I think these discussions of PL and SDS in the period 1969-1970 are too narrowly focused on a few individuals at the national level. The squabble at the last SDS National Convention was not followed by a wholesale disintegration of SDS chapters on the local level. Activity continued on the campuses in the latter half of 1969, with anti-imperialist contingents participating in the two major demonstrations against the war in October and November. Then in May somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand SDS members on the East Coast (minus both Weatherman and PL) traveled to New Haven for a demonstration in support of Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins, and other Black Panthers on trial for murder. This demonstration coincided with Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. Following a call by Tom Hayden at the demonstration in New Haven for a national student strike, we then returned to our campuses to join the growing national protests. Rejecting both Weatherman's call for guerilla warfare and PL's anti-Panther positions on nationalism, the vast majority of SDS activists remained committed to anti-imperialist and anti-racist mass politics. Along with the mass politics of SDS, there were also proposals at the last SDS convention for what students should do after they left the campuses. The most influential proposal turned out to be the Revolutionary Union's Red Papers. According to Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, the RU sold thirty thousand copies over the next year. Rather than the RU's own political positions on revolution in the US or Mao or Stalin, it was the RU's tactical proposal that ex-students should form collectives, get working class jobs, study Marxism, and discuss their experiences with one another. Elbaum puts the number of activists who followed this path at about ten thousand, much bigger than the formal memberships of the many Marxist-Leninist groups put together. If anyone is interested, I have written an essay called "You Can't Use Weatherman to Show which Way the Wind Blew" which goes over this history in more detail. It can be found either by Googling it or Gil Schaeffer or democraticconstitutionparty.com.
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