The SDS section of my university is composed by a student and a faculty advisor.
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No, you judge whether or not an organization is revolutionary by its ideology, policies, and practice, and recognizing that within a given necessity, mistakes will be made, because revolution is not a dinner party. Simply asserting that something is "100% true" doesn't make it so, especially when that certitude (based on what? faith in anti-communist stereotypes?) is a stand-in for actual investigation.
"I learned during [the fight against the colonial war in Algeria] that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers." - Alain Badiou
The SDS section of my university is composed by a student and a faculty advisor.
Formerly dada
[URL="https://gemeinwesen.wordpress.com/"species being[/URL] - A magazine of communist polemic
Oh really? I've never noticed it.
Your name is Shine the Path and your avatr looks like a guy from the Shining Path.
Geez... it's all starting to make sense! :P
What do you mean? The IWW is always out there organizing workers in agriculture, the service industry, etc.
ShineThePath obviously knows nothing about my union, as he is making the same tired mistake of thinking the IWW is only about organizing in the factories.
The IWW is all about organizing workers from all different industries--NOT dividing them. One Big Union!
STP, time to start learning about the IWW. I doubt any revolutionary, despite their politics, will disagree with it's mission, and what they say.
IWW . ORG
Oh, and STP, let me clear up another misconception people have about the IWW--EVERYONE EVERYONE of all political stripes is welcome, the Union does not limit itself to anarchists, etc. and neither do we advocate a party line.
We simply believe in worker self-management of industry through democratic, solidarity unionism.
formerly Brick
formerly COMRADE CRUM
"To defend Stalin requires more courage than making the Revolution." -Hafizullah Amin
Join the Midwest Marxist-Leninist group.
I think everyone have misread my statements. Let me clear up what I have stated about IWW, I don't think they only organize Industrial Workers. I made that clear with the example of Starbucks workers, however their politics haven't changed from the beginning of the century.
On this particular point, while I agree IWW does good work, I don't want to organize with them and I don't agree with their vision and the role of Unions.
Sorry if people were confused, I was not jabbing at what work IWW does, but I am criticizing their politics.
So all workers are "Industrial Workers?" Then what is the need of calling them "Industrial Workers?" This is a foolish and ahistorical notion. "Industrial" is a term synomous for point of production of commodities, it isn't my Professor...he isn't an Industrial Worker.
This just shows very simple and foolish class analysis.
Now I understand certain differences between Industrial and Craft Unionism; however that was not my point to criticize one or the other methodology. My point was historically IWW first focused on heavy Industrial centres, which is not a bad thing, but their approach and politics have yet to develop to approach the changing developments from the end of the period of Industrialization to the larger development of Service Economies.
I understand that Com. Crum, and I know quite a few sympathetic Socialists within IWW, and obviously now a Hoxhaist. However let us be quite clear on who in IWW dominates its politics.
The same is true of other mass organizations like SDS, but there are quite clearly always political trends which have a certain hegemony of these groups.
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So YSR, can you please tell me then how Sendero Luminos became a popular rebellion amongst Peasants if they had no connection to them? How did an organization based in the country side of Peru grow with no Imperialist support and aid, and yet the Peruvian state had to resort to going under Fujimori's militarist state and creating death squads?
What is exactly a "100%" true of your statements?
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I think it is very important for any radical student movement to be(come) internationalist -- at least in the sense of constantly struggling to understand and politically support the revolutionary struggles of the world. It needs to have a real anti-patriotic flavor and militancy. Unapologetic opponents of the empire!
We all know that the media of this country pretty automatically portrays all struggles (especially around the world) as ugly, inhumane, needlessly bloody etc.
And one of the most important things that ANY radical movement has to confront is the auto-pilot verdict that new revolutionary societies are impossible. Revolutionaries are portrayed as "Pol Potist" and "terrorist" and "totalitarian" and "out of step with history" and so on.
So while we shouldn't automatically support anyone, or support anything in a kneejerk way, certainly we should have an open mind to movement the U.S. media have dissed -- especially when they are radical, popular, revolutionary and secular (!.
Some student movements (including in particular ISO) deal with this by taking distance from any communist movements around the world ("Oh, those guys are stalinist and have nothing to do WITH US.") IMHO this bows before (and in that way may even reinforce) anti-communism instead of opposing it. And more importantly, it doesn't actually grasp the important and positive nature of several key communist movements, past and present.
