Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is Gonna Win!

The reactionary nature of DSA organizational structures are, I think, a side effect of having a violent past.

First, a note. Unlike many of my other pieces, try to understand that this is blatant, unapologetic, pseudo-revisionist speculation on my part, based on cursory research and my feel of DSA over these past two years. Take it as “opinion”, as a sort of non-Newtonian news, as a facet and lens through which to view the DSA’s weirdly hegemonic structures for a democratic organization. This is stream of consciousness, almost gonzo journalism. But its a thing I haven’t seen talked about elsewhere, and I hope that that gets you thinking in ways you haven’t before.

I only use one or two documents here, but there are plenty over at the Marxist library website, because I’m exhausted from EB election stuff and my previous article, and this is me venting with the truth. A shitpost of logic, a pathway to the possible truth. The citations are good, but I don’t actually care enough about this topic to get you scholarly numbers.

I came to a realization a few days ago, when, due to a friend jokingly chanting Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is Gonna Win! which brought me to [this], from a leadership position in DSA and eight months later, a Weatherman, and through that I came across some SDS dispatches and newsletters from 1968 and 1969.

Some context is necissary to explain why this is significant, and support points further in the paper. Please stick with the brief history lesson. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the organization that, after a series of other splits, the kernel of DSA split off from. SDS is notorious for, among other things, many different political tendencies coming to a head in the 1969 National Convention, which instead of anything productive going on, essentially boiled down into a protracted argument about who was the most wrong. One faction that split off from that, was Revolutionary Youth Movement (I), and I won’t really be going into any of the other factions.

Anyway, RYM(I) was one of the factions but an interesting point is that it was most of SDS national leadership. Before I go into it, I know I’m going ot need to state that, yes, I know RYM(I) became The Weathermen. I will cover that in good time, but please don’t let it distract from this leadup. RYM(I) affiliated leadership was basically the exact opposite of everything current leadership is, calling anyone who was actually revisionist revisionist. The thing that initially got me here was this article from one of the leaders of SDS at the time, and it made me realize that SDS was extremely radical, and then I wondered why. And then I remembered she was a Weatherman, which sort of explains it, but upon actually looking, I realized that, most of SDS was like this.

I’m speculating, but the core thesis of my document is that, in a reaction to never wanting that to happen again, or perhaps not wanting to be associated with the violent past, DSA, though the years after that, built the structures into its bylaws that enabled entrenched, unelected positions such that the more moderate old guard could steer the organization were “Radicals” elected to leadership.

I had, at first, also dismissed these. I read about the weathermen and assumed SDS stuff before that led to them splitting off, but not that they were leadership. What went wrong? I don’t know. Were they wrong? Probably, bombs aren’t a great way to get public opinion on your side.

But SDS as a whole was a soup of two mainly *checks notes* revolutionary communist factions. This is Good As Hell for an org that big in the US, in case you were wondering, though their politics, thoughts, and behaviors leave much to be desired (Much like the current US left). These biggest factions were the Progressive Labor Party (henceforth PL) who were maoists on one side, and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (the first one, henceforth RYM(I)), who thought PL was not “revolutionary enough” and also “revisionist”, on the other. There was also, reportedly, a faction of Mets fans, chanting “Let’s go mets!” at one point in the proceedings of this convention. I think left unity can flourish over one point of agreement: Fuck the Mets.

SDS leadership and those aligned with them had been under RYM (I). So when this happened and they were annoyed the other side wasn’t listening to them, they were like ‘its impossible to work with these people’ and they walked out. As you do. We, as Dialectical Materialists, have rightly learned from history, that whenever there’s a disagreement this big you gotta have a split. Its part of a self-righting machine intended to keep the global northwestern left from ever getting anything done.

Another key piece of information is that a paper was circulated by the SDS National Leadership (RYM(I)) containing their manifesto entitled “You Dont Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”, and basically misread the current working-class allegiance to them and how to accomplish revolution. I know this part is controversial but violent revolution without a huge majority of the working class on your side? Kinda a losing proposition, you know? Anyway, RYM(II) split off of this because it was A Bit Extreme, which is sort of the more level-headed branch of what RYM stood for before becoming The Weathermen. Also fun fact, it had Bob Avakian before he fled to Paris because of an unpaid parking ticket or whatever.

So without the relatively moderate PL, and then RYM(II) splitting off, they lost most of the people moderating their views and then became What The Weathermen Were Known For. They eventually decided they needed to go underground (Weather Underground) and form insurgent cells and be all Che Guevara but without, you know, the aformentioned ‘the entirety of the proletariat supports you’ point. They bombed some monuments and public buildings which I, for one, don’t really think is a great way to win over the proletariat, since terrorist attacks sort of look bad.

What does this have to do with current DSA? Well, SDS past 1970 I dont know for sure but I speculate that our history is seen as this sort of “lost era” because of the sheer mention of anything around 1969 brings up The Weathermen, which no one wants to be associated with, and so no one learns the lessons from that year. I don’t think the Weathermen were all that great, but I don’t think they should distract us from the history, either. And DSA was the merger of NAM, the New American Movement, what spun off of the desiccated husk of SDS, and SPUSA, and DSOC, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a spinoff of the minority anti-war caucus of SPUSA.

Some of these are strikingly similar to the views of the lefter wing of DSA, but it is worth noting that those radical left people have learned the lesson of *checks notes* not stockpiling weapons and bombing things. We need revolution, but that revolution either needs a majority of the working class assisting in fighting, or it needs all of the working class backing a huge, unrelenting movement such that elections are just a given because you are the majority compared to capital. The latter, I think, has a chance of winning but is, as they say, Utopian. I would prefer bloodless revolutions but so far those have had issues involving the CIA. But if you go that path, we do not gain that sort of revolution by electing people, we gain that by having the voting plurality of the working class being able to vote in whoever we collectively want, since no the bourgeois have so little in numbers that their own democracy can work against them. But getting anyone to agree on anything is a utopian, seemingly insurmountable task.

The part that most stuck with me was this:

The convention strikingly reconfirmed that there is no way to cheat history by trying to avoid political program; that in the end politics is always decisive; that the debates which have divided the political tendencies in the working class movement for almost 70 years, far from being “sterile,” remain the most fundamental and burning questions of today. It also showed that the “new left,” like the Communist Party and social democracy, is entirely capable of violating the basic democratic rights of members — when it fits their needs — not because they want to be undemocratic, but because they are politically incapable of dealing with serious, organized opposition.

DSA not only is refusing to learn from history, but I posit that current unelected, hegemonic structures are a result of the post-SDS organization taking steps to protect itself from that sort of radicalism, misunderstanding why it went bad. Our current leaders probably don’t even consciously realize it, but the structures to prevent even moderate radicalism are built into the organization and the various factions within the US left at current. All that is happening has happened before. All that has happened before will happen again. The wheel weaves as the wheel wills.