Word: landau
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...Progressive Labor Party (PL) leaflet last week denounced Michael S. Ansara '68, one of the founders of the Old Mole, and David L. Landau, a Cambridge radical, for allegedly disclosing names and handing over SDS financial records at a closed hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SSIS...
...anything we can learn from this article (other than the obvious, that bourgeois ambition can have bad effects on your judgment)? Yes, this: that anti-communism is alive and kicking. It is remarkable how, often the allies of McCarthy (Gene) end up sounding like McCarthy (Joe): and there is Landau talking about a "vibrant," "free-wheeling" organization infiltrated and "taken over" by a "crude," "intolerant," "bitter" communist party...
This scenario describes "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" better than it does the history of SDS: Landau neglects to mention that the slogan of SDS in 1964 was "Part of the way with LBJ!" This "free-wheeling" organization somehow never wheeled its way to political radicalism and an alliance with the working class...
However, this is not to say that in struggling around what they believe to be a correct analysis of issues PL members and friends have always been free from some "mechanical" or "sectarian" errors, but perhaps Landau could point out a political group that has. What is important is that a group undertake a continual self-critical appraisal of its actions: which PL does...
This is what constitutes the true danger of Landau's piece. Take the mistakes and failings of some PL members and supporters and present them in a distorted, incomplete format that plays heavily on an anti-Communist stereo type that is as much a part of us all as racism or male chauvinism, and what you've got is a red baiting smear of an organization that has consistently fought militantly in support of just struggles, even those of groups with which it deeply disagreed (e.g. Chavez Lettuce Boycott, NAC's campaign of last spring against the CFIA...