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Heavy Radicals - The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists: The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980
Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists is a history of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party — the largest Maoist organization to arise in the US — from its origins in the explosive year of 1968, its expansion into a national organization in the early seventies, its extension into major industry throughout early part of that decade, the devastating schism in the aftermath of the death of Mao Tse-tung, and its ultimate decline as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. From its beginnings the grouping was the focus of J. Edgar Hoover and other top FBI officials for an unrelenting array of operations: Informant penetration, setting organizations against each other, setting up phony communist collectives for infiltration and disruption, planting of phone taps and microphones in apartments, break-ins to steal membership lists, the use of FBI ‘friendly journalists’ such as Victor Riesel and Ed Montgomery to undermine the group, and much more. It is the story of a sizable section of the radicalized youth of whose radicalism did not disappear at the end of the sixties, and of the FBI’s largest — and up to now, untold — campaign against it.
356 pages, Paperback
First published February 27, 2015
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1260 people want to read
About the author
Aaron J. Leonard
7 books63 followersAaron J. Leonard is a writer and historian. His research interests focus on twentieth century US history, particularly Sixties history and the interplay between radicalism and governmental repression. He has a B.A. in History, from New York University. He lives in Los Angeles
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
April 7, 2020
when i was younger i lived near an old leftwing bookshop called Revolutionary Books. i purchased literature there, but each encounter was a baffling, unnerving experience. i learned that Revolutionary Books was an organizing center for the Revolutionary Communist Party, and this group relentlessly pressured visitors to study and follow their leader, bob avakian. ever since then i have had a certain fascination with the RCP--although i have never been close, never a member, and retained a polite distance from them.
the research behind Heavy Radicals is extensive; the book's bibliography and footnotes comprise nearly 70 pages. it is hard to believe the history Leonard and Gallagher wrote only arrived in 2014. why?
today it may seem difficult to imagine, but the RCP was once the largest leftwing political party in the US, and a decent anti-revisionist group with a thriving democratic culture, concrete strategies for connecting with the working classes, close ties to black liberation and Puerto Rican independence groups, and whose membership brought seasoned union organizers, old communists, petty bourgeois intellectuals, proletarians, hippies, student activists, war vets, feminists, and genial scholars together under the same banner of socialism and anti-imperialist struggle. what became of the RCP needs to be understood and critically analyzed in order to grasp how US security measures were continually employed to split the group, pit members against one another, organizations against organizations, and how the RCP ended up so isolated from a world to whom it needed to connect. the RCP's history can also serve as a warning about how contradictions within political movements shouldn't be handled.
the book doesn't scrutinize the RCP's theoretical basis too deeply--it's not the focus or the intention of the book--and if readers are interested in that subject, they can readily find writing on the RCP's theoretical (mis)directions (depending on how you see it) on the internet. however, the conclusion of Heavy Radicals seemed to be a weaker part of the book as a result. later editions might benefit from a little more elaboration about mao tse tung thought and two line struggle in order to explain how they contributed to hemorrhaging so much of the membership at critical moments, moments when the Party was an obsessive focus of domestic surveillance and targeted violence by the US government.
i definitely came away with a greater appreciation for the RU/RCP in the 60s and 70s. as grotesque as they may appear today, they were not always the cloistered cult they had become by 1980. i regret not having read the book sooner.
the research behind Heavy Radicals is extensive; the book's bibliography and footnotes comprise nearly 70 pages. it is hard to believe the history Leonard and Gallagher wrote only arrived in 2014. why?
today it may seem difficult to imagine, but the RCP was once the largest leftwing political party in the US, and a decent anti-revisionist group with a thriving democratic culture, concrete strategies for connecting with the working classes, close ties to black liberation and Puerto Rican independence groups, and whose membership brought seasoned union organizers, old communists, petty bourgeois intellectuals, proletarians, hippies, student activists, war vets, feminists, and genial scholars together under the same banner of socialism and anti-imperialist struggle. what became of the RCP needs to be understood and critically analyzed in order to grasp how US security measures were continually employed to split the group, pit members against one another, organizations against organizations, and how the RCP ended up so isolated from a world to whom it needed to connect. the RCP's history can also serve as a warning about how contradictions within political movements shouldn't be handled.
the book doesn't scrutinize the RCP's theoretical basis too deeply--it's not the focus or the intention of the book--and if readers are interested in that subject, they can readily find writing on the RCP's theoretical (mis)directions (depending on how you see it) on the internet. however, the conclusion of Heavy Radicals seemed to be a weaker part of the book as a result. later editions might benefit from a little more elaboration about mao tse tung thought and two line struggle in order to explain how they contributed to hemorrhaging so much of the membership at critical moments, moments when the Party was an obsessive focus of domestic surveillance and targeted violence by the US government.
i definitely came away with a greater appreciation for the RU/RCP in the 60s and 70s. as grotesque as they may appear today, they were not always the cloistered cult they had become by 1980. i regret not having read the book sooner.
