What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of

1968?

Max Elbaum
Seattle used to be just a city. Since December 1999, it has become shorthand for
grassroots protest against the injustices of global capitalism.

This is hardly the first time a place-name has come to symbolize a watershed in
opposition movements. There were a host of such markers in the huge wave of
U.S. protests against racism and the Vietnam War during and after 1968:
"Chicago" (referring to the 1968 Democratic Convention where police beat
demonstrators as they chanted "the whole world is watching"); "San Francisco
State" (where a 1968-69 strike led by students of color made the first major
breakthrough in the fight for Ethnic Studies); and "Cambodia" and "Kent State"
(referring to Richard Nixon's ill-fated 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the
shooting of four white students by the Ohio National Guard).

For the rebellious youth of the late 1960s, those locations-turned-emblems did
not just register as external events. They spurred personal transformations that
led thousands to adopt a revolutionary anticapitalist outlook. Radicalization ran
both broad and deep. In 1968 more college students (20 percent) identified with
Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara than with any of the candidates for
the U.S. presidency. 1 A 1971 New York Times survey indicated that four out of
ten students--nearly 3 million people--thought that a revolution was needed in
the United States. 2 Radical sentiment ran even stronger in the African American
community and by the early 1970s had penetrated deeply into the Puerto Rican,
Chicano, Asian American, and Native American populations. A 1970 survey
showed that 30.6 percent of black enlisted men in the armed forces planned "to
join a militant Black group like the Panthers" when they returned home. 3 The
radical battalions of 1968 and after were not unified around one program or
doctrine. Still, their perspective was characterized by a few predominant themes,
reflecting the fifteen years of civil rights, Black Power, and antiwar protests that
had shaped their political evolution.

Antiracism and anti-imperialism were in the forefront of the new radical

outlook. Its main international inspiration came from the national liberation
movements that seemed to be daily shattering the notion of U.S. invincibility. It
was a time when the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, People's China, and
Marxist-led armed movements in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East appeared to mesh into one unstoppable torrent. The activists of 1968
regarded solidarity with the Third World (the period's most common term for
what today is usually called the global South) as their prime internationalist
responsibility. Well into the 1970s, the militants galvanized by this outlook,
which most regarded as a Third World-oriented variant of Marxism, constituted
a dynamic political trend and were considered by capitalism's guardians as a
force to be reckoned with. Even after this trend passed its peak, its most
tenacious partisans played important roles in the antiapartheid movement, the
Central America solidarity movement, the Rainbow Coalition electoral upsurge,
and other battles of the 1980s.

Yet today the nature--indeed the existence--of this current has been largely
erased from even the left's historical memory. The civil rights movement and the
broad anti-Vietnam War movement have been extensively chronicled and
receive much deserved scholarly and activist attention. But the dominant view
even in progressive circles is that the young people who embraced revolutionary
 ideas after 1968 had essentially "gone crazy," and that the early "good sixties"
were replaced by a later "bad sixties" characterized by political madness. 4 The
post-1968 work of organizations rooted in communities of color--the Black
Panther Party, and to a lesser extent the Young Lords Party, La Raza Unida
Party, the American Indian Movement, and a few others--is sometimes given a
certain due. But for the most part intellectually ghettoized, these experiences are
not seen as central to a United States left that remained vital into the 1970s. 5

Now is a good moment to set the record straight, to appreciate the influence
Third World Marxism once enjoyed, and to analyze why the broad revolutionary
trend inspired by this outlook failed to make an effective transition to the
changed terrain of later years. The special timeliness of this task is due to
"Seattle"--to the stirrings of a new generation against global capitalism, to the
emergence of a new internationalist current manifesting impulses toward
solidarity with the global South. Such a current especially has much to learn
from an earlier generation that exhibited the same impulses, albeit under very
different conditions, thirty years ago.

Roots and Contours of Third World Marxism

The explosive radicalism of the late 1960s evolved out of the sustained, large-
scale protests that had gathered steam ever since the mid-1950s. The prime force
initiating the evolution from 1950s conformism to 1968 revolutionism was the
civil rights movement. First coming to prominence via the Montgomery bus
boycott and spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, his Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), the fight for racial equality played a decisive role in reopening space
for all expressions of dissent in the wake of McCarthyism. The movement's fight
to end legal segregation and the white monopoly on political power challenged
deeply entrenched interests and was protracted and bitter. Its success,
legislatively expressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, was a monumental achievement.

Breaking Jim Crow was an indispensable precondition for opening the path to
further gains not just against racism but for all democratic movements. Further,
by sweeping away the legal edifice of segregation, the civil rights movement
pushed millions toward the recognition that racial inequality was not simply a
matter of unjust laws or individual prejudice, but was related to the country's
economic and social structure. And when the black freedom struggle shifted its
center of gravity to the urban metropolises of the north and west after 1965, with
violent rebellions exploding in one city after another, a huge constituency "ready
for anything" had come into being. According to the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders, almost one out of every five residents within
the affected areas participated in these uprisings, and the majority of African
Americans felt that the rebellions would improve black economic and social
conditions. 6

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the antiracist upsurge was joined by an outpouring

of protest against the Vietnam War. The first major nationwide antiwar
demonstration, called by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for April 17,
1965, beat back a harsh red-baiting campaign and mobilized a then unexpected
turnout of 15,000 plus. Just two years later, more than six times that number
would march on the Pentagon, militant antiwar actions would sweep the country,
and Martin Luther King would denounce the war and link it to the maintenance
of racism and poverty.

These movements, moreover, were growing at a time when fights against

Western colonialism and neocolonialism gripped the entire Third World.
Vietnam stood at the pivot, but new armed organizations such as Uruguay's
tupamaros and chile's Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) sprouted
throughout Latin America. Marxist-led guerrilla movements were gaining
ground in every country of Portugal's African empire--Angola, Mozambique,
and Guinea-Bissau. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was picking
up the banner of popular struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, and armed
left-wing movements were spreading in Asia from India to the Philippines. Che
Guevara's 1967 call to "create two, three, many Vietnams" did not appear to be
just an expression of sentiment, but resounded as an eminently practical
program.

Meanwhile, the Non-Aligned Movement, which numbered twenty-five countries

at its first summit in 1961, grew to fifty-plus member states by 1970 and
consistently expressed its solidarity with armed liberation efforts. Plans to build
a new society in China (the Cultural Revolution) and Cuba seemed to offer
fresh, grassroots-based models of socialism.

This Third World rebellion against U.S. and West European domination also and
inevitably constituted a head-on challenge to white supremacy. It resonated with
young people across the globe, particularly in U.S. communities of color, where
a new generation of activists termed their constituencies "Third World peoples"
within this country's borders.

Through the 1960s, world and national politics became ever more volatile, and
then came the jolts of that turning-point year: 1968. The nationwide Tet
offensive in Vietnam, which came as a near complete surprise to the U.S.
command, revealed the complete failure of Washington's counterinsurgency
efforts and raised the prospect of the first outright U.S. defeat in its long war-
making history. Tet, and the antiwar surge it intensified at home, also led directly
to the ouster of the first of two presidents to be driven from office by the
upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s. On March 31, 1968, a besieged Lyndon
Johnson announced that he was abandoning his reelection bid and that peace
talks with the Vietnamese liberation forces would soon begin.

Four days later Martin Luther King was assassinated, setting off black rebellions
in more than a hundred cities. In Washington, D.C., flames reached within six
blocks of the White House, and machine guns were mounted on the Capitol
balcony and White House lawn. King's murder convinced tens of thousands of
activists that "the system" was incorrigibly corrupt and could not be reformed.
This sentiment was reinforced by the assassination of Robert Kennedy two
months later, by the bloody police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention,
and by both major parties fielding pro-Vietnam War candidates (Nixon vs.
Hubert Humphrey) for the White House.

On the eve of the Democratic Party's gathering in Chicago, the Soviet Union
invaded Czechoslovakia, a watershed not only in international politics but also
for the new radical generation. Just as a new wave of young people were
becoming revolutionaries, the Soviet Union was acting like anything but a force
for freedom and liberation. The Soviet response to the Prague Spring and
"socialism with a human face," along with the suspicion and even hostility with
which the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) viewed most of the 1960s left, 7 led
the vast bulk of new radicals to look elsewhere for strategies and models.

