The Worker Student Alliance or WSA is the faction dominated by the Progressive Labor Party or PL.  It was expelled from the national SDS organization at the Chicago convention of SDS, June 18-20, 1969.  Their expulsion was a strange “democratic” maneuver as the minority of the delegates expelled the majority.  WSA actually controlled a majority of the delegates to the convention and was in a position to elect all officers.  SDS leaders organized a walkout from the convention and those who left reconvened in another building and called themselves the SDS convention.  They passed motions expelling WSA from SDS.  They were strengthened by the fact that they possessed the keys to the steel door of the Chicago office and therefore had access to the mailing lists and funds of the organization.

            This action resulted in two groups—each claiming to be the genuine SDS and each publishing a magazine called New Left Notes.

            Weatherman and RYM combined to expel WSA.  Shortly thereafter, they split and the three factions are now distinct organizations.

            Each faction claims to be communist and to follow the line of Mao Tse-tung.  The enmity between them is fierce and frequently leads to physical violence.

            “The divisions within SDS have both positive and negative aspects.  One result has been a Diminution in the numbers of students who support them.  The appeal is to the fanatic rather than to the rank and file student.  This is cause for comfort.

            On the other hand, the variety of organizations has expanded the appeal to some degree.  Fanatics can now join the organization whose policy and program best suits their emotional and intellectual condition.  Those suffering from an intense urge to violence are attracted to Weatherman.  Those with a more intellectual commitment prefer RYM or WSA.  Those who accept discipline and instruction will find it is WSA.

            The situation is comparable to that which existed in the Marxist revolutionary movement of Russia before the Revolution of 1917.  Small sects of fanatics with strange names such as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were quarreling fiercely.  Some of the issues were the same, e.g. the role and nature of violence and the type of organization needed.

            American is in a period of acute danger.

WEATHERMAN CONDUCTS A ‘WAR COUNCIL’

(Reprint of news report)

Liberation News Service

Flint, Mich.

            The Weatherman controlling faction of SDS held a national “war council” here Dec. 27-30.  About 400 young people showed up at the gathering—nominally SDS’s quarterly national council meeting—to practice karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the “Weather Bureau” lay down its political line for revolution in America.

            The Weatherman group, which came to power at the SDS convention in June, called the meeting to try to bring together various parts of the radical movement and other young people, including those turned on and off by Weatherman politics.

            “We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” said Bernardine Dohrn, a Weatherman leader.  The meeting was planned to make amends for some of these mistakes—such as the hostility shown by Weatherman for the rest of the movement—and to broaden support for Weatherman politics and actions.

            The meeting hall was decked with large banners of revolutionary leaders—Che, Ho, Fidel, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver—hanging from the ceiling.  One entire wall of the ballroom was covered with alternating black and red posters of murdered Illinois Panther leader Fred Hampton.  An enormous cardboard machine gun hung from the ceiling.

            Violence was the keynote of the long hours of talk that began Dec. 27.  The distinction between revolutionary armed struggle and violence for its own sake is a major point of contention between Weatherman and its numerous critics.

            While Weathermen had spoken of their desire to reconstitute SDS as a mass organization representing various points of view within the revolutionary movement, it was clear that Weatherman was running the show.  This was a Weatherman meeting, with a handful of outsiders there to gawk, scowl, listen and occasionally to debate.

            Old-time movement people noticed a large number of unfamiliar faces there.  True, there were the Weatherman founders—people who had played a major role in SDS in 1966-69, many of them from Columbia and other elite schools.  But then there were dozens of new, young kids—long hairs, street kids, a few of them only 13 or 14 years old, some of them from out-of-the-way places like Grand Rapids, Mich. and Fall River, Mass.

            The strongest debate centered on the question of who is going to make the American revolution.  Weatherman, along with many others in the movement, recognizes that the American revolution is part of the world struggle against U.S. imperialism, a struggle for liberation from both colonial and capitalist oppression.  Weatherman’s critics maintain, however, that Weatherman’s internationalism is based on an analysis that ignores capitalist oppression in America.  Weatherman sees revolutionary change in America as happening almost solely, if at all, as a belated reaction to a successful world revolution including a successful revolt by the black colony inside the U.S.

