A-Infos (en) US, Media, The new SDS and MDS

Twenty-year-old Will Klatt, wearing a green knit hat, baggy jeans and
black jacket pulled over a hoodie, stands before a Civil War monument
at the center of Ohio University's main campus in Athens. Although a
February snow is falling steadily, more than a hundred students have
turned out for this rally called by a new organization with a very
familiar name: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

"Many of us at Ohio University have taken classes on the principles of
democracy, on justice, on ethics," says Klatt, "and with the
presumption that we will use this knowledge, acquired in our classes,
to become more informed citizens. Yet this knowledge we acquire is
nothing if we do not put it into practice."

The students, including frat boys and jocks, clap and whistle. They
are here in protest against new fees, elimination of four varsity
sports programs and increased administrative bonus pay. Each decision,
organizers say, reflects a lack of student power on campus--as do
"free-speech zones" confining student protest to irrelevant corners of
campus. "We are talking," says Klatt, "about the corporatization of
our university."

Angry at the Iraq debacle, emboldened by the Bush-Cheney tailspin, a
new student radicalism is emerging whose concerns include immigrants'
rights, global warming and the uncertainties facing debt-ridden
graduates. Such considerations distinguish the new SDS from its
historical namesake, which took shape in a very different context of
economic affluence and establishment liberalism.

The original SDS, formed in 1960, sought "a participatory democracy,"
the involvement of all in running society from the bottom up, as
elaborated in the Port Huron Statement of 1962. Frustrated with
conventional liberalism, inspired by the civil rights movement and
sustained by opposition to the Vietnam War, SDS grew to perhaps
100,000 members before disintegrating in a shower of fratricidal
sparks in 1969.

The notion of re-creating SDS was the brainchild of Jessica Rapchik
and Pat Korte, high school students in North Carolina and Connecticut,
respectively, who met on an antiwar phone hookup in the fall of 2005.
Upon discovering their mutual dissatisfaction with the existing left,
they hit upon the notion of reviving SDS. One of the original SDSers
they first contacted was Alan Haber, president of SDS from 1960 to
1962, now a woodworker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had independently
suggested "re-membering" SDS at a historians' conference in 2003. Once
the call to relaunch SDS went public in January 2006 with a new
website, campus chapters began popping up, from Florida to Colorado.
Today, there are more than 100 college chapters and dozens more in
high schools.

By laying claim to an old name, contemporary students risked that
1960s veterans might disapprove of new wine being made in their
bottle. Sociologist Todd Gitlin, SDS president from 1963 to 1964, is
one such skeptic. "What was often brilliant about SDS," he says, "was
that it was attuned to its moment. It didn't recycle the Old Left. It
was the New Left." Maurice Isserman, who joined SDS at Reed College in
1968, recently published a sharply critical piece about the new SDS in
the Chronicle of Higher Education. In an interview, he said of the
group's revival, "As a historian, I found it a little offensive. It's
like, could I be in the Sons of Liberty tomorrow if I started it,
claimed lineal descent from Sam Adams?"

The new SDSers have few such qualms. They seek continuity with
radical history but value the name Students for a Democratic Society
as much for the future it projects as for its fabled past. They find
it a compelling name for an inclusive, multi-issue student group
seeking social transformation. Emerging from a post-Seattle,
direct-action culture defined by negation--"anticapitalist,"
"antiwar"--they value its forthright, positive aim of democracy. The
new SDSers admit, however, that the name does not always evoke the
associations they intend. "Oh," said a friend to Yale University
senior Micah Landau, 21, "so you want me to join the guerrillas?"

What most links the new SDS to the old is the principle of
participatory democracy. SDSers consider that ideal, both as a social
aim and a guide to present-day practice, to be the quintessence of
their project. They seek to combine the expansive vision of liberation
from oppression, empire and capitalism characteristic of SDS in the
late 1960s with the commitment to participatory democracy typical of
the movement in the early '60s. The tone at meetings is honest,
searching, respectful. Although the group has informal leaders, no one
is a "heavy."

The belief systems of SDSers range tremendously. Variations on
anarchism and socialism are commonplace, but each chapter has a
distinct character. At Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut prep
school, Paul Gault, 18, says "a lot of students wanted just an outlet
for their voice," making the chapter "by SDS standards not too
radical." But since the new SDS has spread most rapidly on regional
campuses and at community colleges, not elite institutions, a more
typical chapter--both demographically and ideologically--might be Mt.
San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California. There the four
SDS members identify themselves as Marxist-libertarian, libertarian
socialist, anarcho-syndicalist and communal anarchist, the differences
between them being "zilch," they report. Ohio's Klatt says that many
people in SDS are "anarcho-something-or-other, but they feel like
anarchist organizations are so unorganized that they haven't been
effective in creating systemic change." At the University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, however, the ten core SDSers are all liberals,
while at the University of North Alabama the thirteen to fifteen core
SDSers are mostly liberals, with a sprinkling of socialists. "Anarchy
isn't really our deal," says Andrew Walker, 23, a journalism major.

