Word: pl
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...part, this weakness stemmed from divisions within the radical movement. Even during 1968-69. Harvard SDS experienced bitter infighting between its two principal factions: the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) caucus, and the New Left caucus. WSA, led by the well-organized and elite Progressive Labor Party (PL), viewed the New Left caucus's rather diffuse ideology- which centered on support for most all wars of national liberation- with scorn. For its part, the New Left caucus generally felt that WSA's rigid Marxism-organizing for a workers revolution- was inapplicable to present condition. Even during the height...
DESPITE such verbal battles, the two caucuses held together in one Harvard SDS during 1968-69, and the combination was potent. WSA-PL provided good organizers- "I don't like PL's ideas but their tactics are usually the best" was a refrain commonly muttered by SDS members at mass meetings. The New Left caucus, on the other hand, possessed more charismatic leaders like Michael Ansara '68, and a looser ideology more attractive to non-SDS students...
Though the two SDS factions complemented one another in one sense, in the long run they were incompatible. At stake were not only specific ideological points but two drastically different approaches to politics. As revolutionaries, the short-haired PL'ers always resembled Lenin: intense, hardworking, and following on ideology which- no matter how far removed from reality- had at least a rigorous internal consistency. By contrast, New Left members resembled Che Gucvara: they sported long hair, waxed as romantic revolutionaries, and stressed ideology less than I got feeling to pick up a gun and fight. The tensions between these...
...open split made the left's internal warfare public property, and the spectacle was one not calculated to draw new recruits to the radical cause. In October, 1969, Boston PL members even called press conferences to attack their political rivals and flabbergasted establishment reporters by charging that Mark Rudd (former leader of Columbia SDS and now a member of the street-fighting Weathermen) was a real live police agent...
...four spectators arrested outside the trial John T. Berlow '71, a member of PL dismissed last year for his participation in the University Hall seizure said that the charges against the four are "totally false, even in terms of technical...