The same kind of reasoning is evident in PL's handling of the race question. Racism is viewed in purely economic terms; it divides white workers from black and makes impossible a united struggle for higher wages and better job conditions. PL believes that the white working class suffers the same consequences of racism-although on a lesser scale-as does the black. Thus, the oppression of black people is measured in dollars and cents; many of the fundamental features of racism are glossed over and the whole issue becomes a footnote to the struggle of the white working class. At the same time, groups like the Panthers, which focus on "consciousness-raising" around ghetto issues and do not pay lip-service to organizing workers as such, are singled out for harsh, unsympathetic condemnation. For this behavior, many members of SDS now charge that PL is racist.

In addition, some SDS members have complained that PL misrepresents real situations in order to make them fit their own explanations of them. Members of Columbia-Barnard SDS mention the ghetto uprising in Asbury Park, NJ., last summer as an example. The blacks in Asbury Park pressed a list of 22 demands on the city government, encompassing such issues as jobs, education, housing, judicial prejudice and day-to-day police harassment of blacks. According to Goldman, who went to Asbury Park as a PL organizer, the party chose to portray the rebellion exclusively as one of blacks fighting for jobs and left the other issues almost untouched. "The economic struggle just around jobs and money is not the only way to get people involved," he commented later. "PL limits its activity to that. In effect, it says that workers are dumb fools who can only relate to economic issues and can only understand them if you underline, italicize, boldface, and capitalize them, as they do in Challenge [the PL monthly newspaper]. It really comes over as a bludgeon."

AS SDS, under the aegis of PL, has grown more and more isolated, the few who remain in the group have made crude, meaningless attacks on other Leftist groups which disagree with them. Opponents of PL are frequently labeled "cops," "anti-communists," "enemies of the party," or, in the cases of a lucky few, "honest center forces who have been misled by enemies of the party." In a typical name-calling display, an editorial in the November 1969 issue of Progressive Labor magazine described the Black Panther-sponsored conference to form a "united front against fascism" as follows: "Except for a few pro-working class people and a scattering of rank-and-file Panthers, what an assortment the rest were: dope addicts, hippies, yippies, freaks, and pot heads."

Even with the gradual disappearance of contact between PL and rival radical groups, there are still instances of this sectarianism; at Harvard, for example, a member of the November Action Coalition who had collaborated with members of SDS on a pamphlet discussing the Center for International Affairs had his political affiliation stricken from the later printings of the pamphlet. Members of SDS had decided that, since they had started and paid for the pamphlet, it should not bear the name of an unfriendly political organization on it-"We were afraid it would buildNAC," one SDS member said later-especially since their own efforts against the CFIA were the only ones SDS would recognize as viable.

In a sense, this sectarianism has been a result of PL's unshakable faith in the correctness of its own line; abrupt changes-usually initiated by the national committees-may come and go, but otherwise, there is only one accepted approach. It is possible, however, that increasing disfavor has forced the party to reaffirm confidence in its own viewpoint. For this reason, there has been less and less internal discussion in SDS and greater emphasis on leafleting and demonstrating-all on the basis of PL's political beliefs. Pro-PL members of SDS often accuse their opponents in SDS of using discussion time as a delaying tactic to avoid taking action. For example, after the last national conference in December, the SDS national committee voted nationwide anti-war protests for March 20 around two slogans: the first was "Smash racist unemployment," and the second was an unspecified anti-war slogan which was left up to the various regions of SDS. At a recent New England regional conference, PL and its opponents spent two hours debating each other on whether the second slogan should be "U. S. out of Southeast Asia. No negotiations" (PL's position) or "Support the People's Peace Treaty." PL won the vote, but it scarcely mattered; thousands of posters and banners outside the meeting room already bore the "No Negotiations" slogan.

MUCH anti-PL tension in SDS surfaced at the national convention in Chicago last December, Opponents of PL grouped around a proposal by the Columbia-Barnard chapter of SDS which berated the national leadership on several scores: its attacks on the NLF, its almost complete silence on the repression of such groups as the Panthers and the Young Lords; and the narrow trade-union economist in which it conceived the old idea of worker-student alliance. The proposal did not assail the worker-student alliance concept, but rather modified it in the context of the student movement. It "must be expanded to include and stress the issues of imperialism and racism as they exist unrelated i. e. [unrelated directly] to the conditions of work," the proposal stated.

Although the proposal was defeated, it garnered nearly one-quarter of the votes at the convention and has become a majority position in such former PL strongholds as the New York City and San Francisco regions. In Boston, PL still holds a huge majority, but the proposal nevertheless has become the organizing focus for the Anti-Imperialist Caucus, which stated at the last regional meeting here that "we intend to stay in SDS to argue our views and make them the leading views in that organization."

One group-from New Orleans-has already made its peace with SDS by walking out of it. According to Ed Clark, a former member of PL and a leading organizer of the New Orleans group, the reason for the walkout was the defeat at the conference of two of its proposals calling for increased internal discussion in SDS. The first was a motion to devote part of New Left Notes "to ongoing political and strategic debates within SDS." This proposal was defeated in favor of one by staff members of New Left Notes which denied that the publication should be an "internal organ-for SDS members only, in effect," but rather an organizing tool of SDS as a whole.

This outcome would have been more plausible if the second resolution of the Clark group-to expand the number of yearly national meetings from one to four-had not also been defeated. Before the split in 1969, SDS regularly held four national meetings a year, even though only one had final decision-making authority. Clark's proposal called for the restoration of the older schedule. The motion was defeated on the grounds that SDS should spend its time and resources on planning actions and confine discussion of tactics to regional meetings. These actions would presumably follow PL's recommendations.

IT IS difficult to speculate how long SDS will survive as even a visible organization as long as PL is the dominant influence in it. As SDS continues to dwindle in size, it also faces increasingly difficult decisions on how it should restructure its political line and re-emerge as viable nationwide radical student organization. With the growth of a viewpoint that opposes extreme sectarianism and favors greater emphasis on internal discussion and debate, there is some hope that SDS may yet be saved.