The intellectuals worry that most members of SDS have yet to shed the bourgeois outlook and prejudices of their middle-class upbringing. "In fact, most students hold a kind of dogged career-oriented conception of their lives which would do their parents proud," observed Paul Potter, a past SDS president, and Hal Benenson, of the Harvard chapter, in a recent paper on the "critical radical perspective." Despite the radical rhetoric and slogans, "there is very little comprehension of what the words that are slung around mean either as descriptions of the society or as prescriptions for action." Most SDSers, they observed, still accept the notion that "getting a majority of people to vote for something creates a force for change"; that the United States will criminate poverty without radically changing, and that the country cannot lose the war in Vietnam if it employs its superior military power. "In a very real way," they note, "rhetoric without content breeds the politics of despair and nihilism. The slogans we use acutely heighten our sense of distance and radical alienation ... the failure of these slogans to specify any content also heightens our sense of desperateness and impotence."

The weakness of SDS ideology not only imperils the commitment of students, the intellectuals believe, but also prevents the organization from making a meaningful appeal to adults and thus filling the hole created by the departing parties of the Left. The collapse of the adult Left during the 1950's, they argue, has left radicals without a meaningful political organization. Neither the present Communist Party nor the Progressive Labor Party (Maoist) comprehends the real needs and problems of modern Americans. Communism is no longer radical: it aims to get power through the electoral process--in other words, working within the system--and supports liberal measures such as Social Security and Medicare. Progressive Labor, on the other hand, fails to fit radical ideology to the American experience: it misunderstands the mentality of the working class, relies on puritanical cadre-like working class, comprising skilled as well as unskilled blue collar labor, has organization, secrecy and dictatorial leadership. Neither the revisionists (CP) nor the Maoists (PL) accept truly democratic methods of decision making internally, and both groups have grubby, materialistic values. But in order to build a movement among adults who are repelled by the old Left and alienated from present society, SDS must develop an entirely new ideology. It must show these adults how their personal sense of alienation relates to the overall structure of decision making. "To reach these people," says Calvert, "we must involve them on the basic level of their own lives."

Need for Ideology

The need for ideology when shifting to noncampus activity was discussed at a meeting of the National Council of SDS in Cambridge during the first week of April. At the last national meeting in December, almost all the workshops preceding the official session had dealt with issues and problems of campus organization. In April, only one ("Curriculum Reform") concerned the university; the rest dealt with subjects like "Labor Strategy," "Middle-Class Community Organizing" and "Organizing Professions." Only eight delegates showed up for the curriculum workshop and most felt--as at least three stated explicitly--that the university would be "the last place to change." They believed that the educational system, as Paul Millman of Antioch said, "is as necessary to the power structure as any other part of society, and just as tightly controlled by the elite." Benenson and Potter warned against "separatism among students, and against student power activity" which "has had the effect of isolating the campus movement in some ways. The impulse to develop a new ideology was reflected in the decision to bring the Radical Education Project (REP) to Chicago and place it under the control of the national office. REP is the formal publishing and theoretical organ of SDS--one member calls it the radical equivalent of the RAND Corporation--and was set up in Ann Arbor as a semi-autonomous unit, for tax purposes, in 1966.

Organizing Unions

At the council workshops, Cambridge chapter members described projects in organizing unions among local hospital workers. Kim Moody of New York discussed his attempts to radicalize the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees by working within Local 1412. A representative of the American Friends Service Committee talked about radicalizing technicians in Cambridge corporations: "They feel they aren't allowed to work on the most significant kinds of problems ...You talk about Vietnam and start a kind of systems analysis of social objectives." Other delegates discussed attempts to organize middle-class neighborhoods in Boston against the war.

The new constituencies to which SDS now hopes to appeal are unlike those it worked with in its organizing activities during the first stage of the movement--they are primarily people involved in the system, rather than those frozen out of it. SDS must speak, Carl Davidson argues, primari Iy to the working class and "new working class," while continuing to recognize the problems of the underclass (the poor, disabled and chronically unemployed). The traditional always been a source of political power for radical movements. But the number of people in this class is declining relative to the new working class -- white-collar technicians, scientists, teachers and others who work at the bottom rungs of huge corporate bureaucracies. And these "new" workers, Davidson says, are the "most exploited people in the entire system. Though well trained and imaginative, they have little or no control over the work they are assigned, and therefore no outlet for creative expression. They are dominated, along with the underclass and working class, by the three other groups: the middle class (petty bourgeois owners of small business), the subruling class (politicians, corporation and university presidents) and the ruling class (owners of the means of production).