For tens of thousands, that elsewhere turned out to be the communist parties of
China, Vietnam, Cuba, and other Third World countries. Inspired by these
parties and the ideology they espoused, layer upon layer of U.S. activists
decided that a Third World-oriented version of Marxism was the key to building
a powerful left within the "belly of the beast."

Third World Marxism saw national liberation in the global South as the cutting
edge of the worldwide progressive movement, and it put opposition to racism
and military interventionism at the very center of activists' vision. It riveted
attention on the intersection of economic exploitation and racial oppression,
pointing young organizers toward the most disadvantaged sectors of the working
class. It embraced the revolutionary nationalist impulses that then held
tremendous initiative in communities of color, where Marxism, socialism, and
nationalism intermingled and overlapped. It linked aspiring U.S. revolutionaries
 to the Third World parties and leaders--from Mao and Che Guevara to Ho Chi
Minh and Amilcar Cabral--who were proving that "the power of the people is
greater than the man's technology."

Third World Marxism promised a break with Eurocentric models of social

change. With its sympathy for militancy, confrontational tactics, and armed self-
defense, it appealed to those who had directly experienced the massive state
repression of the 1960s. In general, its spirit was far more in tune with sixties
sensibilities than was the temper of the more cautious Old Left groups--
mainstream (pro-Soviet) communist, Trotskyist, and social democratic alike.

Third World Marxism pointed a way toward building a multiracial movement

out of what had developed as a deeply segregated U.S. left. (The first self-
identified "Rainbow Coalition" was initiated in 1969 by Chicago Black Panther
Party chair Fred Hampton; it included the Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young
Lords Organization, and the Young Patriots, a group of poor, mostly
Appalachian whites.) Third World Marxism seemed to many the best framework
for taking the most radical themes articulated by Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King and transforming them into a comprehensive revolutionary ideology.

1968: Poised for Take-Off

Based on Third World Marxism, a host of new (or transformed) organizations

and institutions emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Together they formed
a dense network of overlapping--sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing--
forms. As of 1968, many components of this network were just beginning to
gain mass influence or assume definite shape. But as the political earthquakes of
this pivotal year shook the country, one wave of young activists after another
turned leftward and transformed Third World Marxism in the United States from
a set of ideas into a trend poised for take-off.

The period's largest circulation radical newspaper, the Guardian, and most
prestigious left-wing journal, Monthly Review, played linchpin roles. In 1968,
the Guardian was just emerging from a wrenching generational and political
transition. The paper had been founded as The National Guardian during Henry
Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign; in 1967 a staff rebellion led to a younger
and more radical group of activists assuming control of the paper. The masthead
slogan was changed from "progressive newsweekly" to "radical newsweekly."
Coverage of national liberation movements was stepped up, and the new
Guardian established itself as the left's premier source of on-the-spot reporting
from Third World battlefronts. The paper was an enthusiastic partisan of Cuba
and China and began to offer harsh criticisms of the Soviet role in world affairs.

Monthly Review (MR), for its part, enthusiastically welcomed the Cuban
Revolution and backed China after the bitter split between Beijing and Moscow
erupted in the early 1960s. Monthly Review Press issued a steady output of
volumes promoting Marxism, Leninism, and Third World revolutions. In 1968 it
distributed Guardian correspondent Wilfred Burchett's Vietnam Will Win! that
moved thousands of activists from opposition to U.S. intervention to outright
support of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) as much as any other
single book. The Chinese Cultural Revolution particularly impressed MR's
editors, and MR played a bigger role than any other U.S. intellectual institution
in promoting the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, not least by publishing Fanshen: A
Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton, the
paperback edition of which sold a remarkable 200,000 copies.

Widespread distribution of materials from China's Foreign Languages Press and

from Cuba also figured heavily in the creation of the Third World Marxist
current. By 1968 inexpensive copies of articles by Mao, Che, and Fidel Castro as
well as Marx, Engels, and Lenin were available in every large city and college
town.

In terms of building a popular base, Third World Marxism struck its deepest
roots in communities of color. The Black Panther Party (BPP) was pivotal in this
regard. The Panthers were not a Marxist organization in any strict sense, but
combined shifting strands of nationalism and Marxism into an eclectic mix. Still,
they were the most prominent revolutionary organization in the country in 1968
(and in the immediate years after), and they proved the single most important
group in the transition of thousands of activists from New Left radicals, Black
Power advocates, or militants of color to partisans of Third World Marxism. In
September 1968, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover publicly termed the Panthers "the
greatest [single] threat to the internal security of the country" and ordered the
intensification of efforts to disrupt and destroy the BPP via the FBI's infamous
Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO. 8

The year 1968 also proved a watershed for the Asian American and Chicano
movements. Until 1968, organizations of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans,
or other U.S. residents of Asian descent had formed on a nationality-specific
basis. But the formation of the Asian American Political Alliance at the
University of California-Berkeley that spring set in motion a new dynamic. A
few months later, a similar group was formed at San Francisco State University.
That summer saw the first nationwide Asian American student conference, and
by the end of the year a radical Asian American movement was spreading
nationwide.

Almost simultaneously, a pivotal event revived the Chicano community's

militant political tradition. On March 3, 1968, over one thousand Mexican
American students walked out of Lincoln High School in Los Angeles in the
first of a series of high school "blow-outs." That same year saw the formation of
the militant Brown Berets and of CASA-Hermandad General de Trabajadores
(Center for Autonomous Social Action-General Brotherhood of Workers), a
socialist-led group based among Mexicano workers.

Fueled by the intersection of class exploitation and racial oppression, a vibrant

radical current took root among black workers in Detroit. On May 2, 1968, a
group of black activists calling themselves the Dodge Revolutionary Union
Movement (DRUM) spearheaded the first wildcat strike in fourteen years to
close Detroit's Dodge main plant. Within weeks, hundreds of workers were
attending DRUM-sponsored rallies, challenging the United Auto Workers'
leadership, and flocking to newly formed Revolutionary Union Movements
(RUM's) at other facilities. The resulting shock waves extended into the inner
sanctums of corporate America: "No less an authority than the Wall Street
Journal took them [DRUM] very seriously from the day of the first wildcat, for
the Wall Street Journal understood . . . that the Black revolution of the sixties
had finally arrived at one of the most vulnerable links of the American economic
system--the point of mass production, the assembly line." 9

Simultaneously, a new generation was revitalizing the long struggle for Native
American sovereignty, and 1968 saw the founding of the American Indian
Movement (AIM). While Marxism would not gain as strong a following in the
Indian movement as it did in several other constituencies, this movement's stress
on self-determination, its links with indigenous peoples across the globe, and its
belief in the legitimacy of armed resistance (punctuated a few years later by the
seventy-one-day standoff with federal troops at Wounded Knee in 1973)
reinforced key themes struck by Third World Marxism.

On campuses, the cataclysms of 1968 accelerated a radicalization process that

had already begun spreading nationwide. Students of color were frequently in
the forefront. The first ever building takeover on a college campus took place in
March 1968 at Howard University, and after 102 hours, the black student
militants won most of their demands. The Third World Liberation Front
launched one of the hardest fought student strikes of the decade at San Francisco
State in November, and, after four-and-half months and hundreds of arrests,
forced the administration to set up an Ethnic Studies program.

Reflecting the racially separate workings of most of the 1960s left, the thousands
 of white students moving toward Third World Marxism were organized in
different, overwhelmingly white groups. The most important of these was SDS,
expanding frenetically amid the upheavals of 1968. During that single year, SDS
went from roughly 30,000 members and 250 chapters to 80,000-100,000
members and 350-400 chapters. 10 Its internal politics were becoming both more
influenced by Marxism and more factional, due in part to the presence of cadres
from the then Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL) since 1966. SDS leaders
opposing PL, unwilling to be outflanked on the left, increasingly came to
embrace a form of Third World Marxism. Contact was established between
influential members of SDS and Cuban and Vietnamese communists. An
alliance was also forged between key SDS leaders and the Black Panther Party;
Panther support work became an integral part of many chapters' activity and the
Panther influence on SDS became not just generally ideological but direct and
personal. PL was beginning to issue bitter critiques of the Panthers ("all
nationalism is reactionary") and the Vietnamese ("negotiating with the United
States is selling out the revolution") just as thousands of non-PL SDSers were
starting to give their allegiance to these forces as the standard-bearers of
worldwide revolution.

