given the wealth of experience on this list - people who were actually there - i kinda wanted some reflections on the document. What Max had to say was interesting... the document was meaningless later as the group changed its focus. That would seem kind of obvious to me. On the other hand, the Declaration of Independence resonates. Combahee River Collective Statement still resonantes, IYAM. That shit just never gets old. But Port Huron... holeee Christ. I felt like I was transported back to the days when, before I could get to college, I would read stuff on my own. I'd have all these musty paper backs from popular intellectuals of the 50s and 60s: Reisman, C Wright Mills, AJ Muste, Daniel Bell. The language of Port Huron was so rooted in the terminology and style of writing so endemic at the time - talk of alienation, gray conformity, loss of community, robotic lives, etc.
is there something here I should know, such as 'don't criticize SDS or people will get up in your grill about it?" LOL
> 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.
>>
>
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