Structural Debate in SDS: Organizing the Organizers
Posted by Mike E on August 14, 2008
by Hegemonik
(Hegemonik is a revolutionary activist and currently a delegate to the interim National Working Committee of SDS.
SDS after Maryland: We must decide and do it well
The following are general impressions of the SDS National Convention. It is from my own perspective as a member of SDS. It’s also by no means complete, as supporting documents like the minutes and notes from various meetings. Those should be available sometime shortly.
The 2008 National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society in College Park, MD is only just beginning to get out of my bloodstream. There’s an excitement around SDS’s members, clearly evident from all the Facebook status updates, where it feels that we’ve managed to really pull it off — we’ve managed to take this assortment of chapters, regions, working groups and caucuses and integrate them together into a real national student organization.
Students for a Democratic Society was built originally by a few concerned activists, eager to create and nurture an organization that in turn could create and nurture broad liberation movements – while maintaining some level of autonomy for the youth who make it possible to have a radical (dare I say it, revolutionary) youth movement. But soon we ran into the trail of “if only’s”: if only we could join together the scattered efforts of direct action and protest into something larger than ourselves then we could move mountains; if only we could discuss and decide for ourselves a common political orientation then we could join those scattered efforts; if only we could manage to do all this without resort to crude sloganeering, then we would be able to make some decisions for ourselves.
For some two years now, it’s been apparent that SDS’ers can if only ourselves but for so long before it becomes an excuse for inaction or thoughtless acting out. By the National Convention in Maryland, I believe we came to a common understanding that we have to match our audacity to declare ourselves in a righteous common struggle against capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism with some actual means for pursuing these common struggles.
The breakthrough in College Park was to stop the train of “if only’s” and say – how do we do this? What do we already have to do this? What do we need to build into them in order to make it all work?
What we had were Regions, Working Groups and Caucuses — which ended up being the bedrock of the structure which passed.
* Regions worked to inform SDS’s functioning on a national level by accounting for commonalities amongst chapters within a given geographic area (say, the Northeast) while also accounting for the difference between several areas (say, the difference between the Northeast and Southeast). Here the traditional tension is that the areas of the country in which the struggle is hot and vital are the very same areas of the country where the Left has typically divested itself of the responsibility to struggle. So the question for SDS nationally was how best can we work to shift weight (metaphorically) from an area like the Northeast — with tons of SDS chapters and lots of Lefty institutions — to a place like the Southeast where the Left is typically disorganized, isolated, under attack, and where the law is often on the side of the bad guys (such as in the case of Right-to-Work laws?)
* Working groups on the national level are task-oriented sets of members who do specific work across the country which is in the interest of the whole. An example from my own experience has been the SDS News Bulletin working group, which publishes the News Bulletin and acts as an informal publications arm for SDS. Here the tension (and again, this is from my own experience) is between our reliance on technocracy — having the people who can make things happen due to pre-existing skills — and our need and desire to function democratically — that is, having the input of those who don’t necessarily have skills, but who should logically have a say.
* Caucuses work to ensure that various constituencies within SDS and within our milieu are addressed and acted upon. An example being the People of Color Caucus. The question before us was whether the Caucuses should simply exist in Conventions (as breakout groups of people who shared some oppressed status), or if they should have some ongoing life beyond the Convention.
What in the end passed was an integration agreement where we decided to put these existing structures — by themselves parts of an organization — underneath a common roof, which is the National Working Committee. How was that done?
* The National Working Committee acts as a pool of representatives generated from the aforementioned structures, which together compose a decision-making body of general administrative and basic political accountability. Their vote will serve mainly as a metaphorical punctuation mark — be it comma, period, question mark or exclamation point — to the sentence that begins with members speaking up about matters of importance to SDS.
* Regions have the bulk of representatives in the National Working Committee, delegated and charged with their duties by a given region. Here we have a formula for representation that’s progressive, in that it provides disproportionately large representation to relatively unorganized areas in which SDS functions — mainly, so that they can get organized — while still affording larger regions the most reps numerically.
* Working Groups will each have a delegate sent to the National Working Committee, so as to account for their activities to the broader organization, while also being able to draw upon the insights and wisdom of reps chosen from the more democratically chosen Regions.
* Finally, Caucuses will get a vote (divided amongst however many reps are chosen, up to three), so that marginalized groups — women, People of Color, queer folks, etc. — can be assured of the National Working Committee is accountable to their constituents’ interests.
