similar conclusion via quite different routes.
In its early years, NCM organisations formed a loose-knit tendency in United States leftist politics, but never coalesced into a single organization. As time went on, the organizations became extremely competitive and increasingly denounced one another. Points of distinction were frequently founded on the attitude taken toward the successors of Mao and international disputes between the Soviet Union and China regarding such developments as the Angolan Civil War. The Revolutionary Union organized the founding congress of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA in 1975.
Unlike the majority of NCM groups, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), which evolved into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), was formed by factory workers rather than student activists. The AFL–CIO leadership supported the Vietnam War and sought to avoid strikes, but union workers saw through this and independently organized a series of wildcat strikes. Radical Marxist and other African-American auto workers subsequently formed DRUM. From 1968 to 1971 DRUM and the league acted as a dual union, with black leadership, within the United Auto Workers. In the late 1970s a group labeled the May 19th Communist Organization was created, going on a bombing campaign.
In 1979, after the publishing of Enver Hoxha's Imperialism and the Revolution and other criticisms of Maoism from Albania, some groups renounced Maoism in favour of an "orthodox Marxist–Leninist" line similar to that of the Albanian communists. Many of these groups such as the Marxist–Leninist Organizing Committee and Sunrise Collective formed together in a joint statement against the end of Chinese aid to Albania. The U.S. Marxist–Leninist Party, previously the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists, would become the primary recognized vanguard party in the United States supported by Albania, although Albanian aid to the American communists was minimal due to fears of CIA infiltration. Other groups such as the Red Dawn Organization and Pacific Collective (Marxist–Leninist) would meet with similarly pro-Albania groups in the 1979 in an attempt to unite and form a single communist party.[13]
The groups and individuals representing the movement were persistently hostile towards homosexuality and homosexuals, reflecting both the homophobia within the United States, as well as homophobic tendencies within the larger international Marxist–Leninist movement, although gay rights activism was an early component of the New Left.[15] The Revolutionary Union considered homosexuality as "an individual response to male supremacy and male chauvinism."[citation needed] The successor organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA now demands full recognition of LGBT rights as a fundamental element of establishing socialism.[16]
Influences
Frantz Fanon, anti-colonialist writer and existentialist philosopher.
Mao Zedong, military leader of the Chinese Revolution, General Secretary of the CCP.
Huey Newton, leader and co-founder of the Black Panther Party, deeply influenced by Maoism and Black Nationalism
^Elbaum, Max (2002). Revolution in the Air. London: Verso. pp. 94–95. ISBN9781859846179. Ideologically, this new wave of organization builders reflected the full Third World Marxist spectrum. Many - often veterans of the Venceremos Brigade - took their main inspiration from Cuba. Some identified with Third World liberation but focused mainly on one particular struggle or issue within the US. Even among those who believed that the Chinese Communist Party had presented the most comprehensive and useful framework for analyzing current realities there were distinctions. "Hard Maoists" thought only the CPC expressed modern-day Leninism, while a probably larger number of "soft Maoists" - much as they admired Mao - were not prepared to say that the Chinese CP was more revolutionary than the Cuban or Vietnamese parties..."
^Leonard, Aaron J. (2015-02-05). Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists—The Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980. Gallagher, Conor A. Winchester, UK. ISBN9781782795346. OCLC895731467.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Elbaum, Max (2002). "Chapter 4: A New Communist Movement Takes Shape". Revolution in the Air (Hardcover ed.). London: Verso. pp. 102–103. ISBN978-1-85984-617-9. Mike Clonsky and other RYM II leaders in Los Angeles formed the October League collective ..."
^Elbaum, Max (2002). "Appendix". Revolution in the Air (Hardcover ed.). London: Verso. p. 340. ISBN9781859846179. Founded in 1985-1986 bringing together the Boston based Proletarian Unity League (PUL), formed in the early 1970's, the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, and the Organization of Revolutionary Unity. The Socialist Organizing Network, a group of former LRS members, joined in 1883. FRSO split into two groups in 1999; both continue to exist, and both call themselves Freedom Road."
Avakian, Bob.From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist: A Memoir (Insight Press, 2005)
Lovell, Julia. Maoism: A Global History. (Borzoi Books, 2019). ISBN978-1847922502
Elbaum, Max., Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. (London: Verso, 2003).
Waller, Signe. Love And Revolution: A Political Memoir: People's History Of The Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting And Aftermath. London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2002. ISBN0-7425-1365-3.
