| Theory |
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The Legacy of SDS March 24, 2005 by RedStar2000 |
There seems to be a growing frustration in the anti-war/anti-globalization movement with ceremonial and ritualized demonstrations...and some emerging interest in the "legacy" of SDS and the 60s.
And it is difficult for me not to "wallow in nostalgia" for the "glory years" of my youth.
So here, if you'll forgive me, is another discussion of SDS.
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But in many ways SDS was never much theoretical, even in its hyperMaoist groupings. Polemical, ideological, yes. But theoretical?
All too true, alas...and it left us totally unequipped to deal with aggressive "hyper-Maoism" (good expression, that).
The "strong side" of SDS -- the radical "ultra-democracy" and the concentration on direct action locally based -- was never theoretically developed.
Instead, we relied on a mixture of C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and Malcolm X -- adequate for a critique of U.S. imperialism but otherwise hopelessly incoherent.
It's quite astonishing when you think about it. Faced with the Maoist challenge, we were outclassed...by people who, after all, wanted to rely on the peasantry.
I can't think of a single occasion when anyone ever got up and said to them: what peasantry???
We simply lacked any basic understanding of Marx at all...and we paid a heavy price for our ignorance.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 12, 2005
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In France, according to Belden Fields' interesting book on Maoism and Trotskyism in France and the U.S., some Maoist grouplets were 'libertarian' - anarchistic.
Yes...I read that book myself just last year and noticed that. Evidently they fell apart, though I don't recall the details now.
Off the top of my head, I would think it difficult to be a "libertarian Maoist" -- you'd run into, sooner or later, Mao's insistence on "the good personality cult".
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WUO, it could be argued, paralleled this 'theory of the streets.'
Possibly; I've only read a couple of books about the German RAF and it was a long time ago.
As an abstract strategic framework, the idea of "Bringing the War Home" seems not unreasonable to me. But the WUO was remarkably inept in implementing that pragmatically.
After 1970 or so, I don't recall anyone taking them very seriously. In fact, I remember people joking that they were a front group for the Plumbers & Pipefitters union -- as they mostly blew up public restrooms.
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SWP's (US) legacy seems far more limited in many accounts to a 'Bring the Troops Home Now' liberalism, echoed by WWP/ANSWER in today's anti-war movement.
I agree completely. In SDS circles, the SWP's ritual spring and fall demonstrations were regarded as ceremonies, not protests. It looks like the present anti-war movement in the U.S. is still "stuck" in the same position.
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Say, isn't David Gilbert, WUO vet, now an anarchist?
I do not remember him and it's certainly possible that he or anyone else may be calling himself an "anarchist" these days.
The deflated currency of American political discourse -- labels are not worth the paper they're printed on these days -- is such that we can have "anarchists for Kerry" and "marxists for imperialism".
You can't really tell anything about what people think anymore unless you have access to things they've actually written.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 13, 2005
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No radical group had a single-issue perspective or activity. The whole "single-issue vs multi-issue" dichotomy is false and serves only to obscure the real questions.
Evasion. The SWP may (or may not) have had a verbal commitment to a "multi-issue" approach -- I never heard, during the period in question (1964-1973), of the SWP doing anything but mobilization for the spring and fall ceremonies.
Of course, we weren't paying much attention to the SWP then...so people shouldn't just take my word for it.
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SDS, as a national organization, avoided and ignored the biggest issue in world and U.S. politics at the time: Vietnam.
Because SDS was uninterested in large, twice a year ceremonial demonstrations against the war, it is false to contend that we "ignored the war".
We thought -- and I still think -- that local actions against the war machine were much more effective in spreading our message.
We preferred to run a military or corporate recruiter (or the ROTC) off the campus, demonstrate against the local appearance of some imperialist lackey, or help kids beat the draft...to the political equivalent of a half-time superbowl show.
We did these kinds of things on hundreds and perhaps even thousands of occasions. (Unlike the SWP, we weren't "keeping score".)
And we also were multi-issue in a practical sense...SDS did attempt community organizing (not very successfully), did attempt to organize and/or support resistance to racism, and even actually attempted to organize university workers...something that others took up after SDS disintegrated and that actually works today. It's also a fact that some workers did approach SDS for assistance in off-campus organizing drives...which we supplied.
The crucial distinction between SDS and most of the "old left" was, I think, our reliance on local initiative. Our conventions were not for the purpose of issuing "marching orders" -- no matter what resolutions might be passed or defeated -- but rather of deciding on a kind of "general political framework" in which things should be done. But what each chapter did was up to them.
And they did, as it turned out, quite a lot.
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Todd Gitlin, who was an SDS leader at the time, later commented on "our failure of leadership - which was undeniable": "The leadership was already a closed elite, we didn't understand what an antiwar movement would be, we didn't have any feel for it."
I was at the June 1965 SDS Convention in Kewadin, Michigan. Todd Gitlin was not.
Insofar as there was an "SDS leader" at that convention, the logical choice would be Tom Hayden.
The major issue at that convention was the "anti-communist" clause in the SDS constitution; in a blistering attack on bourgeois liberalism and SDS's "parent" group (the League for Industrial Democracy), Hayden proposed its repeal.
An acrimonious debate ensued...lasting some 27 or 28 hours. (!) It was the longest continuous plenary that I have ever attended.
On a roll-call vote (if memory serves me), the clause was repealed by a two-thirds majority plus a little more...and the Austin SDS kids brought out the cases of beer they'd been hoarding for the celebration.
I do not ever recall Todd Gitlin as "an SDS leader". I was present once at a meeting where he spoke up a few times. (This might have been in the spring of 1964 in Nashville at the founding conference of the Southern Student Organizing Committee -- what was supposed to be a kind of "white SNCC".)
Guess what? Gitlin was a liberal bourgeois whiner then...just as he is today.
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It's good that they recognized the importance of opposing racism - though I'm not sure how much SDS contributed to that struggle in practice - but regardless of what else they did, it was wrong to abandon antiwar activity.
Inspite of writing many pages about SDS which do contain some useful information, Sale never understood SDS...he saw politics much like the SWP sees it -- a place where organizations contend for "supremacy" and where substantive decisions are made "at the top". Like Gitlin, for that matter, it's "leadership" that "really counts".
