After several years of organizing, small collectives from all over came together at Davenport last month

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom and love.

SDS Port Huron Statement, 1962.

Ho. Ho. Ho Chi Minh.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. chant at 1969 SDS national convention

Our goal is simply to put socialism on the agenda for the seventies.   Michael Lerner at the NAM program conference, November, 1971.

C. Wright Mills had been the first to say that the pluralist, end-of-ideology emperor had no clothes, but SDS was the first organized attempt to challenge the smugness of the American celebration of the nineteen-fifties. In response to liberal academics like S.M. Lipset, Daniel Bell, and others who maintained that fundamental conflict was absent in post-industrial America, and that decisions about the direction of society were purely technical, SDS's founding charter--the Port Huron Statement--condemned a "perverted democracy" that permitted "disastrous policies to go unchallenged time and again." These charges--which seem mild in retrospect--represented a sharp break with the political past in a pre-Vietnam, pre-Watts America.

SDS traveled a long way during the sixties. After Port Huron, it went through a left-liberal stage ("Part of the way with LBJ") and quickened its ideological tempo as the American smugness evaporated in Southeast Asia and in the ghettos. By the 1969 convention, the organization was riddled with factions which split over such issues as whether blacks were a colony of the American Empire or a super-exploited part of the working class.

Yet one strain of consistency runs through the ideological meanderings of SDS. Its members were almost exclusively college students who were primarily concerned with campus and campus-related issues--student power and free speech, ROTC on campus, black studies, university expansion, and in general, the symbiotic relationship of the colleges and universities to an American government that repressed rebellions in the ghettos and revolutions overseas.

And since radical activity was concentrated in colleges and universities, it seemed the 'cooling of the campuses' happily reported by liberal journals over the past year signaled the end of the New Left. Much of what passed for cooling was in fact a mixture of university repression and accommodation. While some radicals were expelled by disciplinary committees, the majority of the student body was pacified by some reforms. Meanwhile, the struggle was moving off the campus and into the community.

The lack of any radical base outside the university provides a basis for understanding why SDS split in 1969. Although the American working class--both white and blue collar--became increasingly restive during the late sixties, the New Left failed to expand into the communities and offer answers to these grievances; its alienation from the American experience led to its increasing factionalization, elitism and estrangement from serious reality.

While SDS'ers debated the relative merits of the Chinese, Cuban or Vietnamese revolutions, the crisis of an advanced industrial society--a crisis epochs removed from revolutionary upheavals in peasant societies--accelerated in the Nation around them. It was more exciting to glorify Che or Ho or Mao than to do the dirty work of researching and organizing around issues like rank-and-file revolts in trade unions, tenant conditions or day care.

Weather people tried to 'smash the state' by breaking windows in cut-rate department stores in Chicago. PL continued to come up with gems of analysis; they attributed the hardhat attack on the peace demonstrators as provoked by the demonstrators' support for Ho Chi Minh--who the hardhats knew to be a sell-out because he was negotiating at Paris.

But a different--less visible--dynamic on the Left was simultaneously at work. Weary of irrelevant infighting, veteran Leftists dropped out of SDS in the late sixties and began organizing in unaffiliated collectives all over the country. In addition, people who entered the movement late in the sixties often found the existing organizations sterile and simply organized on their own, as independent radicals.

The new dynamic in the American Left surfaced last week with the formation of the New American Movement (NAM), which attracted 450 people to its first program conference in Davenport, Iowa, over Thanksgiving week-end. NAM--a growing organization with more than 25 chapters around the country--began on the west coast last spring. Community organizers--some with projects several years old--sensed that they needed some type of national coordination, and they responded favorably when Michael Lerner. Thierrie Cook and Chip Marshall, West Coast radicals, sent out a statement calling for NAM's formation.