- Revolutionary Youth Movement
The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) was the section of Students for a Democratic Society that opposed the
Worker Student Alliance of theProgressive Labor Party . Most of the national leadership of SDS joined the RYM in order to oppose PLP's party line and what they alleged to be its attempted takeover of the SDS leadership structure, particularly at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago.Politically, the RYM took issue with what they alleged was PLP's opposition to the right of
self-determination for oppressed nations andethnic group s. The publication in 1969 of PL's seminal [http://www.plp.org/pl_magazine/nationalismpl69.pdf 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 " to the U.S. during the Paris Peace Talks, as well as other criticisms. But most of all, the RYM opposed what it considered to be PL's unfounded attacks on theBlack Panther Party .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 RYM itself also split. One section of the RYM (referred to as RYM I), containing most of the SDS leadership including
Bernardine Dohrn ,David Gilbert andMark Rudd , became Weatherman. Weatherman briefly retained control of the SDS National Office and membership lists before dissolving SDS and closing its headquarters in 1970, in favor of instead 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 revolutionaryvanguard party instead. RYM II quickly gave way to various new revolutionary organizations and collectives. This milieu became known as thenew communist movement . The largest of the RYM II groups was the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, which soon absorbed some other groups and became theRevolutionary Communist Party USA in 1975. The Communist Party Marxist-Leninist also evolved out of these disputes. In 1985, faced with shrinking or collapsing organizations, many of these offshoot groups, including theRevolutionary Workers Headquarters ,Proletarian Unity League ,Organization for Revolutionary Unity , and later theAmilcar Cabral -Paul Robeson Collective, consolidated themselves into theFreedom Road Socialist Organization .ee also
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Revolutionary Student Brigade External links
* [http://martinrealm.org/documents/radical/sixties1.html "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.
* [http://www.revolutionintheair.com/ Revolution in the Air] book and reference website about the New Communist Movement
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