January 1, 2020
Wrong title. It should be "I, like the FBI, hate the fact that the Revolutionary Communist Party exists." The purpose of this book is to attack the RCP and Bob Avakian using material originally collected by the police also for that purpose.
It's very important that the history of efforts to stop revolution be studied and applied to the present day. Here's something that sums that up: http://revcom.us/a/264/a-reflection-o...
And to see what the RCP, and Avakian, are actually about, go to http://revcom.us/
It's very important that the history of efforts to stop revolution be studied and applied to the present day. Here's something that sums that up: http://revcom.us/a/264/a-reflection-o...
And to see what the RCP, and Avakian, are actually about, go to http://revcom.us/
April 14, 2015
The book ends with an warning that I think we should begin with here: neither to dismiss the FBI nor attribute powers to them that blames them for the dissolution or irrelevance of the 1960’s left-wing movements in the US. Many reviewers of this book will probably see in it how the FBI was able to destroy a principled Marxist-Leninist group as well as the US new left. Other reviewers will see it as an anti-communist track replete with the normal tropes of such literature. I found Leonard’s and Gallager’s work here riveting, but I see neither narrative being entirely true from the information presented in this book, or when paired with other books, such as Max Elbaum’s Revolution In the Air, Muhammad Ahmad‘s We Will Return in the Whirlwind, and Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society. Indeed while Hoover’s FBI definitely seemed like a threat to even the US’s own notions of liberty, it is important to remember that the Cheka, Stasi, Gestapo, and even CIA used much, much more lethal tactics in dealing with dissent groups in the past, and communists coming out of the second red scare, such as Liebel Bergman, would have known that. COINTELPRO was massive, efficient, unethical, and probably illegal, but it was not as ruthless of other opponents of various lefts were even in the time period discussed.
This book is important and a very quick read–in some ways, despite itself. While, as a friend says, the RU/RCP is often ignored because it is see as annoying or past its prime, this book shows you that it was important in ways that many people involved with organizations in which it played a formative role no longer want to deal with. You get a sense of the intersection to RU, in particular, had with history with figures like Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Guilliani, James Burnham, and Robert Scheer all playing bit parts prosecuting, defending, or inspiring members of the group. Heavy Radicals is sympathetic to the RU/RCP in ways that even most of the left are not. RCP’s descent into cultishness during the late 1980s in its attempt to built a vulgar personality cult around Bob Avakian has been a joke by left-wing activists and even other Maoists since the 1990s. This book focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, culiminating in the split between Liebel Bergman and Bob Avakian, which may have, but has no direct evidence of being, caused by the FBI. Indeed, while the FBI played often played a key role in accelerating frictions within the group, there most of the friction occurred in response to political developments within the Soviet Union and the PRC as well as in the context of fall-out in the SDS-WMO.
Leonard and Gallager’s use FIOA documents constructs not just a coherent history of FBI’s interaction, it also creates a much more specific history of RU-RCP that has been provided by either Steve Hamilton or Bob Avakian’s writing. Casually, Leonard and Gallager will sometimes point out that Avakian’s memoirs are vague or self-aggrendizing at key moments as well as play down key figures such as Bergman and Hamilton. Leonard and Gallager point out the twists and turns on RCP’s dealing with the left-wing national question, trying to catch up with the twists and turns of Mao on three worlds theory–including the forgotten but standard CCP interreptation post-Lin Biao’s death that the Second World, not the First World was the greater imperailist threat. The RU opposed the Progressive Labor Party’s stance against the Black Panther Party’s nationalism and even was able to wrestle semi-official recognization by CCP from them, but then came to the nearly identical conclusion from reading Marx and from watching the dissolution of BPP itself just a few years later.
This is not to say that FBI was not deeply integrated into the organization that even militarily-trained informants saw as extremely disciplined. The discipline, as Leonard and Galager note, didn’t seem to stop informants from getting into the central committee from the earliest days. If anything, the lack of transparency within the organization and its centralism actually may infiltration more effective. Indeed, we know most of the internal debates and history of the 1960s RU because of FBI informants at all levels of the organization. It was not, however, the FBI that was the most dangerous external threat to the group ultimately. Local police informants in the late 1970s and 1980s as well as private security organizations with ties to the John Birch Society were much more active in their dealings with RCP. Indeed, the dead of a cadre in 1980 was either prompted by street gangs with local police involved or, at minimum, the police used informants to encourage the group into a dangerous situation. In addition, the Klan and Neo-Nazis had a direct body count on organization.
