Word: pl
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...first reason for SDS's general decline after the Chicago convention in 1969 was that it read itself out of the anti-war movement. The Campus Worker-Student Alliance line-which PL pushed hard and continuously within SDS-sapped the organization of so much energy that it did no work on the issue of the war during the period of the Moratoria. SDS thus rendered itself powerless by the time Cambodia rolled around last May. At a time when tens of thousands of students focused on the war as a major national issue, SDS was engaged in its most intensive...
Even if SDS's refusal to participate in liberal anti-war demonstrations was vaguely understandable, its empty denunciations of radical groups supporting the NLF were not. One of PL's principal objections to the NLF was that its leaders had agreed to peace talks with the U. S., and, as PL is so fond of saying, "there is nothing to negotiate." Yet the NLF has made no binding concessions at the talks, and is probably doing no more in Paris than buying needed time. Another of PL's objections was that the NLF is supplied by two "revisionist" powers...
...PL's entire approach to the Vietnam war is an extremely limited one. As a group which places primary emphasis on economic explanations of American behavior abroad, PL subscribes to the "runaway shop" theory of imperialism. In other words, the U. S. seeks to remain in Vietnam for the sole purpose of extracting labor and raw materials at a far cheaper rate than would be possible in this country. Ignoring most of the cultural and psychological background of American expansionism, PL believes that the principal motivation of the U. S. in the Third World is to utilize foreign sources...
...Thus, PL states that if the NLF does not take a firm stand against U. S. involvement in postwar Vietnam-which it has not-it is selling out the American worker as well as the Vietnamese. This emphasis has led opponents of PL in SDS to charge that the party's approach to the war is one of "national chauvinism...
...same kind of reasoning is evident in PL's handling of the race question. Racism is viewed in purely economic terms; it divides white workers from black and makes impossible a united struggle for higher wages and better job conditions. PL believes that the white working class suffers the same consequences of racism-although on a lesser scale-as does the black. Thus, the oppression of black people is measured in dollars and cents; many of the fundamental features of racism are glossed over and the whole issue becomes a footnote to the struggle of the white working class...