            The logic of that view was expressed in a statement by Ted Gold, a top Weatherman, who said that “an agency of the people of the world” would be set up to run the U.S. economy and society after the defeat of the U.S. imperialism abroad.

            A critic spoke up: “In short, if the people of the world succeed in liberating themselves before American radicals have made the American revolution, then the Vietnamese and Africans and the Chinese are gonna move in and run things for white America.  It sounds like a John Bircher’s worst dream.  There will have to be more repression than ever against while people, but by refusing to organize people, Weatherman isn’t even giving them half a chance.”

            “Well,” replied Gold, “If it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”

            Weatherman—virtually all white—continues to promote the notion that white working people in America are inherently counter-revolutionary, impossible to organize, or just plain evil—“honky -------,” as many Weathermen put it.

            Weatherman’s bleak view of the post-revolutionary world comes from an analysis of American society that says that “class doesn’t count, race does.”

            White workers are in fact fighting for their survival, insisted people doing organizing of factory workers in California.  They claim that strikes for wage increases and job security can fairly easily be linked to the anti-imperialist analysis.

            But Weatherman denies that survival is an issue for white workers.  Weatherman leader Howie Machtinger derided white workers for desiring better homes, better food and essentially better lives.

            Bob Avakian, from the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, argued that not only do white workers need those things for their survival, but that black people need them and want them, too.  The several black people who Weatherman had brought to the meeting shouted “Right on!” and waved their fists.

            “If you can’t understand that white workers are being ----- too, that they are oppressed by capitalism before they are racists, then that just shows your class origins,” said Avakian.

            Machtinger shot back: “When you try to defend honky workers who just want more privilege from imperialism, that shows your race origins.”

            The Weatherman position boiled down to inevitable race war in America, with very few “honkies”—except perhaps the 400 people in the room and the few street kids or gang members who might run with them—surviving the holocaust.

            That notion is linked to Weatherman’s concept of initiating armed struggle now and not waiting to build mass white support—that is, a small but courageous white fighting force will do material damage that will weaken imperialism while the black liberation movement smashes “the imperialist -------” by itself.

            Machtinger talked a lot about how the black liberation movement is so far advanced at this point that the only thing left for white revolutionaries is to support blacks by fighting cops as a diversionary tactic.

            Weatherman is adamant in saying that whites cannot be organized into a mass revolutionary movement.  To say that they can or should, according to Weatherleaders, is “national chauvinism.”  “The Panthers say they should,” argued Avakian.  “Well, we don’t agree with the panthers on a lot of things,” replied Machtinger.

            Weathermen now talks less about a “strategy to win,” more about their historic role as catalysts.  They emphasize the need to establish a white, revolutionary presence, to break movement people out of the traditional role of long-term base-building and passivity.

            A new Weatherman catchword was “barbarism.”  The Weathermen see themselves as playing a role similar to that of the barbarian tribes, such as the Vandals and the Visigoths, who invaded and destroyed the decadent, corrupt Rome.

            Unlike former SDS national council meetings, no specific resolutions were debated or voted on.  The only formal structure consisted of speeches by the small leadership group known as the “Weather Bureau.”  There were many small discussions and regional meetings, too.

            Bernardine Bohrn, former inter-organizational secretary of SDS for 1968-69, gave the opening speech.  She began by admitting that a lot of Weatherman’s actions have been motivated by “a white guilt trip.”

            “But we ------ up a lot anyway.  We didn’t fight around Bobby Seale when he was shackled at the Conspiracy Trial.  We should have torn the courtroom apart.  We didn’t smash them when Move peace creeps hissed David Hilliard on Moratorium Day in San Francisco.  We didn’t burn Chicago down when Fred was killed.”

            Dohrn characterized violent, militant response in the streets as “armed struggle” against imperialism.  “Since Oct. 11 [the last day of the SDS national window-breaking action in Chicago], we’ve been wimpy on armed struggle. . .  We’re about being a fighting force alongside the blacks, but a lot of us are still honkies, and we’re still scared of fighting.  We have to get into armed struggle.”

