Steppin’ It Up: The New SDS
By Doug Viehmeyer


In 2006, youth and student movements around the world showed signs of life
that have inspired and sharpened the focus of radical student organizers
in the US. Despite the continued US imperial onslaught in the Middle
East—demonstrated by the ongoing occupation of Iraq, US support for
Israel’s wars against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and the deteriorating
occupation of Afghanistan—students rose up globally against the neoliberal
economic policies that are the foundation of US empire.

In France, students sparked a nationwide movement against the neoliberal
CPE employment plan, which succeeded in virtually shutting down the entire
nation and culminated in a General Strike which forced the government to
back down from passing the law. In Chile, high school and university
students shut down the educational system in protest of similar “reforms.”
The same happened in Greece early this past summer, with the majority of
universities being occupied by students for weeks.

In the US, a refreshing development in the student left has emerged.
Responding to the need for a nationwide, coordinated, decentralized
radical student organization, young organizers from campuses and high
schools across the US have begun building a new, revitalized Students for
a Democratic Society. The effort to rebuild SDS has been treated with
enthusiasm by many, and with skepticism by others; how could these young
kids have the audacity to claim the name of SDS for the new generation?

SDS has gone forward, with 250 chapters springing up nationwide (and
internationally). The most surprising aspect of the growth of SDS has been
the number of chapters established at high schools and community colleges.
When compared with the initial years after the founding of the original
SDS, we are ahead of the curve.

The spring and summer of 2006 was the incubation period for SDS, with the
initial chapters getting off the ground and spreading via word of mouth
and the web, participating in joint actions with other groups, and
beginning the slow development of organizational vision and strategy. SDS
chapters and members quickly engaged with various struggles for social
justice and against imperialism:

Pace University SDSers inadvertently sparked a free speech struggle when
members were repressed and interrogated by the Secret Service following a
protest against former President Bill Clinton’s record of imperialist
crimes and atrocities. Pace SDS has been greeted with a systematic policy
of repression aimed at eliminating key organizers, which culminated in the
targeted arrests of Brian Kelly, Lauren Giaccone, and John Cronan during a
protest at Pace’s Lower Manhattan campus in November 2006.


6 NYC SDSers were arrested during civil disobedience with members of the
War Resisters League at the Times Square recruiting center on March 19th.

In late April, the Olympia, WA, SDS chapter came together during the
organizing of one of the most energizing direct actions against the war to
date: the blockades against the Port of Washington deployment of the
Stryker Brigade to Iraq. The “Port Militarization Resistance” was an
experiment in local direct democracy and succeeded in gaining national
exposure. Incidentally, the Port of Washington direct action occurred just
before Lt. Ehren Watada emerged as a leading war resister within the
military at nearby Fort Lewis. SDS chapters in the Northwest have
continued to support Lt. Watada as he approached his court martial date.

The Northeast Regional Conference at Brown University in April voted
unanimously to support the May Day national actions for immigrant rights.
SDSers marched with immigrants across the nation, including NYC where
SDSers witnessed racist police brutality against middle aged Chicano women
attempting to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

After Israel invaded Lebanon and Gaza in the summer, SDS in NYC joined
several of the large mobilizations to call for an end to the US-Israeli
aggression.

On January 27, 2007, at the DC anti-war mobilization, SDSers and radical
youth from two separate contingents nonviolently charged the steps of the
Capitol building to express the urgency of ending the war. It was not the
“Days of Rage” redux that some have characterized it as. We confronted the
police blocking our path and engaged them, chanting “who do you serve.”
The spring momentum carried through to the national convention in Chicago
this past August, a return to where SDS tore itself apart in 1969 at the
height of its prominence and imploded as a national entity. Two hundred
members converged on the University of Chicago to lay the foundation for a
national radical movement. Because the membership far exceeded the actual
physical attendance at the convention by SDS members, the question of the
development of organizational structure was left as the primary regional
and national agenda item for the 2006-7 school year leading up to this
summer’s SDS Constitutional Convention. In Chicago, we built relationships
with each other and discussed the most pressing issues facing the radical
left.

SDS Chapter registration exploded in the fall semester. The word was out.
There was something new happening in the student movement. A radical
student formation was in the works, with its sights set on really
organizing thousands of students into a crucial component of an
anti-systemic movement. Chapters that were established last spring
solidified themselves on campus, while new chapters sprung up on other
colleges around the country.

As of the time of writing, the Northwest and Midwest have held regional
conventions that developed regional structure and focused on
anti-oppression training and internal education. Conventions are scheduled
for the late winter and spring in the Southeast at the University of
Central Florida, Middle Atlantic at William & Mary College, and a
Northeast regional on February 16-18, 2007 in NYC at the New School
University.

