Asian American Left, Post 1960s

ASIAN AMERICAN LEFT, POST 1960s. In the late 1960s, the Asian American Left emerged in the midst of worldwide revolutions for national liberation and US-based protests against the Vietnam War, movements for Black Power and Third World Studies, and struggles against racist police violence. For Asian Americans, the gaze towards China and Vietnam radicalized their activism and made them particularly receptive to the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Jung, Castro, Guevara, Nhrumah, Fanon, and others, despite sharp ideological contrasts on their positions on China and the Soviet Union. Many early Asian American Movement (AAM) organizations embraced anti-racist, anti-colonial politics, linked domestic and international struggles, and emphasized serving the community. Within a year or two, these groups moved further to the Left, embracing an eclectic socialism and later a Marxist analysis of capitalism and a Leninist analysis of imperialism.

As one of the earliest AAM organizations, the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) formed at UC Berkeley in May 1968 and is credited for coining “Asian American” as a term of solidarity, promoting pan-Asian and Third World unity against racism. AAPA was the most influential AAM youth group, working in the Third World Liberation Fronts at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley, at Yale to found Amerasia Journal, and at Columbia developing into I Wor Kuen.

In San Francisco, the Red Guard Party formed in 1969, spurred into being by police violence against Chinatown youth. The Red Guards expressed a platform that connected “ruthless landlords and businessmen who oppress the Chinese people” with struggles for jobs, healthcare, relevant education, and decent housing. The Red Guard Party closely emulated the Black Panther Party in their street youth membership and Ten-Point program that they adopted nearly verbatim from the BPP, but added recognition for the People’s Republic of China.

In New York City, Kazu Ijima and Minn Matsuda, women with earlier histories of Left activism, formed Asian Americans for Action in 1969. Triple A was unique within the AAM as an intergenerational organization. Triple A brought an internationalist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist analysis to war, nuclear weapons, and occupation, including forming Asian American anti-war contingents and joining the campaign to repeal the US-Japan Security Treaty and to remove US military bases from Okinawa. With a desire to work in Chinatown, many of Triple A’s Chinese American youth, together with AAPA at Columbia University, formed I Wor Kuen (IWK) in 1969 to focus on issues of healthcare, overcrowding, and poverty in New York City’s Chinatown.

In the early 1970s, several Asian American Left organizations came to adopt various forms of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, bracing a Third World radicalism missing in the older Communist Party USA. In July 1971, members of the Red Guard Party joined New York’s IWK, making IWK the first nationwide Asian American revolutionary organization. IWK was unique for having majority women leadership and for being one of the few revolutionary organizations of the period to include “an end to male chauvinism and sexual exploitation” in their platform. Their 12-Point Platform and Program focused on education, housing, anti-militarism, anti-racism, “community control of our institutions and land,” and more uniquely, “an end to the geographic boundaries of Amerika” and an explicit call for “a socialist society;” The IWK promoted the ideology of revolutionary nationalism/internationalism and saw as flawed the view that Marxism was opposed to national liberation. The IWK worked closely with the community-based organization, the Chinese Progressive Association, in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and elsewhere on issues of immigration reform, labor rights, healthcare, housing, anti-racism, and more.

Wei Min She (WMS) formed in San Francisco in 1971. Its earlier roots lie in AAPA in Berkeley and San Francisco and the Asian Community Center (ACC). The ACC supported labor struggles, including sharing space in the International Hotel with the Chinatown Cooperative Garment Factory. They also began the ACC Food Program and other “serve the people” programs inspired by Mao and the Black Panther Party. As ACC members sought greater ideological clarity, they formed WMS.

In New York City, Jerry Tung, who had left the Progressive Labor Party in 1971, pulled together primarily college students to participate in an intensive study of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in 1973. The Asian Study Group published the Workers Viewpoint and by 1974 turned into the Workers Viewpoint Organization.

