For a group that has lain dormant for close to 40 years, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is looking spry these days. SDS—the group that came to personify student protest on college campuses throughout the 1960s—is back, resurrected in January 2006 by former members of the once-powerful organization and seniors of Connecticut’s Stonington High School. As of early 2007, SDS includes over 200 chapters from across the country, while older activists, including many ‘60s veterans such as Al Haber (SDS’s first president), Carl Davidson, and Bernadine Dohrn, have shown their support by joining SDS’s sister organization, Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS). The group is now, in the words of SDS veteran Robert Ross, “undertaking enormous projects,” including a fight for free speech at Pace University (where five members were arrested for distributing political flyers in November 2006), blocking military convoys in Olympia, Washington, and taking part in mass demonstrations against the Iraq War in Washington, DC, New York City, and other locations. “The level of activity,” Ross concludes, “is stunning.”
Despite the activity, little attention has been paid the new SDS, yet the rebirth of a group that many gave up for dead following a riotous national conference in 1969 deserves closer attention. I spoke with SDS members across the United States about their activism and the legacy of their organization. This is not, however, a comprehensive study of the organization or the movement; instead, it’s a snapshot of an organization-in-movement.
At the heart of this snapshot lies the history of the original SDS. Founded in 1960 by a small
band of students at the University of Michigan, within a few years SDS had become the seminal organization of the American New Left. The group’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, with its focus on such concepts as alienation and authenticity within American political culture, helped articulate the early concerns of SDS and pushed the group toward a belief in the liberating potential of “participatory democracy” and the hope that social change could be affected on the local level. In practice, this took the form of projects like the Economic Research and Action Project, begun in 1964, in which SDSers lived among the poor in such cities as Chicago and Newark, New Jersey. By the late 1960s, racial unrest in many American cities, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the birth of the counterculture all played a role in attracting new members to the organization. Such growth may have led to the group’s demise, as SDS proved incapable of effectively assimilating all of the ideologies, personalities, and conflicts that came with such expansion.
By 1969, rampant sectarianism had beset the organization, and warring factions fought for control of the group. Out of this chaotic atmosphere, the Weather Underground emerged, preaching solidarity with global revolutionary movements and advocating armed resistance. After efforts like the October 1969 Days of Rage riots—when Weather members damaged property and battled police officers in the streets of Chicago—the group literally imploded. In March 1970, while preparing a bomb meant for a military complex in New Jersey, three Weather Underground members died in a Greenwich Village townhouse when the explosives detonated prematurely. It was a tragic end to the possibilities of the 1960s, and ensured that SDS would be remembered as a group of home-grown terrorists.
The reincarnation of SDS by Pat Korte, Thomas Good, and Alan Haber started in late 2005, when Korte—then a high-school senior in Connecticut—came across a posting from Good, a 47 year-old anarchist and database programmer in New York City, on a University of Michigan message board. Korte contacted Good (now a key member of MDS), who put the aspiring activist in touch with Alan Haber. Sensing the need for an intergenerational protest movement, Korte, Haber, and other allies issued a January 2006 call for a national revival of the organization and held the first national convention in August 2006. To Korte, now a student at Eugene Lang College, the name, as he told Counterpunch’s Ron Jacobs, “accurately describes us (we are students for a democratic society), the ideas expressed in the Port Huron Statement, the focus on participatory democracy, and the militancy and radicalism that defined the original SDS are much needed in the 21st century.”
Since January 2006, the group has grown at a rapid pace, mostly due to the organization’s use of technology. Mary Sackley, an SDS member at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., finds that the Internet helped when, for example, “moments after SDS was re-founded last year, [the news] could have been seen in people’s e-mail boxes across the world.” Or, as Alan Haber colorfully puts it, “the Internet helps spread the idea, like a healthful virus.” Such technologies are the most important ways the new SDS is disseminating its ideas.
Story by Michael H. Carriere, excerpted from PP79. Read the rest of it here: http://www.ppmerchtable.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code...
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