What Leonard and Gallager make clear, however, is that group’s real threat was history itself. It’s volunteerism seemed lead to more desperate situations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A group that had tried to join and organize the working class found out that “what could be done in Richmond California in 1968, could not be done in West Virginia in 1978.” Avakian’s rhetoric became more strident, not less, during these periods. When the cadres in the factories got into monogamous marriages, had children, drank beer, and listened to country music, many felt the discipline of the party was not helpful. When several of the organizers were killed by the Klan in the late 1970s, the attempt to integrate with working class was more or less abandoned. The party then aimed to be a mass base and to abandon the force on the working class, which it saw as increasingly reactionary (a position it had criticized the SDS for maintaining in the late 1960s). Yet it was this attempt that led to the cult of personality around Avakian and an adoption of shock-tactics that did exactly what the RU had said the would (and did) bring down the Weathermen: stunts that involved symbolic destruction of property and counter-violence against police. It was this that led to Avakian being a wanted man and exiling himself to France.
I give these details because this book is about more than the FBI’s war on America’s Maoists. It is about the impossibility of those Maoists to move with shifts of history while under-said attack. Particularly after the Bergman and Avakian split, which seemed inevitable in the differing Maoist intereptation of the end of the cultural revolution, the group struggled to find and keep its way. It was not just the RCP that was damaged by this even. It had the same effect on Maoists that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and then Stalin-FDR partnership had had on the first generation of communists a generation prior, which the fall-out of had led to defections from the CPUSA to RU by Bergman and many cohorts in the first place. The FBI, however, was there to continually pour gasoline on the fire.
The authors tone on the book seems conflicted. In quoting people like Mike Ely, who left RCP to form Kasama and who has heavily criticized the organization, one sees a critical edge. Although Ely was important to organizing of coal miners in West Virginia, Ely ultimately left in frustration with the RCP’s inability to change its stance on religion and homosexuality in time with the rest of the left, or even many communist states themselves. Leonard and Galllager allude to this “communist puritanism” a few times, but don’t go into the controversies it caused with the remenants of the organization. To be fair, this happened after the period discussed. The RCP still exists, Revolution Books is still open, and you can find BAsic publications all over Berkeley. Yet, Bob Avakian is not a name that invokes a mass base, and indeed, in many ways, that development obscures the role the RU played in many organizations more than has spread any inevitable revolution. Indeed, Leonard and Gallager admit that even it height of its influence, it has at most 2000 members. What they did, however, was influence the leadership of much larger organizations, and they did this most effectively when they only had around 300 cadres. Still these numbers do not a mass organization make.
The dual roles of watching a group that seemed unable to deal with historical changes and the deceptive tactics of the FBI as well as outright deadly influence of local police involvement (through selective neglect, at minimum) is why this book is important. It is also why the history of the RCP is important even if its ideology seems to have not survived its contact with history with any coherence left. This book is important: for what it says about post-New Left Marxist-Leninists, for what it says abou tthe FBI, and for what it doesn’t say about them. It is critical, but fair. Sympathetic, but honest. Still, though, I think it paints a less rosy picture of the post-68/69 socialists and communist movements than I think the authors intend. It should be read with that in mind and cross-referenced with the other histories of the California and NY post-69 US communists.
This book is important and a very quick read–in some ways, despite itself. While, as a friend says, the RU/RCP is often ignored because it is see as annoying or past its prime, this book shows you that it was important in ways that many people involved with organizations in which it played a formative role no longer want to deal with. You get a sense of the intersection to RU, in particular, had with history with figures like Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Guilliani, James Burnham, and Robert Scheer all playing bit parts prosecuting, defending, or inspiring members of the group. Heavy Radicals is sympathetic to the RU/RCP in ways that even most of the left are not. RCP’s descent into cultishness during the late 1980s in its attempt to built a vulgar personality cult around Bob Avakian has been a joke by left-wing activists and even other Maoists since the 1990s. This book focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, culiminating in the split between Liebel Bergman and Bob Avakian, which may have, but has no direct evidence of being, caused by the FBI. Indeed, while the FBI played often played a key role in accelerating frictions within the group, there most of the friction occurred in response to political developments within the Soviet Union and the PRC as well as in the context of fall-out in the SDS-WMO.
Leonard and Gallager’s use FIOA documents constructs not just a coherent history of FBI’s interaction, it also creates a much more specific history of RU-RCP that has been provided by either Steve Hamilton or Bob Avakian’s writing. Casually, Leonard and Gallager will sometimes point out that Avakian’s memoirs are vague or self-aggrendizing at key moments as well as play down key figures such as Bergman and Hamilton. Leonard and Gallager point out the twists and turns on RCP’s dealing with the left-wing national question, trying to catch up with the twists and turns of Mao on three worlds theory–including the forgotten but standard CCP interreptation post-Lin Biao’s death that the Second World, not the First World was the greater imperailist threat. The RU opposed the Progressive Labor Party’s stance against the Black Panther Party’s nationalism and even was able to wrestle semi-official recognization by CCP from them, but then came to the nearly identical conclusion from reading Marx and from watching the dissolution of BPP itself just a few years later.
