Re: [Marxism] Latest Left Hook Release Online

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comments on Geoff Bailey's "The Making of a New Left: The Rise and Fall of
SDS":

Geoff:
Student antiwar groups increasingly began to see the war not just as a
mistaken policy, but as an outgrowth of a social system based on
competition and profit. The New Left, and SDS in particular, moved from
being antiwar to anti-imperialist. The slogans on antiwar demonstrations
changed from "For a Negotiated Peace" and "Bring the Troops Home" to "U.S.
Out Now!" and "Victory to the NLF [Vietnamese National Liberation Front]."
All of this boiled over in 1968.

Comment:
There's a lot of confusion here. "For a Negotiated Peace" was never the
official slogan of a major demonstration. It was the slogan of Sane/Freeze,
AFL-CIO "progressives", etc. who participated in the mass actions, but the
coalitions never put forward such a slogan. The slogans were variations on
immediate withdrawal, which appeared on official literature as either
"Bring the Troops Home Now" or "US Out Now". Indeed, these two demands were
never in competition with each other. As far as "Victory to the NLF" is
concerned, this was raised by the Spartacist League and SDS factions when
they were going off the deep end. In reality, there was nothing
"anti-imperialist" about this slogan because it is an expression of a wish
rather than a demand made on the state. It was far more important for
750,000 people to march under the banner of "Bring the Troops Home Now"
than for a thousand student radicals to march under the NLF banner. The
first march represented social power, while the second was nothing but
street theater. This might not be a bad thing as long as it is understood
for what it was. Unfortunately, the ultraleftists did not understand this.
When the war continued no matter their militant actions, they escalated
their slogans and tactics until they hit a brick wall. They never
understood that their task was to mobilize those who had not reached their
advanced consciousness.

Geoff:
The strength of the Stalinist currents in SDS was increased by the weakness
of the Trotskyist tradition. The largest Trotskyist organization in the
U.S., the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), played a central role in the
various national coordinating committees that organized the semi-annual
mass antiwar demonstrations in Washington as well as in the youth wing, the
Student Mobilization Committee (SMC). But the SWP always looked at the
antiwar movement as a single-issue movement and reacted with outright
hostility to any attempt to inject more radical, anti-imperialist politics
into it. It dismissed SDS as a petty-bourgeois, semi-anarchist group, and
while it had a large presence in the SMC, it made no attempt to influence
the debates inside SDS. Instead of playing the role of the revolutionary
left-wing of the antiwar movement, the SWP gave a left cover to the
pacifists and liberals who dominated the coordinating committees.

Comment:
Of course the antiwar movement had to remain a single issue movement. After
all, it was trying to reach ordinary Americans who had never marched on a
demonstration before, let alone occupied an administration building on
campus. Furthermore, the SWP did have an impact on the debate within the
New Left even though it did not participate in SDS. When the Guardian, the
semiofficial newspaper of SDS, sent reporter Randy Erb to a YSA convention
in 1970, they expected him to write the standard "Trot" baiting hatchet
job. Instead, he was so impressed with the seriousness of the discussion
and the obvious effectiveness of the group's antiwar focus that he joined a
month later. This was at a time when SDS was imploding. Many local SDS
leaders followed suit, including Jon Hillson who died a month or so ago.

Geoff:
The one group that did try to raise the ideas of socialism from below
inside SDS were members of the Independent Socialist Clubs. They stressed
the importance of building a current that looked to the self-activity of
the working class as the force capable of ending the war and overthrowing
capitalism. They argued that organizing against the war should be connected
to support for the independent struggles of workers, such as building
solidarity for a national strike against General Electric--one of the U.S.
military's largest defense contractors--that broke out in 1969. They
stressed that while the struggle against racism and chauvinism had to be a
central part of any attempt to build a working-class movement in the U.S.,
it was also important to understand that those divisions could be broken
down only in the course of struggle, not through the exhortations of mostly
middle-class students.

Comment:
It would have not been a bad idea for the antiwar movement getting involved
with the GE strike. However, it is not clear if the official trade union
leadership would have been interested in that. To my memory, the only
electrical union that reached out to the antiwar movement was the UE, whose
"Stalinist" leadership the ISC would have disparaged to say the least.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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