The RCP, RSB, and its front groups, identified as the VVAW, UWOC, and USCPFA, represent a threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude.
—FBI report on the Revolutionary Communist Party, September 6, 1976
The story of sixties radicalism in the US is one largely revolving around a discrete set of actors: The Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Yippies, and the Weathermen. That there emerged from the sixties a significant trend, called the New Communist Movement, which at turns embraced conventional Marxism-Leninism, Cuban socialism, and Maoist communism, is a topic relegated to the margins. It is the stuff of debate of fragmented left sects, obscure academic papers, and footnotes along the way of telling other stories.
Such is the case in the popular realm. In contrast, the US government, specifically the Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation, relevant US Congressional committees, and ultimately the executive branch, were never so dismissive. For them, this New Communist Movement, especially its Maoist component, were viewed as a pronounced threat. In turn it was the focus of ongoing, intensive, and relentless attention.
This was most true in the case of the Revolutionary Union (RU), which would become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the largest Maoist organization to arise in the United States out of the fractious decade of the sixties. As the Bureau, with all due alarm, noted, “the magnitude of the threat by RCP and its front groups to accomplish its aims or [sic] organizing and overthrowing the United States Government by force and violence warrants constant vigil…[sic]” While there was an element of hyperbole in such statements—in no small measure to legally justify the extraordinary attention they were giving this group—it was hyperbole nonetheless stemming from real concern.
– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158313#sthash.izywNVwq.dpuf
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