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The New Left

Marxists came in all colors. Take the Communists: the "orthodox" Moscow—oriented Communists, the Peking—influenced "Marxist—Leninists," and the self—oriented Trotskyites were all energetically active in the Vietnam protest activity. It would be surprising if they were not since the objectives of the movement were consistent with the national interests of the USSR and Communist China. The peace movement can be described in ideological terms only if one political element is dominant or exerts a controlling influence.

There were a number of Communist organization in the US, four specific parties - the Communist Party of the United States, the Progressive Labor Party, the Socialist Worker Party, and the new Revolutionary Communist Party, that identified themselves specifically as Marxist-Leninist organizations that seek ultimately to change this form of government into a collectivist form or government. Assets of the US Communist Party (CPUSA) were most commonly noted. In the case of certain groups, particularly in the student field, the Trotskyite revolutionaries (directed by the Socialist Workers Party) or the Maoists (Progressive Labor Party) predominated. These Marxist groups harbored deep hostilities toward each other; often in fact they seemed more concerned about countering each other than about countering the non—Communists.

The Trotskyist Communists, rivals and generally more radical, were represented by their long-time leader, Fred Halstead, and also by Harry Ring, Lew Jones and Gus Horowitz. Their youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, had an official voice in running New MOBE through Larry Siegle, its national chairman and editor of the YSA magazine, Young Socialist, also in Peter Vinther, Allan Myers, and Carol Lipman, all of whom serve on New MOBE's steering committee.

Though historical scholarship on the anti-war movement of the 1960s is dominated by studies of northern schools, a growing body of literature is devoted to activism in other regions, particularly the South. The South saw the lowest incidence of anti-war protest of any region in the country, and historians have attempted to identify the underlying reasons. Many attribute it to entrenched southern traditions of conservatism, militarism, and racism. Specific emphasis is placed on a southern code of honor expressed through military service and the Lost Cause idea.

The Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) --"the white SNCC"-- for example, what one historian calls the "most important organization of activist white students in the South during the decade," employed Confederate symbolism and spoke of the need for southerners to "secede" from the Vietnam War. The organization established a presence on campuses south of the Mason-Dixon Line, from Florida to Kentucky.

The Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) was the leading progressive organization created by young white activists in the South during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. The SSOC was the only activist group of the era that worked to cultivate white support for the social movement. The SSOC's members gave themselves the delicate task of reconciling their love for the South and its history - warts and all - with their modern-day commitment to equality and justice for all people.

This group of white radical southern students incorporated the Confederate flag into their organizational logo, and spoke out at considerable personal risk in favor of civil rights and in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Students for a Democratic Society [SDS], a national organization of students founded in 1962, provided much of the force and direction for the New Left during the 1960's. SDS started out as SLID, or the Student League of Industrial Democracy, an arm of thee League of Industrial Democracy. LID was an Old Left organization made up of cautious anti-Communist liberals/socialists. In 1962 at Port Huron, Michigan, the Students for a Democratic Society declared its platform as, "participatory democracy,11 and practiced its convictions through such efforts as, "organiz[ing] slum dwellers in northern cities" (Scranton 1970:22). Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Alan Haber, Paul Potter, and Carl Oglesby, a Kent State student, were among its early leaders. Their doctrine opens with: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit ...." In addition to fighting racial and economic inequality, SOS decried nuclear armament, the military­ industrial complex, depersonalization, and an apathetic and ineffective university system.

SDS was a radical "New Left" student organization with a militant line on domestic and foreign issues. It claimed by 1967 to have some 3,000 members in 150 chapters on college campuses throughout the US. SDS membership was open to all, including Communists. By late 1968, estimated SDS membership peaked at about 100,000 (although no official membership counts were ever conducted).

SDS worked closely on college campuses with the Communist-controlled W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America. Although the CPUSA placed members in key positions in the SDS, it was unable to control the organization on its policies, largely because of a built-in resistance to Communist domination. SDS was saluted by Gus Hall, CPUSA General Secretary, as a part of the "responsible left." In some ways SDS views were more radical than those of the Moscow-line Communists.

SDS considered itself a "broad" movement, designed to attract people with diverse views and interests concerning such issues as peace, civil rights, poverty, and educational reform. SDS concerned itself especially with protesting the draft, denouncing the US presence in Vietnam, and "radically" transforming university life and the "decadent" American Way of Life in general.

Chapters of Students for a Democratic Society, at the State University of New York-Buffalo, and Michigan State University drew more than 1,500 students to teach-ins during the early months of 1965, when the Johnson administration was beginning to escalate the war.

During the period from the fall of 1962 to August 1965, SDS still considered reform possible and when it maintained four separate national offices: the administrative national office and the offices of the Economic Research and Action Project [ERAP], the Peace Research and Education Project, and the Political Education Project. ERAP, which was headed by Rennie Davis, sought to organize a radical political movement among the poor. From late 1964 to 1970 when SDS became increasingly action-oriented, violent, and fractious, ultimately dividing into Progressive Labor, Weathermen, and Revolutionary Youth Movement.

The Students for a Democratic Society, perhaps the most active of the major organizations, opened its doors officially to Communists along with others of "progressive" inclination. Although plainly radical, the convictions espoused by the SDS and its intellectual arm, the Radical Education Project (REP), made it clear, however, that SDS leaders were not interested in "pre-packaged ideology" or excessive Communist guidance. These militants, who identify themselves as the New Left, generally looked on Communists — especially those with foreign loyalties - as not only suspect but rather old—hat.

