(Im)print the legend

The following is a response to a manuscript of an article I helped edit, entitled “Giving Form to a Stampede: The First Two Years of the New SDS,” which is to be published in the May issue of Upping the Anti. The authors are Brian Kelly and Joshua Kahn Russell.

The article is notable in dispelling myths of how the new Students for a Democratic Society formed. Chiefly, there are two myths: first, that a few dedicated dudes (and they were all, supposedly, dudes — sorry Ms. Rapchik!) got together and made Students for a Democratic Society. The other myth is that the new SDS just materialized out of thin air, a la Pentecost, and we all started speaking in tongues to the four corners of the United States.

Trust me, the article’s great — a much needed and a timely look back on some three years of struggle. I would like to use the occasion of the article, however, to speak of the mythology of the old SDS and how it has been used and misused.

Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

- an exchange from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The above quote is often used as a commentary on how Hollywood inevitably distorts the truth for the sake of entertainment (and more butts in theaters, more DVD’s in your Netflix queue, etc.) The point being that in even in the face of hard facts, we hold on to prized legends, handed down from generation to generation.

As long as I have been involved in projects of the Left, I have had to deal with the fact is “print the legend” is standard operating procedure in most parts, and that the legend becomes reality. In a broad sense, we see this in society (the myth of soldiers being spat on by rabid hippies being an evergreen one).

Beyond people in general, however, there’s a subset of people who “print the legend” (and believe it): that is the Left. We believe ourselves better than the average bear when it comes to our history, but when it comes to the history of the original SDS (and the New Left) very often we see a certain tendency to unconsciously mistake ideological mythology for history within SDS.

I have been able to say this much among SDS’ers: that a lot of things we take for the history of SDS are, in many regards, factoids tinged with a certain propaganda with one of two aims: to narrow the horizon of what young activists consider “possible” (the Todd Gitlin game of demanding a “decent” Left — that is, a Left “decent” enough to retire comfortably on a Columbia 401(k) plan); or to cast aspersions on any young Left project as simply harboring some totalitarian disillusionment (the David Horowitz gambit).

It is easy to say that. I said that in my writeup of the Second National Convention and got a big pat on the back for it from a lot of current SDS’ers who’ve gotten sick of Gitlin and Horowitz and their ilk defining either the original SDS or our own. But I want to push this negative (i.e., Gitlin and Horowitz suck) toward a positive — i.e., to treat the history of the original SDS and the 60’s New Left as a true history of the present and as a political history : in short, to find that in the past which illuminates the present rather than that which casts shadows upon it.

Strategy : Politics :: Horse : Cart

In exhorting SDS’ers to use the past to illuminate rather than obfuscate the present, I’ve encountered resistances from my comrades — in a certain sense, rationalizations for not bothering to think about the implications of the things we take for gospel truth. In that, I will admit that I’ve put emotions into things and perhaps gotten people’s backs up. But here, I hope to put things in as dispassionate fashion as possible.

The rationalization I’ve encountered in pushing for SDS’ers to sift through the baggage of stereotyped tropes on the old SDS is, “This stuff is for those theory-heads out there; why don’t we just organize?” Or, to put it in the current vogue of SDS-speak: this falls into the realm of the “not strategic.”

This has been the red-herring of choice whenever difficult matters of either history, or general Left theory come up. Not too coincidentally, this response only from those SDS’ers who spend much of their time as handlers of former SDS’ers — and I have to honestly question why we’re supposed to just go along with some charade, as if we’re naive to the struggle to get some lessons out of our predecessors’ actions and the resultant reactions from the State.

What is of deeper concern is that under this great big banner of the “Strategic action” — in other words praxis — we’re forgetting something of vital importance to a Left project: that is, Left politics. In putting “strategic action”/praxis at the head, rather than politics, we’re putting the cart before the horse. Praxis — theory and practice — is an expression of politics; politics shapes praxis, and not vice versa, and thus the form one’s praxis will take is largely dependent upon one’s politics.

So let’s put throw the gauntlet down: We (the Left, SDS, and all that good stuff) aren’t the only ones out there doing strategic action/praxis. The Right has a praxis: it is a praxis based on preserving the status quo by immobilizing the alienated masses and catering to a privileged few, and ensuring ever the while that the proper practice of force and consent is carried out in the name of this agenda.

