Revolutionary Youth Movement
Encyclopedia
The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) was the section of Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

 that opposed the Worker Student Alliance
Worker Student Alliance
The Worker Student Alliance in the United States was the section of Students for a Democratic Society led by the Progressive Labor Party. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the working class, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on...

 of the Progressive Labor Party. Most of the national leadership of SDS joined the RYM in order to oppose PLP's party line
Party line (politics)
In politics, the line or the party line is an idiom for a political party or social movement's canon agenda, as well as specific ideological elements specific to the organization's partisanship. The common phrase toeing the party line describes a person who speaks in a manner that conforms to his...

 and what they alleged to be its attempted takeover of the SDS leadership structure, particularly at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago.

The theoretical basis of the Revolutionary Youth Movement was an understanding that most of the American population, including both students and the so-called "middle class," comprised, due to their relationship to the instruments of production, the working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

; thus the organizational basis of the SDS, which had begun in the elite colleges and had been extended to public institutions as the organization grew, could be extended to youth as a whole, including students, those serving in the military, and the unemployed. Students could be viewed as workers gaining skills prior to employment. This contrasted to the Progressive Labor view which viewed students and workers as being in separate categories which could ally, but not should not jointly organize.

Politically, the RYM took issue with what they alleged was PLP's opposition to the right of self-determination
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...

 for oppressed nations and ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...

s. The publication in 1969 of PL's seminal anti-nationalism document was RYM's pivotal evidence of this. The RYM also criticized PL's attacks on the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, whom PL had accused of "selling out
Selling out
"Selling out" is the compromising of integrity, morality, or principles in exchange for money or "success" . It is commonly associated with attempts to tailor material to a mainstream audience...

" to the U.S. during the Paris Peace Talks
Paris Peace Accords
The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 intended to establish peace in Vietnam and an end to the Vietnam War, ended direct U.S. military involvement, and temporarily stopped the fighting between North and South Vietnam...

, as well as other criticisms. But most of all, the RYM opposed what it considered to be PL's unfounded attacks on the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....

.

In the 1969 fragmentation of SDS, RYM departed the convention hall and declared itself the "real SDS" in a new space across the street.

In splitting the SDS, the RYM itself also split. One section of the RYM (referred to as RYM I), containing most of the SDS leadership including Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a former leader of the American anti-Vietnam War radical organization, Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the immediate past Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center...

, David Gilbert and Mark Rudd
Mark Rudd
Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...

, became Weatherman
Weatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...

. Weatherman briefly retained control of the SDS National Office and membership lists before dissolving SDS and closing its headquarters in 1970, in favor of pursuing underground activities that it believed would help to spark revolution in the short term.

The other major section of the RYM, referred to as Revolutionary Youth Movement II, were Maoist-oriented and rejected the Weathermen's line of immediate armed struggle in the U.S., advocating building a new revolutionary vanguard party
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...

 instead. RYM II quickly gave way to various new revolutionary organizations and collectives. This milieu became known as the new communist movement
New Communist Movement
The New Communist Movement ' was a Marxist-Leninist political movement of the 1970s and 1980s 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, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cuban...

. The largest of the RYM II groups was the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, which soon absorbed some other groups and became the Revolutionary Communist Party USA in 1975. The Communist Party Marxist-Leninist
Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (USA)
The Communist Party was a Maoist political party in the United States.- History :The Communist Party 's predecessor organization, the October League , 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...

 also evolved out of these disputes. In 1985, faced with shrinking or collapsing organizations, many of these offshoot groups, including the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters
Revolutionary Workers Headquarters
Revolutionary Workers Headquarters was a U.S. Marxist-Leninist organization that formed out of a split from the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1977...

, Proletarian Unity League
Proletarian Unity League
The Proletarian Unity League was formed in Boston in 1975 by Students for a Democratic Society members who had been associated with the Revolutionary Youth Movement II grouping that emerged out of the split in SDS at its summer 1969 convention. The Proletarian Unity League was critical of what...

, Organization for Revolutionary Unity
Organization for Revolutionary Unity
The Organization for Revolutionary Unity was an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist organization in the United States. ORU was formed in 1983 from a merger of the Committee for a Proletarian Party and the Communist Organization, Bay Area . These groups, and the ORU itself, were part of the U.S...

, and later the Amilcar Cabral
Amílcar Cabral
Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was a Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, writer, and a nationalist thinker and politician. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence...

-Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson
Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...

 Collective, consolidated themselves into the Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
The Freedom Road Socialist Organization — known in Spanish as Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad — was formed in 1985 as many of the Maoist-oriented groups formed in the United States New Communist Movement of the 1970s were shrinking or collapsing...

which, in 1999, itself divided along ideological lines.

External links

  • "Shut It Down!" Includes "SDS: The Last Hurrah", an account of Chicago 1969 written by an undercover federal agent, and the Revolutionary Youth Movement mission statement.
  • Revolution in the Air book and reference website about the New Communist Movement
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