[2] This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution.
[4] Until the 1960s the largest and most influential organization to the left of the Democratic Party within the United States was the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), which achieved peak influence during the Great Depression and World War II, before declining in the post war years due to a number of factors, including state-repression (McCarthyism, the Smith Act, the Rosenberg Trial, etc.
Members were often disillusioned by the party-leadership's official subordination to the USSR ideologically, with the party defending the numerous controversial actions by the Soviet state.
[7][8] They became active in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War after it opened its membership to non-veterans[9] and temporarily gained control when the national office voted to expel non RU chapters and members and voted to integrate into the Revolutionary Union although non Marxist members of the VVAW filed and won a lawsuit prohibiting the RU dominated group from using the VVAW name, logos and materials.
During the early 1970s the OL took positions that were at odds with most of the US Left, including opposition to gay liberation and support of the Shah of Iran, whose regime they saw as a bulwark against Soviet social-imperialism.
The Greensboro city police department had an informant within the KKK and ANP group who notified them that the Klan was prepared for armed violence.
Some former members subsequently developed local organizations that continued the trend, and they attempted to find theoretical backing for their work in the writings of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.
As a result, most NCM organizations referred to their ideology as Marxism–Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and rejected what they saw as the devolution of socialism in the contemporary Soviet Union.
The groups, formed of ex-students, attempted to establish links with the working class through finding work in factories and heavy industry, but they also tended toward Third-worldism, supporting National Liberation Fronts of various kinds, including the Black Panther Party (then on the decline), the Cuban Revolution, and the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam.
The New Communist Movement organizations supported national self-determination for most ethnic groups, especially blacks and those of Latino origin, in the United States.
In its early years, NCM organisations formed a loose-knit tendency in United States leftist politics, but never coalesced into a single organization.
Points of distinction were frequently founded on the attitude taken toward the successors of Mao and international disputes between the Soviet Union and China regarding such developments as the Angolan Civil War.
"[citation needed] The successor organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA now demands full recognition of LGBT rights as a fundamental element of establishing socialism.