Western Marxist collection

These comments are written by the donor about the Western Marxist Collection.

These are the collected papers on an organizer. For the years between 1969 and 1982 I was an activist in the best “radical” tradition of that period. I have since left political life, still with high hopes for building a better society, but with a different vision of how I may contribute my talents.

I struggled for a long time within myself about how to summarize those years. My conclusion: the time was not yet ripe. For the few thousand of us, from several political organizations representing the U.S. Marxist-Leninist trend during the late 1960’s, 1970’s, and early 1980’s, this period is just coming to light. This collection, along with future work by my former political associates, will eventually make this summary possible. This collection will aid in a public review now emerging of a period embroiled in tremendous social turmoil and will allow future generations to view the innermost debates of our struggle. There is also a need, I believe, to record the countless efforts of many truly selfless people in their attempt to create a better society.

Younger individuals than I have asked me how this political activism came to be. I still cannot answer that question, although I firmly believe that my experiences, and those of others, were the result of tremendous social forces produced by rapid technological, economic, and political change. It is a type of change which has marked the development of the U.S. and which escalated in the 1960’s. The decrease in isolationism and the increase in global communications in the 1960’s allowed average citizens to directly view our country’s role abroad.

As a background for the reader, there is, as I found early in my political career, a rich international and U.S. socialist history opposed to war for profit and tied to labor and nationality movements. There are many socialist groups tracing their ideological roots to Marx and Engels, but the U.S. Marxist-Leninist (ML) trend up through the early 1980’s followed not only those revolutionaries, but also the philosophy of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung. The Chinese Cultural Revolution gave a special momentum to the Marxist-Leninist trend in the U.S. The appeal of Lenin’s struggle for political clarity, Stalin’s early writings on the rights of minority nationalities, and Mao’s remarkable 1949 Chinese Revolution were positive examples upheld by the young U.S. Marxist-Leninists. Some negative aspects of these leaders were often dismissed.

As a college student from 1967 to 1972, I and a number of my political friends had received our political education in the Kennedy era. We had high hopes for social justice. However, in a few short years, the Kennedys and King were assassinated and the U.S. became inextricably involved in an unpopular war. My own transition to an anti-government, revolutionary, and Marxist-Leninist political viewpoint, in that order, was no doubt linked with a profound feeling of betrayal by the U.S. government for its persistence in the Vietnam War. This sense of moral injustice, combined with an abhorrence at the lack of fundamental rights of minority peoples which was then being increasingly uncovered, led to a personal search for alternative solutions. My own progression, from anti-war work, through revolutionary study circles, to Marxist-Leninist collectives, and eventually into organizing a Marxist-Leninist party, was the logical result of a desire for wanting to actively build a new and better society.

There are probably many reasons why our movement failed. Among them was a lack of clear class analysis of U.S. society. Certainly there were “ultra-leftist” errors in some of our work and organizational life. These isolated us and demoralized many good activists, who later left politics with their idealism shattered. Much of this is referred to in the debates leading up to the Second Congress of the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist (CPML) included in this collection. However, the changing conditions in the U.S., particularly the end of the Vietnam war and improved nationality relations, were also contributing factors. A future historian will do better than I in unraveling the many components of this movement which was spawned from an age of turmoil.

*See appendix on relevant communist organizations