Venceremos Organization

Venceremos, Spanish for "We Will Overcome", or "We Will Prevail", was a radical left political group which took its name from the battle cry of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a revolutionary communist leader from Argentina and high-ranking member of Fidel Castro's communist government in Cuba.

Venceremos began as a Chicano political organization in Redwood City, California in early 1969. An early chairperson was the jazz musician Aaron Manganiello (1943-2009). Venceremos's next chairperson was Katerina Del Valle. In 1971 a faction of the Maoist organization Revolutionary Union (RU), led by H. Bruce Franklin and consisting of about half of its members, split to join Venceremos. The split was over doctrinal differences; followers of Franklin favored of a strategy based on protracted urban guerrilla warfare while followers of Robert Avakian favored a strategy of building a revolutionary movement through recruitment and political confrontation. The more militant stance of Venceremos suited the Franklinites better than remaining with the Avakianites. According to Franklin in his 1971 anthology "From the Movement Toward Revolution", RU

"split on the question of armed struggle, particularly as it related to national liberation movements within the U.S. Over half the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, including all the collectives from South San Francisco through Sunnyvale and some in San Jose, merged into Venceremos. Since these collectives had been heavily involved in youth organizing within white proletarian communities, in factory organizing and in anti-imperialist struggles on the campuses, the new combined organization was multi-national, extremely diversified in its activities and base, and quite militant"

Franklin's version of the reason for this split is that it had to do with racial issues: originally, Venceremos had been a Chicano organization, while the RU had a policy of suggesting to prospective black members that they join the Black Panthers instead. Franklin and others believed that this racial separation of the organizations was inappropriate, the Venceremos went on to become a multiethnic organization. They also believed that the lumpenproletariat had a strong revolutionary potential.

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