SDS
by Alan Adelson
NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972, 276pp. hb
reviewed by MC5, September 2003

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This is still the best history of the SDS available. At some point, someone may feel that SDS history deserves better. The only problem is that to surpass this book without first-hand quotes will be difficult and time is receding. Adelson took a pro-PL (Progressive Labor Party) view of SDS. SDS started as another ho-hum social-democratic student group. In fact, it had labor bureaucratic money to begin with. The whole history since 1960 is in chapter 12. Although already more militant than in 1962, in 1964, SDS still had a slogan of "Part of the Way with LBJ,"(p. 39) meaning support for the Democratic candidate for president Lyndon B. Johnson. However, times changed even more quickly and PL started infiltrating SDS and booming SDS chapters often had near-effective control of some universities. "There was no precedent in the frenzied history of student activism in America for the nationwide strike that followed the invasion of Cambodia."(p. 48) Opposing military recruiters on campus, freeing the Black Panthers and supporting the expansion of Third World material in college curricula became hot issues in addition to opposing the Indochina War. From that period, Adelson also provided yet another confirmation of what MIM has reported elsewhere about the 1969-1970 period: "Playboy magazine, which is hardly the sort of revolutionary journal that would exaggerate such things, surveyed campuses last year and reported that 15 per cent of the students are committed to making a violent revolution, which they feel is the only hope for instituting real change in the country. That would give you about 1.2 million students who are trying to smash the state. By way of comparison, the National Guard has only about a half a million men. And the New York City Police Department, the biggest in the country, has only about 35,000 men."(p. 90) To youth at that time, it seemed that revolution was around the corner, so after "ten years of do-your-own-thing rebellion, SDS has turned to the master dismantlers of capitalism: Marx, Lenin and Mao."(p. 191) We do not know to what extent Adelson realized what he was doing in writing this book. He seemed to know instinctively that some of the more media-catchy Weathermen tactics could not reflect the student majority, not to mention Amerika, but he seems to have missed out on some of the non-PL aspects of SDS. For example, Adelson's discussion of RYM I and RYM II does not start until page 245. He gives a great rendition of the crucial meeting that split SDS, but he seems never to have understood the difference between "fighting racism" and supporting self-determination. Like PLP, Adelson wanted SDS to have a more "respectable" image. That meant no long hair, no nudity, no drugs etc. etc. To caricaturize the SDS, the non-PL faction were the "cultural radicals" thought to be more intelligent but "crazy," while the PLP was for getting a raise for the petty-bourgeoisie and using language even simpler than USA Today's. An example of how insanely competitive PLP became when confronted with the Black Panthers is this from Adelson: "Some Leftists, especially those that agreed with Progressive Labor's criticisms of the Panthers' program, began to think that John Mitchell's mysterious gang down at the Justice Department was deliberately martyring the Panthers to divert the mvoement away from a direct attack on the system and into Panther support instead."(p. 22) From this sort of thing, we can see that PLP was always sectarian to the max. Someone could die facing the state and PLP would still think s/he was conspiring with the rulers. At that point, "sectarian" and "religious" are about equivalent in meaning. Although we agree with PLP even then about Cuban and Vietnamese revisionism, it must be said that the PLP's stance on racism and national liberation was and is objectively racist. The PLP condemns the oppressed nation bourgeoisie while struggling for a raise for the oppressor nation petty-bourgeoisie. Adelson sided with the PLP attacking the rest of SDS for the correct line that the Amerikkkan working class is labor aristocracy. "The industrial workers get only a little more than half of what they need for comfort. And there's every indication that SDS is right in saying that far from being contented, American workers are becoming extremely bitter and restive."(p. 252) Obviously, Adelson and the PLP were wrong when they said that in 1972. Since that time, the United $tates has set records for lowest number of days lost to strikes. MIM agrees with a worker-student alliance, but only on an international plane. There is no exploited working class within the Western imperialist countries and Japan to ally with. Ironically, despite all PLP's pretensions to opposing nationalism, it is a nationalist error to ally with exploiters, just because your vision is limited to your own country, the way PLP's is. Yes, it will be a little different to ally with the Third World proletariat, but that is the worker-student alliance we need. None of the former SDS factions did very well into the 1970s. PLP wasted SDS energy on the worker-student alliance, which was really an imperialist-petty-bourgeois-career-student alliance. The Weathermen believed focoist tactics from Che would work and ignored Mao on armed struggle in imperialist countries. The Weathermen left little behind. Other factions simply adopted more "moderate" versions of the basic PLP fallacies. The sad part is that students did not manage to sustain their radicalism. That is the number one lesson, not any of the various small organizations SDS did leave behind. From MIM's point of view, all SDS factions were a huge advance given Amerikkkan history. It's unfortunate that PLP and others adopted simplistic ideas of race and nation, in order to treat equally the oppressed and the oppressor-- which as Lenin explained, means leaving the system of oppression in tact. With this line, PLP poisoned the anti-revisionist movement with Trotskyism. What the rulers hate most about SDS and its remnants is that since the 1960s there is a history of Amerikkkan radicalism with many flavors, one that did not strictly originate from a socialist revolution somewhere else, but which led to factions based on Amerikkka's own issues. When we consider the stereotype not far from the truth of the McCarthy era '50s, it's hard to imagine how quickly things changed.