To that end, there’s a certain line the Right feeds us, which many in the new SDS consent to unwittingly: that the original SDS simply got taken over by coffee sipping commies, who theorized much and did little, who became violent but only killed themselves, and so on and so forth. It could have saved itself, if only it kept up its exclusion clause, never met the Black Panthers, kept the women at the mimeo machines instead of allowing them to speak, and most definitely never treated the Vietnam War as anything other than just a bad scene which they could ritualistically cleanse themselves of until good-guy Nixon ended the war.

The aim of presenting history in this way — as is now becoming the rage once more — is to say, don’t even think of trying to take on the system. Don’t even think of revolution, of any kind, much less actually put one into practice. Above all: don’t think of fucking with us. Stay home, shut up, and eat Chee-tohs until your fingers are full of the fake puff-cheese.

The deductions I will make here:

• politics shapes praxis
• praxis is the cycle between theory and practice;
• theory is understanding the present in light of historical developments;

If we were to view this in reverse: politics shapes our view of history, which leads to a theory of its development, and in combination with a practice forms praxis.

So let’s get right into the ideological myths that are active in SDS, that need to be confronted, debunked and smashed as so many idols:

The myth of the “Good Sixties” and “Bad Sixties”

The great myth peddled by such housebroken luminaries as Todd Gitlin is that there was the SDS he presided over: shiny happy people holding hands, who out of the goodness of their own hearts went around getting petitions signed; marched peacefully (even if they got their butts kicked every once in a while); just left-wing Democrats who believed they could fix the defects in the system. And then, lo and behold: in came the sideshow of the “Bad Sixties”:

• SNCC demanded “more than a hamburger” at segregated lunch tables. It later rejected the paternalism of white volunteers in favor of trying to rely on local black leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer.
• The Black Panthers were beginning to form beach-heads in the black ghettos of the industrialized North.
• The Vietnam War, even after ground troops “surged” into the region, was untenable to the point that people considered not only whether it was right for the U.S. to be in Vietnam, but whether the U.S. mission (however peacefully accomplished) was correct to begin with.
• The Second Wave Feminist movement took shape, first with consciousness raising efforts, then with more definite and long-term organization.

What Gitlin and co. would like to forget is that, in large part, the so-called “Bad Sixties” were an attempt to take things not just further, but higher. To examine one such area: SDS’s part in its early years was getting rid of in loco parentis policies that inhibited the freedom of expression on college campuses to support these developments in some degree or fashion. Gitlin likes to take credit for that, but facing facts: one of the great mass developments that came along after in loco parentis started fading was 1967 “Summer of Love” in which emancipated white youth, having said “fuck it” to chastity, experimented with sexuality in a frank and open fashion for the first time.

That was not without its drawbacks or recoil. It’s clear that the Summer of Love may have been for the better, but it wasn’t without contradiction: it was as much the Summer of Patriarchy as anything else. I would challenge those who like to take up male-Boomerologist line that “liberated” sexual expression wasn’t fraught with as many challenges as what came before to Marge Piercy’s Grand Coolie Damn to see how the women of the movement had to deal with increasing pressures to simply “put out” in order to keep some place in the Movement.

It’s because of the “Bad Sixties” — in short, having to deal with what the Left had itself demanded in the “Good Sixties” — that we might be a little bit more up on our game this go around with SDS. That is, if we’re not afraid of knowing what we demand and reconcile ourselves to dealing with it when we get there.

The myth of Port Huron

In knocking down the aforementioned myth, I was knocking down a negative myth. The next task is to undo a positive myth: the myth of Port Huron as some definitive text that we should cower before, speak only in hused and reverent terms about, and which in general we (members of the new SDS, and our generation of activists) should owe some piety toward.

First as a matter of getting it out of the way: I’m not saying that the Port Huron statement wasn’t an important document. Nor am I saying that people shouldn’t attempt to engage it. I am, however suggesting that people do so with a better method.

In discussing any historical document, we should be aware that there’s a context in which it appears. Our view of the document from the present needs to keep in mind how that document related to its context: i.e., was it just a product of the time? Or was it something that came before its time? Or was it some mixture of the two?