            Part of armed struggle, as Dohrn and other laid it down, is terrorism.  Political assassination—openly joked about by some Weathermen—and literally any kind of violence that is considered anti-social were put forward as legitimate forms of armed struggle.

            “We’re in an airplane,” Dohrn related, “and we went up and down the aisle ‘borrowing’ food from people’s plates.  They didn’t know we were Weathermen; they just knew we were crazy.  That’s what we’re talking about, being crazy --------- and scaring the ----- out of honky America.”

            A 20-foot long poster adorned another wall of the ballroom.  It was covered with drawings of bullets, each with a name.  Along with the understandable targets like Chicago’s Mayor Daley, the Weathermen deemed as legitimate enemies to be offed, among others, the Guardian (which has criticized Weatherman) and Sharon Tate, one of several victims in the recent mass murder in California.  She was eight months pregnant.

            “Honkies are going to be afraid of us,” Dohrn insisted.  She went on to tell the war council about Charlie Manson, accused leader of the gang which allegedly murdered the movie star and several others on their Beverly Hills estate.  Manson has been portrayed in the media as a Satanic, magnetic personality who held near-hypnotic sway over several women whom he lent out to friends as favors and brought along for the murder scene.  The press also mentioned Manson’s supposed fear of blacks—he reportedly moved into rural California to escape the violence of a race war.

            Weatherman, the “Bureau” says, digs Manson, not only for his understanding of white America—the killer purportedly wrote “pig” in blood on the wall after the murder—but also a “bad --------.”  (At least one press report explained the “pig” on the wall by saying that Manson wrote that in order to throw suspicion on black people.)

            “Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they are dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!  Wild!” said Bernardine Dohrn.

            Women members of Weatherman held a panel discussion on women’s liberation.  The fighting women, “the women who can carry bombs under their dresses like in “The Battle of Algiers,” was put forward as the only valid model for women’s liberation.  Women’s liberation comes not only with taking leadership roles and with asserting yourself politically, they said, but also with overcoming hang-ups about violence.

            In between the women’s raps, the people sang a medley of Weatherman songs, high camp numbers such as, “I’m Dreaming of a White Riot,” “Communism Is What We Do,” and “We Need a Red Party.”  Spirited chants broke out, too: “Women power!”  Struggling power!”  “Red Army power!”  Sirhan Sirhan power!”  “Charlie Manson power!”  “Power to the People!”  “Off the pig!”

            Other women speakers pointed out that male chauvinism has both an active intolerant side and a passive insulting side.  They criticized the men in many Weatherman collectives for passively accepting women in leadership roles while refusing to engage in political struggle with them.  Another speaker referred to the white women’s role as reproduced and characterized white women who bring up children in white America as “pig mothers.”

            The “crazy violent ----------” theme was picked up in a long address by “Weather Bureau” member John Jacobs, who laid out the “White Devil” theory of all world history and traced the history of today’s youth from the Beat Generation of the 1950s.

            “We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent,’” Jacobs declared.  That notion, coupled with the White Devil theory, formed the basis of what they call “Serve the People --------.”  Serving the people, relating to people’s needs, is a crucial factor in many people’s minds of organizing white working people in America, so that the revolution will come as class war and end in socialism, rather than come as race war and end in fascism.

            Weatherman is not about to collapse or disappear.  The group has grown slightly in numbers since its inception last summer.  The “Weathermachine” is still grinding out intense, excited, very dedicated people who are willing to risk a lot.  But, as a black guy from Seattle, who Weatherman brought along, said, “They are simply not where it’s at.”

700 TURN OUT FOR NATIONAL WSA MEETING

(reprint of Guardian article)

By Carl Davidson

Guardian staff correspondent

New Haven, Conn.

            About 700 students gathered at Yale University Dec. 27-30 for a four-day national meeting organized by the Worker-Student Alliance.  WSA was first organized over a year ago by the Progressive Labor party and a few others as a caucus inside SDS.  Since the split at the SDS Convention in June, WSA has claimed to be the only “authentic” SDS.

            WSA has definitely grown in size since June and is the largest of the three former SDS factions surviving the split.  The other two groups, Weatherman and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, had an attendance of 400 and 300, respectively, at their recent national meetings.  Weatherman also continues to call itself SDS, while RYM has since established itself as an independent organization.

