Re: [Marxism] Re: Traveling with Chairman Avakian

["Pieinsky" <pieinsky@xxxxxxx>]

Avakian, like Michael Klonsky, the head honcho of the October League later
CPML, came out of SDS of which he Avakian was a leader in the Bay Area.  The
original name of the RU was the Bay Area Revolutionary Union.  Avakian and
Klonsky on a national level were "loud-mouthed white guys" in RYMII
(Revolutionary Youth Movement), which was the SDS faction in its final days
that was alternative to both the Weatherman let's go underground and wage
war against fascist Amerikkka option and the PLP let's dress up like working
class heroes option.  Avakian as a student (at San Francisco State?) had
some credibility from his involvement with a strike of oil workers in
Richmond, California.  He is in a Newsreel film about this strike.
Originally, H. Bruce Franklin was the other major male leader of the Bay
Area Revolutionary Union.  But he and his supporters split over questions of
the armed struggle and formed the short-lived group Venceremos.  Franklin
now teaches at Rutger-Newark and is a world scholar on Melville and science
fiction.  He and his wife Jane seem to hang with the Workers World Party
these days.

Along with Max Elbaum's seminal book on this whole phenomenon, see Roxanne
Dunbar Ortiz's memoir, "Outlaw Woman".  The early RU tried to recruit her.
She recalls looking into the eyes of Avakian and seeing a fascist.  (I would
say "egotistical demagogue".) But I have to give the RCP credit for
continuing to profess and practice an out-there revolutionary politics down
through the subsequent years while so many others dating from this time
period have given up and practiced reentry in some form back into the
System.  Where is Michael Klonsky or Martin Nicolas, another CPML leader,
these days?  Goners, I fear.

Everybody back in those days was scrambling around to learn Marx and Lenin
and score polemical points with some quote.

best,
jay





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