where is today's SDS


People on 'The Weather Underground' message boards keep asking, 'where is today's SDS?'. Well, without even touching on the Green Party and Ralph Nader, here's a list of current political activity that people I know in their teens, twenties and even early thirties are into:

Revolutionary Communist Party:

http://rwor.org/rcp-e.htm/

A group closely related to the R.C.P. :

http://www.refuseandresist.org/

There is also another Communist party, 'The Sparticist League'.

All of these groups have been recruiting at both Punk and HardCore shows since the whole early 1990's 'Alternative' culture boom. We had both Communist/Socialist kids and Libertarian/Civil Liberties kids at most area middle schools and high schools when I attended (1990's/early 2000's Massachusetts). There was also a local 'Refuse and Resist' chapter (mid to late 90's) of mainly high school aged people that later evolved into a group named 'Cyrkle' after a number of Libertarian leaning kids joined. Though many local chapters of 'Refuse and Resist' still exist.

The number of young people involved with these groups dropped a bit at the beginning of this decade after the whole 1990's "I want to be 'Alternative'/'Alt. Culture" thing cooled a bit. But there are still many, many young people in their teens/twenties/thirties etc. politically active. They just work from two points of view. One group from the Civil Libertarian/individual freedom point of view. The other group from redistribution of wealth/we all become one point of view.

Kids with all kinds of points of view have worked with or started a local 'Food Not Bombs' chapter to feed the hungry in their neighborhood, city or town:

http://www.foodnotbombs.net/

Kids from both point of views have worked on the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal:

http://www.freemumia.org/

People from a more Socialist/Communist view work on the Anti-World Trade Organization campaign which has large protest all over the world starting with the 'Battle in Seattle' in 1999:

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wto/

You also have to remember the large protest outside both the Democratic Party Convention in Boston and the Republican Convention in New York City in 2004. I was at both and both were attended by large amounts of young people of all political persuasions.

To read more on current Socialist and/or Communist activism try No Logo run by activist Naomi Klein:

http://www.nologo.org/

or

The Revolutionary Worker

http://rwor.org/

For Libertarian/Civil Liberties activism try:

http://www.libertarianrock.com/

or

http://www.theadvocates.org/

Two very different takes on 'freedom' but nevertheless two active points of view from young people today.

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The SDS was a liberal organization. Certain members of the SDS were anarchist/socialist/communist and were more militant. Some of those certain members made up the Weather Underground.


The Revolutionary Communist Party behaves like a cult that tries to infiltrate and take over many of the smaller organizations in the Left Wing in an attempt to pull "The Revolution" under its vanguardist umbrella. They have a leader named Bob Avakian who did a bunch of cool *beep* a long time ago, got in trouble and fled to some other country. He's probably a very cool person but he's not God and I don't believe in that kind of structure. I dunno if any of you know what any of that means, but basically their ideologies are not based in reality. You could say the same thing on many levels about the International Socialist Organization, but they are far more workable. www.internationalsocialist.org

A list of good websites to visit if you're interested in working radical politics:

www.infoshop.org
flag.blackened.net
www.antiracistaction.ca/us
indymedia.us
www.foodnotbombs.net

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Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (still existing) is the above ground arm of the Weather Underground Organization. Some of its members were authors of "You don't need a weatherman...."

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Thanks for the link to the ISO website. Many anarchists (I'm assuming you're anarchist...) are far more hostile to our organization, based on things I've read on various websites including infoshop and just the general amount of criticism that we take in Seattle.

I just wanted to add to this board that the SDS have actually reformed in several large cities, most notably New York. From what I can tell it's made up of old SDS members and younger activists who are attracted to the organization due to their historical significance. I think it would be very exciting if more people from a variety of organizations could join a group like the SDS and help unify the left for the new movement.

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"Thanks for the link to the ISO website. Many anarchists (I'm assuming you're anarchist...) are far more hostile to our organization, based on things I've read on various websites including infoshop and just the general amount of criticism that we take in Seattle."
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Should any sane, rational person who is attuned to the complexity of the human species be at all concerned with what anarchists think? Self-proclaimed anarchists give us lefty leaning liberals an extremely bad name. Their basic philosophical stance is absurd and childish, and is to be taken about as seriously as Johnny Rotten. Are there actually thinking anarchists who can defend with any level of seriousness the position that countries are better off with absolutely no government presence whatsoever???

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It is obvious that you have no understanding of anarchism whatsoever. You should really learn about a subject before you shoot your mouth off about it.

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"It is obvious that you have no understanding of anarchism whatsoever. You should really learn about a subject before you shoot your mouth off about it."
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It is obvious that you can't read, because all I said about anarchism -- a tenet I disagree with -- is that it supports the elimination of what we call the "government." I'll be waiting patiently for your explanation of why this isn't really the case. Please educate us. I'm sure it will be fascination...and completely wrong.