The proposal for this passed by a pretty large margin — it was well over the 2/3rds majority needed — and as I recall there was a feeling of relief that this sprawling organization of Students for a Democratic Society had come to an agreement that we don’t just agree with, but which emerged organically from the work we’ve done.
Of course, this is but a momentary rest. Structure as it will play out in SDS can’t function as simply a debating society or a talk-shop; it will have to be a platform on which the politics of the organization play out, and where the collective wisdom of the organization assembled to help guide decisions of the organization. To that end, there are consultative bodies and functions which will be used to glean whatever insights come from the full membership and hold people accountable. In the end, we must invoke that line from the Internationale: we must decide and do it well.
@ said
Ah! The early formation of an sds proto-bureaucracy! This must be a truly exciting development for the various stalinoids among us!
zerohour said
@ -
Could you present an actual argument, minus the stale terminology?
ShineThePath said
I don’t want to play out the same debate that is perpetual about whether or not we need leadership or some sort of organizational structure, in fact the debate is becoming quickly a dead one for most people in SDS and most people doing national work around it.
Lets just be brief about this.
I won’t whip out my Engel’s “On Authority” or Jo Freeman or show the numerous examples where anarchism has historically shown itself to either gain no traction, confused its enemies and friends, or turn into an essentially “Verticalist” model of organization.
Its beyond the topic. What is important here is what does structure mean for SDS, what does organization mean for us all, and what does SDS want to achieve? Rather than being a loose network of various local chapters with only a name to share, SDS has already embarked on the possibility of doing coherent and meaningful national work. Rather than this being a project of the supposed “stalinoids,” it was a task taken up by a broad spectrum of members in SDS, most who have already various connections and history extending to anarchist lead movements and groupings.
It its through the experience of doing this, that many SDSers’ have made their leap in understanding, we need more than a name.
And lets be real, “proto-bureaucracy?” What world are you really living in? An organization of freely associating chapters composed of people in a transitional stage of their life – being students, being young – can’t develop this “bureaucracy.” The argument that makes analogy of an organized grouping of revolutionaries to that of the Bourgeois State is simply bankrupt.
But further, this notion of the “bureaucracy” is simply an a-political critique, whether coming from Anarchists, Trotskyists, or from Ron Paul. It is essentially a bonified indicator for lack of depth in thought.
To extent my possible argument to its logical conclusion…
Lacan to Orwell “There is no big Other, and there surely ain’t no Big Brother.”
redflags said
Brother @ will likely not be presenting a serious argument, which is itself a fine argument. Refusing to challenge the basic underpinnings of right-wing anti-communism is pretty entrenched in some (which is to say only some) of the anarchist politics in this country. While I did pick up an apology for Stalin (by Ludo Martens) at the FRSO-Fight Back table, it wasn’t exactly a rousing pitch that has weight among SDSers from what I saw… nor did these folks seem intent on pushing this beyond the provocation of putting such a book on their table. Which is to say, that unless Brother @ thinks the overwhelming majority of attendees at the National Convention were Stalinists, which he full well might considering his basic political confusion, then there isn’t much to worry about on that score.
The underlying structural issue in SDS seemed a confusion between representation and administration. The idea that there is ANY body that coordinates national work, communications and the agreed upon projects of SDS is anathema to some folks stems from confusing administration of decisions with imposition of authoritarian leadership.
From debates over voting super majorities to an insistence that all political debates be framed as structure/process issues – its not surprising that a group dedicated to participatory democracy should have these back and forths. What’s good to see is the seriousness with which concerns were addressed and workable ways forward developed collectively even where trust was not there. It’s a good sign.
The old SDS has three national officers at any given time. Sometimes they were leaders of the organization, other times they were trusted administrators – but rarely was the action in the National Office. Instead it was where it should be: out in the chapters and among the student body. The form was not what determined the function of these offices, no more back when than now. Their function changed with the circumstances, maturity, developed politics and the kind of experience that Hegemonik and Freddy are discussing.
Let’s put it another way: centralism and decentralism have far less intrinsic political character than some would think. In American history, centralism has often been the pre-requisite for anything like democratic rights – particularly given the peculiar institutions of the South. Who here hasn’t heard the right-wing rebel yell of “states rights” or the creationists lust for local control of school boards. The enemy believes in participation too, believe it or not!
On the flip side, centralism can and often is a plain tyranny in the service of the ruling groups. Think about Russian history, no matter the political flavor of the state – the strong center is tied to the imperial reality of Russia as a nation-state.