Do you imagine that a speech by Oglesby (or anyone else) caused SDS chapters to stop whatever they were doing and, like a Leninist party, start doing something else?
That is just crazy; i.e., completely divorced from the reality of how SDS actually functioned.
After Oglesby's speech, SDS went on just like before...except that some chapters did move forward on anti-racist actions. Many SDS chapters continued to make anti-war work their main focus; others were still focusing on student rights vs. the university; some of the larger chapters began to reach out more to the community; and so on.
I don't remember if anyone ever articulated it this way at the time, but I think we saw ourselves in struggle against an entire system on many fronts.
We were guilty of what Gitlin, Sale, Halstead, et.al. accuse us of...not being a liberal, single-issue anti-war movement.
And a damn good thing we weren't!
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First posted at RevLeft on February 17, 2005
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And: funny how nobody can ignore the SWP's role in the antiwar movement, retrospectively, huh?
Beats me. I ignore it...cheerfully. The only time I ever went to one of those D.C. rituals was because my ride to New York City insisted on stopping there. It was fairly warm, so I slept through the speeches.
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The real dispute was: the SWP didn't impose its "multi-issue" communist program on the antiwar movement...
No, I agree, it did not do that. It was a grand coalition of nice people who wanted to feel good about themselves twice a year.
*yawns*
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Local actions...like the "ten days of resistance", with tactics to be decided by local chapters, which the SDS National Council called for and then abandoned?
Actually, I don't remember this particular sequence of events (there was much going on then)...but "off the top of my head", the action could have been abandoned because of a negative reaction from the chapters to the idea that the National Council should do stuff like that.
"Top down" was...unpopular in SDS.
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The major "single-issue" antiwar coalitions, local and national, also called local actions, coordinated and otherwise. Typically a lot bigger than anything called by SDS chapters.
I saw nothing of this at all nor do I remember reading about it. Perhaps something like that may have happened in New York City or San Francisco...
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Interesting you should state the goal of "spreading our message" - that was precisely the goal of the mass demonstrations you deride, but not of the confrontationist actions favored by ultralefts.
Clearly mistaken. You were trying to spread a liberal message...stop the war and everything will be fine. Didn't you even have a slogan about "Negotiations Now" or something like that? Or was that the "Communist" Party?
We were trying to spread a radical message...down with U.S. imperialism -- U.S. Get Out Now.
Naturally our tactics were different.
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Those actions tended and tend to alienate more people than they attract.
No way to objectively measure that...except to note that SDS was a hell of a lot bigger than the SWP. We didn't "alienate everybody".
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And that "general political framework" was wrong. It was a framework that downplayed active opposition to the war.
And "up-played" opposition to the whole system.
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It's also pretty rich to call my statement about SDS "as a national organization" a lie...and then change the subject to the local chapter activity.
Yes, I shouldn't have said "lie" or even "deliberate distortion". Since you weren't there yourself, you'd have no way of understanding that the "national organization" was the least important part of SDS.
Indeed, I probably couldn't even fairly criticize Halstead either...he no more understood SDS than you do.
You think within a paradigm (Leninism) where the "national organization" is "primary" and the local organizations are relatively unimportant -- that's how Leninism works.
An organization that works completely opposite to this formula seems so "crazy" to you that you can't help yourself treating it "as if" it "did" work in the ways you are accustomed to thinking that organizations work.
It's probably small comfort to you, but I've had the same problem communicating this to the Maoists in the RCP...they just can't help assuming that if there were no public "great leaders" of SDS then there must have been "private" ones. Because you "can't have" an organization without well-entrenched "leadership".
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Gitlin was, however, SDS president in 63-64 and then coordinator of its Peace [Research and] Education Project in 64-65, including the period it called the '65 March on Washington (which wasn't his idea, though; he was pushing draft resistance.)....sounds kinda like an SDS leader to me.
Yes, you are correct here. SDS was still very small then -- it did not "take off" until after the 1965 Washington demonstration. I was present at the December 1964 NC (in New York) but I do not remember now who argued for the demonstration or even if there was any significant opposition to the idea. What I do remember is that someone said "if we work really hard at this, we might actually get one or two thousand kids to come". The actual turnout (15-25,000) shocked the hell out of us.
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Hayden, since you mention him, was the ultimate example of liberal ultraleftism...
Most unjust. Hayden became a bourgeois liberal...but in 1965, he was not. As I noted, he blasted the League for Industrial Democracy at the 1965 convention. In fact, I was astounded to learn that he actually spoke at an anti-war demonstration organized by Progressive Labor (of all people) in the fall of 1965...hardly the act of a "liberal".
Gitlin, on the other hand, was never anything but a bourgeois liberal.
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Underlying the discussion at the SDS meeting was the fact that SDS locals were following the SMC's lead on antiwar activity because the SDS national office was not providing any national direction or focus on the issue.
Completely speculative and obviously self-serving. The general opinion of the SMC in SDS was not any different, to the best of my knowledge, than our opinion of the "Mobe" itself...irrelevant.
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If not just Oglesby, but the whole NC, was completely out of step with the chapters...then so much for SDS' "participatory democracy", huh?
Well, I explained what happened...but I can see we still have "paradigm problems" here. You assume that if the NC passed a resolution and many chapters just ignored it, that means "participatory democracy doesn't work".
On the contrary, that's how it does work. Initiative comes from the bottom, not the top. Yes, the arguments raised around a successful resolution at the NC or the Convention would certainly predispose a particular chapter to consider its possible implementation on a local level.
But that resolution was a recommendation...not a command.
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The 1969 disintegration of SDS also shows pretty clearly that what happened on the national level was relevant to the chapters...some may have carried on for a time, but only for a time.
Yes, it was pretty demoralizing for most of us...some local groups with good stuff going just reformed as independent local groups, but a lot of folks simply drifted away.
What the big national meetings of SDS mostly provided, I think, was a constant reinforcement of our morale...we were "part of something big" even if, for the moment, things weren't going so great for us locally.
Going to one of those national meetings and intensively arguing politics, exchanging tales of success and failure, etc., for 3 to 6 days was an energizer...it "got the juices flowing again".
And we had those big national meetings four times a year...so we could keep getting "re-charged".
