***** Radical History Review 82 (2002) 37-64 What Legacy from the Radical Internationalism of 1968? Max Elbaum
...1968: Poised for Take-Off
Based on Third World Marxism, a host of new (or transformed) organizations and institutions emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Together they formed a dense network of overlapping--sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing--forms. As of 1968, many components of this network were just beginning to gain mass influence or assume definite shape. But as the political earthquakes of this pivotal year shook the country, one wave of young activists after another turned leftward and transformed Third World Marxism in the United States from a set of ideas into a trend poised for take-off.
The period's largest circulation radical newspaper, the Guardian, and most prestigious left-wing journal, Monthly Review, played linchpin roles. In 1968, the Guardian was just emerging from a wrenching generational and political transition. The paper had been founded as The National Guardian during Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign; in 1967 a staff rebellion led to a younger and more radical group of activists assuming control of the paper. The masthead slogan was changed from "progressive newsweekly" to "radical newsweekly." Coverage of national liberation movements was stepped up, and the new Guardian established itself as the left's premier source of on-the-spot reporting from Third World battlefronts. The paper was an enthusiastic partisan of Cuba and China and began to offer harsh criticisms of the Soviet role in world affairs.
Monthly Review (MR), for its part, enthusiastically welcomed the Cuban Revolution and backed China after the bitter split between Beijing and Moscow erupted in the early 1960s. Monthly Review Press issued a steady output of volumes promoting Marxism, Leninism, and Third World revolutions. In 1968 it distributed Guardian correspondent Wilfred Burchett's Vietnam Will Win! that moved thousands of activists from opposition to U.S. intervention to outright support of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) as much as any other single book. The Chinese Cultural Revolution particularly impressed MR's editors, and MR played a bigger role than any other U.S. intellectual institution in promoting the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, not least by publishing Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton, the paperback edition of which sold a remarkable 200,000 copies....
Max Elbaum, a former member of SDS, was active in the new communist movement in the 1970s and 1980s and was the managing editor of Crossroads magazine in the 1990s. He is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (2002)....
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.html> and <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_history_review/v082/82.1elbaum.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>