Lance: 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.
That's seems roughly accurate. To tell the truth, I don't have the slightest idea just _when_ WSA was formed, or when it began to be a major force in SDS; as experienced from ISU it just suddenly appeared. I have a pamphlet someplace in the piles of literature in my basement which is a critique of PL (WSA is not mentioned in it); it impressed me greatly at the time, and did invoke some principles (as well as the jargon that went with them) that were probably more or less truisms, and hence was probably not too bad a pre-primer in marxism. I doubt that I would be so impressed today by its application of those principles, since I suspect that it (at least in part) belonged to that genre of communist polemics which is both vigorously communist _and_ laced with anti-communism. (Compare some super-left criticisms of China today: at one and the same time they can blame China for failing to be communist _and_ for being communist, with a little dash of yellow peril thrown in for good measure.)
Lance: 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.
That's interesting. I haven't bothered to read Ayers, so I hadn't encountered this. Since the Weathermen are one of my few lasting grudges, even more than the Dean who tried his best to fire me, I tend not to pay much attention to their later careers or views.
Lance: Soon SDS had two big factions PL and RYM.
This is both correct and incorrect. Nominally, and to a great extent really, the factions were WSA & RYM, not PL & RYM. Probably the bulk of the membership of WSA were liberals. As I mentioned when one of the large bursts of WWP-baiting was proceeding on this list, that is no way to attract undecided and untheoretical liberals to your banner. Every attack on A.N.S.W.E.R. probably recruited a few more non-marxists to its coalition. (The care and feeding of liberals tending leftward is an art, best practiced with the ears rather than the tongue.)
Lance: 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.
I don't know. In my memory the "national question" (and incidentally the Panthers did _not_ regard blacks as a nation) came up much later. Both sides of it tended to tick off non-sectarian leftists. Fred Hampton (murdered by the Cook County States Attorney) was anti-weatherman. In fact the speech which he gave over and over again to black highschool students during the last months of his life had as its centerpiece a critique of weatherman. It was the RYM2 faction of SDS that had him here to speak at ISU a few weeks before his death. I never discussed this with Carl Davidson, but I suspect that of all those involved any account he gave would be the most trustworthy. Ron Jacobs on Weatherman is probably pretty trustworthy, & he is gentler on them than I tend to be.
Lance: There were also smaller factions like Bookchin's anarchist one. At the 1969 convention, PL took over the party
Party? You mean like a party party or a political Party? One of the things that tore SDS apart was that so many in it _did_ begin to act as though it were the u.s. equivalent of the RSDLP. In fact at the meeting after the walk-out speaker after speaker pretended we were at the Second Congress of the RSDLP and the split was between Mensheviks (PL) and Bolsheviks (RYM). In retrospect I'm a bit saddened that one of those speakers was Ken Cloke, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. It was in a small group discussion he led at the conference of Radicals in the Professions (Ann Arbor, summer 1966) that I decided I was a socialist and would be a marxist when I figured out what marxism was.
Lance: (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"?
I think it was over the fact that all of us were fucking crazy. That's neither a criticism nor a confession. The favorite quotation from movement history for many of us was paraphrased from Brecht, "Whoever remains calm has not heard the terrible news." We were conducting our education in politics in public, having just discovered that "our" leaders were a bunch of coldblooded killers, at home and broad. (LBJ: "If you want to know what America's policy is abroad look at our policies at home": yeah, Watts, Bull O'Connor, Newark, Detroit . . . .) We would have been seriously crazy had we not been pretty crazy.
But assuming that we were not merely crazy but did make some poor judgments, one can find a good explanation in Hal Draper's essay, "The Myth of Lenin's 'Concept of the Party.'" (Note: Had the leadership of all the SDS factions not suffered from the delusion that SDS was a Party, this would not be germane.) The relevant passage is as follows:
**** (2) _Split and Unity_. This involved the second distinctive feature of Lenin's party concept. One can distinguish three approaches to this question, as follows.
(a) There were those who believed in _split at any cost_, that is, the revolutionary wing in a reformist party must split away at the most opportune moment, and organise its won sect. This is the characteristic theory of sectism.
(b) There were those, and they were legion, who believed in _unity at any cost_. The unity of the mass social-democratic party must never be breached; a break was the ultimate disaster. This was the mirror image of the first approach: the fetishism of unity.
This approach was the dominant one in the International, inlcuding the German party. What it meant in practice was: accommodation with the right wing, even by a majority left wing. If the right wing must be persuaded from splitting at any cost, then the majority left had to make concessions to it, sufficient to keep it in the party.
One of the most enlightening examples of this pattern took place in the Russian party soon after the 1903 congress, at which Lenin's wing won majority control with the support of Plekhanov. The Menshevik minority then split. Thereupon Plekhanov, under pressure, swung around and demanded that the majority of the _Iskra_ editorial board be handed back to the Mensheviks, for the sake of 'unity.' In short: if the Mensheviks had won the majority, there is no doubt that Lenin would have stayed in as a minority; but if the left wins, the right wing picks up its marbles and quits; then, for the sake of 'unity' the left has to hand control back to the right...
(c) Lenin's distinctive approach was this: he simply insisted that where the left won majority control of a party, it had the right and the duty to go ahead with its own policy _just as the right wing was doing everywhere_. The Bolshevik-Menshevik hostilities hardened when Lenin rejected Plekhanov's demand to reverse the outcome of the congress. This distinctive approach was: unity, yes, but not at the cost of foiling the victory of the majority. Unity, yes, but on the same democratic basis as ever: the right wing could work to win out at the next congress if it could, but it would no do to demand political concessions as a reward for _not splitting_.****** (Hal Draper, "The Myth of Lenin's 'Concept of the Party': or What They Did to _What Is To Be Done?_" _Historical Materialism 4_ [Summer 1999], pp. 196-197.)
Now, with the benefit of many years hindsight, my claim is that RYM _ought not to have split_. They should have stayed in as a minority faction and struggled to become a majority again. Clearly, no one in RYM (there was no RYM 1 until RYM 2 was born) had the slightest inkling of what Lenin's _actual_ policy had been in his _actual_ party (the RSDLP), and like most anti-leninists and leninologists would have identified Lenin with approach (a), above: split at any cost.
This is a historical account, not a criticism, because one should be able to learn from criticism and mere identification of past errors offers no such guidance. The principles involved can be defended without regard to past empirical history, but if and when the occasion for _application_ of those principles appears, circumstances will be so different from those of either 1903 or 1969 that those events will offer no guidance whatsoever. Anyone with minimal capacity for abstraction can learn from what our predecessors (whether in 1960s u.s. or 1930s China or 1840s England) did _right_, from their strengths, but lessons learned from their mistakes, from their weaknesses, are always empty lessons, evoking empty truisms.
Lance: * Why did RYM split into RYM I and RYM II?
[to be continued]
Carrol
Lance: > * 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
>
> It's Chuck's wiki that anyone can edit.
> --