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Discussion at the national convention indicated that there are important disagreements within SDS on this new approach. The effort to develop an ideology and push off-campus is supported by the national staff and most of the older chapters in Boston, Berkeley, New York and Ann Arbor. But many newer members believe that SDS should remain primarily a student organization, engaged for the most part in the tactics of confrontation. In the areas where membership is growing most rapidly, students have had little or no previous experience with radical ideas of political organizing. Many of these chapters are located...
...split, moreover, is only one of a series of problems that SDS intellectuals say the organization must solve when shifting tactics and developing an ideology. First, aside from differences resulting from age, SDS is likely to reveal genuine political differences among its members as it attempts to define more clearly a program for social change. Second, assuming SDS can develop a radical movement among adults, it must decide whether to absorb them into the present organization or split them off into a "Movement for a Democratic Society." In either case, students will risk domination by the older radicals. Third, there...
...addition to these internal problems, SDS will raise substantial conflicts of ideology in appealing simultaneously to the two exploited classes it seeks to organize. If past projects in labor union organizing are any guide, SDS will organize the working class around bread and butter issues--steady jobs, higher wages and better working conditions. It will urge laborers to join unions and gain power over their employers as a means to increases in material welfare and higher standards of consumption. The power it urges the new working class to achieve will depend on very different values. The enemy will...
...SDS use these values to organize the working class and, at the same time, re-educate the middle class out of them? SDS organizers argue that after the working class reaches a decent standard of living and gains control over the means of production, laborers will see the futility of unlimited material aspiration and acquire a "revolutionary consciousness." But such predictions cannot be proved, and the fact is that many of the "new" workers who have reached decent levels of consumption aspire vigorously to the middleclass style of life. There remains, then, the problem of how to alter the values...
There are serious problems, furthermore, with the system of decision making which SDS would urge both classes to substitute for the present one. Participatory democracy, critics argue, is a vague and utopian notion that could never provide a workable system of government for society on a mass scale. In reply, SDSers allude to control by workers in cooperative factories, and to town meetings. But aside from the question of practicability, the notion has serious weaknesses even in theory. For it appears to depend on an underlying consensus in values and interests that runs directly against the pluralism and freedom which...