Most SDSers did not participate directly in the internal debate over doctrine or
support any of the main sides. But several thousand--including a large
percentage of those who were by now devoting nearly all their waking hours to
politics--were invested in the outcome. And tens of thousands more, while
repelled by the messiness of factional battle, shared the broad Third World
Marxist view that seemed to inform all sides.

Finally, 1968 also saw the founding of the first organization of what would soon
become the fastest growing tendency within U.S. socialism and communism.
The Revolutionary Union, pathbreaker of the self-identified "new communist
movement," was formed by a small core of San Francisco Bay Area organizers
who had decided that Third World-oriented Marxism provided not only a
compelling ideological framework but that building a new Leninist vanguard on
that basis was the key to social revolution.

1969-1973: Surge in Influence and Organization

The years immediately following 1968 constituted the heyday of Third World
Marxism's influence. It was a volatile, no-business-as-usual time. Richard
Nixon's inauguration in January 1969 did not bring his campaign-promised end
to the war in Vietnam, but rather it brought with it further escalation and killing.
Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization"--gradually withdrawing U.S. ground troops
to lower U.S. casualties while conducting a ferocious bombing campaign that
encompassed Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam--failed to assuage antiwar
sentiment. Protests surged and, linked to the advance of revolutionary
movements throughout the Third World, more and more antiwar activists
embraced a broader anti-imperialist perspective. Meanwhile the economic costs
of the war began to come home with a vengeance. The polarization between
communities of color, where expectations and aspirations had been significantly
raised during the 1960s, and the myriad institutional forms of white supremacy
stayed razor-sharp.

The spread of large-scale protest movements to whole new constituencies added

fuel to the fire. Between 1969 and 1973 women's liberation became a mass
social force, the modern gay liberation movement was born, and a broad-based
prisoner and prisoners' rights movement took shape. Also, in an unprecedented
development, resistance to authority bordering on continuous open mutiny began
to characterize the U.S. armed forces on the ground in Vietnam. A top pro-war
army officer concluding a tour of military installations bluntly told it like it was:
"By every conceivable indication, the U.S. army in South Vietnam is
approaching a state of total collapse, with individuals and units avoiding or
having refused combat, murdering their officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited,
where not near mutinous . . . the morale, discipline, and battle-worthiness of the
 U.S. armed forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at
any time in this century and possibly the history of the U.S." 11

In this context, the institutions and informal circles based on Third World
Marxism expanded manyfold. The Guardian went all out to popularize Third
World Marxist ideas, and the paper became a key site of communication and
debate for the emerging revolutionary trend. By the end of 1969, the paper had
doubled its number of pages and increased paid weekly readership to 24,000, the
highest total since its initial years. 12 Favorable coverage of Third World
revolutions, along with iconic imagery of Mao, Che, and dozens of anonymous
(and often female) guerrillas, began to permeate what was then termed the
"underground press." As of 1970, the Underground Press Syndicate included 200
papers with 6 million readers, and another 500 underground papers existed in
high schools. 13 Hundreds of new black community newspapers were also
launched between 1968 and 1973. The Black Scholar was launched in 1969 and
quickly achieved a circulation of 10,000. The magazine featured consistently
positive coverage of Marxist-led African, Cuban, and Chinese movements.
Dozens of new Chicano publications appeared, linked together by the radical
Chicano Press Association.

Organizing Workers and the Racially Oppressed

Such rapid expansion of the radical press both reflected and spurred extended
outreach campaigns and base-building projects. Following longstanding Marxist
tradition, Third World Marxists targeted the working class as the key agent of
revolutionary change. Yet this trend distinguished itself by making a priority of
reaching workers of color and all strata suffering from racial and nationality-
based oppression and of integrating antiracism and Third World solidarity into
its day-to-day work with workers of all backgrounds.

The BPP continued to set the pace. Despite being the government's central target
for infiltration and repression, the group kept expanding in numbers and
influence from 1969 through 1971. At its peak, the BPP attained a membership
of roughly 4,000 in several dozen cities and circulation of its newspaper reached
100,000 per week. 14 Panther leaders visited and gave glowing reports about
China. They praised Cuba, a country that gave sanctuary to many party members
fleeing the United States to escape frame-ups and arrests. The most Marxist and
internationalist aspects of the Panthers' efforts receded after a bitter split
between Huey Newton- and Eldridge Cleaver-led factions in 1971. But for four
of the most crucial years in the ideological formation of a new radical generation
(1968-71), those features of the Panthers' program had a tremendous impact. the
group's emphasis on reaching the poorer strata of urban blacks, who had
demonstrated their capacity to rebel during the previous years' urban uprisings,
combined with their stress on multiracial alliances, influenced most other groups
that identified with Third World Marxism.

Indeed, for many the Panthers served as a direct organizational model. This was
especially true within the Puerto Rican movement, which experienced a "Nuevo
Despertar" (new awakening) in the late 1960s. 15 A pioneer group in that
awakening, the Young Lords Party (YLP), aimed to be a Puerto Rican
counterpart to the BPP, and some activists briefly held dual membership in both
organizations.

The first Young Lords were former Chicago gang members who became
politicized and worked closely with the Panthers. But the center of gravity
quickly shifted to New York City, whose Young Lords chapter plunged into an
ambitious grassroots campaign in Spanish Harlem. Drawing support from Puerto
Ricans of all generations, the Young Lords expanded geographically to build
chapters in Newark, Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Boston, and Detroit as well as in
New York neighborhoods beyond Spanish Harlem. The YLP launched a
bilingual newspaper, Pa'lante, which in 1970-71 sold almost 10,000 copies
every other week. 16
Puerto Ricans and other Latinos fighting urban renewal on New York's Upper
West Side launched El Comité, another revolutionary group, in 1970. It soon
turned explicitly to Marxism and developed a student sector and a workers'
organization. El Comité members also began the process that in 1975 would
result in launching the Latin Women's Collective, a key institution in the
decade's efforts to organize working-class Latinas.

The Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), which became the largest group on the
Puerto Rican left, grew out of the island-based Movement for Independence
(MPI). Radicalized by the student protests, labor militancy, and antiwar
demonstrations that swept Puerto Rico in the 1960s, MPI transformed itself into
a Marxist-Leninist party. The PSP regarded Puerto Ricans in the United States as
an integral part of a single Puerto Rican nation, and its program stated that PSP's
"primary role in the U.S. is to unleash the national liberation struggle, in all its
fury, in the very hearts of North American cities to which a significant portion of
our colonized population was forced, and to link that struggle to the struggle for
revolutionary transformation of North American society." 17 More than 2,000
people attended the founding meeting of the PSP's U.S. branch in 1973.

The years 1969 to 1973 saw an explosion of Asian American activism, with
young militants spotlighting the racist character of Washington's war in Vietnam,
turning to community organizing in Chinatowns, Japantowns, and Manilatowns,
and linking up with Asian farmworker militants and left-wing veterans of earlier
generations. Third World Marxist ideas held virtually undisputed hegemony
within Asian American radicalism, not least because of the prestige of the
Communist Parties in Vietnam, China, Korea, and the Philippines and of the
Zengakuren student movement in Japan. Militants formed a host of new Asian
American revolutionary organizations, including the Red Guard Party and Wei
Min She in the San Francisco Bay Area, the East Wind Collective in Los
Angeles, and I Wor Kuen (IWK) and the Asian Study Group in New York. In
1973, a year after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines,
revolutionary Filipino activists formed the Union of Democratic Filipinos
(Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino/KDP), which for the next fifteen
years anchored solidarity work with the Communist-led armed struggle against
Marcos and advocated socialist revolution in the United States.

