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Main Entry: New Communist Movement

The New Communist Movement (NCM) was a leftist political movement of the 1970's and 1980's in the United States. The term refers to a specific trend in the U.S. New Left which sought inspiration in the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but did so independently of existing U.S. leftist parties.

In the 1960's student radicals gathered into the Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS grew to over 100,000 members before dissolving in 1969.

The AFL-CIO leadership supported the Vietnam War and sought to avoid strikes. At the same time union workers independently organized a series of wildcat strikes. Radical Marxist auto workers formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) which later became the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement. For a few years DRUM acted as a dual union within the United Auto Workers.

As one if its last iniatives, SDS had begun to leave its campus base and organize in working class neighborhoods. Some former members developed local organizations that continued the trend. The attempted to find theoretical backing for their work in the writings of Lenin, Mao and Stalin. Maoism was highly regarded as a being more actively revolutionary than the brand of communism supported by the post-Stalin Soviet Union.

These new organizations rejected the post-1956 Communist Party USA as revisionist, or anti-revolutionary. They 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. The organizations supported national self-determination for African-Americans and other national minorities in the United States.

In its early years, NCM organisations formed a loose-knit tendency in United States leftist politics, but never coalessed into a single organization. As time went on the organizations became extremely competitive and increasingly dennounced one another. Points of distiction 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 Workers Organization declared itself to be the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. The other national organizations swiftly formed themselves into party organizations. The October League became the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).

The movement became increasingly isolated in the 1980's. Many organizations dissolved while other merged. The Revolutionary Communist Party remains as an original product of the New Left. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Many smaller organisations combined to form the Freedom Road Socialist Organization at the end of the 1980s. Subsequently FRSO split into two similary named organizations.

In 2003 Max Elbaum, a former member of the organization Line of March published Revolution in the Air a history of the New Communist Movement.

See Also

Predecessors

NCM Organizations of the 1970's and 1980's

Current Organizations Decended from NCM

External Links

  • Freedom Road "Fight Back"