"Name the system"

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Wed Dec 1 09:52:14 PST 1999


Doug wrote:
>the stunning sight of AFSCME's Gerald >McEntee urging >us to "name the
system"...

Didn't Paul Potter of SDS have that as his refrain in his speech to the first major demo against the Vietnam war at the Washington Monument in 1965? If memory serves (well, I was four years old, lived in suburbs of Washington, D.C., my Mom and I went to anti-war marches in D.C. from 1970 or '71 or so. Still have some great photos of the mostly union crowd with some hippies waving NLF flags on the U.S. Capitol steps... )This memory being from Kirkpatrick Sales book on SDS, didn't Potter get to the edge of saying "capitalism"? He felt it would sound too "Old Left" He did popularize the "corporate liberal" phrase, no?

BTW, for what it's worth McEntee, is one of the DSA notables in the labor bureaucrat column. As is John Sweeney.

Michael Pugliese



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