Word: pl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
There was a tempting logic to PL's explanations. And there was a certain internal logic to the development from control-your-own-life politics to working-class-oriented politics. Students sensed the connection between their spiritual woes and the material woes of the oppressed workers. And if at first the idea of a Ruling Class was only a helpful metaphor, it began to make more sense as the War got worse and inflation made real wages decline every year...
...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...