The Bronx Bolsheviks: Toward a Bright Future: SDS leads the way for the Student Movement.

It was over 15 hours in a van with students from NYC to Detroit. These were no ordinary students, but students committed toward creating politics that can create an egalitarian and liberated society. The political colors varied from thoroughly Red, to Black, to Pink, to Green, to some mixtures of them all, but what they all had in common was the desire to get to Detroit and begin the process of building a movement, a movement based on the desire to serve the people and smashing oppression. Some with experience in the people's struggles, some more seasoned than others, and many wet behind the ears in their knowledge of the practice of those struggles. Riding in the van to Detroit and arriving there in the first few hours, I was tense, what did I get myself into? Would SDS turn out to be the forum for the self flogging of guilty white petite bourgeois kids, or would it be an actual attempt to create an organization that understood the need for a new Left direction and praxis on the campuses of the US.

I would be pleasantly surprised, and sometimes disappointed by this National Convention.

The pleasant surprises was that there was actually much done, a lot of networks made, and a lot politics discussed informally in a well natured manner. SDS achieved to build unity amongst its different regions, it managed to draw out the questions of the class struggle, the national question, and its relation to itself, and speak about structure and leadership without people having their heads spin. Action proposals for the most part went through, and gave character to what SDS is about. Students unanimously passed the Iraq Moratorium proposal, and will be acting in solidarity with thousands of others participating in it. SDS will be marching on the Capital on September 15th in the International ANSWER supported demo. SDS is showing support to the workers' struggle in this country and challenging the environmental destruction. When the critics of SDS come out of the wood works yammering on what is SDS about, they fail to realize that its broad unity is understood by all within its ranks. Despite its eclecticism, it does have a definite understanding of who they are, and where they are at, but understand that its current stage will need to be superseded by more concrete unity.

Of course such broad unity becomes tedious in the form of liberalism at times. When we go on forever about the process of a matter, or curtail and editing every resolution to a small minorities' concerns, it did get to many a true radicals' nerves. Combat Liberalism is a text that these young radicals should study to understand the need for discipline and taking command of a situation like a few episodes at our Convention. The Broad Unity of SDS did break into a more concrete unity among the most advanced tendencies of SDS, the rallying point of course being the question of structure and leadership. The question of structure is not some mere baseless question of form, but a question of real political consciousness among left students. If a real student movement is to be built, it will be built when we break the immature calls against leadership, against empowerment. Such calls against formal structure and leadership only lead to the authoritarian practices of informal cadre formations, the “undisclosed committee” that exists in many anti-authoritarian models that only sustain itself through the petty bourgeois blindness of the always present structures in society that only reproduce themselves in our own relations.

SDS did make strides in creating a structure, the federated council system, albeit its complexity to avoid any individuals taking too much power seems to only be a call to bureaucracy and for just such individuals to continue to do such work. But this is a step in the right direction, and it did indeed isolate the backward elements of chapters such as University of Central Florida and Tacoma, whose thought seem to converge to the methodology of Crimethinc, The "Ex-Workers" Collective. The proposal for a Nested Council system was withdrawn by its author John Cronan in order to come from this Convention with some direction and formalized way to communicate for chapters.

I found that my prejudices and concerns about Caucuses in particular where not well founded. The Caucuses, and specifically the People of Color Caucus, played a positive role in giving direction to our Convention while not trying the dominated the Convention by utilizing their positions to make any political determining demand on the body. Neither did the Caucuses try to enforce the liberal white guilt mentality by playing identity cards of oppression, “who is more oppressed” game. The direction that the Caucuses gave to our National Convention was needed, and they will become the focal point for further political discussion within SDS.

What are the Revolutionary tasks for those in SDS? Build model chapters, ones which are connected to the struggles in their community, elevate the politics of SDS, and gives an anti-Imperialist analysis to our work. Model chapters that can be emulated by others, by students looking for outlets and forms to begin joining in the struggle against Imperialism.

Where is SDS heading? To the future in my opinion, the organization is now set to handle real political debate and struggle and to begin organizing its campuses (which in many places are already occurring). The Right in Essence group of so-called “Marxists” and Anarchists who have utilized the James Neshewat, a UCF student, produced article to sneer and snicker about SDS show their true colors as utter reactionaries and having no connection to the masses themselves. Their understanding is quite clearly rooted in dogmatic and mechanical approach to building mass, if indeed revolutionary, organizations. There is a need of patience in taking steps and leaps with the majority of its constituency and raising its overall consciousness. The approach of the Right-in-Essence cliques is essentially to ignore this and go to the last step of building real organizations dedicated to popular struggle.

Labels: Revolution, SDS, Students