It _was_ a Movemnt of the Working Class, and like _all_ such movements (past and future) it involved particular _sectors_ of the class: Blacks, Women, Young White Workers. (The students were working class, and ANY serious working-class movement in an urban society will be made up _mostly_ of students, i.e., young workers, because that is where young workers are to be found. Near the end it was beginning to expand to other sectins of the working classd: older people (Gray Panthrs), welfare -ricipients and social workers, members of the already shrinking industrial working class (Lordstown), and so forth.
But in the future I suspect that students will continue to be the heart of any mass movement in the U.S. (Students, of course, were rather central to the Black Liberation Movement as it gained momentum. And in this light we can see how the other two factions in SDS, WSA and RYMII, while not so much political trash as were the Weatherman leadership, were almost equally responsible in blocking the movement's self-undrstanding. The phrase "Worker-Student Alliance" (as put forward by PLP) split the working-class, in fact utterly fragmented it, by the implication that there existed a working class 'other' than the students. Gramsci (pre-prison) split the Italian working class by designating husewives as "petty producers" rather than as working -class. RYM (Revolutionary Yough Movement) ignorantly accepted the same false division, characterizing themselves as a "Youth" Movemen, which was nonsense. And I have frequently seen references to the "failure" of the '60s movement to "reach" the workers! The references to "the workers" in the 1970 speeches of Peter Camejo illustrate this error even more egregiously. He speaks grandly of "the workers" (in contrast to mere students) with no attempt to specify how and why these "workers" would suddenly go home and shut the system down.
While the next upsurge of working-class resistance will catch us by surprise, will surprise even those who organize it, and will not at all resemble the '60s, still from the study of that decade leftists might begin to "loosen" their minds up, be more ready to recognize class resistance when it comes in new forms.
Carrol