Lost Writings of SDS i

Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS

Edited by Carl Davidson

Changemaker Publications PA USA ii Carl Davidson

Copyright © 2011 by Carl Davidson

All Rights Reserved

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Contents

1. Praxis and the : From Student Radicalization To Class Consciousness By Bob Gottlieb, Gerry Tenney and Dave Gilbert...... 1

2, In White America: Liberal Conscience vs. Radical Consciousness By Greg Calvert...... 12

3. Toward a Theory of Social Change: The Full Version of the ‘Port Authority Statement’ By Bob Gottlieb, Gerry Tenney and Dave Gilbert...... 22

4. The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class By Carl Davidson...... 96

5. The Look Is You: Rising Feminism vs Mass Media By Naomi Jaffe and Bernadine Dohrn ...... 129

6. Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement By Mike Klonsky...... 134

7. The Schools Must Serve the People By SDS National Council, Austin 1969...... 141

8. The White Blindspot Documents By Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen...... 145

9. Weatherman vs RYM2: The Debate within SDS By the ‘Weatherman’ and ‘RYM2’ collectives...... 182 iv Carl Davidson

10. Adventurism: A Destructive Disorder By Carl Davidson...... 268

11. Free Women: Connecting Our Battles to All the Others By Susan Eanet and Anne Goodman...... 272

12. Toward a Critical University: Counter-Hegemony in Higher Education By Carl Davidson ...... 276 Lost Writings of SDS v

Foreword

I decided to put this book together about 10 years ago soon after I re- ceived a call from a public television reporter in . He was work- ing on a story on the anniversary of the ‘’ mini-riot on Avenue that launched the Weatherman faction of SDS into national prominence. He had lined up Bill Ayres for an interview and wondered if I would offer an alternative perspective on the same show.

Bill and I had been friends before the whole Weatherman fiasco, and despite our political estrangement during those years, we had recently made peace and were working on common school reform projects in Chicago’s high schools.

I told the reporter I had no problem with being on his show, but I asked if he was aware of the full story of what had happened that day. “What do you mean?”, he asked, “Well, at the same day and time that 300 or so of some Weathermen were breaking windows on Michigan Ave and getting into scuffles with the police, 10,000 of us, together with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization, were marching through Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods encouraging people to rise up against the war in Vietnam.’

“Really,” the reporter asked. “I have never heard of it.” “Look it up, and get back to me,’ I said. Being conscientious, he did, and began plowing through old TV footage in the archives. Sure enough, he found the news clips, showing our action, with thousands involved. “We called our alli- ance that day, ‘The Rainbow Coalition,’ that’s how the term originated,” I added. To his credit, he included these clips and my comments in the show, and Ayres and I also had a reasonable discussion on the subject. The tape of this show is still readily available. “Great,” I thought at the time. “A small piece of history rescued from going down the ‘memory hole.”

The collection of twelve essays and documents in this book are a larger effort to keep an important piece of the history of the 1960s New Left vi Carl Davidson from going down the memory hole. Only one document here, the origi- nal Weatherman paper, is readily and widely available. The liberal me- dia, and sadly, much of the liberal academy too, is drawn to violence like moths to a flame. Even though the was the smallest and least successful of the organizing efforts of the New Left, it has come to overshadow all the rest. Sometimes it’s noted that a ‘RYM2’ faction opposed them, but the actual documents we wrote in opposition were very difficult to find. I had to dig through the personal archives of my friends, and some I had kept myself, to dig them up, and then digitize them.

One of the most important of the twelve items gathered here is the so- called ‘Port Authority Statement.’ This is the first time the complete document has seen the light of day. Written by Robert Gottlieb, Dave Gilbert and Gerry Tenney in 1967 as a successor to SDS’s founding ‘Port Huron Statement,’ only about a third of it was published in SDS’s newspaper, New Left Notes, and even then in a disjointed form. The factional struggle that ensued prevented the entire document from ever being printed. I managed to contact Bob Gottlieb years later, and luckily he found one remaining poorly Xeroxed copy, which I and my partner, Alynne Romo, then tediously retyped and reconstructed it as best as we could, to the point where it’s now 99% accurate.

The ‘Port Authority Statement’, given that nickname because it was largely written in an apartment near City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, was part of a larger effort in 1967 called the ‘Praxis Papers.’ This was some of the most creative, original and far-sighted theoretical work done by the New Left. Without their being assembled and repre- sented here, the papers would be largely lost to historians and others trying to learn from the 1960s. In those heady days, we thought big. We tried to do a concrete analysis of new and rising conditions, based of the scientific and technological revolution, and made a new class analysis that has held up remarkably well. The only computers at the time were mainframes with punch cards. The PC hadn’t been invented yet. There was no internet. Yet we managed to pull together an analysis that rested on foreseeing these developments, and traced how we believed they would unfold. We were not far off. Lost Writings of SDS vii

One interesting question is why we set it all aside, and even dismissed much of it, for a long detour back into Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that suffered greatly from dogmatism and ultra-leftist.

Part of the answer was the earth-shaking events of the year 1968. It be- gan with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, following by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the French student revolt, which led to a general strike in France. Then Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in quick order. Some 180 cities erupted in the armed rebellions of the Black Revolt. Out SDS office in Chicago was- sur rounded with tanks, machine guns aimed at it, and police and FBI teams breaking down the doors. Then came the ‘police riot’ at the Democratic National Convention. If we had shifted far to the left, the fact that the world was in flames all around us had a great deal to do with it.

The Black Revolt played a critical role in changing our thinking and direction.. Those of us who had gone to Mississippi and other organiz- ing projects in the Deep South had been influenced by the rise of black consciousness, but felt we had to learn more, especially to deal with the Progressive Labor Party faction in our midst, which was denouncing all nationalism as reactionary and condemning the Vietnamese as sellouts for seeking the Paris Peace Talks. We turned to certain figures from the old CPUSA—Harry Haywood, Ted Allen, Noel Ignatin, and others— who could help us try to understand this. We deeply plunged into the classics, as only students could, to try to make sense of things. Much of this is reflected in the RYM documents including here, as well as the ‘White Blindspot’ paper, which is still making waves even to this day.

Ted Allen, before his death, managed to complete the two-volume work that was his life-long project, ‘The Invention of the White Race’ (Verso). Noel went on to become a scholar, and under his original name Noel Ig- natiev, published ‘How the Irish Became White’ and other works that are having an ongoing impact. Robert Gottlieb is now a professor special- izing in environmental subjects, and has several book to his credit. Dave Gilbert is serving a life sentence for a killing that occurred during a Brinks robbery, but continues to write from prison. Greg Calvert died a few years back, but completed, with Carol Neiman, his main work, ‘The viii Carl Davidson

New Left and the New Capitalism.’ Mike and Sue Klonsky have dome excellent work in school reform, and have several books to their credit, while Bill Ayes is an author of several excellent books on training a new general of teachers, including one recently completed with on combating white supremacy in teaching and schools.

This is hardly a comprehensive or complete listof the New Left’s intel- lectual achievements. It’s only an indication that even though organiza- tions folded up, important work continued. I apologize for any signifi- cant omissions.

My main hope, however, is that a new generation of student and youth activists will take a look at these documents, and hopefully see that we were not the one-dimensional cartoon characters that are often used in romanticizing, distorting or otherwise dismissing the 1960s. Most of all, I hope some will be inspired to pick up where we left off. These were all works in progress, written in the heat of battle, and often only a begin- ning and an introduction. Much more remains to be done.

Carl Davidson, Pittsburgh, August, 2011