While SDSers are extraordinarily skillful at dissecting race, gender,
class and sexuality in their personal lives, they show less aptitude,
as yet, for economic research and political analysis. Most SDSers
would have an easier time defining "heteronormativity" than corporate
liberalism. Their knowledge of the labor movement all too often begins
and ends with the Industrial Workers of the World. However, the new
SDS's sensitivity to group dynamics is light-years--or several
decades--ahead of its '60s predecessor. Women compose 40 percent or
more of the membership and often exert chapter leadership. Sarah
McGarity, 20, a political science and women's studies major, helped
create the Ohio University chapter and believes women are for the most
part equals within SDS. "Women definitely have the opportunities that
weren't necessarily given to them in the '60s," she says.

Race today is not quite the study in black and white that it was in
the '60s. Now as then, there are few African-Americans in SDS, but
proportions vary. Of the five who started Wayne State's chapter in
Detroit, two were African-American, one Asian and one Latina, says
Carmen Mendoza-King, 21. If SDS is not as heavily white as it was in
the '60s, this is mostly a result of subsequent waves of Asian and
Latin American immigration. Hunter College senior Daniel Tasripin, 24,
whose father was Indonesian and mother Polish-Jewish and French,
argues that SDS should recognize affirmative action, the curriculum
and the "basic justice of the university in relation to the
surrounding community" as issues not specific to people of color but
reflective of "the universal need for a university that represents all
the people."

SDS is loose, more movement than organization. Anyone can sign up
online. The group now claims more than 2,000 members, but it is hard
to tell what that means. There are no dues, and therefore no funds, no
staff, no office and no national publication apart from the website.
The group has no elected national leaders and no basis for national
decision-making. Paradoxically, these weaknesses provide some
strength. The very lan of SDS is anti-bureaucratic. SDS enables
regional and national linkages while preserving local control. Its
appeal is that it is self-creating, do-it-yourself, free from
centralized discipline or external control.

This explains why SDS displays such variety and vitality at the
chapter level. At Brown University, where meetings regularly attract
twenty-five people, SDS distributed a "Disorientation Guide" to 1,600
new students this fall. At Olympia last May and in Tacoma this March,
Washington state SDSers were arrested for blocking Army Stryker
vehicles from being loaded onto ships bound for Iraq. At Pace
University in Manhattan, five SDSers were arrested in November simply
for stepping onto campus to exercise free speech in protest against
their administration.

From the outset, the new SDS sought interaction with older radicals,
in particular veterans of the first SDS. This, however, has proved
more vexing than anyone anticipated. The new SDS's adult counterpart,
Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), has been riven by divisions
rooted deep in SDS history. Power has resided largely with three
figures: historian Paul Buhle, once editor of the original SDS journal
Radical America; Thomas Good, a 48-year-old Communist-turned-anarchist
who created the new SDS website; and Bruce Rubenstein, a Connecticut
personal-injury attorney. Left on the outs have been Haber, a kindly
bearded sage, and a small "democracy" caucus whose best-known member
is historian Jesse Lemisch.

The MDS tensions trace in part to distinct pasts. Both Haber and
Lemisch were present at SDS's founding convention in 1960; Rubenstein
was part of Weatherman, a faction that scuttled SDS in 1969, and its
successor, the Weather Underground, which bombed corporate and
government targets. Bitter sniping on group listservs has been a more
recent source of estrangement. Substantively, the dividing lines
surfaced in an early discussion about whether to bring young and old
together in one big-tent SDS. That proposal proved a dead letter when
the students stated their desire for autonomy. A more gnawing issue is
whether processes in MDS have been transparent, legitimate or
democratic. A final matter is the residual influence of Weatherman.

The Weather controversy erupted when Bernardine Dohrn, a Weather
leader who now teaches law at Northwestern University, was invited to
speak at the first new SDS conference, held in Providence, Rhode
Island, in April 2006. Dohrn received a rousing welcome, but when Bob
Ross, an early SDSer, used his talk to lament that "the largest legal
and unarmed movement in the history of the West" turned "ineffectually
violent and useless," he was received coolly. At the first new SDS
national convention in Chicago, in August, Good opened the proceedings
by reading greetings from Dohrn. Moreover, Rubenstein, MDS's
treasurer, is unapologetic about his Weather history and says that if
it were 1969 he would "do it all over again," but that he does "not
endorse those tactics" for SDS today.

Many in MDS consider Weatherman ancient history. "Heck, they're all
65 already," says Penelope Rosemont, another graying MDS officer. "How
violent can you get at 65?" Lemisch, however, is concerned that a
rehabilitated Weather may corrupt the revived SDS. A critic of a
recent spate of films and books that sanitize and romanticize the
Weather past, he has interpreted some direct actions of the new SDS as
reminiscent of Weatherman's "Fight the People" slogan. The students,
for their part, find Lemisch's criticism lacking in proportionality.
Although intrigued by Weather's notoriety and susceptible to being
impressed by Dohrn's celebrity, they regard Weather as a negative
political example. "They espoused a sort of white-guilt and
white-privileged politics that is, in my estimation, wrongheaded,"
says Tasripin. Co-founder Korte, now a 19-year-old student at the New
School, objects to "people trying to conjure or dress us in Weather's
clothes." An actual inspiration for the new SDS, says Senia Barrigan,
20, a Brown University student and daughter of immigrants from
Colombia and Ecuador, was last year's strike by 70,000 teachers in
Oaxaca, Mexico, which sparked a militant but peaceful popular
insurgency against a corrupt, autocratic government.

