B.A.M.N.

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Actually, as I recall, the actual effect of PL in the sixties was a little
like the hypothetical effect Carrol posits for the elimination of punishment
-- it may indeed have drawn some people towards class politics simply by
violating the taboo against mentioning class politics. But it almost
certainly drove others away by being so stupid and unpleasant a kind of
class politics.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Carrol Cox wrote:


> P.L. is a joke now, and for a time it was destructive. But in the mid
> '60s (though I did not think so at the time) PL was a positive force on
> the left. It was PL members who first brought a class perspective to
> SDS, and there are probably still a scattering of leftists around who
> (though never associated with PL) were positively influenced by it. Much
> of the early anti-PL hysteria in SDS was not based on what even then
> were its real deficiencies but was simple reflex anti-communism. That is
> how I came to regard my own acceptance at the time of the attacks on PL.
> And the walk-out led by Bernadine Dohrn at the '69 SDS convention was
> (in retrospect) sheer sectarianism and utterly unprincipled. It was that
> walk-out more than the PL victory that destroyed SDS.
>
> Carrol