Students for a Democratic Society [Archive]

Zeus the Moose

13th August 2010, 04:00

I was active in an SDS chapter over the past semester. Not in my own school, which doesn't have one, but I took the past semester off, and joined the SDS chapter at the university in my hometown. It was a good organising experience; we had a fairly solid week of actions and activities around March 20th, and counter-protested the local Tea Party rally in April.

In terms of its politics, the national SDS is all over the map, with different local chapters having very different politics from each other. The chapter I worked with could probably be described as "militant liberals" or "generic radicals": decent left-wing politics, but definitely not socialists. Otherwise, a sort of quasi-anarchism is fairly strong in their politics. However, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back!) (http://www.frso.org) has pursued a strategy of working within SDS, which has gotten a number of members and some local chapters affiliated with Maoist politics. The other Freedom Road Socialist Organization (http://www.freedomroad.org) and Solidarity (http://www.solidarity-us.org) have also done work inside SDS.

My opinion of SDS has varied a bit over the years. Nowadays, I'd look on it as somewhat similar to the Green Party- definitely a good idea to pay attention to, as a member of the Socialist Party it might make sense to work within it on a tactical basis, but I wouldn't advocate a strategy of working within SDS (although I used to.)