Michael Klonsky

Michael Klonsky
Mike Klonsky speaking at Loyola University, Chicago, 2007.

Michael Klonsky (born 1943) is an American educator, author, and political activist. He is known for his work with the Students for a Democratic Society, the New Communist Movement, and, later, the small schools movement.

Klonsky's father, Robert Klonsky, a World War II veteran who fought as a volunteer against the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, had been arrested and convicted of "conspiring to advocate Marxist views" in violation of the Smith Act during the McCarthy period. The Supreme Court later overturned the case.

In the late 1960s Michael Klonsky became the national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society, which he joined as a student at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge). He was one of five S.D.S. members arrested on May 12, 1969, when prank phone calls sent police and firefighters to the S.D.S. offices in Chicago.

In the 1970s he became a leader of the New Communist Movement which broke with the older Communist Party USA and its allegiance to the Soviet Union. He headed the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), in which role he was one of the first U.S. political activists to visit the People's Republic of China. Klonsky later became critical of Marxist dogma but stayed active in civil rights, anti-war and educational reform politics.