Notebook: A Report From "Students for a Democratic Society"

...It is true that the peculiarity of SNCC's environment, their position as agrarian revolutionists amidst the whirl of the urban revolution, limits dramatically the extent to which their experience can be generalized...

...Although most SDS members were activists in different movements, they sought in SDS a common analysis of the American scene, a set of values to guide their work, and, after a while, a strategy to focus their activity...

...SDS had received a grant for the purpose of disseminating radical economics material on campuses, very much in the Fabian tradition...

...The hardearned lesson, the only one compatible with the formative goal of participatory democracy, is that the poor themselves must be involved in the direction of their own organizations...

...Two of the projects have concentrated on organizing the unemployed (Negro and white in Baltimore, white in Chicago), initially to expedite the handling of their compensation claims, later for more fundamental purposes...

...It requires, we think, analysis of recent experiences in building movements of the hitherto silent, and an understanding of how the still nascent experience of these movements can be used to catalyze a broadly based movement for democracy and shared abundance...

...The road to sophistication and radicalization of outlook is a tortuous one, and numerically, the success of these Unions for Jobs and Income Now (U-JOIN) has been slight compared to the experience of the 30s...

...Interestingly, most success seems to have come in areas where the govern ment has already defined "sub-classes" of people who experience and comprehend roughly the same set of troubles...

...The organizer's most difficult task is to formulate concerns common to many of the disenfranchised and dispossessed...

...Nor can we say that what SDS is doing and thinking comprehends the diffused concerns of its various constituencies...

...There is a full-time project in the Boston area to organize defense workers and intellectuals for the conversion of military facilities to peacetime uses...

...Its first two years, 1961-62, mirrored the need activist students felt to derive some order and values from the world they had inherited — HUAC, sit-ins, peace marches, multiversities — and their quest for a home in which to search for rudiments and extract from them a strategy...

...and from the vision of a truly democratic order flowed critiques of American corporate power, the cold war, maldistributed abundance, racial injustice, and political stultification...

...Moreover, the kind of social change called for seemed as distant as ever, while the hoped-for coalescence among movements did not take place...

...In Cleveland, to illustrate a third approach, poor white (many of them emigrants from jobless Appalachia) are being organized...

...so are demonstrations designed to expose and challenge the role of American corporations in bolstering South African apartheid, and a demonstration in Washington for an end to the Vietnamese war...

...SDS chose to work among the underclasses not simply because their grievances are more blatant, but because they are least tied to the system of sanctions that encloses the mainstream of the society...

...In the face of test-ban and limited detente, when much of the old peace activism has faded, SDS is trying to focus the attention of academics and others on the role of America in the Third World, particularly to point the finger at abuses of corporate power...

...Given this basic no Lion, experimentation has been the hallmark, and the strategy has been and is ever being adjusted accordingly...

...in North Carolina, SDS people are working with unions to make labor a political force in the state...

...of these projects, six continued into the fall and winter with about 40 full-time organizers, most of them recent students making longterm commitments to their adopted communities...

...The style of organization in these projects contrasts with the more militant, charismatic and racial appeals that have marked other Northern Negro protest movements, though each project has felt these tensions in different ways and with different outcomes (there is miliance, too, in the non-racial tactic of rent strikes...

...If such a strategy is to emerge, it will undoubtedly grow from the frustrations generated by the limits of the current movement—i.e., through the efforts of those who have already become active...

...Here, too, organizers are excited to find "their" organizations no longer theirs, but filled with new leaders who do not hesitate to dispute the organizers' notions, Experience and goals (long-run as well as immediate) come to be shared as the organizer and the poor people develop a capacity to learn from one another...

...The substance of what emerged is not easily summarized here, but what stands out is a departure from the formalism of American democratic theory as well as a deep skepticism about socialist formulations of all varieties...

...and proponents of liberal concerns running from medicare to conservation will be sympathetically heard (within acceptable limits) by the Administration...

...Such a thrust would raise issues the Johnson administration cannot tolerate — shared abundance, democratic control of economic power, etc...

...But it remains true that partly despite and partly because of the galvanizing quality of the community or ganizing projects, the student base has continued to grow...

