Word: sds
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...THING, early in 1967 SDS discovered Marxism. Actually it was thrust in front of its face by the decision of the Progressive Labor Party to disband the May 2nd Movement (a small but militant anti-war group) and send members into SDS. PL was formed in 1964 by a group of dissident ex-Communists who were fed up with the increasingly moderate stance and peaceful co-existence line of the Party. They brought to the rather undisciplined and unideological New Left a coherent, straightforward revolutionary strategy and the discipline of a centralist organization. The children of Hiroshima and Coca-Cola...
...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...
...National Office of SDS had never given too much thought to the working class, and the New Left as a whole had prided itself on being undogmatic in its analysis and flexible in its strategies. And, anyway, the N.O. exerted 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...
...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...
...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...