Revolutionary Youth Movement II
AKA: RYM II · RYM 2
The Record
When RYM broke apart in the summer of 1969, the faction that became Weatherman concluded that revolution would come through Third World movements and armed struggle at home. RYM II did not. It held, as Progressive Labor also did, that a revolution had to radicalise the working class alongside the youth movement rather than write that class off.
RYM II is the more consequential half, and the Record treats it that way. Weatherman produced roughly a decade of bombings and a large literature. RYM II produced careers. Its people went into industrial jobs under the rank-and-file strategy, into the New Communist Movement of the 1970s, and from there into teaching, teacher education and university faculties.
The road that kept moving and the road that won are the two halves of one fork. The quiet one is the one still running.
Relationship Ledger
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
The whiteness-abolition current ran from the New Left factory newsletters into the academy: Noel Ignatin of RYM II published as Noel Ignatiev and co-founded the journal Race Traitor.
Referenced in
Records whose text names Revolutionary Youth Movement II. The list is rebuilt from the published prose and checked for drift.
- The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIis mentioned in
- Noel Ignatinis mentioned in
- Mike Klonskyis mentioned in
- Students for a Democratic Societyis mentioned in