[lbo-talk] port huron

[Carrol Cox]

Shag, you know this better than many on this list, but you're forgetting 
it in this post: Sometimes what you DO speaks loudly enough that it 
really doesn't matter what you say. I suspect _all_ beginnings of left 
movements are of this sort. SDS (formerly a sorLIDt of attachement to 
Lid, revoked its rule that members of "totalitarian" parties could not 
belong. BANG! That did it. Who cares what sort of manifesto went with it.

Carrol

On 10/18/2011 8:34 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> reading about SDS in Freedom is an Endless Meeting so I looked up the
> Port Huron statement which I hadn't read since 1989!
>
> Wow. I always thought that sucker was radical. It was pretty damn tame
> - considering. And holee fuckliotta, be glad, be vewy vewy glad, none
> of this has been issued from OWS. What a total drag to read. I vaguely
> recall that it was inspiring when I read  it(what was obviously an
> excerpt. Oh, the joy of a well-edited document!). But it is so... so
> written by a college junior or something. Arrrrgh!
>
> Anyway, in the book Polletta is talking about how, during the drafting
> of the statement, Hayden and Michael Harrington duked it out and got
> in a heated battle over their position on communism. I learn here that
> the problem with the old Left, according tot he New left, was its
> anti-communism.
>
> What? Really? I had never heard that one - that the Old left was
> anti-communist or that the New Left criticized them for it.
>