Recreating Students for a Democratic Society (SDS 2.0)

A small, but apparently growing, number of students have been trying to create an organization with a historically-charged name: Students for a Democratic Society.

I suspect this happens every five or so years, with starting national student activist organizations becoming an increasingly popular/easy thing to do because of the existence of the internet which both facilitates real connections and the illusion of connection.

I recall being on an email list, perhaps about eight years ago, where another small group was trying to start SDS. They didn't get nearly as far as this effort though.

This group of people have actual chapters at a handful of schools. In fact it only takes having about 5 chapters to be the leading multi-issue (aka not focussed on a single issue like peace, or sweatshops) grassroots (aka they don't have a parent organization) student activist organization in the US. So they may have achieved that.

Disadvantages of Restarting SDS
SDS was dominated by white men, and almost completely ignorant of the racism, sexism, and heterosexism within its organization. Also at its start it was an extremely elitist organization based in the upper-middle class (more so than any current student groups, with the possible exception of STARC when it started).

SDS went through a cyclone. It started off as a boring reformist organization that was best described as liberal, became increasingly radical, grew massively, and then burn itself into pieces with lefter-than-thou sectarianism and ultimately endorsing violent tactics against property (and against people, at least in its rhetoric more than its actions).

SDS had some good politics and some good ideas, but it also had some really bad ones.

Reporters and everyone loves to compare today's student activism to that of the Sixties. This will just make that trend worse. It ignores the student activism of the Thirties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and the current decade -- contributing to a myth that today's students are apathetic. Today's students are less active than students were in 1968-1970, but compare favorably with the other 8 years in the Sixties.

Activism has evolved. You can learn some stuff from SDS, but you are too liable to make the same mistakes that it did.

You aren't SDS. You are using a name as a ploy to gain popularity, and have less right to it than the Progressive Labor Party who took over the canibalized SDS in 1969 for its own use. Pretending to be an important national student activist organization and to be the latest and greatest thing is a common practice of people who have a lot of privilege (class, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc) and derive their big egos from that (note: I know because I'm personally very privileged and have a long essay written about how to build a national student activist network - at least I never got around to trying it). You do need hype to start a new network, but it's better if that hype is backed by solid grassroots organizing, and good politics that includes a commitment to anti-oppression.

SDS was a white organization. Why not restart the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?

Advantages
I have a theory that students who are socially-aware and liberal, don't really care what issue they work on - they just want to get involved. This is particularly true of more privileged students (or of students who don't yet realize their oppression). Thus many students form Amnesty groups. There are perhaps 2000 high school Amnesty groups in the US - because everyone has heard of Amnesty and it does a good job with providing them an easy set of things to do.

Similarly with SDS, a small to medium number of students will know about SDS history and decide that it's a cool thing to do. This provides a recruitment mechanism and a degree of organizational unity that would otherwise be hard to achieve.

Mimicing SDS gives an organization a minimal level of strategy that is better than it might otherwise have. Sure SDS made lots of mistakes (ERAP failed), but its mistakes were generally better than inaction. You can learn a lot from mistakes. For instance, people might join this SDS and realize that not taking into account the importance of race, gender, sexual orientation and class is a FATAL organizational flaw. The next time they join or start a group, they will hopefully do a better job with this.

Student Power. I'm a sucker for student power/campus democracy theory, which was originally developed by SDS and then extended by the now-defunct Movement for Democracy and Education. I think people need to realize that they're oppressed and empower themselves to act against their oppressors (and then ultimately to join people who are more oppressed than they are).
See my Student Power Essay or the Campus Democracy section of this website

Conclusion
I really would love to see a national grassroots multi-issue non-sectarian progressive student activist organization in the US with chapters or affiliates in twenty or more schools. Unfortunately past experience has shown this to be a very hard thing to do, with the Movement for Democracy and Education and the Progressive Student Network being the two most recent attempts that never fully caught on.

Personally, if I'd start a national network, I'd argue for the name Progressive Student Network because it doesn't have historical baggage and based on my extensive web-searching I've found that "Progressive Student Alliance" is the most common name for a campus multi-issue progressive group. I think the PSN name would have the greatest appeal, however just having appeal isn't nearly enough.

Alternatively, I'd argue that the idea of a national organization is bound to fail. Instead we need a "Network of Networks". Strong integration/cooperation between the dozen or so groups in the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) that make up the bulk of the progressive student left in the US is the way to go. Joint conferences, joint publications (magazine/newspaper), joint campaigns, joint materials, joint trainings/training program, joint speakers/trainers bureau, dynamically sharing information between websites (using RSS or other technology), and building coalitions from the local level on up could create a "Network of Networks" that is strong enough to run on its own resources (instead of grant money), and provide local groups with the incentives that they need to be persuaded that networking is useful.

Weak networks don't work because they are too much a waste of effort for too little reward. Strong networks do.

A strong network could promise 1 trainer visiting your campus per year, 1-2 visits from activists at other schools, a stack of student activist newspapers 4 times a year, a state conference in your state, several campaigns with campaign materials, good strategy, and other groups working on that your group could pick and choose from, advice on how to be
an activist once you graduate, email lists that actually have productive conversations, and a lot more. That's a network worth joining!