            The main focus of discussion in the first two days of the meetings, organized into educational panels and workshops, centered on the group’s “campus worker-student alliance” strategy.  The first panel, entitled “Racism, Male Chauvinism and the CWSA,” set the tone for the meeting: speaker after speaker would describe how chapter members on their campus took jobs as cafeteria or maintenance workers and then initiated or supported struggles for better wages and working conditions and against firings or racial and sexual discriminatory practices.

            The only organized opposition to the CWSA strategy came from the Spartacist League, a tiny Trotskyist splinter group with a caucus of about 20 people at the conference.  The “Sparts” criticized the CWSA strategy as “reformist” and “economist.”  “There’s nothing here that a good bourgeois trade unionist wouldn’t support,” one of their speakers said.

            The only other minor difference developed when Alan Spector, one of the original organizers of WSA, said that while he completely agreed with the CWSA strategy, he felt equal emphasis should be given to “pro-working class struggles against the aspects of the university related to the war, like struggles against ROTC and military research.”  He was answered by Bob Leonhardt, a PL member from New York, who said that while he supported those struggles where they developed, he believe that “the best way to fight imperialism is to first build an alliance of campus workers and students.”

            One student, speaking from the floor, also emphasized the need to fight racism in other aspects of the university than the working conditions of campus workers.  “There’s a lot we need to fight,” he said, “police institutes, racist teachers and racist courses.”  He described how WSA at Harvard had disrupted a course on riot control.

            But then came the clincher.  “We have to start doing the same thing with these nationalist black studies courses,” he added.  No one listening seemed to object to PL’s position claiming that black nationalism and the black student movement was basically reactionary.

            One Pler explained the line: “What’s wrong with black nationalism is that it tells all classes of black people to unite.  That’s just like telling all Americans to united around Rockefeller or all French people to united around DeGaulle.”

            A related issue came up in one of the work shops in a discussion of the open admissions struggles of black students.  Out of the 20 students present, only two supported the demand, a few more were uncertain, but a majority opposed it.

            “How do you tell a black cafeteria worker that her kids shouldn’t fight for the right to go to college?” someone asked.  “You can find ways to avoid the discussion,” said a white WSAer going to school in Florida.  “No, that’s not right,” said another white student.  “I just say how the schools aren’t any good anyway and that there’s nothing wrong with working in a factory.”

            Throughout the educational conference, in all the speeches, there was not one mention of the Black Panther party of the recent wave of government repression against them.  This was in spite of the fact that the meeting was held in New Haven, where 14 Panthers are being held in jail.

            There was no discussion in the main sessions of Vietnam and the antiwar movement, except for incidental attacks on the Mobilization committees.  There were two small workshops on “SDS and the War.”  The Guardian was barred from one and the other spent part of its time attacking the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam.

            When the two-day plenary session started, the first discussion and decision was to exclude the bourgeois press.  The first speaker said, “In case there’s any confusion, that also includes the Guardian.”  After loud applause, the vote was about 400 to 3, and the Guardian reporter was escorted out of the building.

(Guardian, January 10, 1970, page 3)

NEW YOUTH GROUP OF THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY

            A founding convention to form a new communist youth organization will be held in Chicago on February 7, 8, and 9, 1970.  This convention has been organized by the American Communist Party.  The new youth movement is designed to replace the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs which have been thoroughly exposed as instruments of the Communist Party.  The name of this new youth organization had not yet been announced.

YSA CHARTS PROGRAM FOR 1970

            Another communist organization which is active on the campuses is the Young Socialist Alliance, (YSA).  It is the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Partyk the Communist Party which follows the line of Leon Trotsky.  The Socialist Workers Party belongs to the “Old Left” since it was formed by Leon Trotsky and others in 1938.  However, the Youth Socialist Alliance has grown considerably during the period of the “New Left” and has had great success in recruiting SDS personnel into its membership.

            YSA has been very effective organizing revolutionary activity in the military forces.

