Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...small but militant anti-war group) and send members into SDS. PL was formed in 1964 by a group of dissident ex-Communists who were fed up with the increasingly moderate stance and peaceful co-existence line of the Party. They brought to the rather undisciplined and unideological New Left a coherent, straightforward revolutionary strategy and the discipline of a centralist organization. The children of Hiroshima and Coca-Cola, now veterans of a few years' moral outrage, were prepared to handle neither...
...believed that political organizing must center around the industrial working class since they were the most oppressed people in society and were the only ones that had the power to change it. Their strategy was to form left-center caucuses in trade unions demanding better wages and working conditions. Hopefully this would lead to crippling increases in the number of strikes and together with other factors, like an unpopular imperialist war, a general strike could paralyze the country and set the stage for the working class (or the Party, at any rate) to seize power...
...same time students were oppressed by the draft and most would become workers of one sort or another after they left school. This would provide the basis for a student-worker alliance. PL hoped to make SDS into a broad-based anti-War movement from which they could recruit members for the Party...
...National Office of SDS had never given too much thought to the working class, and the New Left as a whole had prided itself on being undogmatic in its analysis and flexible in its strategies. And, anyway, the N.O. exerted almost no control over local chapters and it circulated its position papers to encourage debate rather than enforce policy. Many members of SDS who had previously relied on an inmitive feeling for politics now found that their intuitive notions could not match the clear. if mechanistic, analysis of their PL contemporaries...
...strong (mainly Harvard, San Francisco State and Berkeley) and the non-PL leaders of SDS searched for a Maoist alternative to PL. In Berkeley, where things happen about a year before they happen anywhere else, the SDS chapter split in the fall of 1968 when non PL members left to form the Radical Student Union under the leadership of Bob Avakian. Avakian critcized PL for not supporting the sharpest struggles in the movement, such as those over open admissions. (PL was not involved in the Cleaver confrontation and later did not support the People's Park campaign...