When SDS disintegrated, I think we missed that more than anything else.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 20, 2005
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What exactly is liberal about immediate withdrawal from Vietnam? On the contrary, the SWP proposed antiwar coalitions adopt demands for Vietnamese self-determination and opposition to all outside interference, which were objectively anti-imperialist.
I don't dispute that the demand for immediate withdrawal was not objectively anti-imperialist.
What I remember about the ceremonial demonstrations that the SWP/Mobe sponsored was that the enemy -- U.S. imperialism -- was not named and, further, that the speakers at those rituals were by no means unanimous even on the point of immediate withdrawal.
It may be a subtle distinction -- was not your slogan "Bring the Troops Home Now"?
Ours was "No Negotiations -- U.S. Get Out Now!"
And even, "Victory to the NLF!"
In my opinion, that represented a whole difference in political attitude...the SWP/Mobe projected an "accommodating" image while SDS, even verbally, was far more confrontational.
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Neither SDS nor other ultralefts acted as if program or message was of central importance...rather the tactic, the confrontation itself was central.
Well...yes, that was very often the case.
Why?
Because we saw in all the "old left" (including the SWP) an attitude of real acceptance of capitalism...regardless of their "nominal program" or "message".
We did not think it was enough to just "formulate correct programs".
Imagine what we would have said had we had Marx's own words to hand...something like "a real step forward in the movement is worth a hundred programs", if I recall.
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Sure there is: size of the demonstrations.
I said it before and I'll say it again: that's just bizarre.
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Compare the famous liberal ultraleft Chicago Democratic Convention demonstration, for example, to the much larger demonstration called by the Chicago Peace Council a month or so later.
The 1968 demonstration at the Democratic National Convention was not an "SDS project". The chapters as a whole seemed quite cool to the idea, as I recall -- though people from some chapters in or near Chicago may have participated.
We regarded the whole "get clean for Gene" campaign as liberal nonsense. The police attacks on the demonstrators there were not attacks on "ultra-leftists" but on liberals.
Why else the media "outrage"?
We in SDS did benefit from those attacks, however. When chapters held their first meetings that fall, the numbers attending exploded. Chapters with only 5 or 10 members reported 50 or 100 newly radicalized students showing up. Somebody told me that the Harvard-Radcliffe chapter jumped to over 600 members.
Oh, and I never heard of the "Chicago Peace Council" until you just mentioned it. Did they ever do anything? Besides march, I mean.
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SDS was shattered by the test of war...
No, we were shattered by a foolish infatuation with Leninism-Maoism.
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To give one example, Hayden saw all the confrontation at the Chicago Democratic Convention as a way of helping McCarthy.
By 1968, Hayden had completely withdrawn from SDS and was indeed a bourgeois liberal.
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So to the degree that chapters took action around Vietnam, it was despite not because of their affiliation to national SDS.
That is an odd way to phrase it; action against the war was not considered "defiance" of the national organization.
We looked for many ways to confront the system on many issues...but anti-war work certainly played a major role on many campuses, directly or indirectly.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 22, 2005
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There's more to being a revolutionary than rhetoric. Heck, if your goal is to win working people to a revolutionary position, not scare the ruling class with how oh-so-radical you are, you likely will often be looking for a way to express the most revolutionary ideas in the most moderate and reasonable-seeming way.
Our goal was not to "scare the ruling class" -- a nonsensical objective -- but to express in plain words our hatred of U.S. imperialism.
If anything, it was the Black Panther Party that projected the "don't fuck with us because we're really bad" attitude during the 1960s.
True, the people in RYM I (eventually the Weather Underground) did try that approach in the "days of rage"...and got their asses kicked. But this was in October of 1969 (as I recall)...and they were only one of the remnants of SDS at that point.
I certainly believe it is possible to express communist ideas in a reasonable way...but I don't think there's any way to make those ideas "seem moderate".
They're not.
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In any case, you gotta join the fight to bring the mass movement around to a better position, regardless of how far it is from that position at the moment.
I know this will sound "terrible" to some...but, you see, in our own eyes, we (and our constituency) were "the mass movement".
We didn't think of all those people who went to those big ceremonies every spring and fall as "part of the movement" at all.
We considered them "just bourgeois liberals" doing bourgeois liberal things.
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If you want to measure which tactic attracts people, and which repels them...measure how many people are willing to join in using those tactics.
But we were not interested in attracting "just people" as an abstraction; we wanted to attract people willing to confront imperialism.
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While legal demonstrations draw in new forces, including bringing in working people to a movement that was initially student and middle-class.
That may or may not be true.
SDS chapters at elite private universities tended to be middle-class or even higher; at state universities in the mid-west, south and west, many more working class kids were members. The largest SDS chapter on the west coast, for example, was not UC-Berkeley but (I'm pretty sure) San Francisco State...a working class college.
And by 1969 at the latest, there were a few cases when workers approached us for assistance in organizing drives and contract disputes.
In fact, it's interesting how SDS's confrontational "rep" lasted longer than SDS itself. There was a case in 1970 or 71 (I forget which). A Teamster's local was having contract difficulties with the City Sanitation Department. Someone was kind enough to clip and send me the front page of the evening paper there -- with a blazing headline across the top: Teamsters threaten to call in SDS.
I'll always wonder what might have been.
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If we're to take you as a typical member, SDS not only stood aside from the fight against the war, but barely noticed the largest and most important actions.
Well, I don't know how "typical" I was, of course. But I do know that most of us did not consider the ceremonial demonstrations to be "the most important actions"...or even particularly important at all.
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Note that I don't ignore SDS, or refuse to know anything about it, even though its actions were typically much smaller.
"You had to be there", as the saying goes. We were focused on confronting the system...and naturally we didn't have time or motivation to pay much attention to those who weren't.
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I know of no evidence that he'd [Hayden] moved right politically over this period and you've given none.
No, you did. In 1965, Hayden was attacking bourgeois liberalism (the League for Industrial Democracy) as corrupt and manipulative -- this I heard with my own ears at Kewadin. You quoted a source suggesting that he was attempting to promote Gene McCarthy's campaign in 1968...ergo he moved right.