...in a refreshing way it is "getting out of hand...

...Beyond this, top-down administration of "help for the poor" is precisely the ground on which the U-JOINs find the Johnson War on Poverty culpable, and it is for this reason—not simply because of the War's smallness—that they fight it and propose alternatives...

...Perhaps the most frustrating aspect here is that the kind of latency so thick in the Negro ghetto, the pressure and solidarity that have built up for decades under the capstone of segregation, is missing...

...it would pose a clear choice of loyalties for disgruntled though currently collared liberal elements of the Consensus...

...Out of these two concrete experiences, as well as the need to devise and implement a central activity and strategy for the organization, came a decision in December 1963 to experiment with organizing in a few Northern communities, particularly to test whether poor whites and Negroes could be organized in compatible or unified efforts into a movement based on economic grievances...

...In Newark, N.J...

...Stemming from this value comes a desire to create the capacity in men to "translate personal troubles into public issues," through analysis, through organizations and action...

...The result is that emerging movements are left to live (and in the case of the peace movement, to die) in their solitary niches, and are drawn only accidentally toward more comprehensive definitions of problems, goals, and strategies...

...and Chester, Pa., SDS organizers have been working in poor Negro ghettoes, forming block organizations that begin with neighborhood improvement projects (demanding play streets, etc...

...The logic of democracy dictates that community people be hired as organizers, and, in fact, this is happening...

...In Texas, chapters are being organized to fight for free higher education, in cooperation with the liberal Democratic Coa'htion of labor, Negroes, intellectuals, and Latin Americans...

...And the results have been promising, although some grand-inquisitorial managers of the Welfare State have not hesitated to employ the time-tested art of Red-baiting to keep their wards "happy" — and in their place...

...But conversations with SNCC workers had convinced SDS leaders that some of the money should be used to experiment with the possibility of organizing poor whites—in order to deflect the projected "white backlash," and to begin building alliances capable of joining with the civil rights movement for common ends...

...And that, it seems to us, is a good and hopeful thing...

...The Newark Community Union Project has been visited by police harassment and arbitrary arrests, by charges of riot-mongering, by window breaking, by evictions and suits entered by fearful landlords...

...The older, more diffuse concern with peace is also being sharpened...

...Two new projects have been added since...

...often it seemed to overpower the guiding ideology, for that ideology demanded a central strategic focus, and SDS had none...

...But still one feels that the SNCC effort has cast light on the kind of movement America needs...

...Boston SDS members worked actively in the Noel Day Congressional campaign in Roxbury, out of which has come a full-time SDS organizing project...

...Simply put, SDS is a grouping of students and young people who have come to see the need for a New Left politics and strategy, and are playing important roles in the crystallization of each...

...In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, social institutions were analyzed against that standard...

...It requires, besides a diagnosis of "contradictions" and "forces" (though those are needed too), a live sense of the varied roles people can play...

...Moderate civil rights and peace groups will vie for their shares of the Great Pie...

...What we lack, and what a tired, introspective, and only vicariously engaged Left has failed to provide, is any sense of a strategy for raising those issues...

...Probably none of us in SDS would say with any assurance that what is now being tried will definitely work...

...it has posed the paradox that most of the full-time staff of the organization are non-students organizing non-members full-time, while almost the entire membership (about 1500 at this writing) are full-time students...

...only democracy can strengthen these new organizations to survive failures and "successes," as the unions of the unemployed in the '30s did not...

...In this situation, the burden of isolation and the necessity for "tangible results" in the end must suck the creators of insurgent politics into the Consensual whirlpool...

...At about that time, the SDS chapter at Swarthmore College was working in the Negro ghettoes of nearby Chester, Pa., organizing block clubs and a boycott of a hideously overcrowded and archaic elementary school...

...But the tenor of the Northern Negro ghettoes is such that organization comes more naturally than in white neighborhoods, as does its antithesis — hostility and violence from city machines and a host of vested interests...

...And although big business must shy at its ties with the Democrats, it is hard to see disappointments on the horizon that would lead it to desert the President for a free-for-all fight to recapture a Republican party probably doomed to permanent minority status...

...that this requires substantial and hopefully exemplary organization among potentially radical groupings...