This is not to say that FBI was not deeply integrated into the organization that even militarily-trained informants saw as extremely disciplined. The discipline, as Leonard and Galager note, didn’t seem to stop informants from getting into the central committee from the earliest days. If anything, the lack of transparency within the organization and its centralism actually may infiltration more effective. Indeed, we know most of the internal debates and history of the 1960s RU because of FBI informants at all levels of the organization. It was not, however, the FBI that was the most dangerous external threat to the group ultimately. Local police informants in the late 1970s and 1980s as well as private security organizations with ties to the John Birch Society were much more active in their dealings with RCP. Indeed, the dead of a cadre in 1980 was either prompted by street gangs with local police involved or, at minimum, the police used informants to encourage the group into a dangerous situation. In addition, the Klan and Neo-Nazis had a direct body count on organization.
What Leonard and Gallager make clear, however, is that group’s real threat was history itself. It’s volunteerism seemed lead to more desperate situations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A group that had tried to join and organize the working class found out that “what could be done in Richmond California in 1968, could not be done in West Virginia in 1978.” Avakian’s rhetoric became more strident, not less, during these periods. When the cadres in the factories got into monogamous marriages, had children, drank beer, and listened to country music, many felt the discipline of the party was not helpful. When several of the organizers were killed by the Klan in the late 1970s, the attempt to integrate with working class was more or less abandoned. The party then aimed to be a mass base and to abandon the force on the working class, which it saw as increasingly reactionary (a position it had criticized the SDS for maintaining in the late 1960s). Yet it was this attempt that led to the cult of personality around Avakian and an adoption of shock-tactics that did exactly what the RU had said the would (and did) bring down the Weathermen: stunts that involved symbolic destruction of property and counter-violence against police. It was this that led to Avakian being a wanted man and exiling himself to France.
I give these details because this book is about more than the FBI’s war on America’s Maoists. It is about the impossibility of those Maoists to move with shifts of history while under-said attack. Particularly after the Bergman and Avakian split, which seemed inevitable in the differing Maoist intereptation of the end of the cultural revolution, the group struggled to find and keep its way. It was not just the RCP that was damaged by this even. It had the same effect on Maoists that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and then Stalin-FDR partnership had had on the first generation of communists a generation prior, which the fall-out of had led to defections from the CPUSA to RU by Bergman and many cohorts in the first place. The FBI, however, was there to continually pour gasoline on the fire.
The authors tone on the book seems conflicted. In quoting people like Mike Ely, who left RCP to form Kasama and who has heavily criticized the organization, one sees a critical edge. Although Ely was important to organizing of coal miners in West Virginia, Ely ultimately left in frustration with the RCP’s inability to change its stance on religion and homosexuality in time with the rest of the left, or even many communist states themselves. Leonard and Galllager allude to this “communist puritanism” a few times, but don’t go into the controversies it caused with the remenants of the organization. To be fair, this happened after the period discussed. The RCP still exists, Revolution Books is still open, and you can find BAsic publications all over Berkeley. Yet, Bob Avakian is not a name that invokes a mass base, and indeed, in many ways, that development obscures the role the RU played in many organizations more than has spread any inevitable revolution. Indeed, Leonard and Gallager admit that even it height of its influence, it has at most 2000 members. What they did, however, was influence the leadership of much larger organizations, and they did this most effectively when they only had around 300 cadres. Still these numbers do not a mass organization make.
The dual roles of watching a group that seemed unable to deal with historical changes and the deceptive tactics of the FBI as well as outright deadly influence of local police involvement (through selective neglect, at minimum) is why this book is important. It is also why the history of the RCP is important even if its ideology seems to have not survived its contact with history with any coherence left. This book is important: for what it says about post-New Left Marxist-Leninists, for what it says abou tthe FBI, and for what it doesn’t say about them. It is critical, but fair. Sympathetic, but honest. Still, though, I think it paints a less rosy picture of the post-68/69 socialists and communist movements than I think the authors intend. It should be read with that in mind and cross-referenced with the other histories of the California and NY post-69 US communists.
March 4, 2025
The RCP-USA as it exists today is largely a joke and a cult. That said, 50 years ago the RCP was a much more serious organization that had emerged from the radicalism of the 1960s. The Heavy Radicals helps to not only rescue the RCP from undeserved obscurity, but - even more importantly - shows the reality of state surveillance and disruption of the far left.