Not that it's a big deal...we both agree that he had nothing to do with SDS by that time anyway.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 23, 2005
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This is a perfect example of something I described in one of my lost posts: the confrontationists realized pretty quickly they couldn't get that many people to volunteer for their adventures. And, as Redstar describes, they usually got stomped by the cops pretty quickly on their own.
So they began looking for ways to force other people into their games. Because, basically, they see most people as sheep to be herded anyway.
This behavior does not describe any SDS action that I ever took part in or ever heard about.
It is true, certainly, that the dynamics of confrontational tactics often result in people taking a more active role than they originally anticipated; the sight of police brutality sometimes makes people very angry and they fight back in a vigorous way.
99.99% of the SDS actions that I participated in involved minimal violence (some pushing and shoving) or no violence at all. In fact, it seemed to me on some occasions that the authorities were slightly "apprehensive" when we showed up and "did not want to provoke us" unnecessarily.
And I never heard of SDS having to "fight its way into" a demonstration of any kind.
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"We demand that our government meet immediately with the National Liberation Front to assure an end to the war - Now!"
That's from a 1966 Communist Party leaflet. Emphasis in original. Seems to me that's still a negotiations demand, regardless of how it's phrased.
Why do you quote this? SDS was not responsible for the old CPUSA's liberal babble.
I remember, in fact, one occasion when a hapless young woman spoke during the course of a debate at an SDS national meeting (sometime in 1968) and began by announcing that she was from the DuBois Club and the CPUSA...the delegates roared with laughter before she could say another word.
If we paid very little attention to the SWP/Mobe, we paid none at all to the CPUSA.
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And was SDS of any help?
I honestly do not know.
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And of course, a number of unions endorsed, and a fair number of union members participated in, antiwar demonstrations.
Undoubtedly true...and in great contrast to SDS actions. I think that if SDS had successfully met and overcome the Leninist-Maoist challenge, we would have developed a distinct working class constituency -- a "Movement for a Democratic Society" (Cleveland and New Orleans actually had chapters named that). But the chance was lost.
(Interestingly enough, in the early to mid-1970s there was a brief movement to publish underground newspapers directed explicitly to a working class audience; a lot of former SDSers took part in this, including me).
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The FBI missed its target audience, there, I guess, since SDS wasn't part of the Mobe.
I never made a close study of COINTELPRO, but, from time to time, we did take notice of what government sources said publicly about SDS and the left...and it was astoundingly inaccurate. People were identified as "key figures" who weren't; organizations were identified as "allies" who hated each other, etc. Was the FBI, etc., lying or were they so inept that they could just never get the details right?
I've often suspected the latter.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 24, 2005
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Since you bring it up, SDS did do something similar at the anti-Rusk demonstration (Nov. 1967) you mentioned earlier. The demonstration was mainly organized by the New York Parade Committee as a legal action, with permits, and the SDS National Office organized forays into the street, giving the cops an excuse to attack the whole demonstration.
That can't be right.
Another user has a post about that...and I was not in New York City during those events and he was.
But the occasion in which Dean Rusk felt a need for a "strategic withdrawal" was at Harvard University...he departed through the steam tunnels to avoid some vigorous criticism from SDS members and supporters. *laughs*
It was actually rather difficult for prominent pro-war speakers to "find a place" where they could be heard without disruption in those years; SDS was "all over" those bastards wherever they showed up.
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In addition, there is the work done around Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience-- which seeks to create and expand a basis of unity for oppositional forces that includes both a basis for very broad unity and a thrust of radical resistance to the system
This strikes me, oddly enough, as quite similar to the Mobe and its successors...and to A.N.S.W.E.R. for that matter. Lots of "movement celebrities", even a politician or two, etc.
There's really nothing "like" SDS at the present time...though one could find some faint echoes of SDS here and there, particularly among some of the young and poorly organized anarchists.
It seems to me that the anti-war movement now is still like things were in 1963 or 1964...yes, there's opposition and some of it is briefly militant, but there's no on-going movement where internal political struggle takes place while at the same time generating continuous resistance to the whole system -- of which the wars are just the most outrageous symptom.
This generation's equivalent of SDS has yet to emerge.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 26, 2005
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And, on the other hand, redstar kinda mourns the fading of the rough-and-tumble campus mass SDS organization, semi-anarchist, etc. And as if the rise of "Leninist-Maoism" was simply an error or even a tragedy.
I think it was both.
An error because Maoism was unsuited to advanced capitalist countries lacking any significant peasantry. If we didn't know that in 1969, we certainly can't help knowing it now since no Maoist group in the "west" has ever been able to achieve even the beginnings of a mass base...unlike SDS.
A tragedy because the splintering of SDS essentially removed that "sense of being part of something bigger" that was (and is!) so necessary to engaging in sustained resistance "in the belly of the beast".
To be sure, the small number of kids who set up Maoist grouplets could identify with Mao's China...so they could "keep on truckin'". But most of those "100,000" or whatever large number who were part of SDS just gradually drifted away.
And even of that minority who did become active Leninist-Maoists, most of them were lost as well. When Mao started hanging out with Richard Nixon...what could they conclude but that "everything" is "fucked"?
I read the other day that the Maoist group in Denmark just dissolved itself. I think that's already taken place in most or nearly all of the advanced capitalist countries. Your party -- the RCP -- is among the very last of the Maoist groups in the "west" that still functions.
And while your commitment and determination to "stay the course" may be admirable, you're really not making any significant breakthroughs these days.
When your newspaper is not talking about Bob Avakian, it sometimes contains some pretty good articles.
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And redstar says he doesn't see anything like SDS today....
And of course, how can I not agree?
But who would want really want a rerun of SDS? (I assume redstar wouldn't either!)
No, organizations "belong" to specific times and conditions and attempts to mechanically reproduce them at a later time usually just end up as farce. (This applies especially, please note, to Leninist parties.)
What is missing today is the equivalent of SDS...a large movement that fulfills the functions that SDS fulfilled and goes even further.
You know that the vast majority of SDS chapters were never "organized" by the National Office; kids heard about SDS actions and spontaneously organized themselves into a chapter...even at "little shit colleges" in the "middle of nowhere".
There's nothing today that inspires people in that way.
And without it, all you end up with is "Mobe-type" formations that are pretty good at getting police permits and chartering buses, fair at getting press coverage and "name speakers", and utterly wretched when it comes to genuine resistance to the despotism of capital.