The Chicano movement grew substantially, with watersheds in spring 1969

when the first ever National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference was held and,
a month later, when Mexican American student leaders founded El Movimiento
Estudiantil de Aztlán (MEChA). CASA, whose Marxist leadership had ties to
Mexico's sophisticated communist movement, expanded its base among workers
of Mexican descent. Likewise, an important section of the La Raza Unida Party
(LRUP), which took shape as probably the most broadly based center of
Chicano militancy between 1970 and 1972, located itself in the Third World
Marxist milieu. A strong Marxist current also existed within the early 1970s
movement for Chicano Studies and among the radical artists who linked the new
generation to the tradition of Mexican revolutionary artists such as David Alfaro
Sequieros and Diego Rivera.

In June 1969, the various RUMs that had formed in Detroit combined to found
the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Expanding its work within the auto
plants and via community and student organizing, the League argued that black
workers would play the pivotal role in a working-class revolution. The League
recruited some of the period's most talented organizers, including James Forman,
known nationwide for his contributions as executive director of SNCC. The
group established ties with caucuses of militant black workers throughout the
country, and League offshoots remained a significant force in Detroit even after
it broke apart in 1971.

One of the most innovative organizing efforts of the period was the Third World
Women's Alliance (TWWA), which grew out of the SNCC Black Women's
Liberation Committee and was formally founded in 1970. The Alliance
pioneered the concept of "triple jeopardy": that women of color faced the
combined and intersecting burdens of capitalism, racism, and sexism. It declared
in 1971: "Whether we are Puerto Rican, Black, Chicana, Native American, or
Asian, our struggle is one. There is one enemy to be smashed: imperialism and
capitalism. The Vietnamese people, and in particular the Vietnamese women,
have taught us these lessons." 18

Discussion of strategies for bringing revolutionary politics to the working class

meanwhile moved center stage within white student radicalism. Debate over
contending approaches became ever more heated within the SDS, and the group
could not survive its escalating factional warfare, splitting into PL and anti-PL
camps at its June 1969 national convention. The PL-aligned section quickly
faded and was altogether gone within a year or two; the opposing Revolutionary
Youth Movement (RYM) group split into RYM I, the Weatherman faction,
whose few hundred core members abandoned mass organizing and went
underground less than a year later, and RYM II, whose cadre sought to build
revolutionary collectives among working-class youth and within a year was
immersed in trying to build a new communist party.

This organizational disaster disoriented and disillusioned many SDS members

and constituted a serious setback for post-1969 efforts to organize on campuses.
But for several more years at least, most of the thousands of SDSers who had
embraced Third World Marxism carried on in other forms. A large contingent
relocated from college towns to large cities, moved into working-class
neighborhoods, and took jobs in auto plants, other industrial sectors, post offices,
hospitals, or public schools. Flush with optimism, they believed prospects were
good for building a solid base in what seemed an increasingly restive and angry
working class. There were more and harder fought strikes in 1969 and 1970 than
there had been in any year since 1946. The early 1970s also saw the outbreak of
rank-and-file insurgent movements in a number of major unions, with black
workers, young workers, and often Vietnam vets in the forefront.

Other ex-SDSers plunged into prisoner support efforts anchored by

organizations of color. Protests "behind the walls," spearheaded by black and
Latino inmates, frequently turned into open revolt, and there were at least
sixteen prison rebellions during 1970 alone. The bloodiest confrontation took
place in September 1971 at Attica: 1,200 inmates, many advocating
revolutionary politics, seized control of half the prison and took hostages.
Negotiations were stonewalled by Governor Nelson Rockefeller; the ensuing
military assault left twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages dead, every single one
shot by the attacking police.

Still other battle-hardened student radicals persevered as anchors of the

continuing antiwar movement. After Nixon invaded Cambodia, these cadre were
stalwarts of the largest campus protests in U.S. history: close to 4 million
students took part in strikes at upwards of one thousand colleges and
universities. 19 A year later many of these same people organized for the half-
million strong antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., on April 24, while others
took part in the "Mayday" effort to literally shut down the capital. The latter
effort resulted in the largest number of arrests in U.S. history (12,614; most of
them were later ruled illegal).

Though militancy on U.S. campuses began to ebb after 1970, activists who had
turned to Third World Marxism continued to see student organizing as an
important supplement to reaching workers and communities of color. These
cadre set up Radical Student Unions and "Attica Brigades" on numerous
campuses. Supporters of the Panthers, the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers, and nationalist groups such as the All African People's Revolutionary
Party, launched in 1969 by former SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame
Ture), gained influence within Black Student Unions. Revolutionary politics
predominated in numerous chapters of MEChA and leftists led the Puerto Rican
Student Union. Third World Liberation Fronts modeled on those at San
Francisco State and Berkeley formed on dozens of other campuses. Finally, ex-
student revolutionaries helped start new radical caucuses in the academic and
 professional worlds (Union for Radical Political Economics, Health Policy
Advisory Center, etc.), while partisans of Third World Marxism for a time led
the National Lawyers Guild.

International Solidarity Projects

Given their internationalist focus, Third World Marxists prioritized solidarity

efforts with national liberation revolutions and sought especially to reach
workers and the racially oppressed with their anti-imperialist message. They
played central roles in local affiliates of one of two major national anti-Vietnam
War coalitions--the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice--and anchored anti-
imperialist contingents at continuing antiwar actions between 1969 and the final
end of the war. Coalitions like New York's Third World Front Against
Imperialism, formed, among other groups, by the Black Panther Party, El
Comité, and the Third World Women's Alliance, took shape in numerous cities.

The Union of Vietnamese in the United States, which supported the peace
program of the National Liberation Front (NLF), was a vital component of early
1970s antiwar efforts. So, too, was Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW),
whose 1971 Operation Dewey Canyon III in Washington provided some of the
most dramatic moments of the entire antiwar movement. The Operation began
with a 1,500 vets, wives of dead GI's and Gold Star Mothers marching to
Arlington Cemetary; it culminated at the steps of the Capitol with hundreds of
veterans tossing their silver stars, Navy crosses, battle ribbons, and purple hearts
over the fence. By this time VVAW, which had started in spring 1967 with a
half-dozen members, numbered 11,000 and included a left wing that called for
an outright NLF victory. In 1973, VVAW adopted an explicitly anti-imperialist
program.

Solidarity with Marxist-led armed movements in Africa was the focus of the
African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), which a number of activists
from the Youth Organization for Black Unity and Malcolm X Liberation
University in North Carolina began to build after a 1971 trip to Africa. The
United States-based activists forged direct ties with the Front for the Liberation
of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and Amilcar Cabral's African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC). Mobilizing for
the first African Liberation Day actions after their return, they turned out 60,000
demonstrators (30,000 in Washington, D.C.) in May 1972. Soon the ALSC had
grown into a nationwide network, its chapters able to mobilize 100,000
demonstrators in thirty cities for the second African Liberation Day on May 26,
1973. The next month ALSC declared itself an "anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist
Black United Front," and for a brief period it stood out as the broadest grassroots
coalition of activist Marxist and nationalist groups in the African American
community.

The Venceremos Brigade (VB) was another project that drew strength from
direct contact between North Americans and Third World revolutionaries. The
idea of organizing U.S. activists to work and travel in Cuba originated after a
SDS delegation visited Havana. The first Brigade, with 216 participants, left for
Cuba in November 1969. A much larger second Brigade went in March 1970,
more contingents followed, and the Brigade became an annual activity that has
lasted to the present day. The Brigade gave priority to recruiting young people of
color and became a key site of ideological development as well as networking
among black, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Native American, and Asian American
activists.

Solidarity with Chile was also a focal point of early 1970s internationalist work,
both before and after the bloody 1973 United States-backed coup that toppled
the elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. Work promoting
sympathy with China and the normalization of United States-China relations,
spearheaded by United States-China Friendship Committees formed beginning
in 1971, also played a significant role. In 1973, coalitions involving these
Friendship Committees and revolutionary groups sponsored celebrations of the
 anniversary of the Chinese Revolution (October 1) in over two dozen localities,
with 5,000 attending the events in New York and the Bay Area. These years also
saw the launch of many publications, still extant, focusing on Third World
solidarity, for example the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (begun in
1969) and the Middle East Report (launched as MERIP Reports in 1970).