...But there were built-in limits to that kind of eclecticism...

...To build from all this a successful strategy of political change is a task that must defy the imagination of even the most astute formula-maker...

...SDS today reflects in many ways the maturation of the first wave of student radicalism that crested in 1960...

...At the time, that was all the instruction we could give him...

...there are now over fifty campus chapters, about twice the number of a year ago...

...and graduate to more basic questions of edu cation, jobs, housing...

...The theory behind this move is relatively simple: that the route to significant change is through the creation of new political power capable of challenging the Consensus...

...Whites particularly must be made to see that there are collective solutions to the problems they face as atomized individuals, and programs must suit the needs of people whose despair has not been tempered by even small success, personal or organizational...

...In September, a oneyear "college drop-out" (an increasingly frequent phenomenon in SDS) was sent to Chicago to "organize white youth...

...In this respect we should be looking hopefully toward the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which has done more than any other group to demonstrate, plan and work for basic democratic change...

...As the call for Consensus continues to roll from the lips of Lyndon B. Johnson, the American Left must begin to search for the sources and qualities of dissidence that could break progressive forces loose from Johnson's grip...

...they can be the first to move, but hopefully their motion can be made to jog the complacency of others who belong in the movement...

...This notion of a needed strategy differs from the usual polemic about how the old order must fall...

...At Berkeley, the SDS chapter has been active in the Free Speech Movement and inm^rmental in enlarging its scope to a broad-gauge attack on the factory notion of education...

...It is against this background that it makes sense to talk about Students for a Democratic Society, the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy, and the role it is beginning to play...

...During 1963 these factors blended and forced a series of important decisions...

...In other words—and this is important for an understanding of the organization's later dialectical development—SDS's major contribution during its first two years was intellectual and ideological...

...where, four years ago, action itself was considered an accomplishment, student radicals today make much more stringent demands on themselves and their peers, for the quest for strategy is uritversal in the organization...

...mothers living on public welfare payments, and public housing tenants...

...To the organizer, public assistance and housing are potentially what the factory system was to the industrial organizer...

...Although the labor "movement" cannot but squirm about its eroding position, there is little indication that it will cease following its usual ways...

...A series of pamphlets is planned...

...If the Great Consensus is to be jarred, it must be by groups outside it, finding ways to articulate the deep and divisive issues that are today mostly hidden...

...But the forces of breakdown, we suspect, are not inherent in the apparent contradictions among the coalition's inhabitants...

...All this has been immensely and sometimes even paralyzingly stimulating for SDS...

...it was an odd assignment...

...In their place came the simple but embracing notion of participatory democracy: the right, and ability, of the individual to be engaged in the control of the environments and decisions that govern his life...

...It was argued, and to some extent justly, that SDS, although it talked a lot, did little but cast greedy eyes on other organizations...

...And all the time SDS people were growing frustrated in their university cages, just as the SDS analysis predicated they would...

...The chapters vary a great deal in size and sophistication, but all contrast sharply with student work of the early 60s...

...The economy seems to have enough room for poor whites to convince many of them, and their onlooking neighbors, that personal bootstraps are the way of salvation...

...The view of SDS at that time was still one of a loose coalition of people and ideas, synthetic of a wide range of strategies and eclectic in its approaches to social movements...

...The emphasis then was on the universities as microcosms of the larger American distortion of priorities, and on students as the agents of change...

...Imprisoned during the boycott, a group of native Chester Negroes drafted a 37-point program of demands—most of them non-racial in character, (jobs, housing, health care, etc...

...By summer, about 150 students were carrying out that experiment in nine cities...

...We have learned the hard way that the face of Northern power differs only in degree, not in quality, from its Southern counterpart...

...What is frequently missed is that this progress takes place almost entirely within the marginal or menial sectors of the economy...

...What we can say is that SDS has committed itself to hypothesize, to test, and to revise, trying to maintain throughout an openness to the long list of possibilities that remain blurred and untested...

...The point, rather, is that for one of the few times in the last twenty years a group of conscious radicals is attempting, seriously and systematically, to build a strategy and movement for basic change that reaches beyond the armchair but does not ignore it...