Some important issues have been raised on the Kasama blog by Mike Ely
about anti-communist exclusionary policies in the new SDS.
The first entry, dated August 31, was titled “SDS: Ideology, Agendas and
Raw Anti-Communism” and published an interview with SDS member Rachel
Haut that originally appeared in Platypus, an online publication.
Ely prefaces the interview with the following comments:
>>The following interview appeared in platypus1917.org. It focuses
heavily on Rachel Haut’ belief that communist politics have no
legitimate place within a movement for an alternative society. Her
discussion lumps some very diverse forces together under a single label
“Maoists” i - but that superficial and questionable generalization is
part of the overall anti-communist method. The interview raises issues
about the meaning of democracy, the kind of society that should replace
this one, and whether communists have “agendas” and “ideology” (while
presumably non-communist democrats do not).
It also raises the question of how this approach of pressuring Obama is
linked to a particular (and anti-communist) view of “democracy.”
Laurie Rojas is a member of Chicago SDS and editor of The Platypus
Review. Rachel Haut is a member of the New York non-student SDS chapter.
Both are participating in the Hundred Days campaign- which plans to
mobilize people in the first hundred days of the next administration to
put pressure on Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.<<
Haut’s interview expresses a need not just to exclude “Maoists” but
“crazy anarchists” as well:
>>However, I think it is inappropriate to have conversations about
ideological differences when we still have Maoists in the organization.
Why should we be having these conversations with them, including them in
the discussion, if their ideology is in direct opposition to building a
democratic society? To say that the Maoists can be part of the
ideological debate would mean to condone them being in this
organization, which is something I don’t do. In the New York City SDS I
have spoken numerous times with SDSers who are not Maoists about having
the Maoists or certain kinds of anarchists in our organization, because
both sides hurt us. If we want to build a democratic society, and we
want to be relevant, both of these opposing forces are working against
us. There are varying degrees of anarchism, definitely, as well as
varying degrees of socialism. But, I think ideas that conflict with our
vision and our goals need to be clearly defined and excluded before we
can actually start talking about our ideological differences formally as
a national organization.<<
It is a little hard for me to judge the role of anarchists in SDS but I
am somewhat surprised by this characterization since I was under the
impression that anarchists enjoyed something of a hegemony in SDS. I
surmised that with the implosion of the anti-globalization movement,
anarchists have been on the prowl trying to find an outlet for their
tactical fetishism. Apparently, they must have worn out their welcome in
SDS, at least with people like Rachel Haut whose politics are a bit hard
for me to extract out of the interview. I guess she sounds a bit like
one of the early New Leftists who operated in SDS until factional lines
were drawn with an earlier generation of Maoists.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/excluding-reds-from-sds/
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