MDS secretary Good, however, has referred to "my Weather comrades"
and called himself "an unrepentant Weather supporter." He donned a
"Fuck Jesse Lemisch" T-shirt at the national convention and issued a
facetious "fatwa" calling for a pie to be thrown in Lemisch's face.
Some in MDS and SDS find these puerilities obnoxious or embarrassing,
but that hasn't translated into support for the "democracy" caucus,
widely regarded as a nuisance for sending frequent, adversarial
complaints over the group's listservs. (The dissidents, for their
part, object that they have been removed or excluded from many
listservs.)

In February MDS held a daylong public meeting to announce a nonprofit
corporation, MDS, Inc., that will raise funds for SDS. One of the
selected speakers, former Weather leader Mark Rudd, delivered a
piercingly honest self-criticism, stating that Weather "did the work"
of the FBI by "killing off" the original SDS. Rudd urged the new SDS
to recognize violence and property destruction as politically
self-defeating in the United States. A panel of students, in turn,
asked MDS to assist SDS by sharing wisdom and skills rather than
bickering. However, Haber's desire for extended participatory
conversation among the gathered MDS members was not fulfilled, and the
dissidents felt railroaded. "It was not democracy's finest hour,"
allows Rudd. "I felt they should have been given ten minutes to
present their case."

The newly elected board of MDS, Inc., is broadly representative of
the whole left, but its biggest names--Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Cornel West, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky--are symbolic luminaries,
not actively involved. Much hinges on whether the new chairman,
Manning Marable, a distinguished African-American historian at
Columbia University, can guide MDS, Inc., beyond its present
contretemps to "assist and promote the development of activism among
young people," as he envisions.

The youth in SDS have for the most part tuned out MDS. They are
instead focused on their own priorities: defining their points of
unity, developing a decision-making structure and challenging the Iraq
War.

The connection between these needs became clear at the January 27
mass mobilization on the Washington Mall called by United for Peace
and Justice. SDSers could not agree on where to meet beforehand. Some
wanted to convene at Dupont Circle, the traditional gathering point
for the masked anarchist "black bloc." Others, greater in number,
wanted to meet at the Smithsonian Castle and leaflet the crowd. In the
end, all SDSers found themselves drawn behind the black bloc as it
trampled a flimsy fence, rushed up the Hill bearing plastic shields
and painted obscenities and slogans on the Capitol steps. While some
in SDS were elated by this action, others considered it witless.
"Propaganda by the deed doesn't work," says Yale's Landau. "They
probably alienated far more people than they inspired with the Capitol
rush, especially the graffiti on the steps of the Capitol."

Because the Capitol police behaved with extraordinary restraint and
made no arrests, the provocation received scant media scrutiny. Such
luck cannot be expected to hold twice. Many in SDS conclude that the
episode proved there is a need for greater coordination and that
structurelessness can be undemocratic if a chapter or two engage in
rash actions contrary to the wishes of most members. At a February SDS
meeting in New York, more than eighty students from twenty-two
Northeastern campuses endorsed a federated regional council system, a
possible basis for a national structure. Whether organization and
anti-authoritarianism can be synthesized in SDS, however, remains to
be seen. Klatt foresees a period of transition, "kind of like how our
American government had to go through the confederation of states
before they came up with a unified country."

Within SDS there is rising awareness that the wildest tactic may
derail the most radical strategy. Landau believes SDSers "who are
willing to jump into the most extreme action without thinking about
base-building and movement-building" are counterweighed by others with
more thoughtful approaches. Korte says SDSers are increasingly asking
themselves, "Rather than tactics guiding our strategy, is strategy
guiding our tactics?" Joshua Russell, 23, a Brandeis grad whose job
for the Rainforest Action Network allows him to travel as an
unofficial national SDS organizer, hopes SDS will become a
"movement-building institution that will unite people."

The matter of moment is the Iraq War. Whether or not they approve of
the Capitol rush, SDSers are eager to push the envelope beyond large
marches. There is "a general feeling that the tactics being used now
are not enough," says John Cronan Jr., 23, a Pace student. At the
University of Alabama, SDS recently staged a "die-in" to dramatize the
war. Three Michigan chapters are investigating their universities'
financial ties to the military industry. To mark the war's four-year
anniversary in March, SDS initiated class walkouts, rallies and
marches at more than sixty campuses and high schools. And, to borrow a
'60s phrase, momentum now flows "from protest to resistance"--from
merely speaking out against the war to the nonviolent obstruction of
its operation. Twenty New York SDSers were arrested on March 12 after
they shut down an Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Manhattan for two
hours. Their chant: "Stop the war! Yes we can! SDS is back again!"
=========================================
* An antiauthoritarian anticapitalist network
_______________________________________________
A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
http://ainfos.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
http://ainfos.ca/en