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JAMES GILBERT
plosion at Chicago, its contending names, organizations and ten–
dencies, results from the question of who expelled whom and which
tendency represented a majority of the convention. There
is
no
doubt that the RYM tendency represents a majority of the national
SDS organization, not PL, but this is only a numerical superiority.
What
is
left of SDS (PL is still PL, whatever it chooses to call
itself), is deeply divided. Moreover, the distance between the SDS
leadership and campus organizations has probably never been greater.
The most important faction is currently allied around the new lead–
ership of SDS, elected after the split in Chicago, and particularly
around the document, of which Mark Rudd of Columbia is one of
the authors, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
wind is blowing." A second, much smaller group, RYM-II, is associ–
ated with former National Secretary of SDS Mike Klonsky. A third
group is centered around the Independent Socialist Club, which
opposes the first two groups on the grounds that they are "Stalinist."
And then there are the local SDS organizations, unaffiliated and still
recoiling from the political bust in Chicago, who have taken no firm
stand.
If
Weatherman is representative of the primary energy of what
remains of SDS at the moment, as it seems to be, then the organiza–
tion unmistakably has moved to create a program which will deal
with the problems of the past year and the organizational crisis at
Chicago.
It
reflects, perhaps inevitably, the desire to combat PL
on its own ground, with Old Left verbiage. Simultaneously it seeks
to shift the Movement from the campus to a head-on struggle with
American capitalism. This is to be done primarily by changing the
emphasis from SDS's earlier program in its university sanctuary to
the creation of a revolutionary vanguard and, presumably, of a
Marxist-Leninist party. Its theoretical program rests, significantly,
upon those three areas which the Movement has underestimated in
the past, or, it might be said, in which its failure is reflected. In
one sense Weatherman's program falls upon the shoulders of the
Black struggle, with the assertion that Black people in America are
the revolutionary vanguard, and perhaps a sufficient revolutionary
force even alone. The Black movement on the campus, Black cau–
cuses
in
unions and other special programs designed to weaken
institutionalized racism need support, the position continues, and it
is
