Next Left Notes   
Documents from the SDS Northeast Regional Conference
Brown University, Providence, RI - April 2006
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Comments to the New SDS Regional Meeting

by Bob Ross



Comments to New SDS regional meeting
April 23, 2006
Bob Ross
rjsross@clarku.edu

Che Guevara notoriously said that "at the risk of seeming ridiculous let me say that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." I want to add, at the risk o f seeming obvious, a true radical should be a great observer of her society and the human condition.

My father was a cutter in the garment industry. He was a class conscious worker, but was disillusioned by the collapse of the working class movement and to some extent intimidated by McCarthyism. In the late sixties at a moment I cannot recall exactly we had some heated words. His were to this effect; look around, talk to our neighbors, do you see a revolution? Get off the rhetoric train. Listen to the people.

No real legacy is merely heroic. Only those who have been perfect, who have never made a mistake nor been confused or afraid, in short, only those who never really existed can say unambiguously that they have no regrets. It is not with Edith Piaf that people who have lived real political lives - as opposed to fairy tales told to very small children - can say "Non, je ne regrette rien " I regret nothing. For the rest of us, real human beings whose shit stinks, we must try to liberate ourselves from the mistakes of our past even while we rescuing from the attic mice of history noble deeds done in good faith.

The history of SDS is filled examples of good and bad observations and I see absolutely no reason for me NOT to add my own.


Good:
  • Democracy as the radical solvent
  • Democratic language as useful as an American medium for talking about social ownership and social control

Not so good:
  • Trivializing the idea of participatory democracy into a small group process vision;
  • Resisting the idea of representation, thus confounding the governance of large organizations
  • Reacting so strongly against bureaucracy and centralization that we could not handle the rapid growth of post-1965.
  • No formal leadership training
  • No succession preparation
  • Not contributing very much or very seriously to the problems of democracy and levels of control. Thus, nothing very useful about the NIMBI problem.

Good:
  • Being action-oriented

Not so good:
  • Confusing militance with radicalism; mistaking tactics with strategy.

Good:
  • Identifying the War as a necessary focus.
  • Despite only narrowly deciding this centrally (December 31, 1964) and vacillating about national programming
  • Communicating moral urgency about it
  • Identifying apartheid and corporate complicity in it (the Chase demo)

Not so good:
  • Not staying with the apartheid theme
  • Using the rhetoric of opposition to imperialism as if that were a revolutionary process in itself (The historic bloc much broader than we were)

Good:
  • Challenging ourselves and others to be serious about commitments to change

Not so good:
  • Creating a guilt-ridden movement culture in which only the totally committed, the full-timers, the cadre, those who might style themselves as professional revolutionaries, were the center and definition of the movement. Elitism.

Almost entirely bad:
  • Having left behind the language of nonviolent civil disobedience as SDS more or less slavishly allowed the rhetoric of Black Power and then the Black Panthers to define our view of the Black movement, some SDS grouplets turned sabotage and then others to planned violence. The consequence:
  • The largest legal and unarmed movement against imperialism in the history of the West gets recorded in historical memory as ineffectually violent and useless.


I have been thinking lately, as a teacher and as a participant in the anti-sweatshop/community-labor movement, about the ways social movements have been part of great historic changes in the US, especially in our eras - in the last 50 years. This has been combined with some teaching and interviewing about community organizing.

Movements that aim at their immediate targets - the plant manager and the next contract, or the location of the next elementary school in the city, or Alabama's voting rights practices - these are not the definitions that produce broad movements or national change. Each of the struggles that has really leveraged local action onto a national agenda - a legislative agenda. Even if one does not participate directly electoral politics, the linkages to elected officials and a policy agenda is what links and focuses local struggles.


King and Civil rights
Antiwar and the US Senate circa 1972-74


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