Word: sds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...intellectuals worry that most members of SDS have yet to shed the bourgeois outlook and prejudices of their middle-class upbringing. "In fact, most students hold a kind of dogged career-oriented conception of their lives which would do their parents proud," observed Paul Potter, a past SDS president, and Hal Benenson, of the Harvard chapter, in a recent paper on the "critical radical perspective." Despite the radical rhetoric and slogans, "there is very little comprehension of what the words that are slung around mean either as descriptions of the society or as prescriptions for action." Most SDSers, they observed...
...weakness of SDS ideology not only imperils the commitment of students, the intellectuals believe, but also prevents the organization from making a meaningful appeal to adults and thus filling the hole created by the departing parties of the Left. The collapse of the adult Left during the 1950's, they argue, has left radicals without a meaningful political organization. Neither the present Communist Party nor the Progressive Labor Party (Maoist) comprehends the real needs and problems of modern Americans. Communism is no longer radical: it aims to get power through the electoral process--in other words, working within the system...
...need for ideology when shifting to noncampus activity was discussed at a meeting of the National Council of SDS in Cambridge during the first week of April. At the last national meeting in December, almost all the workshops preceding the official session had dealt with issues and problems of campus organization. In April, only one ("Curriculum Reform") concerned the university; the rest dealt with subjects like "Labor Strategy," "Middle-Class Community Organizing" and "Organizing Professions." Only eight delegates showed up for the curriculum workshop and most felt--as at least three stated explicitly--that the university would be "the last...
...constituencies to which SDS now hopes to appeal are unlike those it worked with in its organizing activities during the first stage of the movement--they are primarily people involved in the system, rather than those frozen out of it. SDS must speak, Carl Davidson argues, primari Iy to the working class and "new working class," while continuing to recognize the problems of the underclass (the poor, disabled and chronically unemployed). The traditional always been a source of political power for radical movements. But the number of people in this class is declining relative to the new working class -- white...
Discussion at the national convention indicated that there are important disagreements within SDS on this new approach. The effort to develop an ideology and push off-campus is supported by the national staff and most of the older chapters in Boston, Berkeley, New York and Ann Arbor. But many newer members believe that SDS should remain primarily a student organization, engaged for the most part in the tactics of confrontation. In the areas where membership is growing most rapidly, students have had little or no previous experience with radical ideas of political organizing. Many of these chapters are located...