The FBI and the Shattering of Students for a Democratic Society
Thursday, 02 October 2014 11:40 (
By Aaron Leonard, Truthout | News Analysis
This past August, when protests in response to the police killing of Michael Brown did not abate after the first few days, instead attracting forces such as the New Black Panthers and the Revolutionary Communist Party, first the right-wing blogosphere, then other media, started reporting on “outside agitators.” What was remarkable – leaving aside what one thinks of the particular actors being “outed” – was the way such media seemed focused on and effectively worked to undermine, a certain kind of protest. Such press behavior in Missouri along with such things as revelations of spying on Muslim-American leaders, the making an example of Occupy activist Cecily McMillan, and other such repressive phenomenon, point to the omnipresence in 2014 of ubiquitous police-state measures in play. Sometimes covert, sometimes just the normal operation of things, they are an expression of a repressive terrain that has become effectively a way of life for anyone seen to be standing on the wrong side of the dominant authority. They are, however, manifestations not without precedent. In that respect a look back to an earlier time, the experience of the breaking apart of the largest radical student organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), is instructive.
SDS’s roots lay in the early 20th century America Student League for Industrial Democracy, the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy. (1) This was an organization mainly focused on socialist and progressive education, founded by Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, Jack London and other socialists of the turn of the century United States. (2) In 1962, in an effort to broaden its appeal, it changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society and issued its famous Port Huron Statement – after the site in Michigan where it was issued. Drafted during a particularly dark period of the Cold War, it was a broad call for students to step into activism, ending with the clarion call, “If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” (3)
While initially not sharply radical, its name embodying its overall sensibility, by 1969 that was no longer the case. The group, in the view of the FBI, had “evolved from civil rights struggles to an anti-Vietnam war stance to an advocacy of a militant anti-imperialist position.” (4) Correspondingly, it contained an array of different organizations vying for influence within it – from Trotskyists, anarchists and pro-Soviet communists, to Maoists. The latter found organizational expression in two groups: the Progressive Labor Party and the small and newly formed, Revolutionary Union. These two in turn, would figure prominently in the Bureau’s efforts against the group. Continue to Full Article
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