Word: sds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first reason for SDS's general decline after the Chicago convention in 1969 was that it read itself out of the anti-war movement. The Campus Worker-Student Alliance line-which PL pushed hard and continuously within SDS-sapped the organization of so much energy that it did no work on the issue of the war during the period of the Moratoria. SDS thus rendered itself powerless by the time Cambodia rolled around last May. At a time when tens of thousands of students focused on the war as a major national issue, SDS was engaged in its most intensive...
...this isolation from the antiwar demonstrations which made SDS's shrill condemnation of the Moratoria particularly inappropriate and offensive. If SDS had worked toward an anti-war strategy and lobbied within the Moratoria for radical speakers and viewpoints, then the criticisms would have been more understandable. Instead, SDS held its own antiwar demonstrations in advance of the October Moratorium, with trade unionism as the principal motif ("an American victory in Vietnam will be a terrific defeat for the U. S. worker...
...Even if SDS's refusal to participate in liberal anti-war demonstrations was vaguely understandable, its empty denunciations of radical groups supporting the NLF were not. One of PL's principal objections to the NLF was that its leaders had agreed to peace talks with the U. S., and, as PL is so fond of saying, "there is nothing to negotiate." Yet the NLF has made no binding concessions at the talks, and is probably doing no more in Paris than buying needed time. Another of PL's objections was that the NLF is supplied by two "revisionist" powers...
Thus, PL states that if the NLF does not take a firm stand against U. S. involvement in postwar Vietnam-which it has not-it is selling out the American worker as well as the Vietnamese. This emphasis has led opponents of PL in SDS to charge that the party's approach to the war is one of "national chauvinism...
...footnote to the struggle of the white working class. At the same time, groups like the Panthers, which focus on "consciousness-raising" around ghetto issues and do not pay lip-service to organizing workers as such, are singled out for harsh, unsympathetic condemnation. For this behavior, many members of SDS now charge that PL is racist...