The "New Communist Movement"

Within the broad Third World Marxist milieu, a significant layer of activists set
out to build tight-knit cadre organizations. This contingent, the self-defined "new
communist movement," recognized that a slacking off in mass protests could be
on the short-term horizon. But they believed any such lull would be short-lived
and followed by an even greater popular upsurge. They believed it was urgent to
prepare a militant vanguard so the revolutionary potential glimpsed in the 1960s
could be realized next time around.

To guide this process, not just Marxism but Marxism-Leninism was deemed
indispensable. This was a common view at the time, with harsh critics of
Leninism such as former SDS leader Carl Oglesby acknowledging in 1969 that
"There was--and is--no other coherent, integrative, and explicit philosophy of
revolution." 20 From 1969 through the mid-1970s, the new communist
movement grew faster than any other left current. At its height it held the
allegiance of roughly 10,000 core activists and influenced many thousands more.
Its leadership and membership ranks were more racially integrated and diverse
than those of any other ideologically defined socialist tendency.

New communist movement cadre were among the most dedicated on the left and
were in the forefront of base-building efforts in the trade unions and people-of-
color communities. Hundreds experienced blacklisting from employers, were
beaten by police or right-wingers, and served time in jail. Movement partisans
played pivotal roles in many of the projects already mentioned and led
grassroots strike-support efforts for some of the biggest labor battles of the early
1970s. Many of the formations that had embraced Third World Marxism--from
the Guardian and I Wor Kuen to offshoots of the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers and the Young Lords--threw themselves into the new communist
project. Following the path taken by the Revolutionary Union in 1968, a host of
new Leninist groups such as the October League and the Workers' Viewpoint
Organization were formed, and the Communist League, which traced its roots to
a far left faction of the CPUSA, overlapped with these groups in both outlook
and support base.

In these years, the Communist Party of China (CPC) was more ambitious than
any other Third World communist party in presenting its views as a rallying
point for leftists worldwide. Largely for this reason, the specifically Maoist
components of the new communist movement were at first much better
organized than the sections that looked as much or more to the Cuban or
Vietnamese Revolutions or to other variants of Third World Marxism.

The momentum enjoyed by the new communist movement, and especially the
initiative it held within communities of color, was widely recognized on the left.
Even opponents such as Stanley Aronowitz admitted that "like other sections of
the American left, many [Black] movement activists adopted Marxism-Leninism
as the 'guide' to their action. . . . A version of Marxism merged with nationalism
became the hegemonic discourse of Black radicalism." 21

Attempting to turn such momentum into lasting organizational clout, the

Guardian and others sought to bring the different new communist groups
together for dialogue and eventual unification in 1973. The most public effort
along those lines, a Guardian forum titled "What Road to Building a New
Communist Party?", drew more than 1,200 to a New York auditorium while
thousands of additional activists around the country read transcripts or listened
to tapes of the event. Exuberance about both short- and long-term prospects
spread throughout the new communist ranks.
Unrealized Promise
With such an impressive array of organizational initiatives encompassing
thousands of the most hardworking and skilled cadre from the tumultuous 1960s,
Third World Marxism seemed poised to transform spectacular short-term growth
into institutional durability and broad influence. But after 1973 its progress
stalled, by the end of the 1970s its prestige had sharply declined, and by the late
1980s it had nearly disappeared altogether. The reasons lay in a combination of
economic and political changes beyond its control and its own shortcomings and
misjudgments.

Third World Marxists had based their strategy on a few cornerstone premises:
Following an anticipated Vietnamese victory, national liberation movements
would win power in many other countries and break free of the capitalist world
economy; Third World nations would develop ever greater unity against
imperialism; U.S. capital would face steadily mounting economic troubles as it
lost control of its far-flung empire; and the resulting domestic squeeze would
push the population, especially the working class, toward anticapitalism. Further,
it was believed that the traditional ways of "doing politics" had become so
discredited that it was possible to consolidate a large left-wing base while
essentially ignoring the electoral arena.

This perspective seemed plausible in the very early 1970s. Indeed, anxieties
along those exact lines gripped important sections of the policy-making elite.
And some elements of these views did turn out to be at least partially correct:
Third World struggles continued to register advances in several regions through
the 1970s, and the U.S. economy did experience some very rough going as the
long postwar boom came to an end.

But overall, the strength of Third World movements was exaggerated and the
resilience of U.S. capitalism qualitatively underestimated. Moreover,
anticipation that the 1970s would see a steady, if uneven, shift of popular
sentiment leftward proved completely off the mark. The overriding reality of the
1970s was an across-the-board capitalist counteroffensive and a tectonic shift to
the right in mass politics.

Third World movements for self-determination did not actually have the
economic base to achieve the results revolutionaries hoped for and imperialists
feared. Rather than beginning a new wave of innovative socialist projects, the
1970s national liberation victories proved to be the final phase of the post-World
War II anticolonial tide. While the Vietnamese and other communist-led
struggles were able to achieve national independence--no small
accomplishment--they were not able to escape the capitalist-dominated world
economy and in fact were terribly bled by Washington's economic retaliation and
sophisticated use of "low-intensity warfare."

This limitation was closely connected to the structural weaknesses of the largest
countries that had embarked on the socialist path. During the 1970s, deep-seated
flaws in the models employed by both the USSR and China began to eat away at
those societies' apparent stability. Further, the Sino-Soviet split that had erupted
in the early 1960s widened into an unbridgeable chasm by the end of that
decade. The two strongest anticapitalist powers were unwilling to make common
cause against imperialism, qualitatively weakening the international progressive
front.

In the United States, meanwhile, the guardians of capitalism successfully

maneuvered to regain the initiative. Some retrenchments (cutting U.S. losses by
withdrawing from Southeast Asia) were required. But the technological,
financial, political, and ideological reserves at capital's disposal meant that, after
considerable scrambling, such adjustments could be made without the level of
shock and crisis the left (and many nonleftists) had anticipated. Plus, a host of
factors were at play that made translating popular discontent into durable radical
allegiance a formidable task. These have deep roots: The weakness of the
 socialist tradition within the U.S. working class and, in contrast, the widespread
consensus behind an essentially pro-imperialist version of patriotism; the
pervasive racial fault lines that, among other things, lead so many white workers
to believe they have more in common with their white exploiters than their
nonwhite coworkers; an entrenched two-party, winner-take-all electoral
arrangement that erects tremendous structural obstacles to radicalism's ability to
gain a stable footing in the political system.

1973-1976: Major Bumps in the Road

Between 1973 and 1976, all these factors began to make themselves felt,
checking the momentum of Third World Marxism.

The Energy Crisis of 1973-74, followed by the recession of 1974-75, was central
to this process. The slump was the worst since the Great Depression;
unemployment reached its highest point in thirty-five years. But contrary to left-
wing expectations, the downturn did not produce an outpouring of worker
militancy or a new wave of radicalization. Rather, it played a role that recessions
have often played in the history of capitalism, "disciplining" the working class,
exacerbating intraclass divisions, and narrowing many workers' vision to issues
of immediate survival. Furthermore, the slump led to massive layoffs in auto,
steel, and other key industries. Those expelled from the plants included a
disproportionate share of those workers most open to left politics, young
workers and, especially, young black workers. Most of the rank-and-file
insurgencies that had spread through various unions between 1968 and 1973 lost
ground or collapsed.

Simultaneously, a massive government/media campaign to blame the slump on

the oil-producing countries of the Middle East fueled jingoism among broad
layers of the population. While the Energy Crisis was a product of market
manipulation by the big oil transnationals, it was convenient for the
establishment to target the Arab countries that had briefly conducted a selective
oil embargo against the United States for backing Israel in the 1973 Middle East
war and then followed the embargo by a price hike. (Iran, a supporter of Israel,
also endorsed the higher oil prices for economic reasons and in order to obtain
additional Western weapons.) Abuse was heaped especially on "the Arabs" and
"Third World radicals." This crusade tapped into the resentment millions felt at
what they believed to be the "humiliation" of the United States' forced
withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

This propaganda offensive was not effectively countered by the broad coalition
that had opposed the war in Vietnam. The antiwar movement's radical wing
celebrated the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement and the 1975 final revolutionary
victory as important blows to imperialism and tried to get this message out. But
other political actors had protested the war mainly because "American boys" had
been dying in combat and consequently did not oppose the new casualty-free
jingoist campaign. Worse, the grip of Zionism on U.S. politics (especially on
mainstream liberalism) meant that many who in the late 1960s had been in
opposition to Washington's Vietnam adventure joined in whipping up anti-Arab
hysteria.