Treating form for function is a way of never solving the problem, but insisting on one form or another just… because!
What’s funny about these discussions in SDS, from what I can gather, is that those most bent out of shape in opposition to any kind of functional national structure are exactly the same people who want to impose their own particular vision on the majority of the organization that disagrees. This isn’t a new phenom. At the national convention, the same votes were had over and over, slipped back in with new language, to strip any functional administrative ability between national conferences. The demand for super majorities didn’t themselves seem all that concerned that this proposal was not supported by a super majority… and so on.
Underneath these process debates was a truly radical, if largely inchoate opposition to imperialism and the semi-democratic political structure of the United States. This was what united the students no matter which side of the debates they were on. Yet these over-arching political issues were given short shrift compared to the internal structural debates.
This is itself a way of framing political arguments so that no matter how people vote, the inward focus and various formalisms take precedence over the very real power structures outside the organization that compel resistance and action beyond people looking for meetings and leftist subculture (which is to say just about everyone!).
Part of this is bound up in the anarchist histrionics about how “true” or “authentic” democracy is always “betrayed.” So while some move to student politics and radicalism to fight the whole state of affairs, others see their main task as managing other activists into the right vocabulary, personal habits and voting processes. Instead of “authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian”, these tensions are better understood as “outward politics versus inward self-cultivation”.
It’s worth remembering that in the old SDS, it was actually PL that won the “participatory” democratic votes and the RYM I and RYM II forces who walked out of the convention. PL had awful politics relative to the rest of the student movement at that point, but still won the votes because they were all about the formalism.
SDS exists. It has some remarkable young people involved, and with that said also carries far more leftist baggage than is healthy for a student group that aims to find the forms to activate this far-too-quiet generation. This is where radical students are gathering, learning and moving forward.
There must be a far more outward focus. That is what will draw the active element into activity and discussion. Not an inward focus on creating a dystopian mini-utopia of all-day process meetings.
_________
Literally every political force in SDS supports chapter autonomy, with a diversity of tactics and approaches. It couldn’t function any other way. Nobody is trying to create a national body that imposes political decisions on local groups, and even if there were they would have absolutely no means to enforce it. Seen in this light, the attempts to sap democratically decided national bodies from having basic administrative functions is a way of keeping SDS from growing beyond a self-selecting group of students who identify with radicalism into a radical political force with which millions can identify.
It’s not top-down versus bottom-up: it’s inward versus outward.
Dave said
Kind of off-topic, but provoked by some of Redflag’s comments – I’ve noticed that the one thing that new SDS’ers of all political stripes seem to be unanimous about is that PLP was a terrible thing.
I’ve been involved in some of the activities of the SDS chapter at my school (not the organization itself or any of the national-level organizing discussed here), and one of my friends’ dads is/was a PLP member.
I don’t really agree with a lot of PLP’s politics (especially their current hysterical politics, which cause them to be a tiny isolated ultra-left sect), but I also don’t quite understand why everybody is so anti-PLP.
In spite of their many mistakes, it seems like PLP made an effort to build an actual mass movement. You can disagree with their line of “fight nationalism” – which was really just taking the side of Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin, although, of course, PLP would never own up to it – but you’ve got to admit that it has more merit than Weatherman’s line of “fight the people.”
I don’t intend to defend all of PLP’s errors, which were and are too numerous to list, but it seems strange that so many new SDS’ers seem to hold in high regard people like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn – who not only followed a completely and totally absurd and destructive political line in the 60’s and 70’s (idolizing Charles Manson, for instance), but who are now squarely part of the Chicago bourgeois establishment – while vilifying PLP veterans like my friend’s dad, who is a retired steelworker and history teacher.
It’s not my intention to resurrect any ancient feuds, but why is there so much unanimity that the PLP was a bad thing? It seems like, at least in their early years, they did some good work.
Mike E said
dAve raises important points and important questions. Here, to spur the discussion are several observations from history. And in passing, i’d just like to note that I was in and around SDS (and then RYM2) during much of this time, and watched these struggles very closely — and was myself involved in some sharp struggle with an influential PLP chapter on my campus at that time.
1) PLP was themajor anti-revisionist and pro-Maoist party in the U.S. in the early sixties (having left the CPUSA as this great 2-line struggle swept over the international communist movement.)