It should not be forgotten that no matter what section of the left you identify with - Trotskyist, anarchist, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, etc - the forces of the state have a vested interest in watching us and undermining our collective efforts. The Heavy Radicals details how the FBI and other police forces were able to infiltrate the RCP at the highest levels, sow discord, manufacture evidence, etc in order to undermine the group. As such, it is invaluable reading for any comrade on the threats we face.
It should not be forgotten that no matter what section of the left you identify with - Trotskyist, anarchist, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, etc - the forces of the state have a vested interest in watching us and undermining our collective efforts. The Heavy Radicals details how the FBI and other police forces were able to infiltrate the RCP at the highest levels, sow discord, manufacture evidence, etc in order to undermine the group. As such, it is invaluable reading for any comrade on the threats we face.
October 26, 2025
Heavy Radicals is a necessary historiographical contribution to the history of the 1960s. Moving beyond a simplistic narrative that Students for a Democratic Society dramatically collapsed in 1969 with a small faction of Weatherman engaging in left-wing terrorism, the authors argue that a significant portion of SDS went on to form RU/RCP, continuing the radicalism of the 1960s into the 1970s with serious, revolutionary communist organizing. The authors also seriously contend with an underemphasized portion of the history: the FBI’s deep infiltration and penetration of New Left and New Communist Movement organizations. It is simultaneously astonishing and comical to read the extent to which the FBI had penetrated the RU/RCP, with informants at the highest level of the organization.
Despite U.S. intelligence infiltration, the RU/RCP was ultimately caught up in the confusion of Mao’s death as the capitalist roaders seized power in the People’s Republic of China. The authors emphasize that moment of disorientation, perhaps too heavily, as they condense the 1980-2000s period of the RCP into a short chapter, leaving out its role in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and the formalization of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the highest stage of revolutionary science.
As the first significant historiographical contribution focusing on the RU/RCP, Heavy Radicals is also replete with some minor and major errors (curiously not corrected even in its second edition). I highly recommend people to read the exchange between Mike Ely (a former member of RU/RCP) and JMP in the comments of JMP's review.
Despite U.S. intelligence infiltration, the RU/RCP was ultimately caught up in the confusion of Mao’s death as the capitalist roaders seized power in the People’s Republic of China. The authors emphasize that moment of disorientation, perhaps too heavily, as they condense the 1980-2000s period of the RCP into a short chapter, leaving out its role in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement and the formalization of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the highest stage of revolutionary science.
As the first significant historiographical contribution focusing on the RU/RCP, Heavy Radicals is also replete with some minor and major errors (curiously not corrected even in its second edition). I highly recommend people to read the exchange between Mike Ely (a former member of RU/RCP) and JMP in the comments of JMP's review.
June 1, 2015
My review for this book is now up at Marx and Philosophy Review of Books:
http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie...
http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie...
June 28, 2015
This is a very important book that both corrects the common perception of what happened to radicals of the 1960's and exposes the illegal role of the FBI in its attempt to disrupt revolutionary organizations. The evidence of FBI efforts to destroy the RU/RCP reaches to the highest offices of the FBI.
Along the way, this book adds to the history of SDS by documenting the role of the Revolutionary Union during SDS's last years, gives balance to the history of VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) that was needed due to the bias in Gerald Nicosia's "Home to War," and balance to the New Communist Movement correcting some of the bias in Max Elbaum's "Revolution in the Air" and finally, hopefully encourages other writers to engage in untold histories of revolutionary minded organizations that emerged in the early 1970's.
Due to its focus on FBI efforts, this is not a complete history of the RU/RCP. That remains to be written.
Along the way, this book adds to the history of SDS by documenting the role of the Revolutionary Union during SDS's last years, gives balance to the history of VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) that was needed due to the bias in Gerald Nicosia's "Home to War," and balance to the New Communist Movement correcting some of the bias in Max Elbaum's "Revolution in the Air" and finally, hopefully encourages other writers to engage in untold histories of revolutionary minded organizations that emerged in the early 1970's.
Due to its focus on FBI efforts, this is not a complete history of the RU/RCP. That remains to be written.
April 10, 2025
a well researched history of American maoist groups of the late 60's to the 80's.
much of the ideological purity and fractionalism of the American maoists provides valuable lessons for leftists on what exactly not to do when trying to build a radical working class movement.
much of the ideological purity and fractionalism of the American maoists provides valuable lessons for leftists on what exactly not to do when trying to build a radical working class movement.
March 14, 2018
This book showcases a history that has never been written in so much detail about the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP-USA) from it's inception in 1968 as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union. Leonard argues that after the demise of the Black Panther Party that the RCP was viewed by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover as the "greatest threat to the internal security of the United States". This despite the RCP not being involved in any heavy illegal activity as say the Weather Underground. The threat of it however lay in the power of it's ideas and it being the only New Communist Movement that survived the turbulent 70s to go on and construct a Communist Party with a mass base well into the tens of thousands entering the 1980s.
