A World to Win…? (OR, “Timely thoughts on untimely factionalism”)

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
- slogan of the proletariat in the class struggle for revolution

The knives are so sharp because the stakes are so low.
- slogan of the professoriat in the classroom struggle for tenure track.

For the past few weeks, those in SDS with a taste for cheap entertainment and/or masochism have had the pleasure (schadenfreude perhaps?) to watch what is probably the First Full-Fledged Faction Fight (FFFFF) emerge out of the organization. To get the Hegemonikhanate up to speed, here’s the necessary background: SDS had its annual National Convention. As mentioned earlier, we seem to have figured out how to put the sprawl of the organization under a single roof.

Well, not so fast.

SDS after Maryland: We must decide and do it well

EDNOTE: The following are general impressions of the SDS National Convention. It is from my own perspective as a member of SDS. It’s also by no means complete, as supporting documents like the minutes and notes from various meetings. Those should be available sometime shortly.

The 2008 National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society in College Park, MD is only just beginning to get out of my bloodstream. There’s an excitement around SDS’s members, clearly evident from all the Facebook status updates, where it feels that we’ve managed to really pull it off — we’ve managed to take this assortment of chapters, regions, working groups and caucuses and integrate them together into a real national student organization.

Meta Monday: Participate in a project to promote SDS blogs

Not too long ago, there was an exchange of emails amongst a few bloggers in SDS about trying to tie together SDS’ers blogs into some common project, something a bit more coherent.

As many such exchanges go, it generated some excitement but fell by the wayside in the middle of a crunch around Finals-time. So maybe it’s time to take that idea off the bikerack and put it into effect.

There’s several potential solutions. One of the ones I would like to commit to would be passive, wouldn’t require a lot of effort, but could help boost up readership and interest in blogging from the SDS angle.

It’d involve the following:

• Consolidating the RSS feeds from SDS’ers blogs into a single, easily-to-subscribe-to RSS feed.
• Using that feed to power a Feedburner Headline Animator displaying the headlines of SDS’ers blogs that anybody with a blog or MySpace page could add.
• Taking some time to promote both the feed and Headline Animator on Facebook.

What’s all this jibber jabber about RSS and some Headline Animator? Here’s explanations of both:

RSS feeds explained in plain English

Now check out some info on the Headline Animator from Feedburner. All it does is take the RSS feed and does a ticker of the headlines from an RSS feed. In this case, it’d be SDS’ers blogs.

If you’re an SDS’er and would like to participate, please leave a comment to this story that includes your site’s address plus the address of your RSS feed. This is a volunteer project, so give this about a week to start up.

Just move on up!: Some ideas ahead of an SDS People of Color Caucus

For members of Students for a Democratic Society, this is that strange time of year when classes are finished but we start to hit the books with some renewed fervor. Yep, we’re in the lead-up to the National Convention once again! This go around with the SDS National Convention, there’s been some back and forth on caucuses and how they will work, attempting to sum up some lessons learned on what to do and what not to do.

With that in the back of my mind, I felt like writing at length about my experience with the SDS People of Color Caucus, from the period of SDS’s founding National Convention to the current day.

SDS News Bulletin #4

For print and distribution to your Chapter, Campus and Community: the SDS News Bulletin working group is proud to bring you our fourth issue, the best yet. From front cover to articles to action reports to poetry to art, we loaded this issue up for maximum Dangerousness, and once again you made it all possible by sending in your work, thoughts, ideas and love.

Now here’s the result:

Print Version
Online Reading Version

Enjoy! and Distribute widely!

SDS’ers: send your stuff to be published in Issue 5: sds.bulletin@gmail.com

Want to join the bulletin working group? Get involved by signing up for our email listserv: http://groups.google.com/group/sds-news-bulletin

- SDS News Bulletin Working Group

Is “Anti-Oppression” enough?

This is a comradely criticism/critique of the current theory and practice of Students for a Democratic Society. It’s assembled from notes and recollections of various conversations. By no means is it meant to tear down anyone’s work in SDS. I understand this is controversial, but I hope that as a comradely critique this leads to a deepening of both theory and practice in SDS.

Anti-oppression. It’s this buzzword I’ve only recently encountered due to heavy involvement with SDS. I have to say, I have an almost constitutional dislike for the modern-Leftist fixation with “anti” formulations (anti-[fill in the blank]ism”), perhaps due to an early love of Elements of Style, but also because I find that it reflects the modern ideology of neverending resistance struggle without revolution — for a sharp discussion of that, here’s Zizek.

Anti-oppression, as it’s been put before SDS at least, is a catch-all term for the praxis built around political/popular education against forms of systemic oppression — white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism — for the sake of having the male, pale, and stale Left confront these things as they show themselves in both society and in the movement (as a reflection of society, however distorted). It gets translated into organizations usually running down a laundry list of oppressions they oppose, and the stances they take up in opposition (i.e., “anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexist” etc.)

Why “white supremacy?” Why not just “racism?”

Something’s been on my mind of late. Namely, with Left terminology and trying to break it down for folks, there’s an inevitable friction: why do we have to know all these terms? Aren’t the things that “normal people” say just . . . . ok? Are we just engaging in some jibber-jabber, as Mr. T would put it, where we speak this private language of oppressions and exploitations and alienations and so on and so forth?

I’ve been thinking this through, because I’ve gone through quite a few strange encounters between people of color caucuses and confused whitefolk. The most recent being at a convention of the Northeastern SDS chapters in Boston, which at some point just became a strange exchange of jargon which wasn’t at all collective, which had a certain ring of rote memorization of formula.

(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.