Both in history and in politics, the Port Huron Statement occupies a strange place. It’s neither here nor there; there are tons of caveats to every point it makes; there are outright illusions it promotes (a favorite being the notion that a more active FBI would have protected black Southerners). Still, the boldness of Port Huron resonates with students today. The question is: why?

This is where we should employ some critical thinking both about content and context. What was being said, and to whom, by Port Huron?

First and foremost, the sharp and substantive criticism being put forward was that America was not what she presented herself to the world. It presented itself, at the time, as a state that cared about welfare; it was actually much more a state of warfare.

Returning this to its context: in its time, such a statement bordered upon treason. This was not too long after McCarthy had wiped out most of the Left in the U.S. It was a period, as Port Huron put it, in which anti-communism had become reflexive. Liberals are today just people that we taunt; but then, they toted guns for defense against some mythical Soviet threat.

Thus, the importance of Port Huron was that a couple of “those damn kids” looked around and said the obvious, in a climate in which doing so made you liable to get one’s ass kicked. That truth-telling ability is something that must not to be lost, under any circumstance, even if we have to deal with Bill O’Reilly because of it.

Second, and also substantive: this was not just the period of leftist politics; this was when the U.S., whose politics had not aligned on a Left-to-Right spectrum, was beginning to do so. We identify the Democrats and Republicans as the Left and Right of the political spectrum; but this is only a recent phenomenon. In this, SDS was beat to the race by (the late, unmourned, and thankfully rotting) William F. Buckley and his Young Americans for Freedom.

Amid this, SDS at the time was still the junior partner of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), whose politics exist today as the Euston Manifesto-types — in other words, they’re the house of the proverbial “gin-soaked popinjays” who had the nerve to cheer on the Iraq War and call it a leftist enterprise. It would have been easy at the time of Port Huron to simply say, “Well, we’re either with the LID or we’re with the YAF.” Instead the authors of Port Huron did what was unimaginable: they drew a line in the sand, independent of either LID or YAF, and said “We’re on this side, and you’re on the other.”

It was only in doing what is considered taboo today — taking a conscious stand to follow one’s own conscience rather than be subject to a game of double-blackmail — that SDS could have existed. It was only by completely ignoring the rules of the game, that one had to ritualistically Kill a Commie for Mommie before saying anything about politics, that a generation was able to find its voice independent of what they were being told to think by a few stooges on the White House payroll.

That said, it’s clear that SDS’s politics changed radically in the years that followed (otherwise, there’d be no need to do the whole “Good 60’s/Bad 60’s” routine). What lived on, however, was a spirit of freedom and rebellion against those who attempted to keep the political spectrum confined to which warmonger one could get the best deal from.

The myth of reds under the bed

Flowing from the discussion of the Port Huron Statement and its significance come a pair of moments in the original SDS’s history where we’ve gotten more heat than light in discussions: first, the 1965 lifting of the anti-communist exclusion clause, and second, the entrance of Progressive Labor (PL).

I will say, prefacing this: here is where we need to know whether we’re reading these events from a Left or Right perspective. All too often, we’ve had Leftists who have been confused, don’t know which side of the spectrum they’re on, and use the sort of red-baiting language that would make genuine conservatives blush. If we are Leftists, let us read history with an eye toward devising Left theory in the service of a deeper Left practice.

It is not without any trepidation that I say that I’m a Marxist of the type a prior generation would’ve called a “Red” (that is, I’m not an academic who rubbishes everything that came out of Marx in Marxism as simply trash that we can walk away from) — and further that I wear that as a badge of honor and not shame.

It is also without any trepidation that I’ve got to say that the culture of SDS, in which all manner of aspersions get tossed around for being honest about my politics, needs to be re-examined. I say this not just because I want the freedom to quote the Red Book every once in a while (really, I neither want nor need to), but because we should generally encourage people to be open and above board; if folks out there think I’m bad for being openly Red, then try dealing with those who have far less scruples about honesty.

The lifting of the anti-communist exclusion clause in 1965 is something that needs to be re-emphasized within the current SDS. Not because of how Marxism went from a dissident strain in SDS prior to the dominant and hegemonic trend almost overnight, but because SDS’s explosive growth correlated to it.