This book should be read by any serious American Marxist-Leninist-Maoist as it will showcase the proud ideological heritage we have as well as the large boots we should hope to fill. The RCP today is a shadow of it's former self and given their current state its almost hard to imagine how serious an organization it was half a century ago.
This book should be read by any serious American Marxist-Leninist-Maoist as it will showcase the proud ideological heritage we have as well as the large boots we should hope to fill. The RCP today is a shadow of it's former self and given their current state its almost hard to imagine how serious an organization it was half a century ago.
May 8, 2024
This book looks at one branch of Maoism in the United States, specifically at the Revolutionary Union, later the Revolutionary Communist Party, led by Bob Avakian. It is based on extensive files from the FBI, who had numerous informants inside the organization, including one in the top leadership of the RU before it was even officially founded. This, for me, is a central takeaway of the book: A revolutionary organization can hide the deliberations inside its leadership from the working class, but it's almost impossible to keep secrets from the state. While members of the RU / RCP weren't allowed to know when the leaders disagreed, the FBI was always well informed: "the two entities with the fullest understanding of the group were the small number of leaders at the top of the organization and the FBI."
Unlike Max Elbaum's book, this one doesn't look at the whole U.S. Maoist movement, but only at Avakian's wing. The death of Mao split the RCP down the middle, and eventually to the creation of a deliberate cult of personality around comrade Bob. Avakian indeed had an impressive trajectory, from a leader of SDS in the Bay Area who was a close ally of the Panthers, to a leader of a national faction inside SDS (RYM III), to the leader of the most cohesive Maoist group.
Despite the commitment of many Maoist activists to fight against oppression and exploitation, this book glosses over the numerous betrayals by Stalinism and Maoism. How could the new Maoist groups not fall victim to bureaucratism while they were defending the Great Purges and similar crimes? Was it really such a brave stance of Leibel Bergman and other communist veterans to keep defending Stalin after 1956? The authors praise the RU until about 1975, without grappling with whether its fundamental positions were correct. As Max Elbaum points out, U.S. Maoists were in a particularly difficult position when Mao started arguing that U.S. imperialism was the lesser evil and deserved critical support against "Soviet social fascism."
This is an interesting read today because almost 50 years after the foundation of Avakian's RCPs, a group led by ted by Alan Woods has founded new RCPs — but with far less weight than Avakian's original had. These new RCPs are also convinced that a revolutionary party can be formed with a bold proclamation, a lot of newspapers, and a few theatrical stunts — a get rich quick scheme to avoid the patient work of building revolutionary factions in the working class. The new RCPs will face the same problem as the old one: a flurry of activity by new members quickly flips into demoralization. We study the history of the revolutionary movement in order to avoid repeating it!
Unlike Max Elbaum's book, this one doesn't look at the whole U.S. Maoist movement, but only at Avakian's wing. The death of Mao split the RCP down the middle, and eventually to the creation of a deliberate cult of personality around comrade Bob. Avakian indeed had an impressive trajectory, from a leader of SDS in the Bay Area who was a close ally of the Panthers, to a leader of a national faction inside SDS (RYM III), to the leader of the most cohesive Maoist group.
Despite the commitment of many Maoist activists to fight against oppression and exploitation, this book glosses over the numerous betrayals by Stalinism and Maoism. How could the new Maoist groups not fall victim to bureaucratism while they were defending the Great Purges and similar crimes? Was it really such a brave stance of Leibel Bergman and other communist veterans to keep defending Stalin after 1956? The authors praise the RU until about 1975, without grappling with whether its fundamental positions were correct. As Max Elbaum points out, U.S. Maoists were in a particularly difficult position when Mao started arguing that U.S. imperialism was the lesser evil and deserved critical support against "Soviet social fascism."
This is an interesting read today because almost 50 years after the foundation of Avakian's RCPs, a group led by ted by Alan Woods has founded new RCPs — but with far less weight than Avakian's original had. These new RCPs are also convinced that a revolutionary party can be formed with a bold proclamation, a lot of newspapers, and a few theatrical stunts — a get rich quick scheme to avoid the patient work of building revolutionary factions in the working class. The new RCPs will face the same problem as the old one: a flurry of activity by new members quickly flips into demoralization. We study the history of the revolutionary movement in order to avoid repeating it!
