Rebels With a Cause

In many ways SDS was the organizational expression of the 1960s radicalization, just as the Communist Party was of the 1930s. Given that fact, it was only a matter of time when a documentary film maker would take a stab at SDS using the example of a film like "Seeing Red", which was based on the CP. Directed by Helen Garvy, an SDS veteran herself, "Rebels With a Cause" combines interviews with other SDS'ers--now mostly in their fifties and sixties (listed below)--and film footage from the era. Like "Seeing Red", the general tone is one mixed with feelings of accomplishment and ruefulness about mistakes made under the pressure of events.

At its peak in 1968, SDS probably had over 100,000 members--mostly college students radicalized by the war in Vietnam. According to Kirkpatrick Sale's article in Buhle-Buhle-Georgakas' Encyclopedia of the American Left, these members were organized in 350 chapters and the national organization operated with a budget of perhaps $125,000 a year. (Sale is the author of "SDS".) In less than a year, the organization imploded--largely a victim of youthful frustration with the inability to stop the war in Vietnam.

SDS was a project of the League for Industrial Society, a social democratic/trade union formation with close ties to Max Shachtman. This early history is documented in Maurice Isserman's "If I Had a Hammer". In 1962 the group met in Port Huron, Michigan and voted to adopt a resolution authored by Tom Hayden that became known as the "Port Huron Statement."

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html

Unfortunately the main ideological input to SDS was a mixture of anarchism and populism rather than the kind of Marxism that had been developing in the 1950s at Cochran and Braverman's American Socialist magazine. Unlike similar formations in Europe, the Americans opted for a mixture of Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills rather than to try to resurrect a Marxism that had been heavily tarnished by Stalinism and Trotskyist sectarianism.

The interviewees describe their involvement with the early SDS, prior to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Mostly their activity consisted of moving to impoverished neighborhoods in the South or the northern cities and attempting to organize people around very minimal demands, such as getting a traffic light at a dangerous intersection, etc.

All this changed in April 1965 when SDS called for a national march in Washington against the war in Vietnam, which drew more than 20,000 people--ten times more than the organizers expected. This march went on despite heavy pressure from the social democratic godfathers of the organization. What the film does not mention is the role of Trotskyists in the Young Socialist Alliance in applying pressure from the other direction. To the credit of SDS, they had adopted a non-exclusionary policy to work with Marxists which was as much of an aggravation to figures like Michael Harrington as was protesting the war in the first place.

After 1965, SDS never called for another mass demonstration. It had developed the ultraleft notion that since the "system" was the problem rather than the particular war, it was a waste of time to march against the war. Fortunately it did not retreat into empty theorizing which characterized some of the Marxist sects, but threw its energy into extremely militant campus-based actions.

The most famous of these was the student strike at Columbia University--my employer--that effectively shut down the campus in 1968. This action was a fusion of two distinct protests, one against campus complicity in the war and the other a protest by mostly minority students over plans to build a gym in Harlem over the objections of local residents. After taking over the offices of President Grayson Kirk, they rifled through his files and discovered documentation of university complicity with war research. Those files were turned over to students outside the occupation who made them public. Kirk eventually lost his job over the ensuing scandal and the strike itself. The gym was never built.

This protest and similar protests around the country electrified the student population in the United States which began to join SDS by the hundreds and thousands. Rather than thinking coolly and calmly about how to maximize their power, the SDS leaders began to lose track of who they were and what they represented. In anguish over the continuing war, they sought a shortcut to ending it using their own militancy rather than the social power of the working class. That power could have only been tapped by seemingly "safe" actions such as the mass demonstrations in Washington and the Moratorium.

The SDS'ers kept raising the level of militancy at demonstrations, using the chaotic street battles at the 1968 Democratic Party convention as some kind of model. What they could not understand is that bloody heads were not likely to encourage other students to follow their lead, despite all the press coverage. This is a lesson that obviously has to be transmitted to the new generation of radicals that is coming together around WTO protests, etc.

At the 1969 SDS convention ultraleftist frustration came to a climax with the formation of the Weatherman faction. This group of several hundred honestly believed that by raising a ruckus in the US, the war effort in Vietnam would be weakened since imperialism would be forced to fight on several fronts. In 1969, after the Weathermen were defeated and scattered by cops in a adventurist street action they called "The Days of Rage", they decided to up the ante rather than analyze their failure. A small group within the Weathermen formed the Weather Underground which would embark on a terrorist campaign. The only thing that got blown up was the Greenwich Village townhouse of leftist lawyer Leonard Boudin, where comrades of his daughter Kathy accidentally set off an explosion in a basement bomb laboratory on March 6, 1970.

Even though the SDS had ceased to exist as an organization, the tens of thousands of activists who had formed its ranks continued to do excellent work in their neighborhoods and college campuses. It is quite possible that a sizable minority of left academics today spent some time in SDS. Many local institutions such as food co-ops, Sister City projects for Nicaragua in the 1980s, anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear groups, etc. depended on cadres who went through the SDS experience.

My own analysis of SDS and what it represented could not find expression in this documentary. Rather than seeing SDS as a necessary outcome of student frustration with a seemingly endless war, I see it now as a spontaneous expression of indigenous radicalism that a Marxist current can ill afford to ignore. This was the posture of the Trotskyist movement which oriented to the antiwar committees that built the mass demonstrations and viewed SDS as the enemy. While these antiwar committees were hotbeds of activism, they were generally devoid of the kind of analysis and debate that marked a typical SDS chapter. SDS'ers tended to be the natural leadership of the campus, while antiwar activists tended to be more interested in ending the war than changing the system by and large. The small minority that believed capitalism was some kind of problem were recruited into the Trotskyist movement, where they were condemned to sectarian irrelevance in the long run.

One Maoist group, the Progressive Labor Party, chose to work in SDS but their heavy-handed style led to needless polarization and partially to the ultimate demise of the organization. If a Marxist current is given the opportunity to work in a broad-based mass movement in the future, it will have to be on a different basis than the kind of mechanical "democratic centralism" of the past. Obviously this was what SDS needed, but no such Marxist current existed. Maybe we will be more fortunate the next time.

"Rebels With A Cause" is being shown at the Screening Room in NYC, at 54 Varick St. www.thescreeningroom.com.

Interviewees included Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, Carl Oglesby, Bernadine Dohrn, Casie Hayden, Steve Max, Jeff Shero, Mike Kleiman, Richard Flacks, Bill Ayers, Kathy Wilkerson and Juan Gonzalez.