VLVL PR3 and "the Movement"

[jbor]

from _SDS_ by Kirkpatrick Sale, Random House, New York, 1973:
 
SPRING 1969 (cont.)

  Repression proved to be ultimately very debilitating for SDS both
nationally and locally, exacerbating the paranoid style, wearing down
individuals and eating into groups, tying up people in courts, exhausting
both finances and energy, forcing chapters to give up some confrontational
tactics, sending leaders into jail and exile, and over the whole
organization casting the dark realization of what the stakes were in even an
infant, proto-revolution. But its effect was gradual and diffuse, like a
slow poison, and its victims initially skeptical and unimpressed, so very
little was done to combat or circumvent it: to the SDS leadership it seemed
that a few security precautions, some words of legal advice, and a
bloody-but-unbowed response would suffice. [...] _New Left Notes_ published
several warnings to SDSers about the power of grand juries, the dangers of
talking to juries or FBI agents, and the ubiquitous penetration of
undercover agents in campus chapters. (553-4)

  It is remarkable, really, what had happened to SDS. By now both those who
sided with the national collective and those who favored Progressive
Labor--and a number of various stripes in between--were in general agreement
on several bedrock points: you can't make a revolution with a loosely
controlled organization without substantial internal discipline . . . a
dedicated cadre is necessary in any revolutionary group . . . only a
vanguard party, or band, has the toughness and discipline to undertake the
organization of masses of people, to withstand repression, to forge a
militant force, to lead the revolution. The points of disagreement among
these factions were many and in some cases crucial, but they all tended to
agree, if not necessarily consciously, that there was no longer any need for
something like SDS. All that had been essential for SDS--a student
constituency, membership in autonomous chapters, bases in the universities,
a loose national structure, the absence of rigid rules and internal
discipline, freewheeling debates and open disagreements, resistance to
ideological prescription and space for a multitude of tendencies, political
consciousness founded on the ability to make connections, and a
self-interest in one's own liberation as necessary for the liberation of
others--were no longer cherished, no longer protected: they were for the
most part seen as impedimenta to the revolution. The shapers and movers of
SDS no longer cared particularly for students--or for a democratic society.
Something new was wanted, a new kind of organization for the new
revolutionary job at hand.
    This, combined with repression from above, the defections from below,
and the factionalism within, wrote the death sentence for SDS. That death
sentence was read, amid much cacophony, at the June National Convention.
(555-6)

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