October 17, 2022
The FBI is a notoriously difficult subject matter for any kind of study, let alone one concerning its attempts to obstruct left-wing activism in the USA. However, Leonard and Gallagher do a good job in this book of navigating between the respective Scylla and Charybdis of wild, conspiratorial speculation and total inoculation of the bureau. They recognise that, for instance, the splits within the RU, and the massive decline in influence of the RCP in the '80s were mostly due to greater geopolitical events over which the FBI had no control. However, by using documents acquired through persistent Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI archives, the authors have succeeded in isolating the actual extent of FBI involvement, as well as the influence that this involvement likely had on the political undulations of the New Communist movement. It is also a great credit to the authors that they withhold from speaking wherever doing so would require them to exceed the ambit of rational inference from their evidence. Lastly, it merits notice that the authors willingly, and often correctly, challenge the RU/RCP for many of its historical positions, including its condemnation of homosexuality as bourgeois individualism, and its eventual disparaging of black liberation struggles in the US.
The second edition of this book includes a new preface by the authors, based on newly-fulfilled FOIA requests. These requests reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald H. Wright was an FBI informant, as the previous edition had only speculated. The new edition also includes an interview with one of the RU's emissaries to China, Danielle Zora, from the 1971 visit. This is an important addition because of the honesty with which Danielle speaks of the PRC in the '70s, and the grave extent to which it had already fallen from the path of socialism. Although the visit was orchestrated with the intention of galvanising a new generation of Maoist activists and to foster political connections with the PRC, in reality it resulted in the disillusionment of some party members from the party's own naive and triumphalist depiction of China.
The second edition of this book includes a new preface by the authors, based on newly-fulfilled FOIA requests. These requests reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald H. Wright was an FBI informant, as the previous edition had only speculated. The new edition also includes an interview with one of the RU's emissaries to China, Danielle Zora, from the 1971 visit. This is an important addition because of the honesty with which Danielle speaks of the PRC in the '70s, and the grave extent to which it had already fallen from the path of socialism. Although the visit was orchestrated with the intention of galvanising a new generation of Maoist activists and to foster political connections with the PRC, in reality it resulted in the disillusionment of some party members from the party's own naive and triumphalist depiction of China.
August 17, 2018
This is maybe the best history book that i have read. Not just because the topic is sexy as hell, but because it is so detailed. This book uses as sources newer before seen by FBI and the Justice Department. Also of course the COINTELPRO-documents are used and the maoists own publications, to paint a lively picture of one of Americas most powerful and dangerous communist parties of the 60´s. The writer not only tells the history of the RU and RCP, but their philosophy and internal discussions. FBI had implanted agents inside the party and their reports and testimony's where recorders and archived for future historians. But also this is a great history of the 60's "new left" scene and how great historical and geopolitical processed first created radical communists in the most capitalistic superpower in history and how they destroyed it. This book is a great lesson on how a small window of opportunity can open for a radical group to seize power and how they mostly lost this opportunity. Maybe the same will happens eventually to jihadists.
November 16, 2019
Leonard's impeccably cited account of a leftist organization's history, specifically the role of US intelligence in its rise and fall, is a specific example of a general phenomenon. With this work, Leonard outlines repeated infiltration of informants into leftist orgs, how far up the ladder these informants held positions, US intelligence's willingness to break the law in the process of disrupting those orgs, their collaboration with local law enforcement, their feeding of specific talking points to journalists across the country, as well as countless other seedy actions and relationships often broadly speculated on in the abstract. Unfortunately, Leonard's limited access to the full document history, even with all the of the clever circumvention by weeding through obscure archives, prevents him from following these convergent trails into their most damning, likely given the trajectory, conclusions. As it stands, the book is a rather narrow account confirming broader speculations. Leonard has released a book since expanding on this foundation which is likely superior.
January 21, 2024
A compelling look at a still-to-be-fully-uncovered history. Fascinating to me, a reader born at the turn of this century, to get a look at professed communists in the era of the Vietnam War era thru to Reagan's ascent to power.
For people coming to this book for history, my layman self thinks "there's a lot of citations to get intrigued about."
Writing this review months after the fact (as is the trend with all my 2023 book reviews), the strongest impressions I have left on me are from the history of the turbulent SDS split in the beginning of the book, the egging-of-Nixon anecdote that serves as introduction, and the image of self-professed-communist organizers heading into coal mines and other such industrial fields in the mid-to-late-'70s (something I describe as feeling like an alternate history that is actually real, like for example finding out there's a Tibetan language written in an Arabic-based script).
I give this book a "Very Much Worth Your Time" for people actively interested in the subject, and a "Worth Your Time" for anyone else.
For people coming to this book for history, my layman self thinks "there's a lot of citations to get intrigued about."
Writing this review months after the fact (as is the trend with all my 2023 book reviews), the strongest impressions I have left on me are from the history of the turbulent SDS split in the beginning of the book, the egging-of-Nixon anecdote that serves as introduction, and the image of self-professed-communist organizers heading into coal mines and other such industrial fields in the mid-to-late-'70s (something I describe as feeling like an alternate history that is actually real, like for example finding out there's a Tibetan language written in an Arabic-based script).
