My Summer Vacation

10.

That June, Derrick recruited Sasha and I to go to the infamous 1969 Students for a Democratic Society – SDS – convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum. We hadn’t been active in SDS, but that didn’t seem to matter. The PLP was organizing everyone they could to go to the convention to be ready for a confrontation between its own Worker Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus and the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement, a loose coalition of rivals themselves. Thanks largely to the influence of the PLP, both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist.

It might be hard from today’s perspective to understand why so many young people were attracted to such a rigid and in some ways moribund ideology. At the time, it didn’t seem moribund at all: the Marxist-Leninist movements around the word seemed to be winning. Consider the year 1968:

• Tet Offensive, Vietnam, pushed US and South Vietnamese forces into defeat after defeat.

• The Cultural Revolution in China seemed to be challenging bureaucracy and establishing genuine equality (we didn’t hear of the excesses until later)

• A student-worker General Strike in France

• Student strikes at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and many other schools

• Kent State, Jackson State, in the US, students protesting the war were being killed.

• Several hundred students killed in protests in Mexico City (leading up to the Olympics)

• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, and the cities erupt in rebellion, with many black people killed.

These were heady times indeed, and we might be forgiven if we really thought revolution was just around the corner.

The PLP was the more experienced of the groupings in SDS. The party was formed when a group of people split from the Communist Party USA to side with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The PLP practiced orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which means that it operated on the basis of democratic centralism. In theory, democratic centralism meant that there would be a thorough discussion of all policies throughout all levels of the party. Then a decision would be made by the National Committee, which would be binding on all members, whether they agreed or not. While the democracy aspect of this process was largely ignored (as it was in most such organizations), the process was effective in organizing people. So, by the time the convention opened with 2000 delegates, it was clear that the WSA caucus had the majority of votes.

As the first vote on direction of the organization came closer, a proposal from the WSA to make fighting racism a key strategy in SDS, the RYM faction, led by Berandi ne Dorhn and others, led a walkout. The RYM faction convened in a neighboring conference room. Because we were unknown in SDS, Sasha and I were asked by Derrick and other PLP leaders to go next door and spy on our rivals. We were aggressively frisked as we entered the room. Given that our politics weren’t ostensibly all that different from the others in the room, it seemed odd that we felt that we were in enemy territory, and the situation was frightening. The RYM faction placed a high value on security, and the room was surrounded by dour looking cadre with armbands identifying them as part of the security force.

From the stage, speaker after speaker attacked PLP. The most effective attack came from a Black Panther leader who called the PLP racist for criticizing the Panther’s for “nationalism.”

The PLP had recently and somewhat simplistically concluded that Lenin’s two-stage revolution strategy, where the party first fights for national liberation and democracy and then for socialism, was the reason that the Soviet Union and now even China were abandoning the international struggle in favor of their own national interests. The PLP was even critical of the North Vietnamese for negotiating with the US. Some of us questioned this party line, but were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Given that no other communists in the world held this view other than some tiny PLP offshoots in Canada, Great Britain, and Mexico, it was an arrogant and sectarian position. At the same time, taking such a position took a certain courage and gave PLP a certain purity and independence which, arguably, strengthened it for a time, especially as its rivals spun off into the even more sectarian Weathermen and other grouplets.

As the RYM announced that they were about to take a vote on the expulsion of the PLP and WSA from SDS, someone from the podium announced that the room was being sealed. Sasha and I rushed for the exit, and managed to talk one of the security types to let us out to rejoin our friends in the infinitely calmer WSA caucus. A group of friends of ours from Berkeley were acting out a hilarious skit about how some people could wrap themselves in red flags, brandish Mao’s Little Red Book, and do nothing to actually build the movement among ordinary U. S. workers.

Soon, the RYM faction returned to the main hall, surrounding the WSA caucus. Bernardine Dohrn in combat boots and flak jacket commandeered the stage and announced that the PLP had been expelled from SDS. The reaction of the group was a spontaneous outbreak of derisive laughter, hardly the desired effect. Dohrn then led the RYM out of the door, leaving the “expelled majority” to continue the work of SDS.

There were other ramifications from this split. RYM produced not only the Weathermen, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) as well, but our – Sasha and my – work was done and as we returned to San Francisco, I was proud to have played a role in this “victory” for PLP and became more committed to the struggle.

It’s surprising to me that as I write about these arcane struggles in SDS, I find myself continuing the polemics as if one faction was “right” and the other was “wrong.” There are things in the PLP position that continue to motivate me today, namely the fight against racism and the role of the working class. Yet all of these groupings were hopelessly ultraleft in terms of ever winning over a large section of the U. S. population.

The people with a genuine strategy for change worked in the Eugene McCarthy campaign and the McGovern campaign trying to express the electoral consensus against the war. The PLP did work “secretly” in the McGovern campaign and managed to call a demonstration against him at his own headquarters during the convention, which probably didn’t help.

But, hindsight is 20/20, bla bla, and it makes no sense to fault ourselves for what we didn’t understand.

I met some of the main leaders of the RYM faction – Mike Klonsky, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayrers -- in Chicago some 35 years later, and was pleasantly surprised to find them working on developing the small school movement in the Chicago school system, precisely the reform I was working on at the time in Oakland. We had all evolved substantially in our politics, yet we were still committed to the same ideals of developing an egalitarian society. (No, I never served on a board with Bill Ayers or went to his house, or did anything other than shake his hand!).

As part of an effort by the Party to keep its teachers close to the working class, I got a job in the warehouse at Wilson-Jones envelope company for the rest of the summer. I had a good time getting the job, creating a persona of a hayseed fresh off the farm, deliberately misspelling words on the application. It was refreshing to have a job where the only stress came from the school boy games the workers played with each other, throwing staples (Swingline Staplers was part of Wilson-Jones) at each other when the boss wasn’t looking. I made a good connection with one of the workers there, and even got the nerve to talk socialist politics to him before I quit to return to teaching.