A Report on the LID

...Hopefully, the Institute will become a permanent educational center in which young civil rights activists can receive training in the intellectual and organizational skills for leadership...

...There is not space to describe the circumstances which led to the separation of the League from its former student department, Students for a Democratic Society...

...We have not, in a year, reclimbed those heights, but we have got our publications program moving again...

...At the end of the year, the League produced as a pamphlet Michael Harrington's The Politics of Poverty, which originally appeared in the Fall 1965 Dissent...

...There were signs of a revival of radical energy, and we wanted to make a contribution to its programmatic development...

...Courses in Negro history, urban problems and community organizing techniques are now under way, drawing upon LID experts in a variety of fields...

...So far, papers by Bayard Rustin, Herbert Gans and Theodore Draper have been enormously successful, enjoying distribution by the tens of thousands...

...This is one concrete example of how the close working relationship that has just been established between LID and Dissent can bring benefits...

...There is perhaps no more urgent task for democratic radicals in this period...

...They revolve largely around concepts of democracy and attitudes toward Communism...

...The new relationship with Dissent will make possible a considerable expansion of this publications program...

...The split with SDS, far from signifying the end of the LID's work in the student movement, frees us from petty organizational squabbles and makes possible the pursuit of work which is more substantive...

...Another area of cooperation will be the organization of public meetings...

...Scheduled for the fall of 1966, the Conference would bring European experts together with trade unionists, civil rights activists, and intellectuals to discuss techniques of democratic allocation of resources to meet the unmet social needs of the nation...

...When Michael Harrington was named LID Chairman in September, 1964, and a young staff took over the office, we sought to avoid the grandiose predictions of progress that frequently characterize organizational motions on the American Left...

...Another League project, conceived last year, has become even more relevant with the escalation of the war in Vietnam and with the debate over the growing military budget's effects on domestic social spending...

...The Institute is a unique attempt to train the new kind of activist required in the current stage of the civil rights revolution...

...Continued on page 217) A REP O R T ON THE L. I. D. (continued from page 116) Probably the single most dramatic breakthrough for the League was the opening in October of its Leadership Training Institute in Harlem...

...We saw opportunities to bring together intellectuals, civil rights activists, trade unionists and students—not into an all encompassing ersatz political party but into dialogue and association...

...To Build a New World: A Brief History of American Labor, by Thomas R. Brooks, was distributed to over 17,000 high school students...

...These, too, were an important part of the League's tradition and have recently been resumed by the New York Chapter...

...the budget has doubled, and so has the staff (most of whom, incidentally, are under 30...

...These differences cannot be ascribed solely to the "generational gap" or subsumed under "New Left" v. "Old Left...

...At least four major pamphlets will appear in 1966, plus more occasional papers, some of which may first appear in the magazine...

...It is expected to become a standard item in trade union education programs, as well as a useful means of orienting college students toward the labor movement...

...My pamphlet The Economics of Equality, has sold out (15,000 copies) and has been excerpted for several anthologies...

...In this context 1965 was a year of steady, encouraging gains and important new departures...

...In addition to such pamphlets, the League initiated Looking Forward, a series of occasional papers...

...The housekeeping statistics are good: LID membership has grown by well over 50...

...We spoke, rather, of reestablishing the League as an educational and intellectual center among the movements for democratic social change...

...With the sponsorship of an impressive list of economists and "movement people," the League proposes to initiate a Conference on National Economic Planning...

...The rich tradition of the League in past decades rested very largely on its muckraking pamphlets, which were disseminated by the hundreds of thousands...

...For further details on SDS etc., see the article in the current Dissent by Paul Feldman—Ed...

...It is time to take stock...

...Robert Curvin, former head of Newark CORE and a member of CORE's NAC, is director of the project and has been working with civil rights organizations, block associations, and other community groups...

...Norman Thomas and Harry Laidler, stalwart voices for democratic socialism, have been joined on the Board of Directors by a host of new faces—Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe, Norman Hill, Frank Riessman, Patricia Sexton, Donald Slaiman, and others...

...I have left for the end the area in which the League has been working most intensely, the student movement...

...What is important here is that the League, more than any other adult organization, has soug it to maintain the links between the new student movement and the older generation of liberals and radicals, while stimulating honest debate of the issues...

...20,000 copies of this pamphlet will be distributed nationally to individuals and organizations active in the anti-poverty movement...

...The first year of the effort to reinvigorate the League for Industrial Democracy has been completed...

...The ideological and political differences that emerged between the two organizations are part of ongoing controversy among American radicals...