The toll was all the heavier because many sixties activists had been drawn into a
new liberal-led effort to reform the Democratic Party by 1973 to 1975. George
McGovern's successful bid for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination was
the most visible expression of this new initiative that tried hard to enlist white
college students, liberal feminists and, to a lesser extent, the emerging layer of
African American elected officials. Suddenly the "traditional channels" that had
seemed irreversibly closed in 1968 appeared to reopen, and many of the
constituencies Third World Marxists hoped to reach saw opportunities here to
achieve at least some of their objectives. Especially as militant grassroots
activity began to ebb in the black freedom movement and the student movement
(after more than a decade of near continuous flow), many sixties veterans tried
to seize these opportunities without adequate consideration of their complexities
 (for example, how to successfully keep an independent power base while
participating in an alliance led by procapitalists?).

Finally, a dramatic shift in China's policies divided the Third World Marxist
ranks. During the 1960s the Chinese Communist Party had presented itself as the
main champion of Third World aspirations and criticized the Soviet Union for
vacillating in its support of armed liberation struggles. This stance was a prime
source of Beijing's attraction for sixties radicals. But especially after Richard
Nixon's 1972 visit to China, opposition to the USSR became the central
preoccupation of Chinese foreign policy, and support for liberation movements
that accepted Soviet aid was cut back or stopped. China indicated its willingness
to join an anti-Soviet alliance with even the most reactionary imperial powers.
The consequences of this shift remained muted until the United States was
finally thrown out of Southeast Asia in 1975. But less than a year later China
called for strengthening NATO, saying that a "restored capitalist" USSR was the
"main enemy" of the peoples of the world and siding with the United States and
apartheid-backed contras in Angola against the Angolan liberation movement
supported by Africa's other revolutionary movements, Cuba, and the USSR. 22

These changes led to widespread disillusionment with China on the left. They
took place even before Mao Tse-tung died in 1976, after which information
about the dirty underside of his Cultural Revolution became available and Mao's
successors criticized and abandoned what they now called a catastrophe for the
Chinese people. This about-face discredited and removed the other key factor
that had made China a pole of attraction in the late 1960s.

Despite these unfavorable developments, some sections of the Third World

Marxist trend continued to grow. The Puerto Rican left conducted some of its
most successful activities in the mid-1970s. In October 1974 the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party was the principal sponsor of a pro-Independence rally in New
York that drew an overflow crowd of 20,000-plus to Madison Square Garden. In
1976, PSP anchored a broad-based radical coalition formed to protest the official
U.S. bicentennial celebrations. Coalition-sponsored demonstrations on July 4,
whose main demand was for a "Bicentennial without Colonies," turned out
50,000 protesters in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Third World Marxist-led solidarity efforts around Chile, defense of the Angolan
revolution, and the anti-Marcos struggle in the Philippines likewise remained
vibrant. And the largest components of the new communist movement, utilizing
the tight nationwide structures they had fashioned over the previous years, added
new recruits from continuing campus activism as well as from their organizing
efforts in workplaces and communities of color.

These bright spots notwithstanding, this period was mainly characterized by a

halt to Third World Marxism's forward motion. The pattern of whole layers of
activists shifting leftward and gravitating toward Third World Marxism from
1969 to 1973 was not reproduced. The radical milieu within which Third World
Marxism had thrived began to shrink, depriving this current of crucial links to
the constituencies in which it had hoped to sink roots. Facing unanticipated
political changes both within the United States and abroad (especially in China),
Third World Marxism no longer offered a unified and compelling political
analysis, eroding this trend's internal unity, self-confidence, and attractive power.

The Late 1970s: Sliding Downhill

Developments in the late 1970s made things even more difficult. The rightward
shift in U.S. politics accelerated. The so-called New Right emerged as a
powerful nationwide force, adding fierce attacks on feminism and
homosexuality to the time-tested backlash arsenal of racism and
anticommunism.

Additionally, galvanized by a section of capital and the shock troops of the New
Right, a wide swath of U.S. society mobilized behind "a broadly embracing
'have' politics" antagonistic to the interests of people of color and the poorer
sectors of the working class. 23 Expressions of the rising "Have" coalition
included a "rolling earthquake of suburban protests . . . antibusing movements,
campaigns for a return to educational 'basics', landlord and realtor mobilizations
. . . and, most importantly . . . the 'Watts Riot of the Middle Classes'--[California
property tax-cutting] Proposition 13 and its spinoff revolts." 24 So strong was
this motion, and so weak the bonds of working-class solidarity, that "a section of
the traditional New Deal coalition, especially suburban white skilled workers,
was conscripted to the 'have' side." 25 By the end of the 1970s, the New Deal
coalition was in tatters, replaced as the country's dominant alignment by the pro-
inequality, militarist, and antilabor coalition that elected Ronald Reagan.

All this took place during the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, who, while
using the rhetoric of human rights, directed a new turn toward militarism and
intervention in foreign policy. In response to the huge popular movement against
the Shah in Iran, Carter insisted on backing this guardian of Western interests to
the very end and, after he was overthrow, welcomed him in the United States.
His actions led directly to the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, an
event exploited to whip up national chauvinism on a scale not seen since the
early days of the Vietnam War.

Simultaneously, Carter started a new round of escalation in the nuclear arms race
by arm-twisting NATO into deploying a new generation of ultra-fast
"Euromissiles" in Western Europe. Laying the groundwork for a new round of
direct military intervention in the Third World, the 1980 "Carter Doctrine"
proclaimed Washington's intention to use military force to "protect" Middle East
oil or accomplish any other objective deemed to be of vital U.S. interest. Within
months, Carter approved $5.7 million in military aid to combat El Salvador's
growing popular rebellion, and the CIA began organizing former Somocista
National Guardsmen into a contra army to fight against the Sandinista
government that had come to power in the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution.

Making matters even worse, China was backing rather than opposing
Washington's turn to a "Second Cold War." 26 Top leader Teng Hsiao-p'ing
visited Washington in January 1979 and told Time magazine that the CPC
unequivocally viewed the United States as part of a united front against the
USSR. 27

Of course, all of these events involved powerful social forces far beyond the
control of the entire U.S. left. No matter what policies they had pursued, Third
World Marxists in the United States could not have reversed the rightward
motion of U.S. politics or stopped Washington's military muscle-flexing around
the globe. To the contrary, it was all but inevitable that these shifts would take a
toll on the Third World Marxist ranks and that the damage would be exacerbated
by the bitter conflict among the Third World countries (China vs. Cuba and
Vietnam) that had once seemed a unified vanguard of world revolution. But
things were made worse by Third World Marxism's own shortcomings.

Having come of age in the turbulent late 1960s, most Third World Marxists
made undue generalizations from their youthful experience and embraced a
"voluntarist" perspective on the pace and ease of social change. They came to
believe that virtually anything could be accomplished if revolutionaries only had
sufficient determination and correct ideas. When combined with Third World
Marxism's overoptimistic assessment of the balance of class forces (in the Third
World and within the United States), this led to serious misassessments of the
actual realities of the late 1970s. The right's influence tended to be regarded as
far more fragile than it was, and prospects for a 1960s- (or 1930s-) style mass
radicalization were still considered strong (as long as the revolutionaries
remained faithful and pure). Such misjudgments led directly to ultra-left tactics
in mass movements and sectarian policies toward progressive groups and reform
leaders who did not share all the movement's goals. It fostered inflated rhetoric
and encouraged building organizational structures and an overall style of work
that was out of touch with the sentiments of the social base the revolutionaries
were trying to reach.

These problems especially afflicted the new Leninist groups within the Third
World Marxist milieu. After their freewheeling and dynamic formative stage,
they fell into a dogmatic "quest-for-orthodoxy" mindset and embraced rigid, top-
down organizational models. These problems affected not just the groups that
followed Beijing's foreign policy, but also the post-1976 antidogmatist trend that
tried to develop a version of Third World Marxism that would retain the
movement's traditional anti-U.S. imperialist thrust and carve out a space
independent of both China and the USSR. (This trend included the Guardian and
the leaderships of the Union of Democratic Filipinos and the Third World
Women's Alliance as well as many local Leninist workplace-organizing
collectives.)

