Thus I was happy when Chuck0 opened up his anarchist wiki. He also opened up a few other wiki's. I'll have to see what Chuck's authority over it will be, I've had some of my comments on his news board censored, which strangely makes it more authoritarian than most message boards I'm on.
Anyhow, I've been doing various entries and am doing some SDS stuff right now. I've been trying to figure out what was going on. Noam Chomsky says people who spend too much time studying things like SDS's different factions and leaders are wasting there time, but I'm spending a little time on it anyhow. For the people who like Carrol Cox were at the 1969 SDS convention, please keep in mind I wasn't born yet and am somewhat clueless regarding some of this stuff.
Anyway, one question is - what were the main things RYM split over into RYM I and RYM II? RYM I was obviously geared towards immediate revolution, and was probably had a dimmer view of white American workers than RYM II from what I can gather. Was there more to it?
Also, what groups came out of RYM II? From what I can gather, BARU was formed in 1968, and sometime after the RYM split began calling itself the Revolutionary Union. It seems to me BARU or RU had some association with RYM II. Other groups aside from the RU came out of RYM II as well. RU eventually became two groups - Venceremos and the RCP.
It seems to me that PL/WSA entered SDS and brought class and Maoism into the discussion (Carrol said that a bit back) where it wasn't much before. PL/WSA was well-organized while the rest of SDS was more autonomous and decentralized, and PL/WSA began gaining more and more power with SDS. This caused some of the previously decentralized rest of SDS to start getting together to fight PL's power grab. Bill Ayers even said that he and RYM I started reading Marx primarily to be able to argue against PL. Soon SDS had two big factions PL and RYM. The primary thing that divided them was the "national question" - RYM supported the Black Panthers and NLF while PL saw them as being more reactionary. There were also smaller factions like Bookchin's anarchist one. At the 1969 convention, PL took over the party (PL and what would become RYM had been battling for a while), and RYM walked out. Soon after the walkout, RYM split into RYM I and RYM II. So to reiterate the questions -
* Was the main SDS split of PL/WSA and RYM over the "national question"? * Why did RYM split into RYM I and RYM II? * What was the relationship between BARU, RU and RYM II? * What is the family tree of RYM II? Was it born of SDS and BARU? Were there RYM II groups not part of the RU/Venceremos/RCP group?
I've been putting all of this together here:
http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society
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