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 (e.g.,
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. 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.
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. They became active in the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War after it opened its membership to non-veterans 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. Deep animosity still exists between the two organizations.
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. The OL established influence within some of the established
civil rights organizations, including the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the
Southern Conference Educational Fund, which had been under the influence of the Moscow-oriented
Communist Party USA. In late 1975 they organized a "National Fight Back Conference," which drew 1,000 participants and was attended by representatives of the
August 29th Movement, the
Congress of Afrikan People and the
Marxist–Leninist Organizing Committee of San Francisco. They also had a youth group called the Communist Youth Organization.
Greensboro massacre 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.
1970s and 1980s 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 (
see New 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. The
October League organized the founding congress of the
Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist) in 1977. During this period a few other new communist movement organizations also formed new
communist parties. 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. == Legacy ==