SDS is back!
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is back! As reported by Next Left Notes - A News Magazine Devoted To Participatory Democracy and Direct Action:
Several chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced today, Monday, January 16, 2006, their intent to form a national organization and hold the first SDS national convention since 1969. “It seemed appropriate to make this announcement today, on the observed Martin Luther King day”, said SDS regional organizer Thomas Good. “We have an anti-war movement that is addressing the issue of stopping the bloodletting in Iraq but the civil rights issue remains unaddressed”, he added. The national convention is scheduled for Summer 2006 and will be preceeded by a series of regional conferences occurring on the Memorial Day weekend.
The newly formed SDS national organization was the idea of a student anti-war activist who contacted other student and veteran organizers. Good joined SDS when Stonington High School (Connecticut) senior Pat Korte contacted him with the idea of linking nascent SDS chapters into a national structure.
“Although I have been an active participant in the anti-war and student activist movement, I have become frustrated with the groups collective inability to unify enough people under a common goal/vision to address the overall problems with our society. Historically, SDS was able to address many of the issues pertinent at the time through Tom Hayden’s Port Huron Statement. This document has stood the test of time, thus several fellow activists from across the country and myself decided to form a national SDS movement, only to discover that chapters already exist! Because of this we decided to hold a national conference”, said Korte.
At his request, members of Korte’s informal network of student activists from across the country began contacting Good and very quickly the informal network was replaced by a national structure that now includes a website, discussion forum and mailing list, all of which are now based at studentsforademocraticsociety.org.
Korte, realizing that the original SDS suffered from not having alot of veteran activists, WHO UNDERSTOOD THE IDEA OF STUDENT POWER, reached out to some older activists, including several members of the 1960s era student organization, to help ground the project and provide logistical support.
The first original SDSer to come on board was Alan Haber, president of SDS 1960-62. Haber speaks of “re-membering SDS” rather than eulogizing it. Never giving up on the Dream, Haber is looking forward to the “the next meeting of SDS”. And the next meeting will be a national event linking any and all SDS chapters interested in taking part.
Today chapters exist at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, at the New School in New York City, at the University of Michigan and at Eastern Michigan University. In the western part of the US chapters that sprang up independently in Santa Ana, California and at Reigs University in Denver, Colorado have signed on to the national organization. Connecting these chapters and their organizers proved less difficult than Korte and Good initially thought. Technology was the key.
“We should reconnect our networks. We should reassert the continuity of the radical movements in American politics. The new technologies of communication and independent media make this more possible than ever”, said Alan Haber. Korte and Good took this advice and ran with it.
As the project coalesced, Good, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) contacted labor historian Paul Buhle, co-editor of a graphic history of the IWW (”Wobblies”) and former SDSer from the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter. The timing was right on. Buhle, who teaches at Brown in Rhode Island, is working on a new project: a graphic (i.e. comic bok) history of SDS from the perspective of the individual chapters. Working with artist Gary Dumm, Buhle looks to avoid the usual history of the SDS national office by focusing on the street activists and their local branches. Buhle is asking that members of the original SDS with stories to tell contact him via e-mail at pbuhle@studentsforademocraticsociety.org.
In addition to the book, Buhle has a personal interest in SDS. Describing himself for a recent article in Next Left Notes (www.nextleftnotes.net) he noted: “Founder and publisher of RADICAL AMERICA, Paul Buhle was active in Champaign-Urbana, Storrs and Madison SDS chapters, 1965-1969. He hasn’t been all that happy since, but he teaches at Brown.” In the piece on NLN Buhle talks about the historical parallels between the 1960s and the present noting that the US empire is over-extended, liberal Democrats are not the answer to vexing problems and the Port Huron Statement remains as vital today as it was in 1962 when Tom Hayden presented it to the third SDS national convention.
“Today, students of all backgrounds can be shown the need to mobilize, to help prevent the ongoing devastation of our world, to help empower the lowly as students learn to empower themselves, and to set out a vision of a really democratic society. There’s the key. The Industrial Workers of the World had it long before. Decentralized democracy, democratic decision-making at all levels is the most radical idea ever hatched in North America and the only one with real lasting appeal”, said Buhle who has joined the new SDS.