I give this book a "Very Much Worth Your Time" for people actively interested in the subject, and a "Worth Your Time" for anyone else.
June 16, 2022
A compelling history of a section of the American Far-Left that has been largely overlooked despite the lasting impact of this period and those involved. As a communist in America today I know a large chunk of my older comrades were in the RU/RCP and that the work they did made them the dedicated and skilled comrades they are today. Understanding how both the dogmatic cultish formation of the modern “RCP” and these still dedicated and principled activists, came from the same origin, is incredibly enlightening. That and the book is just fun to read, Leonard and Gallagher are careful to allow for the facts of history to speak for themselves where they can and to offer a solid analysis where it’s needed, that combines to for a great literary flow. Highly recommend to any comrades reading this, also join FRSO lmao
June 12, 2020
highly informative, though not as comprehensive or insightful as i would hope. use of FBI documents is a good tactic but there is less focus on Party organizing method and theory than ideal. also riddled with grammar and (small) factual errors or omissions, though im not sure if the former is due to my online copy.
December 7, 2024
Fascinating account of fbi infiltration of the cpusa, starting from essentially the very beginning. A warning to all organizers to never underestimate the risk of infiltration and to appreciate the risk no matter how small you org is.
January 27, 2020
Well researched - 749 footnotes, 18 page bibliography. Summation of RCP history based on FBI files, critical observers, and disaffected former members. Not objective.
October 19, 2022
I hate everything.
April 10, 2025
so funny how they achieved literally nothing at all
July 9, 2016
This book seeks to reestablish the importance of American Maoists in the 1970s left. But I finished the book unconvinced of the movement's impact or relevance. Ultimately, the Revolutionary Union comes across like failed splinter groups: factional, dogmatic and hopelessly unrealistic, even accounting for the FBI interference that it, like others, faced.
As the authors candidly acknowledge:
"There is, of course, the matter of the group's politics and what one makes of it. In all candor there. Was hope in undertaking this project of finding something better than we did. Here things broke two ways. There was never a question about the sincerity of intentions of those who made up this group. There were, in our view, good things here; the daring to conceive of a socialist society as a fundamental negation of the rapacity of capitalism, a renouncing of American exceptionalism and willingness to call out the crimes of the U.S. government rather than making accommodations with them, the feeling that the dispossessed need to be brought to the center of the levers that run society. This is a list that could be added to in multiples. This group was not whimsical, but was called forth by great wrongs and towering inequality.
"In the end, however, one needs to look at the piece as a whole. The controversies that made up the nodal points and their resolution are definitive here: the struggle against urban guerrilla warfare that lead to a heightened organizational authoritarianism, the inherent reactive response in opposition to the complex debate around nationalism, the dogmatic methodology used to analyze the intricate, complex and shifting events in China. Such things, among not a few others, serve as points of transformation, largely in the wrong direction. ... The sectarianism, dogmatism, and voluntarism eventually came to characterize the group; diminishing and overwhelming much of the critical grounding, liberatory vision and communal spirit -- that had made it attractive in its beginnings. The reasons for this are many, but the overriding one being its willingness from inception to tie itself so uncritically to the communist legacy dating back to the Russian Revolution."
As the authors candidly acknowledge:
"There is, of course, the matter of the group's politics and what one makes of it. In all candor there. Was hope in undertaking this project of finding something better than we did. Here things broke two ways. There was never a question about the sincerity of intentions of those who made up this group. There were, in our view, good things here; the daring to conceive of a socialist society as a fundamental negation of the rapacity of capitalism, a renouncing of American exceptionalism and willingness to call out the crimes of the U.S. government rather than making accommodations with them, the feeling that the dispossessed need to be brought to the center of the levers that run society. This is a list that could be added to in multiples. This group was not whimsical, but was called forth by great wrongs and towering inequality.
"In the end, however, one needs to look at the piece as a whole. The controversies that made up the nodal points and their resolution are definitive here: the struggle against urban guerrilla warfare that lead to a heightened organizational authoritarianism, the inherent reactive response in opposition to the complex debate around nationalism, the dogmatic methodology used to analyze the intricate, complex and shifting events in China. Such things, among not a few others, serve as points of transformation, largely in the wrong direction. ... The sectarianism, dogmatism, and voluntarism eventually came to characterize the group; diminishing and overwhelming much of the critical grounding, liberatory vision and communal spirit -- that had made it attractive in its beginnings. The reasons for this are many, but the overriding one being its willingness from inception to tie itself so uncritically to the communist legacy dating back to the Russian Revolution."
January 3, 2019
the rcp and ru were so freaking terrible... smdh
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