Discussion at the national convention indicated that there are important disagreements within SDS on this new approach. The effort to develop an ideology and push off-campus is supported by the national staff and most of the older chapters in Boston, Berkeley, New York and Ann Arbor. But many newer members believe that SDS should remain primarily a student organization, engaged for the most part in the tactics of confrontation. In the areas where membership is growing most rapidly, students have had little or no previous experience with radical ideas of political organizing. Many of these chapters are located in rural areas, away from urban centers of the working and underclasses. "There has always been this split between those who see SDS as primarily a student organization and those who see it as the main party of the Left," says Lee Webb, a past national secretary, "and now it's coming more and more in the open."

More Problems

The split, moreover, is only one of a series of problems that SDS intellectuals say the organization must solve when shifting tactics and developing an ideology. First, aside from differences resulting from age, SDS is likely to reveal genuine political differences among its members as it attempts to define more clearly a program for social change. Second, assuming SDS can develop a radical movement among adults, it must decide whether to absorb them into the present organization or split them off into a "Movement for a Democratic Society." In either case, students will risk domination by the older radicals. Third, there may be very serious limits to the application of participatory democracy to larger memberships. At the national council meeting, SDS members from the newer chapters complained that the participatory democracy of the session was "not even as democratic as most forms of representative democracy." The proceedings, complained Craig Livingston, of Rutgers Law School, were "dominated by an elite meeting in committee and bringing proposals before the body." The larger the number of participants, the more difficult consensus decision making becomes. Fourth, SDS lacks the money to support a substantial organizing drive. It now operates with a budget of $80,000 a year--one-tenth that of the National Student Association.

Conflicts of Ideology

In addition to these internal problems, SDS will raise substantial conflicts of ideology in appealing simultaneously to the two exploited classes it seeks to organize. If past projects in labor union organizing are any guide, SDS will organize the working class around bread and butter issues--steady jobs, higher wages and better working conditions. It will urge laborers to join unions and gain power over their employers as a means to increases in material welfare and higher standards of consumption. The power it urges the new working class to achieve will depend on very different values. The enemy will be the same corporate elite and the exploitive bureaucratic structure, but decisions will relate much more to the quality of life and work, and power will be exercised in accordance with an ethic that consciously rejects the goals of higher consumption and materialistic satisfaction. Radical change, in this case, will not only replace the present owners of the means of production but will challenge the entire ethic which makes such ownership worth while. For SDSers reject the "crass materialism" of present society -- the values as Greg Calvert notes, that "transform people into consumers of things." They reject the statistical economic indices of the government -- employment rates, gross national product, etc. -- as true measures of the quality of life. The "main and transcending" concern of society, Tom Hayden has written, "must be the unfolding and refinement of the moral, aesthetic and logical capacities of men in a manner that creates genuine independence." Whatever the meaning of that goal for the individual man, it surely will not be equivalent automatically to a house in the country and a two-car garage. Yet these higher standards of consumption appear to be the present goal of the new working class -- and, even more strongly, of the working class.

How can SDS use these values to organize the working class and, at the same time, re-educate the middle class out of them? SDS organizers argue that after the working class reaches a decent standard of living and gains control over the means of production, laborers will see the futility of unlimited material aspiration and acquire a "revolutionary consciousness." But such predictions cannot be proved, and the fact is that many of the "new" workers who have reached decent levels of consumption aspire vigorously to the middleclass style of life. There remains, then, the problem of how to alter the values of teachers and technicians who have been indoctrinated by the system. It is possible that alienation about assignments on the job, and discontent about the Vietnamese War may be translated into an understanding of the faults of the entire system. But it is questionable whether such "knowledge" can lead to a genuine commitment to radical change among individuals who are already career oriented, who have settled down with a wife, children and mortgage after long years of training, and who are at the beginning of the income trajectory. The least successful SDS projects so far, as SDS intellectuals are aware, have been those dealing with the middle class.

Participatory Democracy

There are serious problems, furthermore, with the system of decision making which SDS would urge both classes to substitute for the present one. Participatory democracy, critics argue, is a vague and utopian notion that could never provide a workable system of government for society on a mass scale. In reply, SDSers allude to control by workers in cooperative factories, and to town meetings. But aside from the question of practicability, the notion has serious weaknesses even in theory. For it appears to depend on an underlying consensus in values and interests that runs directly against the pluralism and freedom which SDSers value so highly. The student radicals believe that meetings should produce a unanimity of viewpoint; yet they also prize a rebellious, strong-willed individualism2