Word: caucused
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...world") whre we ate and argued. He made it quite clear he dislikes the communist Party for Workers Power (Workers Power, for short), which I'm a member of. He's against the "overly serious pro-worker approach through which people in and around the Worker-Student Alliance Caucus (WSA) helped build and lead SDS from '67 to '72. And he made it perfectly clear he opposed Workers Power members (many of whom were deeply involved in this earlier organizing) building this same type of movement against racists like Jencks, Kilson and Herrnstein at Harvard today...
...well they might have been--except that I never made any such speech. Shapiro invented this "recollection" to make the worker-student alliance politics behind the anit-ROTC campaign in '69 look unreal. The Workers Student Alliance Caucus (WSA) won many to transcend a narrowly student-centered approach, to take on broad problems (war and ROTC, racism and Harvard expansion) from a consciously proworker, anti-big-business vantage point. Instead of fighting ROTC because "militarism sullies an otherwise neutral university," we said fight ROTC because it serves the giant financial interests which control Harvard (among other things) and use ROTC...
Shapiro paints a different picture of our opponents at the time, the "new left" caucus, one of whose leaders, Mike Kazin, is treated especially kindly--expecially now that he's coming on even less radical than he did back in '69. (Kazin always talked about how he'd been radical when younger but now knew better, so maybe he hasn't changed). Shapiro presents Kazin as a leader of the "small group" which planned the University Hall takeover. In fact the plan was first worked out in the WSA caucus. We then presented it to a mammoth SDS meeting which...
...case the '69 strike was built for very patiently. WSA caucus members and others prepared for several years. We did it then the same way Workers Power members and oteers are building the anti-racist movement on campuses today, by discussing every question with everyone we can, organizing struggles (the successful fight to keep Shockley out of Yale a week ago is an example) exposing every administration lie, organizing a mass-based political defense when the administration tries (as they're now trying at Yale) to silence us with punishments, using these very attacks to help people understand the system...
...weeks later, of course, came the occupation of University Hall. On April 10, the day police evicted the students from University Hall at dawn, the Faculty's liberal caucus met for the first time. More than a hundred Faculty liberals condemned Pusey for ordering police into University Hall and for his public statements on ROTC, and condemned the students who had occupied the building. The liberal caucus was larger and less well organized than its conservative counterpart. It included junior as well as senior Faculty; its members tended to be in the Humanities and the Natural Sciences...