<HTML>The Port Huron Statement never was radical. The original radical gesture of "Port Huron" SDS (SDS having had a long dull prior history as the student branch of the League for Industrial Democracy [this is not quite accurate]) was that they refused to deny membership to Communists. That marked them off sharply from the anti-communist left of the '50s. By the time I (as a faculty member) linked up with SDS in 66 or so the Port Huron Statement was long forgotten. </BLOCKQUOTE> Chickenshit, horseshit and bullshit: manure of every sort. This is a historically myopic notion of radicalism if I ever saw one, centered around necrophiliac fealty to the dead and rotting corpse of Communism. What was radical about SDS at its origins, and what was so important about the Port Huron Statement, was the capacity to think and express radicalism in an American idiom, not in some unintelligible dogma torn out whole cloth from a radically different semi-feudal social context [Russia in 1917, China in 1945, etc.]. What was so historically tragic was the way in which that was quickly surrendered, because of the lack of a political theory and strategy, for the some honky tonk version of Marxist-Leninist vaudeville. <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Does the documentary reveal how important the PL(Progressive Labor) was in introducing a class perspective to SDS? I never liked PL but it was contributions from PL dominated local chapters to _New Left Notes_ that first introduced me to marxist thought. </BLOCKQUOTE> Does it talk about PL made such a signal contribution to the destruction of SDS, feeding the descent into nihilistic madness which reached its highest expression in the Weatherunderground? PL was and is incapable of thought, period, much less Marxist thought. Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --</HTML>