2) Their militant youth group (May 2nd Movement – M2M) entered SDS at one point during the 60s — a few circles of revolutionary youth entering a growing mass organizaiton that was heavily marked by social democracy (witness its name!)
3) Overall, in the earliest days, PLP played a good role in injecting anti-imperialist and revolutionary and their semi-maoist communist politics and the question of class (and the working class) INTO SDS and the radical student scene.
4) The nature and role of PLP changed radically (in one moment, in fact) when durring the San Francisco State strike the national leadership announced a very basic change of line — that PLP thought that all nationalism was reactionary, and that the demands of the Black liberation struggle were to be increasingly opposed as reactionary. (This included demands for affirmative action and ethnic studies — in the universities that had excluded studies of black history and non-white populations etc.)
5) There is an analogy here: this proportedly communist organization suddenly placed itself in opposition to some of the most important, radical and influential currents arising from the people — the Black Liberatin struggle. It was quite a bit like the RCP entering the 1980s (so deeply marked by the AIDS crisis) and announcing that all gay people were marked by reactionary politics and bourgeois decadence and could not be part of the revolutionary party. In other words, PLP’s change of line was intensely wrong, and reactionary, and infuriated revolutionary minded people (including me at the time, who was a Maoist student.)
6) PLP’s line on “all nationalism is reactionary” also let them to make bizarre twists on the Vietnam war — saying that countries like Vietnam needed “workers revolution for socialism” not national liberatoin. That waging a broad united front against imperialism was revisionist. And they argued that entering into negotiations with the U.S. was reactionary (since in their logic: the U.S> was the enemy and needed to be defeated, so what was there to negotiate). this (rather crude and anti-marxist) view led them to start to denounce the Vietnamese revolutionaries. (Including in a famous quote where a PLP leader said “we struggle, struggle, struggle, and the Vietnamese sell us out.”)
there is an analogy here to the RCP’s mechanical and arrogant view of the Nepali Maoists decision to negotiate with reactionary parties as a component of the anti-monarchist struggle, and as part of preparing new leaps toward power and new democracy.
7) And finally, PLP adoped an extreme form of economism — that insisted that really only the struggles of workers matter. I remember going to May Day for Bobby Seale in New Haven — a massive revolutionary demonstration in 1970 demanding freedom for the black panther leader (who was on trial for his life). students went from all over the U.S> prepared to fight and even die for Bobby seale, and the center of New Haven were filled with street fighting, as teargas and the treatment of the injured filled Yale University.
In the middle of all that, PLP mobilized its (then considerable) supperter base in their splinter of SDS (Worker-student Alliance SDS — WSASDS) to go to Yale university in New Haven — not to support the Panthers, or the revolultionary Black liberation struggle, BUT TO RALLY IN SUPPORT OF A FEW PAINTERS HELPERS on the staff of Yale who had gotten fucked over in some firing or job posting dispute.
In other words, the story of PLP is a case of a revolutionary group that started off in a promising way, and even played an important early role in promoting revolutionary and Maoist ideas (in a U.S. where no one knew much about this.) And who then (in a very quirky sequence of line changes) set themselves AGAINST the most revolutionary elements of actioin, organization and thinking among the masses of people (the black liberaiton struggle, and the anti-imperialist support for Vietnam’s national liberation struggle).
In that way they earned the hatred of many people, and found themselves isolated from previous allies.
And their opponents within sDS formed the Revolutionary Youth Movement (that included the forces that later became the October League, the RU/RCP, the Weather Underground and other groups lie Sojourner Truth.)
There is, of course more to say…
but i think this can raise some elements of the history, and also suggest ways that history is relevant today.
Revolutionary communists can play a very very important seeding role within radical student movements — especially when conditions are ripening. And revolutionary parties can through political influence and opportunities away by moving in dogmatic and backward ways, and isolating themselves from the forward revolutionary development.
The switch of the RCP to its “Avakian as cardinal question” has reminded me in a number of ways of the PLP’s switch in line — adopting positions that were wrong (on their own merits) and that instantly produced a sharp “ew factor” from broad numbers of emerging revolutionary people of the new generation.
hegemonik said
Just a brief note:
Any nincompoop with a keyboard can press shift-2 and come out with a squiggly “a”. I don’t want to belabor this point, but it’s been clear through my years with SDS that there are more than enough — ahem — @ssholes, who have worked to pit SDS’ers against each other.