Since so much energy in the world is eaten up by Islamic fundamentalism -- which is (imho) reactionary in many ways. I think we should pay attention to those movements that exist which are different.
Needless to say, Maoism has given rise to some of the most important mass revolutionary movements in the world today: including in Peru (1980-92), India (from Naxalbari uprising until today), Philippines, and especially Nepal (where the maoists may well try to take power soon).
If we are going to have a real, radical student movement in the U.S., how can it NOT take such movements seriously! And I think the debate over them should be principled -- meaning: let's not start with simplistic or anti-communist rejection!
Obviously the new SDS is different from the old SDS. And we don't need to be constantly looking back over our shoulders. But... the most important turning point of the "old SDS" was when they broke with anti-communism and started to grasp the (then-shocking and forbidden) fact that the revolutionaries of Vietnam were the "good guys" and the U.S. invaders were the "bad guys." In other words moving toward a politics that really opposed and understood this system and what it does and who is fighting it.
Precisely. This is what I've been trying to say for awhile.Originally posted by kasama-rl@November 18, 2007 08:41 pm
And one of the most important things that ANY radical movement has to confront is the auto-pilot verdict that new revolutionary societies are impossible. Revolutionaries are portrayed as "Pol Potist" and "terrorist" and "totalitarian" and "out of step with history" and so on.
So while we shouldn't automatically support anyone, or support anything in a kneejerk way, certainly we should have an open mind to movement the U.S. media have dissed -- especially when they are radical, popular, revolutionary and secular (!
Some student movements (including in particular ISO) deal with this by taking distance from any communist movements around the world ("Oh, those guys are stalinist and have nothing to do WITH US.") IMHO this bows before (and in that way may even reinforce) anti-communism instead of opposing it. And more importantly, it doesn't actually grasp the important and positive nature of several key communist movements, past and present.
But this is what I feel is wrong with SDS. It's a patchwork of different ideologies, some of them very much opposed to one another. Can that work at all? I'm still skeptical. Hopefully I can get to one of the coming conventions and see how it works in reality.
A thoughtful question. Here is what I think:
All major human endeavors and movements are a patchwork of different ideologies.
Even a future socialist state will have struggle between ideologies. Even a leading revolutinary party is not "monolithic" -- as we can learn from the study of history.
And certainly we need movement that draw in people -- who want social change but are still rather untrained and inexperience -- and that will inevitably mean that any living radical and revolutionary movement will be filled with turmoil and struggle over ideas and program.
This is not something to be skeptical of, or to fear -- it is something to embrace and 'HANDLE WELL".
We need to think about the Maoist process of "unity struggle unity" -- where you start with an initial basis of unity, and then struggle over differences with the goal and outcome of arriving at a new and higher level of unity.
And we also need to pay attention to the approach of "unity, struggle, transformation" -- where we are all open to transformation, learning new things and deepening our understandings in the course of a collective struggle to uncover truth.
What else could this process of change look like?
Could we ever begin with the same ideology? how would that work? And if everyone had the same ideology in order to 'get in" how would the larger process unfold?
Even when it looks like we have "the same ideology" -- you will discover that there are different views (both now, and more as the experience unfolds).
So again: we should embrace this, live with it, learn to struggle through differences to unite more and more people around higher and higher levels of common understanding....
that's an important part of what preparing minds and organized forces for revolution looks like.
Thanks for the reply.
Perhaps I should have phrased my concerns differently: the problem isn't that there are simply too many ideologies, it goes far deeper than that. The real issues is a unified program. Read the SDS National Convention publication; I defy you to find a cohesive, constructive program that has true potential. I couldn't and I read it twice.
Secondly, different ideologies can and should work together. This is something I believe. What I also believe, however, is that this can also be a recipe for stagnation if not combined with cohesion. If we get everyone from the democratic socialists to the anarchists to the marxists, does that form the roots of a vanguard? I doubt it.
Again, I'm still very receptive on SDS, I'd like to see them prove my criticisms wrong. We'll see.