The new SDS plans to continue the independent radical tradition in America: political education and demonstrating, advocating and organizing for democracy and justice, unions, civil liberties, peace and freedom. According to Korte the meetings this spring and summer will focus on building an infrastructure that facilitates these goals as the new SDS, like the old, is an organization of activists. Friends of peace and justice, those students who want a voice, a say in their own destiny, should visit www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org where regular updates will be posted and contact information is now available.
SDS is an education and social action organization dedicated to increasing democracy in all phases of our common life. It seeks to promote the active participation of young people in the formation of a movement to build a society free from poverty, ignorance, war, exploitation, racism and sexism. Visit www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org for more information.
(c) 2004,2006 Thomas Good
Verbatim copying and distribution of entire articles is permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
I should say thanks to Jesse Walker (of Reason magazine fame) for alerting me to this via the Left Libertarian email list. He noted:
Share ThisBill Kauffman forwarded this to me with the note: “Maybe your
left-libertarian websites will be innarested. Buhle has emphasized that the anti-statist right and libertarians are welcome, indeed necessary [emphasis added], to a revived SDS.”
I’m sure you must know, but a reminder: SDS and IWW are Marxist, both historically and today.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1050.html
http://www.iww.org/culture/official/preamble.shtml
http://www.thestudentunderground.org/article.php?id=22&issue=50
http://unrepentant.blogspot.com/2005/04/supporting-resistance.html
They may pretend otherside, eg:
http://www.thestudentunderground.org/article.php?id=145&issue=55
But from their publications (eg Radical America, their magazine http://dl.lib.brown.edu/radicalamerica/index.html where you can find lots of discussion about Marxism) and very obviously in their protests eg “On March 28, SDS New York demonstrated at the French Consulate in solidarity with French Students opposing the so-called First Employment Contract (CPE).” and “Books not Bombs” - they want government to set wages, decide when people may be hired and fired and spend money on education. That isn’t free market, libertarian or anarchist - its old school big government Socialism.
Just a reminder that these kind of groups are your *worst enemy* not a group to link yourself with. I found your site after reading ” Rothbard’s “Left and Right”: Forty Years Later” on mises.org. I found it very interesting and compelling - except that I knew Rothbard was a little confused if he linked himself with SDS. Communists cannot be libertarian - they fooled themselves if any ever thought they could. The free market is the only way to keep free and decentralized and any group that hates the market or wants to control it is not libertarian. As that article contends, quoting Rothbard: But the left socialists, he holds, are “trapped in a crucial inner contradiction”: they criticize not only state power but private property. Yet “how is the ‘collective’ to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself”?”
And there it is in a nutshell. Any group that argues against markets or for “worker’s rights” that regulate the market, or criticizes wealth made in the free market as too coercive a power and wants the state to regulate it or redistribute it, is not a friend of libertarianism and freedom.
It’s more complex than that. I once thought as you did. Read (and explore the links in) these posts:
Recognizing faux private interests that are actually part of the State
War, Socialism and Precision in Thinking
Teaching The Three R’s: Reds, Republicans and Randroids
The Emerging Anarcho-Centrist Agenda for Socialist Revolution with Free Market Characteristics
Klafta and left libertarian reconciliation
CPE and MLL letter of libertarian solidarity
Rothbards Reds Redux
How does any of that explain why you would ally with a group that wants more regulation not less. I agree that big-business allied with government is bad. I agree that Republicans often endorse regulation, big governmen and big business allying with government. I agree that sometimes repubs are as bad as dems and liberals. None of that explains why I would think its a good idea to ally with hard-left Marxist groups, who are the worst.
As for the one discussing seizure of state proerty - thats just wrong. It should be sold to the higest bidder, made private. There is no nuanced reasoning to explain how it was stolen and now rightfully owned by the workers - that’s just communism. Contorting around things just makes you invert your own belief system.
Fundamental rights - the founding fathers knew it, America was libertarian until the socialists came along - life, liberty and property. They need to be respected and protected and that is the single role for a democratic government. If rights are not protecred (and only voluntarily respected) you have anarchy. Anarchy is not good; its not conducive to economic prosperity or freedom. You have criminals who can easily steal your property and not face justice. You cannot invest in a business without worry that someone will embezzle funds and leave you bankrupt or simply murder you and take all your money. A lawless society is not a pleasant one as many from tribal countries can avow.