The current phase of organizational development in SDS could be
characterized as “radical base-building” on campus, as well as the
formulation period for ideas about national structure that will ensure
participatory democracy from the chapter to the national level. These
questions continue to dominate strategic discussion on the left and SDS is
determined to build a new model of national organization that incorporates
the vision of participatory democracy with the lessons of the left since
the 60’s. We also hope to draw lessons from the experience of the
post-Seattle global justice movement and build relationships with
organizers of that generation.

Intergenerational dialogue

One key factor that has helped SDS grow has been the commitment of young
SDSers, as well as former SDSers and activists from the 60’s and 70’s, to
building a dialogue about the lessons of that period for our current
organizing. Former SDSers representing every period in SDS’s history, from
the Port Huron era “Old Guard” and the post-65 “Prairie Power,” to the
post-68 revolutionaries and Weatherpeople, have made themselves available
to the new radicals.

SDSers look to our predecessors for their collective wisdom and their
knowledge of left history and strategy. We hope that the Movement for a
Democratic Society advisory board in formation becomes not merely a
fundraising body full of left luminaries, but an active support body for
SDS/MDS’s national organizing efforts. Older radicals have a rare
opportunity to build a speaker’s bureau to speak at campus teach-ins and
forums organized by SDSers that are already asking the hard, strategic
questions facing the movement. The idea of a SDS/MDS “sustainers’ program”
could be a way to build and maintain an active fundraising effort without
bestowing undue authority upon board members.

We can also envision in the near future the formation of an FDS (Faculty
for a Democratic Society) to help support SDS efforts to radically
democratize the educational system and bring together the fragmented
academic left. Of course, such efforts would also have to include support
for the struggles of staff, workers, adjunct faculty, and graduate
assistants on campus. As the old slogan goes, towards a “Free University
in a Free Society.”

Radical organization

Among the major problems SDS is faced with as it builds itself from below
is that of organizational structure. SDS needs to repudiate both the
centralism of vanguard parties, as well as the anti-organizational (and
anti-mass) excesses exhibited by some “anarchists and
anti-authoritarians.” We don’t want a steering committee to dictate
national policy, but we also need to step back and examine the concept of
“total autonomy” in the context of a nationwide radical organization. If
chapters of SDS were totally autonomous, one chapter could initiate an
action that might have severe consequences for the entire national SDS,
bringing down state repression on chapters doing the hard work of movement
building on campuses.

The “network model” of left organizing strategy has both positives and
very clear shortcomings. There is very little accountability in loosely
based networks; while they have been very effective in bringing people
together for mobilizations and direct actions, they have not been able to
build a model for organizing that has exerted a considerable influence on
the trajectory of the left in the US. SDS needs to look to decentralized
mass movements that have successfully challenged the status quo around the
world and draw lessons from their experiences.

While it is important to take the approach of “Resist State Power/Build
Dual Power” and build counter-institutions from below, student radicals
would be mistaken to adopt the more problematic anti-mass ideas of some
sub-cultural sectors of the left. From Paris in 1968 to the 1st
Palestinian Intifada and beyond, it is clear that successful radical
movements are mass movements, movements of millions mobilized for change.

SDS has the chance to become a truly mass phenomenon if its members build
a structure that will ensure internal democracy and allow for the
facilitation of coordinated nationwide actions. If this is solidified in
the coming months, SDS will be able to absorb growing numbers and chapters
that are immediately plugged into the organization and receive active
support and solidarity. During the summer of 2007, SDS is planning to hold
a series of “action/organizer” camps in different regions to build
organizing skills and strategic vision.

Student power

Young students are crucial to the stability of the power structure; the
“system” relies upon the university and educational system to indoctrinate
young people and channel them into positions which support the functioning
of the neoliberal political-economic order. The routines and social status
competition in many colleges and universities reinforces ideological
domination to serve elite interests. Through everyday activity in a
university setting, the individual is conditioned to accept the ideas and
social patterns that support the status quo as “common sense.”

Of course, due to the general atmosphere of “intellectual pluralism,” a
small minority of radical faculty members remain and encourage their
students to challenge the prevailing ideology and take action for social
change. That is the reason David Horowitz and the organized
neoconservative right wing foundations—like Campus Watch and the hard-line
Zionist David Project—have attacked dissenting professors, like David
Graeber at Yale and Joseph Massad at Columbia. Their goal is nothing short
of wiping out the remaining radical left academy.

