Revolutionary Youth Movement
AKA: RYM · the Revolutionary Youth Movement
The Record
Mike Klonsky, then national secretary of SDS, set out the position in "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement". He wrote it on 23 December 1968. Campus-based activism had to go: SDS was to link up with working-class people and build a revolution with them.
SDS's own paper called the proposal a transitional strategy, meant to develop a specifically working-class movement. It recommended that SDS stop being a radical students organisation. It should become a class-conscious movement of the youth of the entire working class.
That formulation is the doctrinal move this record tracks. Marcuse had said the system absorbed the workers and the agency lay with those outside. Mills had said the agency lay with students and intellectuals. RYM completed the manoeuvre by redefining the students as workers. That move preserved the Marxist vocabulary of class, while it replaced the class the vocabulary referred to.
RYM took control of SDS at Chicago in June 1969. It lost that control within days to a split of its own. What survived under the name RYM was two things: a group that went underground, and a group that did not.
Relationship Ledger
The June 1969 convention split over the Revolutionary Youth Movement. Source: New Left Notes, 1969: Six Issues Through the Split, {"offset": 368990}
Kathy Boudin went underground after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion of March 1970; the FBI issued her wanted poster that May. Source: Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies
Referenced in
Records whose text names Revolutionary Youth Movement. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Mike Klonskyis mentioned in
- Revolutionary Youth Movement IIis mentioned in
- Worker-Student Allianceis mentioned in
- Students for a Democratic Societyis mentioned in