"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." – Sun Tzu
WHY WE WRITE
We were also skeptical of the idea at first. We knew we needed to learn from movements and organizing traditions that have come before us, and to root ourselves in history as part of moving forward. But do we really need a half-assed reunion tour or more Sixties worship? Surely, we thought, we should be building new organizations, not trying to reignite old ones. And why would we want to restart one with as fractious a history as SDS?
The new SDS celebrated its second birthday on Martin Luther King Jr. day in 2008. The new organization bears little resemblance to the original SDS. But building an organization with the same attention-grabbing name, aspirations to inter-generational organizing, and roots in student power and participatory democracy hit a nerve in the US. Within a year, we had hundreds of chapters and thousands of members across the country, the vast majority of them new to organizing. SDS quickly became what is likely the largest self-identified revolutionary youth organization in the country. It has been an exciting time, producing lots of interest and opportunities, as well as mistakes, disputes, frustrations, and heartbreaks. Two years later, we want to step back and examine the birth of SDS,[ii] distill the dynamics of its growth, and draw some lessons from the challenges we have faced. While we have each played different roles within the organization, we have also each done our best to maintain a broad view of the national direction of our group.
SDS is on the brink of what may be a make-or-break year. In exploring both the possibilities and challenges within this young organization, we have identified a spectrum of assumptions about how change happens. While many members came to SDS with at least some analysis of how society works, SDS has engaged in little political education or internal debate about what we think it will take to build a revolutionary movement. Most SDS projects and adventures continue to be informed by a mixed and often contradictory set of approaches, tools, and biases that flow from a number of unexamined assumptions.
WHERE WERE WE? NATIONAL AND LEFT CONTEXT
It’s easy to mistake reasoned disillusionment for apathy. In a now infamous New York Times op-ed entitled "Generation Quiet," Thomas Friedman claimed that youth today embody an apathetic student culture, more interested in blogging about social change than actually creating it. Professors across the nation decry the level of disengagement they see in their students.
Young people do not need to be convinced that society is broken. What our generation needs is a sense of agency. We need to show each other that change is possible, that there are ways of reorganizing society, and that there are groups with a plan to make it happen. By rooting itself in the tradition of an older organization of the same name, SDS hit that nerve amongst students. The result was an attractive force for lots of new (progressive, mostly white) people, many of whom had never had any experience in social movements, as well as young radicals who were excited to feel a part of something big for the first time.
SO, WHAT IS SDS?
SDS began as a concept – a meme[iv] that was set loose among youth in the United States. Embedded in the idea was the possibility of a national youth and student-led organization that could transcend ideological factionalism, carry explicitly revolutionary politics,, and ground itself in youth power and participatory democracy. That idea has opened a doorway into movements for social, environmental, racial, and economic justice for thousands of young people in the US.
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