I would like to say, that IMHO — the significance of SDS’ers settling upon their structure and how they run their affairs is that, in this day and age, an organization that authentically springs out of its own constituency is rare. Even more rare is an organization that takes its radicalism seriously enough to do the work of settling what work gets done and how, without some grant-maker saying “This is what you’ll do and how you will do it.”
We’re radicals in a time where George Soros types can color code themselves a bunch of little regime changes and call them revolutions according to their fancy, so it’s important that SDS have a structure in place to make sure that 1) our politics is real and operating through our organization, and 2) it’s our politics, and not the politics of some schlub with a 6 figure grant.
I speak personally when I say that there’s a disturbing trend of late around SDS’s periphery, where a few SDS’ers have been snapped up into this or that NGO, or advocacy project, or some other nonsense now serving as Obama campaign surrogates — this generation’s answer to “part of the way with LBJ.” That happens mostly because things like alliances and who we work for isn’t a transparent, and it’s certainly not central in any way (including the way in which it makes most sense — let’s discuss who’s our friends and who are a bunch of opportunists from a single center, rather than giving the Soros types a hundred different entry points).
So in response to the charge of this or that red cadre organization subverting SDS — that’s a wonderful way of distracting from the folks whom we’re really finding underneath the bed, that being the liberals who look at the whole “Participatory Democracy” thing as just another way of selling bullshit to people if they just pay enough to play.
lol said
Maybe it’s because people actually need jobs? I mean I don’t know maybe you’re planning on being a ivy league professor for rich kids or perhaps a John Edwards style trial lawyer but everyone else has to get a “real job” and you can either do that for the public good at a non-profit or you can go work for a capitalist.
That’s why grown-ups other than hippy professors and crusty true believers find sds as a bit of a joke. A bunch of 20 year olds living in ivy league wonderland taking it upon themselves to judge everyone older and more experienced than them?
zerohour said
“That’s why grown-ups other than hippy professors and crusty true believers find sds as a bit of a joke.”
I don’t know what such “grown-ups” [what adults refer to themselves this way?] have to be proud of. All those years of experience and all they can tell us that historically failed liberal bullshit is going to work this time? They are the true believers, in the illusory promise of a humane capitalism, and they deserve much criticism.
Quorri said
Good point Lol, people do actually need jobs, too bad our wonderful capitalist economy is too broke too often to provide them for everyone. And too bad unemployment is rapidly rising in this rotten economy…
How are we to stay off welfare and unemployment and other social services conservatives seem to hate so well if we can’t even find viable employment? The amerikkkan dream is a shithole….
TellNoLies said
LOL raises an important question, even if not in the most constructive way. Young radicals looking to make a life often take jobs in the non-profit sector or in academia or as a union staffer. Rather than pose these choices against each other, I think we should ask what they have in common. The way I see it, all of these options tend to place radicals in a mediating role between the people and the powers that be and are fraught with dangers. The answer to this is not to condemn the choices of individuals but to build a revolutionary movement robust enough to encourage collective decisions to take working class jobs that root us in strategic sectors and communities AND that is able counter the bourgeois ideological dangers that face those who pursue “professional” careers by keeping them organizationally grounded in the larger struggles of the masses.
Many of the people who today go into the non-profit sector (or as academics or union staffers) are the same sorts of folks who in 1970 would have been taking jobs in the mines and factories. Much has changed since then, but he need for a movement committed to sinking real roots among the masses is not one of them.
A final note, LOL’s equation of academia with “the Ivy League” is sloppy. Higher Ed in the US is huge and diverse in the jobs it offers and the sorts of students it serves. I don’t think anybody should apologize for organizing at an Ivy League school, but it is not my impression that this is what most SDSers do, nor where most would-be academics are likely to end up.
Mike E said
Moderator’s note:
Hegemonik wrote….
We understand that there are frustrations and hostilities developed in political confrontations. But for these discussions, labeling opponents “nincompoops” and ‘@ssholes” is not ok. the issue is not even whether any particular hostility is justified — it is quite simply not the general tone and framework we need.
hegemonik said
In response to “Lol”: the proportion of SDS chapters at Ivy League schools is pretty small; the amount of influence the Ivy League has in SDS is minute. The fact is that the Ivy League colleges have been thoroughly organized by mainstream political groups within the two party system. SDS has mostly taken off at campuses where radical politics has had an organic link to local organizing, or where SDS is the first political organization of any kind has taken root.
