Mike Klonsky
AKA: Klonsky · Michael Klonsky
The Record
On 23 December 1968, Klonsky wrote "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement". It argued that campus activism was a dead end and that SDS had to link itself to working-class people. The paper named the faction that took SDS the following June.
He argued that youth was not revolutionary in itself. Roots in the class struggle would keep it from turning reactionary. Young workers were the place to organise, because they felt oppression through the draft, low wages and irrelevant schooling.
When RYM split he went with RYM II rather than underground. In the 1970s he led the October League and then chaired the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). The party took its bearings from Peking.
He then took a doctorate in education. He spent the following decades as an education professor and an organiser of small-schools reform in Chicago. The archive keeps this file because the trajectory is the argument. The same person, without recanting anything, moved from the leadership of a revolutionary youth organisation to the training of teachers.
Relationship Ledger
As SDS national secretary, Mike Klonsky published 'Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement' on 23 December 1968, rejecting campus-bound activism. Source: The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents
The June 1969 convention split over the Revolutionary Youth Movement. Source: New Left Notes, 1969: Six Issues Through the Split, {"offset": 368990}
Veterans of the New Left's revolutionary factions moved into the education faculties through the 1970s, where Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed became the foundation of a new field. Source: The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race
Referenced in
Records whose text names Mike Klonsky. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Revolutionary Youth Movementis mentioned in