PLP sets record straight on SDS

September 21 2008

The Progressive Labor Party issued a new statement on its role in SDS (in December 2007?). We concur with most of what PLP is saying about SDS and the social-democratic histories written about it. PLP denies charges of "infiltration" and points out that other factions such as the Weather faction admitted to wrecking SDS, the student organization of the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Mark Rudd was an example of someone saying if he were not a pig, he should have been paid to be one.

The article may have responded to MIM in part, particularly our article on "Single Issue Organizing." MIM's attitude toward organizations such as SDS is still different than PLP's.

In retrospect, PLP was open about its membership in SDS. Since then, various organizations have infiltrated mass organizations secretly and created bad impressions while coordinating with various state organs. PLP looks principled compared with much that goes on. One can only make a statement like that by reading the books about the 1960s and comparing numerous organizations since that time.

Although MIM takes a maximally combative approach on our website, there is a difference between having a website that people can choose to go to and pushing one's way into organizations that are inherently petty-bourgeois. MIM argues it is best to have some petty-bourgeois organizations and not join them as proletarian organizers. If we do join what have to be petty-bourgeois mass organizations, then we should be careful to follow the inherent logic of their organizations and not eat up their time and our own time with proletarian challenges.

Petty-bourgeois anti-war, anti-imperialist and civil liberties organizations should not be damaged by direct proletarian confrontation. It is better to seduce the petty-bourgeoisie away. When we get in the petty-bourgeoisie's face, ugly passive-aggressive and pseudo-feminist results are guaranteed in the imperialist countries. PLP is reluctant to admit the result, because of its dogma on the student-worker alliance.

When confronted, the petty-bourgeoisie can only take up pseudo-feminism and national chauvinism through various informal strategies. That's why the first encounter with communist leadership should be through intellectual seduction, not direct persynal confrontation. The people who landed the heaviest blows against MIM have met MIM and then coordinated with the state. Meanwhile the work that MIM has done to land the heaviest blows was with people MIM never met.

Rank-and-file comrades should promote independent strategies of public opinion and propaganda distribution. There are also other absolutely decisive activities that have to be done independently. From the point of view of the organizer, it is difficult to maintain an even but combative posture in in-persyn meetings, because many do not have the persynal strength for confrontation. That is why it is better to have a Panchen Lama-like website such as MIM's that is combative, but not in the face of 99.9% of its readers. The vanguard should prove itself by seeking out websites like MIM's and struggling anonymously.

In the 1960s, it should be clear that the people PLP confronted were like the perennial new kid on the block feeling picked on and inferior. People like Bob Avakian, Klonsky--they looked at PLP and they looked at the Black Panthers. Instead of choosing one side or the other and looking to develop that side, they chose neither. They vacillated and hedged the rest of their lives. The blame for that does fall on PLP.

Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver asserted a negative role for white workers and a growing Black lumpen. PLP mistakenly pointed to mostly white industrial workers. Neither the Black Panthers nor PLP had a revolution, but at the margin Newton and Cleaver were correct, because the lumpen did grow astronomically as they predicted with the prison craze of the 1970s onwards. There was a contrast available but the anti-PLP faction of SDS fell in-between and never developed either line, the BPP's or the PLP's. Later it was MIM that developed line on superprofits and the labor aristocracy to build a more coherent and deeper line.

PLP was first, more articulate and well-organized. It shaped all the negative results since the 1960s.

The point is not to challenge the petty-bourgeoisie to develop a petty-bourgeois ideology to defend against proletarian or oppressed nation organizational intruders--open or not. Yet that is what is going to happen when we challenge college- educated people in their organizations. It's predictable. The other route to go is not to challenge them but to weld them into the Democratic Party like the cp=u$A, rcp=u$a, LRS, FRSO, Kasama, CoC etc. We wish PLP would give up its line organizing exploiters, because the copies have all used that wrong line to justify their transition to the Democratic Party. PLP has done more to organize factions for the Democratic Party than anyone else by undertaking predictable struggles with the petty-bourgeoisie.

It's ironic but true that the useless Trotskyists who have the same line as PLP on the history of the united front and the need for an international party do show more independence from Democrats than those organizations claiming to come from Stalin. PLP and MIM are the exceptions. We invite PLP to criticize our line, and when they realize they cannot, to join us.

Source:
"Setting the Record Straight: Progressive Labor and SDS"
http://www.plp.org/web_supplement/sdsnplp.html