SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[edwin honigire]

Most of the retrospects have been written by white
male activists from elite backgrounds and reproduce
their relationship to these movements. Almost all
books about the new left note a turning point or an
ending in 1968 when the leadership of the movement
turned toward militancy and violence and SDS as an
organization was collapsing. The retrospects commonly
identify the key weakness of the movement as the
absence of effective organization, the lack of
discipline, and utopian thinking.

Consider what the restrospects have ignored. For
example, 1968 was not quite the turning point that the
white intellectual remembers, it was much more than
that, but he never saw it and he still refuses to
acknowledge it. 
It represented a turning point for Asian Americans and
Latino Americans. The white intellectual elite failed
to communicate with the blue-collar workers and appeal
to diverse constituencies. In their retrospects they
have failed to acknowledge or grossly distorted the
contributions of these groups. The elite white
intellectual Left remains convinced that American
society is so grossly defective that nothing short of
a violent disruption can restructure it. Since no
violent revolution has materialized they can onlylook
back with surrender and pollute the pragmatic and
constructive legacy that lives still in the hearts of
those willing to do the hard labor.  1968 may have
been a death for some, an excuse for others to drop
out and get rich. And for the white elite intellectual
leftover scribbler it is mostly a bitterness that is
most evident in his prose. While he is quick to
condemn the police state, he will call in the Man when
losing an argument. But 1968 was birth not a death. 
It marked the beginning of the San Francisco State
strike and all that has followed it. 

Glenn Omatsu informs us that the San Francisco State
strike ("the longest student strike in U.S. history"),
fought for changes in the educational system such as
open admissions, and led to the creation of the first
ethnic studies department.
The strike was especially important to Asian Americans
because it marked the beginning of the Asian American
Movement, and particularly because it took place on a
"working-class campus and involved a coalition of
Third
World students linked to their communities,"'
providing a broad range of supporters for various
resistance actions in the area (Aguilar-San Juan 1994,
26). 

[The Strike] critically transformed the
consciousness of its participants who, in turn,
profoundly altered their communities' political
landscape. Through their participation, a generation
of Asian American student activists reclaimed a
heritage of struggle-linking their lives to the
tradition of militancy of earlier generations of
Pilipino, farmworkers, Chinese immigrant garment
and restaurant workers, and Japanese American
concentration camp resisters (ibid. 1994, 25). 

It was the revitalization of this link to the past
that spurred younger Filipino Americans to support the
"old-timers" during the ten year period, beginning in
1968, when redevelopment plans for the Golden Gateway
Project in San Francisco threatened (and finally
succeeded) to evict them from the International Hotel.
Curtis Choy's video, The Fall of the I-Hotel, reveals
both the emotional and "mass" nature of the        
International Hotel protest marches (over 5,000
participants at one point), involving groups as
disparate as the Longshoremen's Union, the Gray
Panthers, Postal Workers and various student and
tenants' organizations.

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~critmass/v2n2/gier4.html


See as well, The SF General Strike, linking the past
through labor. 

Edwin

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