As for influence: the structure document that got approved was written by someone who attends a City University of NY school who, if I may say, didn’t have the sort of petit-bourgeois baggage of believing everyone had to feel okay in order for us to take a next step.
As for taking jobs in the NGO sector: there’s genuine community based organizations that have taken up the 501 c3 status for lack of a greater Left that could sustain them, and then there are the sort of housebroken campaign surrogates of the Democratic Party that are what a prior generation aptly called “poverty pimps” — organizations whose sole purpose is as a pressure valve for every responsibility the state now divests itself of.
As always, compromises with the system can be principled or unprincipled. As Lenin aptly put it, the principled compromise is when you’re met with a robber on the highway who tells you that it’s your money or your life — and give the robber your money. If you’ve really got no skills and no way of making money other than putting a begging cup out to elect mildew-butt Politician X, go ahead and do it. But it’s straightforward opportunism to use an organization simply as a launchpad for a career working as the housebroken campaign surrogate of the Democratic Party, simply because there’s personal enrichment involved. Or worse, to do so mostly as a matter of selling fellow young activists on working for a part of the system designed to crush their revolutionary spark.
Mike E said
The smear on radical students through references to Ivy League is (rather obviously) both factually mistaken and hypocritical (especially when coming from the defenders of this system).
first, it is not true that radical politics resides among the privileged. As any history or analysis can attest: ideas of all kinds are studied and debated among intellectuals (ideas that are both left and right and more…) but ultimately the force of revolutionary ideas anywhere in the world has come from the oppressed, with powerful allies among educated youth who are deeply concerned about the future.
Second, this system is the reason there are elite institutions, privilege and huge gaps in eductation and access. And it is a cheezy and false populism that the rightists put on when they attack the elite institutions of their own system.
Third: there is nothing wrong with students in elite schools. There is nothing wrong with them embracing and acting on radical ideas. It is not wrong for someone to be offered privilege and access — and to endanger all that to take up the cause of others. In the u.s. students of elite colleges and universities have played an important role at times in the revolutionary movements (this was true in both the 30s and the 60s). the takeovers at columbia and Harvard were extremely important for the emergence of the original SDS as a major force (since their SDS chapters were central to those famous events). And at yale the students played a key role in the huge struggle to free Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panthers who was on trial for murder in New Haven. and (of course) berkeley has been both relatively elite and a major nervecenter of radical politics in the U.S. This is something to be proud of.
If rightists (and sometimes the proponents of identity politics) are suspicious and mocking about being radical at an elite college — it is largely because their own morality find something odd and irrational about adopting views add odds with your own most narrow, personal and superficial self-interest.
[moderator note: this site is not for debating rightwingers, and so to avoid that distraction posts like LOL's trollish provocation will routinely and quietly be removed.]
gangbox said
Mike,
I’d like to ask you some questions about something you said up in reply # 6.
Regarding the Progressive Labor Party and it’s “economism”, you refer to May Day 1970 at Yale.
At the time, according to your narrative, many others were mobilizing in solidarity with Bobby Seale (the Black Panther Party leader who was on trial in New Haven at the time) but PLP was going in another direction.
In your words “In the middle of all that, PLP mobilized its (then considerable) supperter base in their splinter of SDS (Worker-student Alliance SDS — WSASDS) to go to Yale university in New Haven — not to support the Panthers, or the revolultionary Black liberation struggle, BUT TO RALLY IN SUPPORT OF A FEW PAINTERS HELPERS on the staff of Yale who had gotten fucked over in some firing or job posting dispute.”
You know, you could make a case that the PLP were, in a manner of speaking, actually on the right track there – especially if you look at it in hindsight from 2008.
At the time, the Panthers probably did seem like the vanguard of a petty bourgeois-led lumpen revolution – while the struggles of employed workers were just so aristocratic.
But, 40 years down the line what do we see?
The Black Panther Party is dead in the water – having cracked in the face of police repression, and with it’s remnants dissolving in 1981 not with a bang but a whimper as they absorbed themselves into the Democratic Party.
All that’s left of the BPP today is a few latter day nationalists in black berets who try and wrap themselves in the old party’s tattered banners.
But, as for the class struggle at Yale, that’s another story.
The Yale Corporation/Yale University Medical Center is both the largest employer and largest landlord in the City of New Haven.
Consequently Yale is locked in a permanent battle with the city’s predominantly Black and Latino working class.
Standing between Yale and the New Haven proletariat is UNITE – HERE, which through it’s affiliates local 34, local 35 and GESO is the dominant labor union in the city.