Filipino immigrants and US-born activists formed the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) in July 1973. In the debates prioritizing homeland struggles or US-based justice work, the KDP developed a dual-line strategy. “[O]nly the KDP was poised to lead organizationally and ideologically on both fronts,” writes Augusto F. Espiritu in the Foreword to A Time to Rise. Considering themselves the most “advanced” political force in Filipino American communities, the KDP engaged mass-based work around fair housing, ethnic studies, immigrant rights, affirmative action, and labor and established the newspaper, Ang Katipunan. The KDP also boldly supported the National Democracy Movement, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the CPP-led New People’s Army in a struggle against semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism in the Philippines. They were best known for their campaign against the Marcos regime and martial law in the Philippines. In 1981, KDP activists Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo were gunned down at the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU) union hall in Seattle in 1981, after gaining passage of an ILWU resolution criticizing Marcos’s labor practices. Activists waged a decade-long battle to link the murders to the Marcos regime.

The various Asian American Left groups had strong political unity—centered on anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and in favor of socialism—but also bitter conflict. The KDP, IWK/CPA, and WMS/ACC all participated in the ten-year struggle to save the International Hotel as a low-income home to elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrants. But the three groups had sharp differences over ideology, strategies, and tactics. KDP worked with the International Hotel Tenants Association (IHTA) to prioritize tenants’ needs and were the most willing to work with city officials to prevent eviction and demolition. Other Left groups accused the KDP of being “hopelessly reformist.” By contrast, WMS and its later formation as the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) stressed class struggle and capitalist profit-making. Activists criticized the WMS/RCP for using ultra-Left tactics and for promoting ideological conflicts over collaborative work. The IWK/CPA strove to improve conditions for the tenants, while raising critiques of the racialized nature of capitalism and gentrification.

The AAM is generally considered to have ended by late 1970s, attributed in part to the I-Hotel eviction and with it, the loss of space for numerous Asian American activist groups. But, the revolutionary movements continued on in the 1970s and 1980s, with a turn to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism primarily in multinational formations. In 1978, IWK merged with the Chicano/a August 29th Movement to form the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), soon joined by Amiri Baraka’s Revolutionary Communist League (formerly Congress of African Peoples), the primarily Japanese American East Wind, and others. The League was unique for its majority women leadership and majority Third World leadership and membership (75-80 percent people of color). The LRS was also especially strong in working with young people. Often working without identifying their LRS affiliation, members exerted a significant influence on Asian American student and community struggles on both coasts. The LRS was known for its mass-based work (and criticized for having a lesser focus on theoretical study), notably in the Chicano, Black, and labor movements and critiqued vanguardism. Like IWK before it, the LRS sought to facilitate space for women’s liberation, including organizing collective childcare.

In 1980, the KDP joined with the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Northern California Alliance and the Guardian Clubs to form the Line of March. Line of March focused on theoretical development and party building. The Line of March took a position against Maoism and embraced the Soviet Union. By contrast to the LRS, the Line of March gave lesser attention to mass organizing, especially on campuses and labor organizing, and instead focused its united front work largely on women’s and lesbian/gay rights. With former KDP members in its leadership, the Line of March also helped to build the anti-Marcos movement.

As WMS members studied Marxism-Leninism, they joined with the Revolutionary Union (RU). In the broader debates on proletariat revolution and national liberation, the RU took the position of internationalism over revolutionary nationalism, unlike the LRS which viewed the two as interconnected struggles. In 1975, the RU developed into the RCP, which grew into arguably the largest New Communist organization.

While Line of March disbanded in 1989, as did the LRS in 1990, the RCP continued to to work against racist police violence. The legacy of the Asian American Left continues to this day in the activism of former members and its influence on later generations of activists.

Asian Community Center Archive Group. Stand Up: An Archive Collection of the Bay Area Asian-American Movement, 1968-1974. Berkeley: Eastwind Books, 2009.

Cruz, Rene Ciria, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena, eds. A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP.) Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Elbaum, Max. Revolution in the Air: Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. London: Verso, 2002.

Habal, Estella. San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.

Ho, Fred, with Carolyn Antonio, Diane C. Fujino, and Steve Yip, eds. Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America. San Francisco: AK Press, 2000.

Ho, Fred. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader, ed. Diane C. Fujino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Pulido, Laura. Black Brown Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

History of the Red Guard. by “Former Members” https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/red-guard.pdf.