With these weaknesses complicating an already unfavorable political situation,

the Third World Marxist trend began to decline markedly. To be sure, activists
and groups from this current participated in numerous battles against the right,
trying to hold the line against the concessions employers began to demand of
unions and battling the antisocial services "tax revolt." They played the central
role in mobilizing resistance to the first high court decision rolling back
affirmative action (Bakke v. University of California) in 1977-78. Cadre groups
and individuals espousing Third World Marxism anchored the anti-Bakke
coalitions that turned out 20,000-plus for a Washington, D.C., demonstration in
April 1978 and tens of thousands more at protests elsewhere during the two-year
fightback.

Third World Marxists also continued as stalwarts of international solidarity

work. They spearheaded support for the Zimbabwean revolution (which finally
overthrew white minority rule in 1980) and were among the most active backers
of the Iranian peoples' upsurge against the Shah. In 1978 activists in the Puerto
Rican left and Puerto Rico solidarity movement formed the Vieques Support
Network to assist Vieques residents trying to stop U.S. warships from using the
area as a firing range, a fight that continues and has become an important
component of solidarity activism today.

Still, Third World Marxism lost ground. The problems of voluntarism and
sectarianism, combined with the objective difficulty of winning even small
victories, made it very difficult to recruit and led to battle fatigue among many
core cadre. Differences over political perspective especially between those who
backed Beijing and activists more sympathetic to Vietnam and Cuba led to bitter
interorganizational divisions and splits. Groups that had remained vibrant
through 1975 or so, such as the African Liberation Support Committee or
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, fell apart or became shadows of their former
selves. Organizations that had retained their vitality through 1977, including the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party and CASA, by the end of 1979 had lost members
and begun to slide downhill. Standard-bearers of the early new communist
movement such as the Revolutionary Union (after 1975 the Revolutionary
Communist Party) and October League (after 1977 the Communist Party) split
or altogether collapsed.

In addition, most Third World Marxist formations were unable to match their
resolute antiracism, anti-imperialism, and commitment to working-class
organizing with similar strengths on other battlefronts. They offered some of the
most penetrating criticisms of the racial, class, and national-chauvinist
blindspots of the dominant tendencies in the women's, lesbian/gay,
environmental, and antinuclear movements. But, with a handful of exceptions,
these groups were unable to incorporate the insights of those movements into an
inclusive vision that dealt adequately with the complex interweaving of class,
race, gender, and sexuality, or with the urgency of environmental protection.
And since these newer movements were among the most vital of the late 1970s,
especially among youth, Third World Marxism's shortcomings in these areas cut
it off from potential sources of renewal.
The 1980s: Facing Reaganism
Then came the Reagan years with the intensification of the rightward course
already evident under Carter. What has become known as "Reaganism"
amounted to an all-out effort to reverse the setbacks U.S. imperialism had
suffered between the mid-1960s and late 1970s. Internationally, it was a crusade
to roll back the gains of national liberation struggles, undermine the Non-
Aligned Movement, regain a nuclear edge over the USSR, and bolster United
States' competitive economic position vis-à-vis Western Europe and Japan. At
home, the goal was to impose social austerity, take back the gains made by
peoples of color and women since the 1960s, and undermine the trade union
movement.

Reagan's program spurred a renewed wave of popular protest, as every attacked

constituency mobilized to defend its interests. On the peace and solidarity front,
large-scale movements took shape in opposition to Reagan's nuclear buildup,
against U.S. intervention in Central America, and in solidarity with the resurgent
tide against apartheid in South Africa. The Central America and antiapartheid
movements in particular attracted large numbers of radical-minded young people
and, especially the black-led antiapartheid movement, galvanized a multiracial
constituency of activists. Key organizations within them (the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador [CISPES], the Free South Africa
Movement, and many others) displayed tremendous creativity as well as
tenacity, having absorbed many lessons from the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Large numbers of activists within these movements not only expressed solidarity
with but also admired the revolutionary organizations that were leading the
freedom struggles in South Africa and Central America: the African National
Congress, El Salvador's Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN),
and Nicaragua's Sandinistas. But, in contrast to the late 1960s, this did not
translate into the formation of a new wave of United States-based revolutionary
organizations or a new political trend based on an updated version of Third
World Marxism. In part the failure to do so reflected the changed international
landscape. While Marxist- oriented liberation movements still played leadership
roles in many Third World countries, they no longer held the kind of worldwide
initiative, nor did they seem as closely linked and united, as they did in the era of
"two, three, many Vietnams." But it also reflected domestic realities. In contrast
to their 1960s predecessors, hardly anyone in the radical 1980s generation saw
revolutionary possibilities anywhere on the U.S. horizon. To be sure, the groups
that survived from the Third World Marxism of the 1970s took up Central
America and antiapartheid work, obtaining some fresh energy and sometimes
recruits in the process. But this was not enough to revitalize the Third World
Marxist current as such.

Likewise with the main multi-issue, multisector rallying point against

Reaganism: Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 presidential bids and the Rainbow
Coalition. The Jackson/Rainbow upsurge did not take the same form as had the
civil rights/Black Power motion of the 1960s, but in at least some respects it
played a similar role. Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition had their strongest
social base among the dispossessed within the African American community,
and, as in the 1960s, this sector's mobilization behind a progressive program
galvanized and drove forward all democratic movements. Moreover, from its
springboard in the fight against racism, this upsurge was driven to challenge
Reaganism in general. The resulting dynamic provided the basis for the
"economic common ground," "moral higher ground," and antimilitarist, anti-
intervention themes that crystallized Jackson's multisector appeal. There were
enormous (and eventually unsolved) complexities in trying to make the Rainbow
Coalition program, which went beyond the bounds of mainstream politics, into a
force within the Democratic Party. But for several years the strategy of entering
Democratic primaries allowed Jackson to present a radical message to tens of
millions and construct a nationwide progressive apparatus.

The prominence of antiracism and anti-U.S. military intervention in Jackson's

program, as well as the depth of his support in communities of color and among
the most militant wing of organized labor, led most remaining Third World
Marxists to see the Rainbow Coalition as a fruitful arena for activism. Here they
shouldered at least their share of day-to-day work, and many attained positions
of considerable influence, not least because by then most surviving Third World
Marxist groups had broken with the crudest ultra-leftism and sectarianism of
earlier days. But again, some temporary growth of particular organizations did
not mean a resurgence of influence for Third World Marxist ideology. And
when, under tremendous pressure from top-level Democrats, Jackson cut a deal
and threw his weight against further development of the Rainbow Coalition as a
semi-independent, grassroots-based democratic structure, the leftists who had
pressed for such a form were not strong enough to prevail against Jackson and
his inner circle. As the Rainbow Coalition structures lost their grassroots
character after 1988, the Third World Marxists within them suffered further
losses.

These events occurred at the same time that a crisis of unprecedented

proportions was overtaking the entire Marxist, socialist, and revolutionary left.
The 1989 Tiananmen massacre in China, combined with Beijing's ever-more-
obvious use of capitalist mechanisms to stimulate economic growth, shattered
just about all that remained of China's already tattered revolutionary prestige.
The defeat of the Sandinistas in the elections of 1990--though primarily caused
by Washington's long campaign to terrorize and stifle the Nicaraguan
Revolution--demoralized many radicals who had looked to the Sandinistas as
pioneers of the freshest, most democratic revolutionary project in decades.

But above all, it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that changed the world's
ideological as well as political power terrain. Mikhail Gorbachev's effort at
restructuring Soviet society under the (initial) slogan "more socialism, more
democracy" ended in the debacle of a disastrous hard-line coup, a Boris Yeltsin-
led resistance and then countercoup, and then the dissolution of the USSR itself.
This removed the main counterweight to unfettered exercise of Western imperial
power in the Third World, creating a new situation that Washington immediately
took pains to demonstrate in Iraqi blood via the Gulf War. Because of the deep-
seated flaws in Soviet society and the particular way in which Communist Party
rule unraveled, the collapse of the USSR also opened the gates for an orgy of
capitalist triumphalism throughout the world. Everywhere left of center
manifested widespread disaffection with socialism and Marxism, in particular
with variants of it that, like Third World Marxism, included doses of Leninism
and defended the one-party state.