If right of life, liberty and property are protected by a government - and its role is limited to just that; no regulation on wages or contracts, no government run firms or watch-dog agencies; no subsidies for firms or for people; just protection of rights, enforcement of voluntary contracts and the few departments and agencies for this enforcement - courts, prisons, congress to appoint judges and declare war, etc. What we have only without about 75% of the budget and without any price and output regulations and so forth; then you have a free and prosperous society. Simple as that - we had it when this country was founded.
You seem to have a rather limited understanding of the word ally. We’re urging them to abolish all regulation.
OK. But It still seems to me like a strange partner to go after. Why not work with libertarians, the Libertarian Party, the libertarian-minded conservatives?
I have to guess that its because you want to do away with all government, which means you have to work with other “revolutionaries”. But this puts you in a position where most of your allies favor much more regulation, statism, while you want less. You are polar opposites, only connected by your urge to overthrow the government. Its not a good position. You’ll probably get nowhere, but if you get somewhere you are likely to be as destructive as he Bolsheviks in 1917. In yout case you would start with no-government instead of communism, but soon a coup would take back the seat or small warlords, gangs and mafia would take control, or some such thing.
The only way to prevent abuse of power is to strictly limit it. Abolishing it will only leave a vacuum which will be filled by those with ill-intent.
This might answer that: Why are you left libertarian?
The most successful stateless society so far was medieval Ireland. Their tuath system of privatized law and defense lasted roughly a thousand years — which makes it at least 4 times as successful at protecting freedom as the American experiment with constitutionalism has been. If you date the Civil War as the overthrow of constitutional government, then the tuath system was more than 10 times as successful. If you date the loss of liberty back to the wrong people losing the Whiskey Rebellion under the George Washington regime, the Irish tuath system was so much more successful that I personally don’t care to take the time to calculate exactlly how much more so.
I am not even against the idea of privatizing law and defense, to be perfectl honest. But we must get there somehow. To get there we need to scale down the size and nature of government until it is limited to only the protection of life, liberty and property. Then it will be much less likely to be corrupt - you cannot buy off politicians to get them to create hiuge programs, subsidize your company, etc if those things are all unconstitutional. And the economy will be booming and we will all have freedom and most everything will all be voluntary. In fact, 99% of your goals will have been reached. At that point, we could privatize the rest if we saw fit, just to make it that much harder to ever turn back and become statist again. But that is the only way we could do it - by scaling down and interpreting the constitution as it was originally intended, and codifying that interpretation. If we overthrew the government now, the vacuum would be filled by tyrans. If we started by privatizing the courts, it would become corrupt and poorly run and regulated by the government and then the state would have further excuse to expand - its the wrong order. The only realistic way to get there is by first cutting out the massic social programs (find them unconstitutional - they are) and eliminating the income tax via repeal of the 16th amendment; which would leave us with less than half the budget and a booming free economy. Eliminate the minimum wage by finding it unconstitutional - which it is. Continue like this, until the government has the very small role of simply protecor of rights. Then, if we are still not satisfied, if we want to make sure that the leap is bigger to having a big government again, then we can see f it makes sense to privatize the courts and so forth. We could then be reasonably certain whether there will be a vacuum left by it, or whether it will be natural.
By the way - this formula is exactly what most libertarian-conservatives plan, and there are even some republican congressmen advocating each of these steps.
On the left you have people advocating the steps to take us to socialism, on the right you have some advocating the steps toward a stateless (or at least very very limited state) society. Then you have thugs in both parties who just want a bigger state because it suits their interest and they are being bribed.
Actually, no — that’s not the only way. Read this.
Furthermore, read a lot of those other links I posted specifically for you. I’ve had a great deal to say about why reformism (the approach you advocate) doesn’t work. I say that as someone with roughly a decade and a half of Libertarian Party activism under my belt.
I’m sorry but it reads like utopian hogwash. You predict absurd changes in the way that people work almost as much as Marxists do. Its no wonder you get along. You say “Pockets of statism,mostly contiguous in territory,since the State requires regional monopolies,would first appear .Ther emaining victims are becoming more and more aware of the wonderful free world around them and “evaporating” from these pockets.”
But that doesn’t correspond to any reality that has ever existed. The “wild west” was much more stateless than we have today, as are some warlord areas. Why would people stop trying to gain power while the “victims” somehow break free? Its a utpian fantasy that has no basis in historical, theoretical or mathematical truth.
