Word: pl
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There it was. Everything we'd heard from the steps of Mem Church and University Hall. Everything that PL has been ranting about ad nauseam. Al Vellucci was telling the people. But he wasn't telling them, he wasn't educating them, they knew it all. He was saying it for them. He was putting all their fears and anxieties into words. He is their man because he is the political expression of these people. He fights their battles for them, and all these people were cheering Al on as he denounced their common enemy...
...PL was obviously valuable as a minor corrective. It was about time SDS started thinking about poor people, particularly poor white people. But as PL became stronger within SDS, the National Office, under various leaders, frantically tried to concoct an alternative to the PL analysis. In doing so it allowed PL to set the terms of debate. Rather than pursuing their intuitive sense that PL was dead wrong about the dynamics of American politics, and creating a revolutionary vision that comprehended the complexity and uniqueness of American life, the leaders of SDS tried to find an analysis that they could...
...PL kept growing where it was 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...
After October, 1968, PL became more sectarian and critical of other radicals in the movement and around the world. Since 1966 they had withheld their support from the NLF and Ho Chi Minh because they had "sold out the people's struggle" by negotiating with the United States. Cuba was a petty-Bourgeois country. The line on Black struggles had also changed-all nationalism was reactionary and separate Black organizations were "Racist." Open admissions demands were reactionary since universities would only brainwash the poor (Had PL appointed itself the student part of the student-worker alliance...
...United States can no longer sustain the kind of control over world resources and labor that it has in the past and if internal tensions simultaneously disrupt the system, then it might be possible to radicalize the workers. Aside from being a longshot (but no longer than PL's strategy), the Weatherman proposal is the best argument yet for white radicals not to do anything...