By the early 1990s, nationalism had come to play a very different role in the
world than its overwhelmingly anti-imperialist and emancipatory form of the
1960s and 1970s, which caused further complications. Now nationalism was
manifesting itself more frequently in campaigns for ethnically or religiously pure
nation-states with no rights for minorities. "Ethnic conflicts" and "ethnic
cleansing" spread across whole regions, including but not limited to areas
previously under communist rule. Additionally, 1990s nationalist movements
were as frequently characterized by conservative as by radical economic
programs. This created overwhelming analytic and political problems for a
current that had tended to see Third World nationalism as completely and
inherently progressive, if not as the vanguard force against imperialism.

Even the Third World Marxist organizations that had persevered into the 1980s
were unable to successfully navigate these immense transitions. A few solidarity
projects and publications that originated in the late 1960s survived the Reagan
years (often in somewhat changed form), and so did a handful of tenacious but
tiny Leninist formations that can trace their roots to the 1970s party-building
efforts. (A number of the largest remaining organizations from the new
communist movement--the League of Revolutionary Struggle, Line of March,
and Communist Workers' Party--dissolved between 1987 and 1990.) But by the
time the dust had settled from the Soviet collapse, the Tiananmen Square
massacre, the Sandinista defeat, and the Gulf War, Third World Marxism as a
 distinct trend on the left was no longer a power.

Confronting Global Capitalism on New Terrain

Still, thousands of people whose political roots lie in the Third World Marxist
tradition continue as stalwarts of progressive activity, especially in the trade
union movement and communities of color. The vast majority now function as
individuals rather than as members of revolutionary organizations, but they draw
on their rich experiences in both mass organizing and left institution-building,
and they are among the strongest voices for internationalism, for challenging
white supremacy, for building multiracial organizations and coalitions, and for
constructing bridges between political generations.

In the movement against corporate-dominated globalization, symbolized by

Seattle, these veterans have made their impact felt. The most widely read article
analyzing the dynamics of racism and racial segregation within the Seattle
upsurge, "The WTO: Where Was the Color in Seattle?", was authored by
Elizabeth Martínez, whose activism goes back to SNCC, the late 1960s Chicano
movement, and the Third World Marxist milieu. 28 The editor of the periodical
in which her article first appeared, ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action, is Bob
Wing, who cut his political teeth in the Third World strike at Berkeley in 1969,
the Venceremos Brigade, and the anti-Bakke campaign.

Walden Bello, who has emerged as one of the most prominent analysts of
corporate globalization and as a leader in the global South's resistance to it, was
active for many years in the Third World Marxist sector of the United States-
based left. Scores of the union leaders, staffers, and rank-and-file militants who
are in the forefront of U.S. labor's opposition to corporate globalization, and of
the fight against national chauvinist trends within the unions themselves, are
veterans of the PSP, CASA, and the various components of the new communist
movement. All these activists provide a direct human link between the dominant
radical current of the late 1960s and 1970s and today's growing international
movement against capitalist globalization.

The world has changed tremendously since the years between 1968 and 1973,
and there is no way repeating approaches from that earlier time can be effective.
Third World countries' battles for genuine sovereignty and economic
development are taking far different forms than they did in the 1960s. No
countersystem exists for liberation movements to connect with, so the old
strategy of taking the noncapitalist road by hooking up with a socialist camp is
now a total nonstarter. The mix of mechanisms by which the imperial centers
control the Third World have altered substantially. Technological, demographic,
and cultural shifts have changed the contours of politics and class struggle in the
United States and all over the world. And the problems of voluntarism,
dogmatism, and antidemocratic organizational practices that afflicted the Third
World Marxist current would need to be overcome even if the world had not
changed so much.

But, if anything, this vastly different world needs internationalism and

antiracism more than ever. No project that aims at deep social transformation
can succeed today unless it put the needs and interests of the global South at the
forefront, grasps the central role of communities of color in changing the United
States, and finds ways of building durable unity across racial lines. For those
determined to make headway in these areas, there is much to learn from the long
march Third World Marxists began thirty years ago.

Max Elbaum, a former member of SDS, was active in the new communist
movement in the 1970s and 1980s and was the managing editor of Crossroads
magazine in the 1990s. He is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties
 Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (2002).

Notes
I would like to thank Jim O'Brien for his political and editorial help in preparing
this essay.

1. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam,
1987), 344.

2. George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of

1968 (Boston: South End, 1987), 124.

3. Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers:
Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger, 1984), 59.

4. This view is articulated most thoroughly in Gitlin's The Sixties, but the
specific terms "good sixties" and "bad sixties" come from the description of
Gitlin's volume in Paul Buhle, "Madison Revisited," Radical History Review 57
(1993): 248.

5. This pattern is documented in Elizabeth Martínez, "That Old White (Male)

Magic," in De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored
Century (Cambridge, MA: South End, 1998), 21-30.

6. Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1969), 126.

7. The CPUSA's negative stance toward the new generation was summarized by
Peggy Dennis, a longtime party activist who was also the widow of pre-Gus Hall
CPUSA head Eugene Dennis: "Throughout the 1960s decade the current Party
leadership placed the organization in opposition to and in isolation from
practically every new form of struggle that erupted in the ghettoes, on the
campuses and in the streets." See Peggy Dennis, The Autobiography of an
American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life, 1925-1975 (Berkeley,
CA and Westport, CT: Creative Arts Book Company and Lawrence Hill, 1977),
290-91.

8. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents
from the FBI's Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End, 1990),
123.

9. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in

Urban Revolution (New York: St. Martin's, 1975), 24.

10. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 664.

11. Irwin Silber, "U.S. Army in Vietnam 'nearing collapse,'" Guardian, August 4,
1971.

12. Jack A. Smith, "The Guardian Goes to War," in Voices from the
Underground: Volume I: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground
Press, ed. Ken Wachsberger (Tempe, AZ: Mica's, 1993), 103.

13. Katsiaficas, Imagination, 143.

14. JoNina M. Abron, "'raising the consciousness of the people': The Black
Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1967-1980," in Wachsberger, 352.

15. Andrés Torres, "Introduction: Political Radicalism in the Diaspora--The

Puerto Rican Experience," in The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the
Diaspora, ed. Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), 1-22.
16. Pablo "Yorúba" Guzmán, "Ain't No Party Like the One We Got: The Young
Lords and Palante," in Voices from the Underground, ed. Wachsberger, 304.

17. José E. Velázquez, "Coming Full Circle," in The Puerto Rican Movement,
ed. Torres and Velázquez, 52.

18. Alliance Statement, Triple Jeopardy, November 1971.

19. Katsiaficas, Imagination, 120.

20. Carl Oglesby, "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin," Liberation 14.5/6
(1969): 6.

21. Stanley Aronowitz, "Remaking the American Left, Part One: Currents in
American Radicalism," Socialist Review 67 (1983): 18.

22. On China's stance on Angola, the USSR, and its foreign policy generally, see
Azinna Nwafor, "Liberation of Angola," Monthly Review 27.9 (1976): 1-12;
Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, (London: Verso, 1983), 161-
62; and William Hinton, "The Soviet Union Is the Main Danger," in Some
Background Articles for a Discussion of the International Situation, ed. Ad Hoc
Committee for a Conference on the International Situation (New York: Ad Hoc
Committee, 1976), 15.

23. Mike Davis, "The Political Economy of Late-Imperial America," New Left
Review 143 (1984): 34.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Halliday, Second Cold War, 228-31.

27. Teng Hsiao-p'ing, interview by Hedley Donovan, Time, February 5, 1979,

32-35.

28. Elizabeth Martínez, "The WTO: Where Was the Color in Seattle?"
ColorLines 3.1 (2000): 11-12.

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'Not everything that is faced can be changed.

But nothing can be changed until it is faced.'
— James Baldwin
'Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced.'
— James Baldwin