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We know so much more now! And in particular we have developed and organized revolutionary forces of a caliber that simply didn't exist in the 60s. Now we have a party like the RCP and a leadership like Bob Avakian!
No, you have "a party like the RCP and a leadership like Bob Avakian". Those of us who are not Maoists don't "have" either one.
Fortunately.
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Here are some more things I've written about SDS...
SDS: A Revolutionary Model?
Students for a Democratic Society vs. Leninism
SDS Revisited
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First posted at RevLeft on February 27, 2005
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The disagreement between [the RCPer] and myself is not really a dispute about what occurred: it is a disagreement about whether it is OK to physically attack political gatherings you disapprove of.
In my opinion, it is not OK. Physical force should never be used to settle disagreements within the working-class movement.
Whoa!
In what sense are bourgeois liberals to be legitimately considered "part of the working class movement"?
Why is it "wrong" to attack their meetings or meetings that invited them to speak?
Their purpose, after all, is to divert and weaken the resistance to imperialism.
They are part of the class enemy.
And how far do you want to go with that? Is it "wrong" to physically attack a Nazi meeting? How about when Progressive Labor used to go around attacking those racist "scientists" and trying to bust up their meetings? (I actually thought at the time that that was one of the few "really good things" that PL did.)
I'll grant you your understandable Trotskyist "sensitivities" on this matter; it probably wasn't much fun to have your public meetings attacked by CPUSA goons in the 1930s and 40s.
But you seem to project a view that the domestic struggle against imperialism "was" or "should have been" or "is" some kind of debate at Oxford or Cambridge...in which scholarly decorum and a spirit of disinterested inquiry prevails.
And you must be aware that that is really not the case at all.
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On the tactic generally: nobody could actually prevent these speakers from being heard (heck they got TV) nor is trying to silence your opponents such a great goal anyway...especially when they have a lot more physical means of silencing you than vice versa.
Indeed, they have such means and at Kent State and other schools, they used them.
Nevertheless, from 1966 onwards, I think we radicalized a lot of people by showing that those mandarins were not "untouchable superiors" or "sacred personages" to whom the people "owe deference".
To put it in contemporary terms, imagine if some lefty was invited onto the Bill O'Rilley program to be verbally bullied...and the guy just got up in the middle of the program and punched O'Rilley in the face so hard that the bastard fell out of his chair!
It would be a form of "de-mystification"...showing that deference to the class enemy is not compulsory.
That's what we in SDS did...and the SWP did not.
Did we "alienate" more people than we won over?
I can't say...nor do I think anyone can.
There were polls taken during that period -- and you know how dubious polls can be. Nevertheless, there was at least one in the late 60s suggesting that more than a million college kids thought there was a real need for "a mass revolutionary party" in the United States.
Not a bad half-decade's work.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 28, 2005
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quote:
Excuse me, but you guys keep describing these rallies as SWP-controlled. So is the SWP part of the working-class movement, or not? Does it cease to be part of the working-class movement if a liberal politician, or a union official, is invited to speak?
If you want to maintain the view that the Mobe, et.al., was "not controlled by the SWP", I will not dispute the point...even though I think everyone or nearly everyone in SDS thought that such was the case.
But if you are "part of the working-class movement" and want to be thought of in that regard, what the hell were you doing inviting bourgeois liberals or labor aristocrats to address your meetings?
Or, if you were out-voted and had those kinds of speakers imposed on you by a majority of the coalition, why did you stand for that?
Frankly that seems to me to be extraordinarily unprincipled...like those "anarchists" who were telling us to "vote for Kerry".
You may respond that as an "ultra-leftist" I simply "don't understand" coalition work.
I guess I don't.
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First posted at RevLeft on February 28, 2005
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quote:
It helped build the rally and involve more people, including more workers.
Were they giving you "legitimacy" or were you contributing to their legitimacy?
Do you think that "we are more effective" standing along side bourgeois liberals or labor aristocrats or that "they are more effective" because we've helped them polish their "creds" as "real opponents" of things as they are?
Is it in our class interests to make some of our enemies "look better" than they actually are?
Why?
quote:
...how could you function in the unions without working with some labor officials sometimes?
Good question...and rather far off-topic. We're talking here, presumably, of inviting some labor aristocrats to speak at an anti-war rally...and tell us "why" we should support the Democratic Party.
Do we need to hear that?
Again, why?
quote:
Please, explain to me how the elected leaders of the largest workers' organizations in this country are not part of the workers' movement.
That's an easy one. Union leaders have learned from the bourgeoisie how to fake elections. (Only if they "have to", of course.)
Some unions probably still retain faint traces of the 1930s and 40s...a curious and almost archaic respect for the will of the membership.
But I expect most of them are about as "democratic" as the Congress of the United States.
Surely it must have occurred to you by now that we need "a new CIO"...that what we have now is a lap-dog labor "movement" run by capitalist lackeys and/or outright thieves.
quote:
The liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats were, under pressure of the growing movement, endorsing our position, not us theirs.
No, you were not endorsing their ideas...you were endorsing their legitimacy. You were saying, in effect, that these people "are our allies" and "worthy of our respect".
Neither one of those things was true then, of course, much less now.
quote:
What principle is being broken exactly?
The principle of not knowingly entering into an alliance with the class enemy.
quote:
If principle was the criterion, no tendency other than communists would qualify.
And by no means all of them. *laughs*
Seriously, I think this dispute can only be resolved in terms of what kind of movement do you want to build?
A liberal and ceremonial anti-war coalition will be, perforce, led by liberal politicians, labor aristocrats, clergymen, and such scum.
A radical and confrontational resistance will have a different constituency and produce different kinds of leaders with different kinds of ideas.
And in the ordinary course of events, "never the twain shall meet".
quote:
My question is, do you think it's OK to settle this disagreement with goon-squad methods? Mr. Anti-authoritarian?
I think I'd take it on a "case-by-case" basis. I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to put a lot of time and energy into bashing liberal "anti-war" gatherings on a systematic basis...but I might be willing to make an occasional exception when especially provoked.