            The Guardian reports on the 9^th annual convention of the Young Socialist Alliance which was held in Minneapolis, December 27-30, 1969, as follows:

By Randy Furst

Guardian staff correspondent

Minneapolis, Minn.

            The Young Socialist Alliance outlined a strategy for a 1970 offensive at its ninth national convention here Dec. 27-30.  More than 800 persons attended.

            The 140 convention delegates—representing more than 1100 YSA members—debated and passed resolutions on the antiwar movement, black self-determination and a strategy for “the red university.”

            A huge red banner emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and giant poster of Lenin and Trotsky and other revolutionaries hung from the walls of the convention auditorium.

            The discussions were marked by a critique of the new left.  “We are not part of the new left,” Larry Seigle, YSA national chairman, said at the opening session.  “We are the socialist—the Marxist wing of the new radicalization—and the fastest growing current within this radicalization.”

            Seigle and other YSA leaders believe that the Young Socialist Alliance has outdistanced the factions of SDS, politically and organizationally.  About 10% of the YSA membership has been recruited from SDS in the last year, according to one official at the convention.

            Some SDS figures have long viewed YSA as irrelevant to the developing revolutionary possibilities in the United States.  They have viewed the organization as part of the old left with a program more suited to the 1930s and having little to offer today’s youth.

            YSA is tied to the Socialist Workers party as a “fraternal organization” with no hard official links because of internal U.S. security statutes.  A minority of YSAers have joined the SWP which has “fraternal relations” with the Fourth International.  Founded by Leon Trotsky and others in 1938, the Fourth International has groupings in more than 30 countries with the U.S. and France being the largest.

            The convention discussions—which ran from mid-morning until late in the evening—continued to center on the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement.  “The imperialist aggression in Vietnam and the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people remains the single most important event in world politics,” said Susan LaMont in introducing the antiwar resolution.  “It is the central confrontation between imperialism and the world revolutionary forces.”  The resolution, passed unanimously, stated in part: “The Vietnamese have said they will not rest until all foreign forces are withdrawn from Vietnam.  Neither will the YSA.”  The resolution called for “full support for mass actions against the war.”

            The YSA calls itself a “multi-national” organization.  Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican-American and other third world radicals make up 10% of YSA’s current membership, Nelson Blackstock, a YSA official, reported.  The YSA said it was determined to increase its participation in the struggles for self-determination.  The organization puts forward a black and third world party as a way of building the nationalist movement in the U.S.

            The YSA voted full support to the efforts to halt the “vicious repression” against the Black Panther party.  While critical of some of the Black Panther tactics and what they term “ultra-left rhetoric,” YSAers said they considered the attacks and murders a conscious assault on the entire movement, reaffirming their “commitment to defend the Black Panther party against these attempts to harass and liquidate it.”

            All of the programs presented at the convention were passed virtually unanimously.  Termed “general line resolutions”—in that agreement with the general line would mean a “yes” vote—the resolutions had been discussed in YSA locals for three months prior to the convention.

            Certain objections to the YSA resolutions were submitted, incorporated into the literature and debated at the convention.  Members of the Madison, Wisc., local for example, raised the possibility that “Support the Vietnamese Revolution” be a main slogan for the antiwar movement.  Other left groups have urged in the past that “Support for the Provisional Revolutionary Government” be a slogan for the antiwar movement as part of a “multi-issue” strategy.  Some of the YSAers interviewed said that while they supported the PRG in its struggle against imperialism, they were critical of some aspects of the 12-point program.  They also mentioned, however, that the NLF advocated immediate withdrawal as the central demand which will aid the struggle for self-determination.

            The Young Socialist Alliance said it intends to continue to build the Student Mobilization Committee into a mass organization on U.S. campuses around the single issue immediate withdrawal.  Many on the organized left view the SMC as a “Trot front,” however.  The YSA disagrees.  “Look, there are some 20,000 students who consider themselves members of the SMC,” said one YSAer.  “Sure, we’re the main revolutionary tendency inside the SMC.  But most people in the SMC are independents.”

            In a women’s liberation workshop, a YSAer said that the “women’s liberation movement is at an unprecedented high level.”  It was suggested the YSA women should “initiate women’s liberation groups where there aren’t any.”  Said Kipp Dawson, a YSAer, “It is as important as the other movements into which we throw wholeheartedly our cadre.”