Anyway, it sucks that I can't get to the NE SDS Convention this weekend. Is anyone else going? If so, try to fill us in on how it went.
i just dropped in on this thread and i read the beginning posts. i'm glad to hear that the SDS is a completely dead organization. I've always admired what they did back in the day, I'm happy to here that they haven't been converted to some meaningless reformist organization (like so many others have)
i'm going to college soon (though i don't know which one) maybe they'll have a branch.
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I think it is worth identifying the different (but intertwined) things that a revolutionary student movement aims to accomplish:
a) students as student: mobilizing fellow students as an important and influential force in society to struggle against the system and its crimes -- campaigns among students, student strikes and teachins against the war, contingents to the mass resistance, exposing and protesting ruling class reactionaries who come to campus.
b) students as carriers of radical ideas and movement: spread radical ideas off campus by connecting students with the surrounding communities and especially oppressed youth. Organizing teach-ins in nearby highschools... leafletting. etc. Mobilizing other students to do research, do exposure, make our skills and information available broadly in society (especially among the oppressed).
c) students as emerging revolutionary cadre: serving as a school for revolutionaries: training ourselves to become communists and be the core of a future revolution. Part of that is starting to think and act as representatives of the oppressed, and as representatives of a liberated future within the present, and starting to take seriously training and organizing ourselves in ways that go beyond this moment or this place.
All three of these are important in their own right.
And one way to measure any organization among students is how (and how much) it is able make progress on these different tasks.
Yes, that's all well and good, but any organization provides such things. The problem is SDS' line, which seems to favor liberalism and anarchism as much as possible. I swear, if I ever find a passage from SDSwiki or NLN or the convention that contains a hint of Marxism, I'll reconsider, but that hasn't happened yet.
And plus, all my previous points about impotence and disunity still stand IMO. If you have communists and anarchists and liberal sociologist majors fighting over an organization, how much can it really do?
That being said, does anyone know what went down at the NE Convention?
YARG!
This whole thing leaves out the ONLY way of theorizing students that actually matters:
Students as workers-in-training.
I don't want to be a "representative of the proletariat". I am a member of the proletariat!
The goal isn't, then, to shun these groups, but to work within them in order to guide them towards a materialist outlook and a Marxist perspective. Breaking from these groups and shunning them is throwing away a very valuable political tool.
One can be a member of the proletariat as well as a "representative of the proletariat" (i.e. a member of the proletarian vanguard; a communist).
Why stop there, let the mostly white male SDS be the representatives of women and people of color too!
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves. Flora Tristan, 1843.
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Understand that it's not like there's an SDS group down my street that I can join. If there were a chapter here, I'd work in it, but there isn't. I would have to rebuild the chapter here myself, and I don't think it's worth it for the reasons given. Also, the reason their politics annoy me so much is because I WANT them to be something they have no interest in being.
Back to the larger issue: How is SDS a "very valuable political tool"? Is it because there are a lot of people in it? Is it because they have vaguely "radical" ideas? Beyond that, I see very little reason to consider them valuable. I'd take 10 Bolsheviks over 100 Second Internationalists if you get what I mean.
Plus, how does one go about bringing them to a Marxist perspective if they embrace the idea that Marxism is "old left" (as if ideologies go out of style like clothes or something
I'd love to see SDS get a serious analysis, but most of their rhetoric sounds like it came straight from an intro to sociology class. If I tried to present a communist program, I'd probably do more harm than good anyway. I'd much rather put my energy towards working with a Marxist organization, no matter how undermanned it may be.
Because workers can't be communists.
And because "white males" can't understand the dynamics of sexism or racism in class society.
Take your identity politics elsewhere.
No, I know what you mean. But, to be completely honest, I don't know enough about the political character of the SDS as a whole to back up my statement. I was basing it off of the local chapter here mostly, so I could be mistaken.
Where'd they state that?
In Soviet Russia, class reductionism take you elsewhere!
I understand. I'm basing my view off of what I get from the national organization (resolutions passed at the convention) and one of the listservs, so my perspective is limited as well. However, I really don't see SDS coming to Marxism anytime soon (I hope to be proven wrong).
On the "old left", I've heard SDSers say that sort of thing a few times, I can dig them up for you if you want.
YSR (on edit)
Don't you have some Marxist theory to vulgarize?
Oh wait, you're doing it right now. :wacko:
