PARTISAN
REVIEW
359
ican Communist Party than it does the New Left. It is unlikely that
this
is anything more than a temporary posture, but its immediate
ef–
fect is to strengthen the language and the appeal of Old Left positions.
The enormous difficulties which the Movement faced as a result
of its new political stance, and which it will continue to face because
of its division into warring camps, was illustrated this spring at
Columbia. After last year's amazing success, when SDS exposed the
university's ties with the military establishment and closed it down
in utter confusion, evoking enormous sympathy on the campus, its
activities
this
year led to failure and defection. The administration
at Columbia mustered a new arsenal of sophisticated legal weapons,
and the faculty showed itself to be profoundly alienated from student
demands. The factional fighting within SDS seriously confused and
often alienated the student body. Thus, the effort to cement the ties
of the student left with groups off campus, in the first instance, in–
tensified the internal weaknesses of SDS and perhaps weakened its
only secure university foothold. Nationally, the growing commitment
to revolutionism was more than matched by a show of police strength,
from Wisconsin to Harvard to Berkeley.
Many SDS leaders interpreted such difficulties as the work of
PL. PL as an organized and powerful faction, which opposed the
Panthers and which was hostile to the revolutionary cultural move–
ment, seemed to be the greatest obstacle to extending the movement.
When the SDS convention met in Chicago in June, it was probably
inevitable that the organization would split. Only PL went to the
convention with a unified position; the rest of SDS was divided
into at least three important groups, which united only to oppose
Progressive Labor. Thus PL forced the SDS leadership to make some
hasty ideological commitments, which, though tenuous, are extremely
important historically. Most important, however, was the decision
that the life of the movement depended upon the purification of the
ranks of SDS. For better or worse, SDS turned to cleanse itself,
before it could face the task of creating a new democratic soicety.
There are now two organizations which call themselves SDS,
one established at the National Headquarters in Chicago and based
upon RYM and its allies, and the other, consisting largely of PL
and its Worker-Student Alliance, with headquarters in Boston. Much
of the confusion and bickering over the debris of the factional ex-
