Word: sds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...approach signifies the beginning of a third stage in the development of the New Left organization. At the beginning, following its break with the parent League for Industrial Democracy. SDS stressed community organizing among people excluded from the system; mainly Negroes and poor whites. Members opened a Community Union Project in Newark, financed by the United Auto Workers, and built similar Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP) in other cities. Since 1965, however, SDS has concentrated almost entirely on students, and its main issues have been the war in Vietnam, the draft and "student power." During this second stage...
With the tactics of direct action--picketing, campus recruitment by war oriented corporations or sitting in a against university social rules--SDS has appealed to a vague sense of alienation among students, without defining a radical ideology. Unlike the old Left, which spent much energy on theory and analysis, SDS has been purposely anti-ideological, even anti-intellectual. Members have tried, as national secretary, Greg Calvert, puts it, to "build a movement out of people's guts." Rejecting the dogmatism of the old Socialist and Communist parties, they have stretched their ideological tent to include anyone feeling the frustration...
Their evolving ideology, such as it is, focuses on the inability of the individual to make meaningful decisions in society. Individuals, according to the SDS analysis, are deprived of power over their own lives by a corporate elite which manipulates human beings economically and politically. The few who own the means of production, in alliance with the military, control all aspects of society. Their crass materialistic values reduce human beings to "consumers of things." This depersonalization, combined with the separation of most people from power, produces a sense of apathy and resignation...
...place of this structure of decision making, SDS proposes "participatory democracy"--a decentralized system without real leaders in which every man would have an equal voice. It strongly rejects the contentention of liberals that reform can be achieved through established parliamentary institutions. Numbers of supporters--or votes--do not count for political strength, since "representative" bodies only disguise manipulation by the industrial military elite. Thus, the so-called "new middle"--a group of student leaders who recently wrote President Johnson expressing "responsible" doubts about the war--fails to recognize that the Vietnamese conflict is only one manifestation of a corrupt...
...reliance on action--confrontation and protest--rather than ideology has enabled SDS in the middle phase of its development to include a wide variety of personalities and interests. The organization can claim as members blue-collar militants of the Progressive Labor Party, as well as three-piece suit liberals from ADA. There are anarchist hippies, humanists, Communists and an increasing number of former members of Young Americans for Freedom, a liber tarian laissez faire capitalist group. About 85 per cent of the membership, according to Davidson, serves merely as "shock troops." These are younger members, usually in the "long hair...