1989-1991
FRSO played a role in the anti-war movement that emerged in 1990 in opposition to the Gulf War. FRSO also helped build the reproductive rights / abortion rights movement in this period, including the massive 1989 demonstration in Washington DC.
In response to the fall of Eastern European governments, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, two distinct positions began to emerge within Freedom Road on how to assess the socialist countries. One position saw the events of 1989-1991 as indicative of a deep crisis in socialism that required what they called "left refoundation". The other position continued to assess the experience of socialist countries as essentially positive, and saw their defeats as the result of revisionism, not as a crisis of Marxism itself. This side continued to identify itself as Marxist-Leninist. At organization's 1991 Congress, the group's highest decision, a document explaining the official position of the organization was adopted titled "On the Crisis of Socialism." This document was reaffirmed at the 1997 Congress. This internal division solidified throughout the 1990s until the organization split in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Freedom Road Socialist Organization