If, as was indicated, the coalition invited Mayor John Lindsay to speak in the immediate aftermath of a violent police attack on the Black Panther Party...well, that's pretty provocative. I can see a lot of SDSers and their sympathizers (hardly "goons") being pretty pissed off by something as brazen as that.
And a point I've made before: I'm not anti-authoritarian when it comes to the class enemy.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 1, 2005
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quote:
They [bourgeois liberal politicians] came out against the war, under the pressure of growing popular opposition, in order to polish their image. Excluding them from antiwar actions won't stop that. Demanding they vote against funding the war, then, might help...
I think this is a pretty revealing statement; you (and presumably your party) still imagine that "portions" of the class enemy can "do something useful".
In Marx's time, that was true. In the present time, it may well be true in the semi-capitalist provinces of the empire.
I don't see how any case can be made for that in the advanced capitalist countries...not in the 1960s and certainly not now.
If they do anything "progressive" now, it's almost sure to be an unintended consequence of something reactionary.
quote:
After winning that battle, we're going to turn around and exclude the liberals and labor officials...which really means excluding ourselves, as they still had a bigger following among working people? Nonsensical.
Is that how you decide "who to exclude"? If some group has a "mass following" among workers, then "they're in"?
No matter what their politics???
quote (Peter Camejo):
And to those politicians who are joining the bandwagon, this antiwar movement is not for sale. This movement is not for sale now, not in 1970 and not in 1972.
The movement may not have been for sale, but he was. *laughs*
quote:
For me, the workers' movement is just that. It involves actual workers, and their organizations, whatever I may think of the leadership. If middle-class leftist groups are included, it's because they still have some relationship to the workers organizations.
Ok, there's nothing intrinsically "wrong" with a purely pragmatic definition...but there are certainly logical consequences of that view. When you try to analyze the existing trade unions (in the United States) "as a movement", you're in trouble. They don't act like one. At all!
In fact, the leaders most closely resemble a "temp agency"...renting out collective labor power and raking off a commission.
quote:
For you, it seems to mean something else, defined in ideological not class terms. "Communism is not a doctrine but a MOVEMENT; it proceeds not from principles but from FACTS..... Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle, and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat." Remember? The class and the class struggle come first, ideology is just a reflection of that.
There have certainly been times when that would have been a pretty good description...and I expect those times to come again.
But at the moment, that description just doesn't fit the facts...at least in the U.S. Class struggle continues to take place...but it's almost completely fragmented and disorganized. The "position of the proletariat in this struggle" is one of almost complete demoralization.
And, in fact, this has been the situation among the American proletariat since Taft-Hartley and McCarthyism...over a half-century of pretty much nothing.
Granted that in other countries, the description makes a good deal more sense.
quote:
Excuse me, when did it become a principle that communists can never work with any capitalist force, for any purpose whatsoever?
You mean do I have an "authority" to "quote from"? No. (Maybe I could find some good quotes if I looked for them...but at the moment I don't feel like going to the trouble.)
I think that it's a good principle to follow because I don't see anything to be gained by alliances with the class enemy (or portions thereof) in the advanced capitalist countries.
In the semi-capitalist countries, it may make sense to work with "progressive bourgeois elements"...if you can find some.
In the advanced capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie is entirely reactionary.
Schemes to "use" the rivalries between different reactionaries "for our benefit" will, in my opinion, always come to grief.
quote:
I see. What a "principled" basis for action...it depends on how mad you are.
It's the same thing that often motivates a wildcat strike. "How mad you are" is a perfectly legitimate basis for taking an unusual action...up to and including revolution itself.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 1, 2005
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quote:
And this example brings up one of the points of tension between proletarian dictatorship and workers' democracy: who decides what's the class enemy and what's a disagreement withing the working class?
Well, at least in the eyes of this ultra-leftist, "everyone" decides except that the old ruling class and its lackeys don't get a vote.
Or even a voice.
I think, for example, that ruling class politicians are part of the class enemy by definition.
Some might disagree with me or say that "most are...but this one isn't".
And we'd struggle over that bone of contention. Eventually, there'd be a clear winner and a clear loser...though the issue might come up over and over again.
I think time "is on my side" on this one...but the struggle continues.
quote:
Under Stalinism, all disagreement is typically labeled pro-capitalist.
Indeed it was...often without a shred of justification or evidence. (Note that "dialectics" was very useful in Stalinist polemics -- "left in form; right in content" was a phrase that was used frequently.)
In my opinion, pro-capitalist ideas do resurface time and time again even among people who are sincerely committed to revolutionary politics. Those ideas do need to be struggled against...openly and in a principled way. Real evidence and arguments must be provided.
Nevertheless, lines must be drawn...if you don't do that, then things get hopelessly muddled. And you end up with "anarchists for Kerry" and "marxists for imperialism".
quote:
Yes, that's the primary criterion.
Like I said before, if the decision was made on the basis of politics, communists would be working with no-one but ourselves.
Well, there are a fair number of workers who are involved in or at least support groups that combine Christian Fascism and a sort of populist neo-protectionism...would you include them as a legitimate part of "the workers' movement"?
quote:
...nothing an individual does decades later can erase all the positive contributions they ever made. That's part of the Stalinist tradition too: airbrushing people out of the photos, publishing lists of "counterrevolutionary maggots" and so forth.
"Counter-revolutionary maggots"? That's a good one; I'll have to remember that one for later use. *laughs*
Actually, I'm treating Camajo in the same way you treated Hayden. Decades of "bad politics" do tend to overshadow early "positive contributions".
I don't think that's "Stalinist"...it's just human.
You know...what have you done for me lately?
quote:
One more time: the union is the membership.
Idealist. The "union" is what it does.
It ain't the name that determines social identity, it's the social practice.
Lots of workers are members of the Catholic Church; that doesn't make the church a union.
quote:
But thanks for the clarification: if Redstar says, the workers' movement, he's not talking about actual workers or their organizations.
Maybe, maybe not. What I will be talking about when I use the phrase "the workers' movement" are those particular workers and those particular organizations that act like a workers' movement.
It is most unlikely that I will be using the phrase anytime soon with regard to the United States...we don't have one.
quote:
Something can be the expression of workers' struggle at some times, but not others?
Off hand, I don't see why not.
quote:
What you call "communism" is NOT in reality the expression of the workers' struggle.