What were the real stakes of eliminating the exclusion clause? As I mentioned with the Port Huron Statement, they are not necessarily what they appear; we need context as well as content.

What the elimination of the exclusion clause accomplished for SDS was that in a real way, it stated to the power structure that it was no longer going to be cowed by vague threats over having too many reds under the bed. It said that the Boomers were no longer going to be caught in the game of policing its own organizations for the sake of appeasing the House Un-American Activities Committee (a real threat in those days).

To wit: an often overlooked, but momentous achievement of the 60’s New Left was in having ushered in the beginning of the end of McCarthy-style Congressional bullying over ideology. The end of HUAC is often attributed to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, who made open mockery of the proceedings by dressing and acting ridiculously in hearings to look at “subversive” influences in the anti-war movement. What is often lost in reminisces of how Abbie Hoffman wore an American flag as a shirt and got beaten up for his trouble is that prominent SDS figures were also subpoenaed to appear before some of the same hearings – and just plain didn’t show up. They said, “Screw it — let Abbie entertain the Representatives for a while.”

And it worked. The HUAC faded away, almost overnight; we never had to deal with it, and we hopefully never will. And we should be thankful that people were willing to say “I’d rather be called a red by a rat than rat on a red.”

In all of this, there tends to be a great big shadow cast by the emergence of Progressive Labor in SDS. There’s some temptation to use PL to simply to say, “We never should’ve gotten rid of the exclusion clause!” I suggest people re-examine the facts before succumbing to that temptation.

The facts on PL were that they were a definitely “Old Left” outfit that was out of place in a “New Left” organization like SDS. They split from the CPUSA; they confined themselves mostly to labor organizing and, in SDS, to student solidarity with unions; they lectured the young about Demon Marihuana and upheld the revolutionary culture of folk dancing in the era of rock n roll. They later pissed on everything that was New in the New Left: support for black, women’s and queer liberation; the necessity of organizing students as students and not simply newly-minted workers; the creation of new theories of class, imperialism, and other forms of oppression.

In that, there’s a strange disconnect: everything leads one to believe that PL’s errors were typically fell toward the Right, yet PL becomes emblematic (to some) of the Marxist Left in general. The only thing which muddles matters is that for the time period that PL was active as a faction of SDS, they toted Little Red Books.

In that, historical context is needed, and it’s simply this: in the 60’s lots of people toted Little Red Books. In fact, a lot of those most bitterly opposed to the PL (such as the Black Panther Party) sold the Little Red Book. Why? Because China was popping off like a firecracker with revolution — and not just revolution, but with revolutionary youth (this is why “fun loving” anarchist Abbie Hoffman is reputed to have called Mao a “rock star”). People can say what they will about the Cultural Revolution, but that it was an organic expression of a young generation of Chinese who were trying to keep the country from becoming what it is today (a nation firmly on the capitalist road) — this should not be in any dispute.

Going back to PL: a long-term view of Progressive Labor reveals that far from some expression of admiration for the courage shown by the young generation, PL was more interested in trying to get some new orthodoxy to replace that handed down from Moscow. Having been composed of those in the CPUSA who lost out once Stalin kicked the bucket, there is a discernable wish in their literature from and on the era to once again have the certainties which came with receiving directives from a handler from abroad. Moreover, having received none, PL continued doing the sort of organizing they did dating back to the Depression era CPUSA.

Of course, when such certainties didn’t come from Beijing — the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) would later become the official U.S. conduit of such directives — PL lost its bearings. Since the period of 1969, in which it was officially expelled (and SDS wrapped up by all non-PL factions), PL has lost its sense of direction: first, it declared the Black Panthers and Young Lords (as representatives of black and Puerto Rican nationalism) to be reactionaries; then it proceeded to chuck any and all of its Marxism in favor of some strange ultra-left ideology.

It is strange to say, that for all the accusations of “vanguardism” within SDS, there is a historical irony in the development of Progressive Labor post-SDS: the faction in the original SDS which everyone points and calls “vanguardist” actually chucked the idea of a vanguard in any and all senses decades ago. One could actually make a case that in its theory of simultaneous worldwide revolution, accomplished by what it calls a “mass party” which it will alone form, PL has far more similarities to some strains of anarchism than it does to Marxism-Leninism.