This state of affairs isn’t surprising. The modern university is a
corporation; its major product is educated white-collar professionals,
mid-level and ideological managers in the society at large. Through its
connections with the corporations and the military industrial complex, the
university also plays a key role in providing research and academic
justifications for US imperialism and the class warfare being waged
against people here at home. Schools provide free space to recruiters from
the military, intelligence agencies, and other corporations.

The anti-war movement and campus organization against the war have not yet
reached the levels that will cause a decisive split in the elite pro-war
consensus that was achieved during the Vietnam War movement. A campus
explosion akin to the nationwide student strike after Kent State, Jackson
State, and the invasion of Cambodia would be needed to make the government
reevaluate its commitment to occupying Iraq. This would also have to occur
alongside a community-based nationwide, decentralized mobilization,
perhaps based on the models of the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium and the Chicano
Moratorium.

Another important aspect of anti-war organizing that should become a
central issue for campus activists is building student support for the
growing resistance within the military and among veterans. A GI coffee
house has been established near Fort Drum, NY. Over 1000 active duty
military personnel have initiated a call for an immediate end to the
occupation of Iraq, under the banner of an “Appeal for Redress.” Iraq
Veterans Against the War continues to grow; SDSers and campus organizers
should continue to build relationships of solidarity and cooperation with
IVAW members in the coming months.

The occupation of Iraq will end when three key elements of resistance
coalesce and exploit the “cracks and fissures” in the elite consensus.

1.The campuses, streets, and workplaces of the nation must become
ungovernable, raising the domestic cost of continuing the war to the point
where the ruling class and state apparatus is faced with the possibility
of significant social unrest over a long period.



2.Resistance to the war among active duty personnel, veterans, and
military family members must exponentially increase, connecting the
occupation to rising economic and social costs the war effort is incurring
at home. For instance, homeless and wounded vets being abandoned by the US
imperial warfare state.



3.The institutions of government and key economic players must begin to
actively oppose the war effort and exert their influence over the decision
making apparatus at the highest levels of State. The “liberal” wing of the
Democratic Party is beginning to show signs of life, with presidential
contenders Obama and John Edwards carefully playing the field as
“anti-war” alternatives to the “Hillary Machine.” The grassroots
impeachment movement has failed to generate significant momentum to affect
Congress. The level of growing congressional activity against the war will
closely correspond to the escalation of grassroots anti-war mobilization
and growing militancy among key sectors of the anti-war movement. When the
level of “civil disorder” at home causes a decisive split and “crisis of
legitimation” among the ruling class and high level bureaucrats, we can
expect a cutoff of funding for the war to follow shortly. It all depends
upon the level of activity that the grassroots anti-war movement is able
to mobilize and escalate in the coming months.

The anti-war movement, the student movement, and SDS are faced with a key
strategic challenge. We have a “passive anti-war majority” and a “militant
anti-war minority” that actually participates in demonstrations and active
organizing against the war. Our overriding goal should be to increase the
mass scale of the movement, while further radicalizing growing numbers of
people in an anti-systemic direction. The level of direct action and
resistance against key pillars supporting the war will need to grow,
including war profiteers, military recruiters, pro-war and fake anti-war
politicians.

Dissent will have to spill over into every institution of American
society. The “long march through the system” has begun; anti-war forces
need to articulate a strategic vision to exploit growing anti-war
discontent and mobilize the millions of people that it will take to end
the occupation. The idea of an Iraq Moratorium should be seriously
explored as the next major strategic mobilization for the movement in
2007. It would be a major organizing effort, increasing the participation
of the grassroots movement in developing local actions on a set date when
the people say “NO MORE.”

SDS is emerging as a major force to organize students behind a radical,
anti-systemic platform. Students and youth will no longer tolerate the
attacks on free speech, academic freedom, the total corporatization of the
university, the national debt and student loan regime that will ruin our
lives and dreams, the assault on the public sphere by the hegemonic media.
We will not stand by and acquiesce to the expansion of US empire, the
attacks on basic civil liberties, the mass incarceration of young people
of color, the increase of government surveillance and repression of our
movements, and the growing erosion of democratic culture within US
society.

Hopefully SDS can articulate an inspiring strategy of resistance and a
vision of a world without war, exploitation, and oppression that will
appeal to a growing generation of youth and students unwilling to accept
the tyranny of our system and its global machinations. Join us.

Doug Viehmeyer is a radical anti-Zionist Jew who graduated Hartwick
College in 2005. He worked on anti-war, Palestine Solidarity, and feminist
issues as an undergrad and currently is a worker in the "hospitality
industry."

http://www.leftturn.org/node/561