Well, you want to argue the opposite position? Where are the working class communists in the U.S.? I agree, they exist in Europe...but where are ours?
Communism in North America is the ideology of a small number of intellectuals...and that's about it. They probably number less than 5,000 people...in a country of nearly 300,000,000.
quote:
Communism is not an ideology, a doctrine, a vision, or a plan for a future society. It is the expression of the struggle of the working class, in the present, or it is nothing.
-- emphasis added.
Then, by your definition, it's nothing.
What else can you reasonably conclude?
quote:
Its theory is the generalization of the experience of past struggle, guiding that present struggle, or it is not communist theory.
We "guide" nothing.
quote:
Its perspective on the future is a continuation of the line of march of the working class through those past and present struggles, or it is not a communist view on that future.
There is nothing left to "continue" save a small number of tiny Leninist museums and their curators.
We are at zero in the present period. All we have to build on are Marx's ideas and a lengthy list of other ideas that didn't work.
quote (The Communist Manifesto):
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
When those words were written, those were goals...not a description of reality.
They were excellent goals and fully worthy of striving to achieve...and still are.
But to speak as if they have been achieved is just fantasy -- especially in the United States.
quote:
That's what distinguishes and defines communists. That's all. Not militancy, not radicalism, not a willingness to confront the ruling class, not super-revolutionary rhetoric, or anything like that. Those qualities - and everything else - are only good when, and to the extent that, they advance the line of march of the working class.
Well, the working class in the U.S. has mostly been marching backwards for the last half-century -- that's a fact.
We in SDS concluded that "the forward march" would have to be done by us...and we (or at least some of us) hoped this would awaken the working class to its historic tasks.
We were not successful in that regard...but we tried. So did the SWP and a lot of other groups...with no more lasting success to show for their efforts than we had.
I certainly expect that there will be future groups that will do a lot better than we did; but I'm convinced that they will have to build a resistance to the despotism of capital that is even more radically intransigent than we in SDS were.
There's just no hope in any other course.
quote:
If your view of the state of the class struggle was true, communism would be impossible.
Communism is "impossible" until the working class itself becomes communist.
That is not happening yet...if it were, it would show!
quote:
The historical fact is a great deal was gained by holding common actions with forces that supported capitalism but opposed the war.
Bah! What was "gained"?
The U.S. pulled out because its own army was becoming unreliable.
Bourgeois liberalism had nothing to do with the matter.
quote:
Only if you're fighting to lose.
Lose your temper in the ring, wake up on the canvas.
Probably true. Fortunately, revolutions are not "like" boxing matches. We Americans do love our sports metaphors and use them constantly...and almost always inappropriately.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 7, 2005
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It seems to me that you are taking this thread further and further away from the original topic...but I will try to follow as best I can.
quote:
Which is why the Bolsheviks didn't ban the Mensheviks, SRs, etc until they took up arms against the Soviet government.
If one were to take your criteria and draw the logical conclusion, they woulda.
The working class in Russia was a small minority of the total population -- I believe, if memory serves me, that the country was 80% peasants.
I don't think this has much relevance to a proletarian revolution in a country where the working class is in the overwhelming majority.
By "lackeys of the capitalist class", I'm not referring to a generic group but rather to those identifiable individuals who directly served as agents of the enemy class...such as, for example, all bourgeois liberal politicians and (most? nearly all?) trade union bureaucrats.
quote:
You seem to be taking back, when it comes to brass tacks, a correct statement you once made in abstract principle: that the dictatorship of the proletariat should not be used as a weapon in disagreements within the working class.
I don't think that's true...but since neither of us will be around to see how things turn out, I don't see how such a disagreement could be resolved.
quote:
The attack was against the antiwar movement, not against those politicians.
Naturally, you would interpret it that way. But is it not at least equally possible that those who attacked liberal politicians at anti-war demonstrations did so precisely because they disputed their right to speak to that audience?
After all, what has been the historical fate of rebellious or potentially rebellious movements in capitalist countries? They get co-opted by bourgeois liberal reformists. It's happened so many times that bourgeois sociologists think it's a kind of "law".
You may disapprove of ultra-leftist efforts to stop that from happening by shouting them down or running them out of "left" gatherings; you may not think that's "the best way" to handle the problem.
But how did it help matters when groups like the SWP invited those counter-revolutionary maggots to speak?
Why did you want to give them a platform for their dirty work?
I'll bet you didn't even trash them after they spoke; I'll bet no one from the SWP who followed a bourgeois liberal to the microphone said words to the effect of "that bastard who just spoke is a turd; disregard every word he said!".
The more I think about it, the more I find the SWP's version of an "anti-war movement" simply incomprehensible.
quote:
I mean, if somebody at work has right-wing ideas or supports one of these groups, you still gotta treat him/her as a union brother/sister, if possible.
I didn't. In fact, in the places where I worked, I baited and taunted right-wingers frequently. Of course, I did have an advantage...most of my co-workers were "friendly" to left ideas and thought right-wingers were nutballs or worse.
And yeah, the righties would go whining to the boss and I'd catch an occasional reprimand and, in one place, I got fired.
That's life.
quote:
Incidentally, most fascist, or other ultrarightist, groups are not all that working-class in membership as far as I can tell. That seems to be more of a middle-class liberal preconception: those people are ignorant inbred rednecks, not like us superior well-educated people. It's even claimed by some that the German Nazis had a major working-class following, which is clearly contrary to fact.
There may be something to what you say. The German Nazis did get some support from the working class...but I think it came mostly from towns and small cities where even social democracy was weak. In the U.S. at present, I think that a worker in Texas would be much more likely to be sympathetic to a Christian fascist viewpoint than a worker in San Francisco. But we really have no data to work with on a question like this.
quote:
What who does, the bureaucracy, or the membership? You say the former, I say the latter.
No, that's a false distinction in my view. A "union" is a real union only if it acts like one. If a rowdy membership forces the leadership into militant actions, fine. If a progressive leadership drags a passive membership into militant actions, also fine. The union is what it does.
A corrupt leadership and a passive membership "lose their certification" in my opinion.
quote:
The class struggle had to take a detour around one of its main routes, the organized working class....due to the roadblock posed by the strength of the labor bureaucracy during a prolonged period of capitalist prosperity. But, it was able to advance nevertheless.
