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JAMES GILBERT
the working class. The troubling adoption of Old Left rhetoric, how–
ever opportunistic or temporary
it
is, will not restore unity, for it
can never serve for the serious thought which must accompany any
attempt to move off the campus. Moreover, making the creation
of a Marxist-Leninist party the goal of the Movement invites some
of the bewildering sectarian struggles of the Old Left. This
is
to take
the business of revolution quite seriously, but in a special way.
The most particular danger of the moment is that SDS
will
substitute the lessons of the past year for the lessons of the last
decade. In some ways, what happened at Chicago was healthy,
even though the tactics used to exclude PL belong to the twisted
history of those Old Left organizations whose splinters represented
not much more than their spokesmen's name. Nonetheless, SDS
is
probably better off without Progressive Labor, an organization which
condemned the North Vietnamese for negotiating, and worked against
the Black movement for its attempts to secure such programs as
open admissions to the universities.
But the expulsion of PL did not mean exorcism of all discour–
aging possibilities for the Movement. There still seems to
be
an urge
to take on capitalism now, to seize what is construed as the revolu–
tionary moment. More specifically, to continue to mistake growing
repression for a moment of weakness reflects the provincialism of a
movement which is still pretty much defined by the university, the
one institution in America openly in a state of crisis.
For the contemporary crisis of elite institutions does not reflect
a general polarization of society or a radicalization of any of the
raw elements of social power.
If
SDS fights itself, whether for a uni–
fied program or over leadership, it
will
not
be
able to do the work
it
must. With pressure to create a revolution, there is also often
the tendency to search for outside allies, to romanticize their radical–
ism, or to assume their allegiance. In such a state it
is
sometimes
difficult to see one's own increasing isolation and irrelevance.
Furthermore, there
is
the possibility that the cultural movement
will die - or be embalmed in a rigid program of revolution culture
as it was in the 1930s. All of these things would probably
be
in–
evitable if a clandestine party were established. The historical meaning
of Marxist-Leninist parties in America
is
much more than ·their repres–
sive internal structures, a set of incredible, irrelevant positions or the