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I don't give a *beep* what's better for countries; why don't you start asking whether <i>people</i> are better off without centralized state authority?

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Well, Noam Chosmsky is an "anarchist" (I think he would describe himself as a libertarian socialist) and he's considered by many to be the greatest intellectual alive today. So when you're asking if any "sane, rational person who is attuned to the complexity of the human species" could be an anarchist, I would certainly say yes! That's not even mentioning hundreds of brilliant anarchist and socialist thinkers that have lived in the last hundred years. It's obvious you know very little about anarchism. I'm not even an anarchist, and I know that it's a much more complex ideology that you seem to assume it is.

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"Well, Noam Chosmsky is an "anarchist" (I think he would describe himself as a libertarian socialist) and he's considered by many to be the greatest intellectual alive today. So when you're asking if any "sane, rational person who is attuned to the complexity of the human species" could be an anarchist, I would certainly say yes!"
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And the great thinker Noam Chomsky was a fierce advocate of Pol Pot. Think he can't get his thinking ass backwards? And like I asked another pompous schmuck on this thread, tell me where I'm wrong that a basic tenet of "anarchism" is the rejection of a centralized "government."

It's really amazing how you blowhards, you supposed scholars of anarchism, offer nothing more than "you don't know the first thing about anarchism," yet are too lazy or ignorant to bother explaining what your conception of it is. You certainly give the impression that you yourself don't know the first thing about it, as if you just like the way "I'm an anarchist" sounds to your ears.

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I think it should be said that Chomsky did not support Pol Pot and why would he support a far-left authoritarian anyway? Chomsky is an anarchist. More info here where Chomsky blames the US for Cambodia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman

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Saying that SDS was a liberal organization ignores the facts. SDS described itself as a radical new left organization. They saw liberals as part of the problem. SDSers had deep disagreements with liberals about the extent and pace of change that was necessary. Whatever SDS was, it was NOT a liberal organization.

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Of course, that definition is based on the 1960s definition of "liberal" which has different connotations than it does today. If you would like to know more reply to this and I will try to sum it up as my various readings have defined it... it's complicated!

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SDS has recently been revived at many college campuses.

http://www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org/

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yup, you beat me to it
I'm a member

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Yeah, I'm member of NCSU SDS. They're all over the country and using direct action whenever possible. Join up!

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What made the New Left of the 60's such a potent force was that it resulted from a kind of unpredictable groundswell. From elements of 50's underground and youth culture, from the civil rights movement, and from the general cultural zeitgeist at the start of the decade came a natural inclination among students to become active and start looking for a new way to direct their lives and the society around them. First this applied to a vanguard but by the end of the 60's it would more or less, to varying degrees, apply to the entire generation.

And due to the lack of the specific circumstances present at that time, as well as an innocence and naivite, which no doubt played a part in the "virgin birth" of SDS (a misconception, but one that many of the SDSers themselves seemed to share) - it's hard to imagine as potent and original a force emerging on today's Left.

Though of course the organizations you mentioned are not the only ones of their ilk they are notable for being more or less controlled by ideological factions. SDS, in the early 60's, managed to become an active force on the Left without leaning towards Communism (or other extreme ideological factions) on the one hand, or anti-communism (a prerequisite for most social democrats and liberals) on the other. It's hard to imagine as un-beholden a group making an impact today. For one thing, SDS was more or less filling a vacuum in the student world. Today there's no vacuum, too many diverse groups jostling for power and their own little patch of activism, for better or worse (probably worse in the long run, at least in terms of building a broad-based movement).

This is my perspective from what I've read & seen. I have never been active in movement politics, despite sympathizing with some of their causes, particularly the opposition to entering the Iraq war. I remember seeing protests on my campus at that time which seemed so futile and embarrassing, and so encumbered by ideological dead weight and stridently "outsider" fashion and approaches, that I was never tempted to get involved. One protest in particular stands out: a group of students, after staging an "anti-Iraq war" event in which they ended up talking more about Palestine and other pet causes, marched into a building and lay down on the steps to stage a "die-in." The sight of them lying inside this building, as ineffectively as if they actually were dead, while people walked around outside, oblivious, sadly seems to sum up post-60's activism to me. Too bad, because the situation is ripe for a genuine, ORIGINAL student movement.

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The SDS/Weatherman were bad people operating on bad principles. They were ruthless and selfish. In reality, they did win. Virtually every social failure of the last 30 years can be attributed to the spirochete of their illness in the American body politic. Anyone who respects these people ought to be compelled to live with the Black Panthers or to serve with Che's spiritual and political inheritors.

LL

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