Yale workers – in particular the blue collar maintenance workers (those “PAINTERS HELPERS” you referred to – along with their brothers and sisters in the other maintenance departments) – have waged many major class battles in the years since 1970 – some fought in the dark Reaganism days of the early 1980’s, when the American left had pretty much folded up it’s tents.
So maybe PLP had the right idea – instead of jumping on the bandwagon of a shooting star of petty bourgeois radicalism, they got on board with the slow steady flow of the blue collar class struggle.
Remember, truth is not a popularity contest – just because nobody agrees with you does not mean your wrong – and just because everbody thinks you’re right does not mean you are correct.
Carl Davidson said
For what it’s worth:
Organization is critical. It’s the way words are turned into deeds on a mass scale (Chou En-Lai)
The life of SDS is in its chapters, at the base. Any ideas, structures, programs that don’t make any sense in terms of what the chapter members can actually do and accomplish when they get back home, what they actually face and what they can build, should be set aside.
Students and youth are a critical force is social change. they are a mirror and a catalyst that can make a society examine itself and start to change.
When all is said and done, however, they are not the main force, which is the masses in their millions. They should be audacious and speak truth to today’s power.
But they should work to set aside the arrogance youth and students are sometimes prone to, and always pay attention to the views of the majority of the people, the future power, and take those views into account, even if they don’t agree with them. They have to find the forms of struggle that can build bridges and unite with them to defeat the main adversary.
Finally, politics and structure are connected, but they are not the same. Structures that help us grow politically and in our political impact, and unite with the main force, should be nourished. Structures that hold us back, or strangle us in our cribs, should be set aside.
Linda D. said
First Mike:
Then Gangbox:
I think we have to look at this more all-sidedly. Sure, it is important for us to look at the larger picture, and within that with a critical eye. Hopefully in summing up some errors of our predecessors, we won’t be making some of the same errors that they made. But we have a history and legacy, and various groups and movements can be building blocks in our current situation, and in helping us understand the way forward.
So, there are many contributions to uphold, even contributions from the likes of PLP (or SDS for that matter), who never ever had the kind of response and sway that the BPP evoked. The BPP crossed over class and racial lines. Added to that, the BPP was instrumental in inspiring groups like The Young Lords, La Raza, Women, Black, Latino, Indian, Asian studies, etc.
In terms of the PLP, where are they today, 40 years later? Without getting into all the PLP history, what Mike added to his list of criticisms, but DIDN’T emphasize, was something very confusing and retrograde to forces closer to the PLP (and more or less at their peak)–”set themselves AGAINST the most revolutionary elements of action, organization and thinking” but NAMELY against support for Vietnam’s national liberation struggle (and war! against U.S. imperialism) and ultimately against the anti-war and anti-imperialist forces, most especially in the U.S. (Some current lessons we can glean from the PLP’s both economist as well as ultra-left errors is our stand around Nepal?)
But as far as the Panthers go–Yes, these days, and even starting several years back, the Panthers made errors we can LEARN from and hopefully not repeat…but the Panthers, were the most outspoken militants (in words and deeds) of the time. They organized, mobilized and spoke to, and had a real base, amongst thousands in the U.S. and in other countries. “Free Huey!”, “Free Bobby Seale!”, “Avenge George Jackson”, etc. These were not empty slogans. The BPP played a significant role in changing the political landscape in the U.S. They brought Mao and the revolution in China to the Black “community”. They elevated the political consciousness of thousands. They were not solely respected and even revered in the U.S.—but became symbolic of the Black liberation struggle in parts of Europe, Africa and Asia amongst a myriad of forces. (And a lot of their actions and program was a development of Malcolm X.)
But the Panthers paid an undeniable price: they didn’t just go out with a whimper instead of a bang. Their whole organization was devastated because the ruling class knew all too well, the kind of impact that they were having on broad numbers of people. And in the course of their “good years”, many members were outright murdered by the U.S. rulers. Even Mumia still had ties to the BPP–and I think in part that is why the r.c. has been so ruthless with him.
I think it is important to have a deeper understanding of both the situation, at any given time, and the role that many people and organizations played when summing up the life and death struggles of our predecessors. Yes, we can criticize and learn from the errors–in line, organization, tactics, strategy, etc. But there are many important contributions to uphold. Think we have to ask ourselves: Where did our more revolutionary ideas come from? Outta nowhere?