CONTINUING NEGOTIATION WITH GARRETT THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AND THE METHODIST CHURCHES OF EVANSTON

            After the Methodist Churches of Evanston and Garrett Theological Seminary had granted full use of their facilities to the “red army” organized by the “Weathrman” leadership group of SDS as a base for their civil war, Chicago 8-11, 1969, I wrote to the churches and Garrett requesting the use of their facilities to conduct anticommunist seminars.  Replies have been received from both Garrett and the churches and negotiations are proceeding.

            The following letter has been received:

“Dear Dr. Schwarz:

            In response to your letter of November 11, in which you requested use of the facilities of the Evanston United Methodist Parish to conduct an anti-subversive seminar during the spring of 1970, I have been asked to reply.

            Your letter was presented, as requests of this kind are, to the Ministerial Staff in its meeting, then referred to the Parish Council, which is made up of the ministers and three laymen from each of the six churches.

            The Parish Council has asked me to request you to arrange for two officials of your movement to meet with a committee of laymen and ministers from the Council to ascertain your needs for the seminar.  If you will let me know when these officials could meet with us for that purpose, we will then be glad to notify them of the place of meeting at a mutually agreed upon time.

            Sincerely,

            Dow Kirkpatrick”

            The “seminar” at Garrett is taking place.  The latest correspondence from Garrett suggests the following conditions:

1. The seminar will be held on May 13, 1970.
2. The full duration of the seminar will be four hours.  Part of this time will be given over to “dialogue.”  In practice this means the seminar will reduce itself to one or two lectures and a period of discussion.
3. Attendance by supporters of the Crusade will be limited to a very few.

There is little similarity between the treatment given the SDS and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.

            Many people have written asking for permission to attend the seminar.  Since it will be impossible for all of those who have made the request to attend, we are faced with the difficult task of selection.

            Some have written suggesting that since the treatment is so unequal, I should refuse to cooperate in the seminar.  However, I am most anxious to present the message to the faculty and students of Garrett and also to hear them express their views, and I plan to take advantage of this opportunity.

            Further information will be provided as it is available.

DEBATE WITH MARCUSE

            The following letter has been received:

“Dear Dr. Schwarz:

            University of California, San Diego Extension is preparing an important program on Conservative and Traditional Views on Contemporary Issues for spring quarter, 1970.  Enclosed is a tentative draft of the course.  As you can see, one of the highlights that w have planned is a debate between you and Professor Marcuse.

            Dr. John Geddes has designed this program, and has been in contact with Dr. Rod Ledford.  Dr. Ledford has contacted your office concerning this program, and I very much enjoyed chatting with your Jim Colbert.  We would very much like you to appear on Thursday, April 2 from 7 to 9:45 p.m.  In case Professor Marcuse is unable to appear at this time, we will attempt to obtain from him the name of an alternate.  In case no alternates are forthcoming, we would like you to take the full time to discuss those aspects of the Communist problem that are of current concern to you.

            Sincerely,

            C.A. Lewis

            Extension Specialist”

            I am not very optimistic about Marcuse agreeing to debate.  The prospects are brighter that he will appoint a substitute.

WHERE DO THEY GET THE MONEY?

            One of the mysteries of the present revolutionary scene in the origin of the large sums of money which are at the disposal of the revolutionary criminals.  Very large sums are needed for bail and these are usually forthcoming.  One illustration of this is the situation of the three radicals—Jane Alpert, Dave Hughey, and Sam Melville, who have been arrested and charged with “conspiring to damage government property.”

            The arrests followed the bombing over a period of months of several corporate and military offices including: The Whitehall Street Induction Center, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Federal Office Building, R.C.A., Standard Oil, and several others.

            Hughey and Alpert have been released on bail of $20,000 each.  Bail for San Melville was originally set at $50,000.  When friends arrived in court with this bail on January 3, Federal Judge Milton Pollack doubled the bond to $100,000.  Later this $100,000 was offered but those offering the bail refused to state where it had been secured.  For this reason, the judge at first refused to accept it. 

            What do you think?