You say “but there is no real eason to imagine the remaining victims will choose to remain oppressed when the libertarian alternative is so visible and accessible.” — but you ignore the fact that many people feel safer with a government, others may be taken in by propaganda, still others are also interested in power and hence want to live in a society with a government in order to try to curry favors. Later you say “In this phase, the State moves into a series of terminal crises,somewhat analogous to the well-known Marxist scenario,but with different causes -in this case r,eal ones.” You have no proof for any of your claims. Its hogwash. Its as bad as Marx.
You are assuming a change in human nature, ignoring facts and history and living in a fantasy world. ne step away from what you declare will happen, is what you slip in just in little bits here and again eg “unless the State launches an all-out last aggression” — what does it actually mean?
Civil war.
The economic realities of collectivism, socialism, is: totalitarianism
The economic realities of an immediate move from a state society to a completely stateless one are almost as deterministic: anarchy = civil war
However, if you would give up this stupid revolutionary, manifest drivel and just work on incremental change, founded in a constitution which states the limits of government and the rights of the people - which is all the government can do - you can get there. Then, if its still so important, you can go the next step, clealry, consciously and when its only a small step to take. At that point, it wouldn’t be anarchy, it would be the final privatizations of the last of the important institutions. Then it would simply be a private society. It wouldn’t be crazy, we would know what to do if anyone tried to take power, we would have a police consistantly, it would just go from a public force to a private force and nobody would really even notice.
But you have an incremental idea too. You have your several-steps, included among them “These communities, whether above or underground, can now sustain the New
Libertarian Alliance, NLA acts as spokesman for the agora with the statist society, using every chance to publicize the superiority of agorist living to statist inhabiting and perhaps argue for tolerance of those with “different ways.”"
Two obvious questions:
1. Isn’t that spokesman kind of like a politician?
2. If you are going to do it incrementally anyway, why not do it the way I suggest and reduce government until is weilds almost no power anyway (by using our constitution!) and then we can eliminate it if we so desire quite easily at that point. It seems like your way is much harder, less likely to work, could end up in a State backlash and/or civil war and devastating revolution (”When the State unleashes its final wave of suppression -and is successfully resisted - this is the definition of Revolution.”), and the only thing it provides that my way doesn’t is power for you, by leading the movement. Is that your real motive?
Apparently you didn’t read the whole book and read for comprehension. Agorists advocate incrementally moving toward the free market — unilaterally, one individual at a time. Economic secession, fed by both propaganda and the profit motive. We call it “counter-economics”, short for counter-establishment economics.
Your concerns about agorists taking power in a Bolshevik style dictatorship don’t hold water, because we don’t advocate the coup d’etat model of revolution that Bolsheviks embraced.
My summary of how counter-economics at the micro level ultimately becomes revolution at the macro level is at the bottom of agorism.info.
I read all that, and all about counter-economics in your manifesto. Still, it leaves society open to much more dangers than reform from within, which we have the basis for in this country in our very own constitution. Once you have passed the part where its a few fringy people not filing income taxes and running things on the black market and becomes a real movement that you hope will change society, you run into some very real dangers:
1. State repression in response to your activities - might expand the state further, and you won’t be able to call them on it and use the constitution to outlaw it.
2. Violent state repression. When you do something illegal to the government, they can use violence against you and your followers.
3. Civil war. They fight,m you respond, etc.
4. Because of your tactics, people don’t follow you. You become a small group of bandits rather han a large movement.
5. People do follow you but then choose to “regress” and re-join society once the violence breaks out. This adds to the misery, violence and break up of families and communities.
6. Coup d’Etat. Once there is no government in some areas, and after the state has been abandoned by so many - the state that is still there could be overthrown by another group who may then take power and be willing to use force to keep that power - because it is more willing to supress the masses, it will be harder to uproot and we may then live under a dictatorship.
– I could go on. All of these are possible outcomes, likely even, if your movement got very far. Instead, if you use the constitution that we have and repeal the 16th amendment and make big moves like that, you have a n actual real chance of limiting government to a tiny role - and then possibly even eliminating it safely.
Once again, I ask you: why not try to it that way?
[…] Perhaps the most notable development for left-leaning libertarians over the past several months has been, just as we are beginning to re-assert ourselves as a current within the libertarian movement, a new generation of our old allies have appeared again from out of nowhere to fight imperialism, the emerging police state and the neo-liberal/neo-con elite — the New Left. People, SDS is not only back, but this time the most prevalent influence in that broadly pan-Left coalition is not Maoism but, instead, anarchism! […]