???
quote:
First, the civil rights movement, a movement of workers mostly, which dealt some heavy blows against divisions enforced on our class. Later, movements of Chicanos and other oppressed nationalities, mostly proletarian in character.
No doubt the workers who were part of various oppressed ethnic/cultural minorities benefited indirectly from the assorted civil rights movements to one extent or another.
But to suggest the gains that those movements made were "proletarian" in content seems to me to be really "stretching it".
quote:
By the late 70s, a recovery in union struggles themselves was evident.
Clearly, our class gained ground in the 60s and 70s...one cannot reasonably say it was retreating. The advance just took an atypical route.
Well, if you say so. I lived through those years and I didn't notice any startling improvements or any abrupt changes for "the better".
In fact, it was during the 70s that I started to notice a decline...or at lease a cessation of the "every year will get a little better" phenomenon.
quote:
In other words, [SDS] declared themselves the vanguard and attempted to substitute for the masses. Exactly what you are always mistakenly accusing Leninists of doing.
We "declared" no such thing...although an argument could be made that by taking the initiative ourselves, we were acting "as if" we were a "vanguard party".
We never suggested, however, that we were appointed by history to rule the post-revolutionary society.
As to Leninist theory and practice, you know better.
quote:
Which convinced more and more young men, even before they went over, that the war was not worth fighting.
I see...the SWP "gets the credit" for convincing young men that the war was "not worth fighting". The daily bad news from the front had nothing to do with it.
Oookaay.
quote:
That's all about influencing mass opinion, exactly what the confrontationists disdained in favor of small street fights which they hoped would radicalize a handful.
More than a handful, I think the record would show.
quote:
Note as well that it was the SWP, before and more than any other group, which refused to write off the ranks of the army as hopelessly pro-war, and sought to do political work among working people in uniform.
I did a little googling on this subject...and it sort of looks as if anti-war pacifist types were the most active in this arena of work.
Now and then I would run into an anti-war vet...but I just treated them like everybody else I would meet in movement circles.
I did know one ex-SDSer who was very active in this area...unfortunately, he had become a cop after the collapse of SDS -- and caused real problems for people in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
quote:
There's been a lot of talk in this thread about supporting the NLF.
Very little, actually.
quote:
Despite their political problems, they were actually fighting a war against U.S. imperialism, and knew who was helping them by making it harder for Uncle Sam to continue or escalate that war. They clearly regarded as very important, the mass demonstrations you deride. They repeatedly endorsed, the immediate withdrawal slogans some label "liberal."
Yes, that's true. They were "focused" -- to the point where when asked about their views of May 1968 in Paris, they responded that they hoped whatever happened would not interfere with the negotiations (about the shape of the table, as I recall).
quote:
If they thought any of the NLF flag-wavers or "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" chanters were significant enough to notice, let alone invite, I never heard about it.
Neither did I...they never invited me or anyone I knew.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 8, 2005
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quote:
There's a pretty limited amount to say about the original topic - SDS and the antiwar movement - given that SDS was in reality peripheral to the antiwar movement, and wasn't even in existence during the movement's peak years, 1970-71.
Actually, the original topic was the "legacy" of SDS...you have emphasized the anti-war movement because the SWP didn't, evidently, do much else.
Yes, we were certainly "peripheral" to your ritual demonstrations as you were peripheral to our confrontations.
And sure, you can take as much credit as you like for your "effectiveness" and your "invitations from Hanoi", etc....if it makes you feel better.
I was there and saw a very different picture...and others will decide to what extent our respective views are relevant to the present day.
Note that the SWP approach is dominant now in groups like ANSWER and NION, etc. And since you have, at present, no "SDS ultra-leftists" to contend with, you have a perfect opportunity to demonstrate your "effectiveness" without fear of being attacked by SDS "goons" or undermined by "SDS crazies".
We'll see how you do.
quote:
You just did. "We in SDS concluded that "the forward march" would have to be done by us". Earlier you said that you considered yourselves and your (rather narrow BTW) constituency to be the mass movement.
Sounds to me exactly like declaring SDS the vanguard, or worse, the whole movement.
"The whole movement" among white students is closer to the mark; many of us thought of SDS as a natural counter-part to the Black Panthers and other ethnic/cultural groups that raised revolutionary perspectives in their various constituencies.
Trying to pin the "vanguard" label on us is really fruitless...we simply did not think in those terms. Only after SDS disintegrated did some ex-SDSers move on to "vanguard" politics.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 9, 2005
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quote:
I gotta say if SDS was important in some other respect, you haven't done a particularly good job of explaining how. Or on the local or campus actions, given any detailed firsthand account of any of those actions. That might actually give some value to your having been there; instead you've just used it for an "argument from authority".
Well, compared to you, I am an "authority"...though very far from an "ultimate authority". You are working from a text by Fred Halstead -- someone who had a line very different from SDS and who therefore painted SDS in, shall we say, "less than glowing" colors.
A "Stalinist" is not expected (by grownups) to write a particularly reliable account of "Trotskyism" or vice versa.
Likewise, one who advocates a coalition with liberal politicians is not going to look kindly upon others who advocated a fairly forceful confrontation with bourgeois liberalism.
In my opinion, the SWP wanted us to be foot-soldiers for their coalitions...and never forgave us for flatly refusing to do that.
What seems to particularly irritate you is that there seems to be some interest in SDS now...while interest is lagging in the kind of ceremonial demonstrations which the SWP once championed.
I think discontent with ritual opposition to the war in Iraq is stirring...and that's reflected in an emerging interest in SDS's historical achievements, limited though they certainly were.
What we did -- in our "anarchic" fashion -- was shock the whole country with the actual presence of an intransigent opposition "to the American way".
All of it.
I'm not sure even the CPUSA at its "height" actually did that much (though it did other admirable things, of course). Perhaps you'd have to go all the way back to the IWW itself to find a comparable impact.
Of course, we failed. Nearly all revolutionary efforts fail.
And yet, we were the last people to even raise the possibility in the United States...however "unrealistic" we might have been in that regard.
That is something that no "historians" can take away from us.
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First posted at RevLeft on March 9, 2005
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