The REP was the intellectual arm of SDS. It was established by SDS in 1966 as an independent education, research and publication organization devoted to the cause of "democratic radicalism," which had been commonly dubbed the New Left in America. REP was incorporated as a non-profit, educational organization. Although claiming to be non-partisan, REP "identified" with the "forces of radical democracy in America and abroad." REP's vision of the future called for scrapping capitalism and the American "establishment." The REP worked to develop a network of people, both in the US and abroad, to serve the movement as rapid "sources of intelligence" on issues as they develop. Such persons, including scholars, journalists, and youth leaders, were expected to provide first-hand reports and analysis on insurgent movement and similar international developments. In this way the REP hoped to challenge "official truth" and to develop opposition resources.

The REP was already involved with SNCC and other organizations in establishing a Latin American affairs institute. This institute was to coordinate research, monitor information and maintain contacts in the Western hemisphere. The REP had contacts in Canada, Japan, most European countries, and kept in touch with the Viet Cong and African nationalists.

By the summer of 1968, SDS was beset by ideological differences that in less than a year fractured it into pieces and effectively ended its position of student leadership on the national level. SDS had always consisted of myriad smaller factions whose political, cultural, and ideological differences — some vast, most minor — fostered intense internecine squabbling.

One faction emerged to challenge for leadership, a small, dogmatic group that was quickly gaining adherents called the Progressive Labor Party (PL). Established in 1962 after being kicked out of the Communist Party USA for taking the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet split, Progressive Labor actually predated SDS's involvement in the anti-war movement, holding the first student anti-war demonstration in May 1964. In 1965 the group was absorbed into the larger and more widely known SDS, but it remained committed to an ideology that was communist, pro-Chinese, and anti-nationalist, and which viewed itself as "a vanguard party whose function it was to develop revolutionary consciousness among the working class."

In late April 1968, the proposed construction of a gymnasium by Columbia University in a neighboring New York City park separating the campus from working-class Harlem initiated a major student protest at that university. "Black Power" and "student power" proponents presented an escalating series of demands resulting in the cancellation of classes and the sealing off of the campus. On April 30, 1968, 1,000 city policemen forcibly removed the protesters from university property. 707 people were arrested, a number that included nine percent of Columbia College's total enrollment and six percent of Barnard College's undergraduate students.

The split between PLP and the majority "old guard" SDS members, who were becoming more radicalized but still held on to many of the precepts of the early SDS ideology, went public at the SDS annual convention in June 1968, when PLP proposed that SDS adopt a new program based on close cooperation between students and the working class. This "worker-student alliance" proposal, although rejected for inclusion in the SDS platform, was popular with many and symbolized the increasingly tenuous position of those in the national office.

When the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago in Augsut 1968, street demonstrations were met by the Illinois National Guard and federal troops, which were used to support the police. The subsequent Walker Report would conclude that the resulting violence constituted, "a police riot." At the Republican Convention in Miami Beach, an undaunted Ralph Abernathy, successor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led a demonstration to call attention to the plight of the poor in the United States.

During Tom Hayden’s December 1968 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the Chicago “anti-war protests,” the following was read from an instructional flyer he had co-authored with fellow SDSer and protest leader, Rennie Davis: "... disobey your parents: burn your money: you know life is a dream and all of our institutions are man-made illusions effective because YOU take the dream for reality…. Break down the family, church, nation, city, economy; turn life into an art form, a theatre of the soul and a theatre of the future; the revolutionary is the only artist…. What’s needed is a generation of people who are freaky, crazy, irrational, sexy, angry, irreligious, childish and mad: people who burn draft cards, burn high school and college degrees; people who say: “To hell with your goals!”; people who lure the youth with music, pot and acid; people who redefine the normal; people who break with the status-role-title-consumer game; people who have nothing material to lose but their flesh…. The white youth of America have more in common with Indians plundered, than they do with their own parents. Burn their houses down, and you will be free."

In December 1969, in an attempt to counteract the growing support for Progressive Labor, the SDS's national leadership issued the manifesto, Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement, to undermine PL's identification with the working class. Written by Mike Klonsky, SDS's national secretary, it argued: "We must realize our potential to reach out to new constituencies both on and off campus and build SDS into a youth movement that is revolutionary."

At the June 1969, SDS convention in Chicago, the PLP made an unsuccessful bid to take over the organization. When SDS disintegrated over these differences at its annual convention in June 1969, three groups emerged to claim the title of "SDS": PL, RYM, and RYM2. RYM, consisting of most of the national leadership, renamed themselves "Weathermen," after a position paper issued at the convention entitled, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," a line lifted from a Bob Dylan song. RYM2 was an offshoot of RYM, whose members disagreed with the Weathermen's call for violent opposition to the government. The PLP element, now known as SDS-PL, was expelled and became a separate group with its headquarters in Boston.

By 1970 SDS became increasingly action-oriented, violent, and fractious, ultimately dividing into Progressive Labor, Weathermen, and Revolutionary Youth Movement [RYM]. The Weathermen went underground [as the Weather Underground Organization], and RYM 2 split into various factions. PLP carried on until 1974, when it, too, disbanded.

In early 2006, a group of former SDS members and sympathizers, led by Democratic Socialists of America activist Paul Buhle, joined with some from a new generation of college students to re-found Students for a Democratic Society. The the Movement for a Democratic Society, formed as an SDS “support group for older activists.”