You Say You Want a Revolution

SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance

John F. Levin, Earl Silbar, John F. Levin, Earl Silbar

• Publisher: John F. Levin
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780578451657
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Today, Students for a Democratic Society is often portrayed as the drama of the good early 1960s SDS turning into Weatherman, the small faction whose story ended in a bombed-out New York townhouse.

The reality was quite different. SDS at its apex in 1968/69 numbered 100, 000 students whose political views reflected a rainbow of ideologies exploring what a new American Left could be with a willingness to risk everything to stop the war in Vietnam and win social justice. When SDS splintered in June 1969, a majority of the delegates supported the program of its Worker-Student Alliance caucus: building a strategic alliance between students and the working class to achieve the movement’s goals.

The contributors in this book were mostly members of WSA, whose formation was initiated by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. Here they recount and evaluate their participation in the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, from trips to revolutionary Cuba defying the US travel ban to student strikes, labor and community alliances, and campaigns against the war and racism across the country, from Columbia and Harvard, Texas and Iowa, to San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. These accounts are both optimistic, from those still inspired, and bitter, from those now critical of their involvement. The stories they tell speak across the years, as a new generation—from Black Lives Matter to Fight for $15 to the Parkland students—faces decisions about how to organize and build alliances to stop wars abroad, confront racial oppression at home, fight for immigrant rights, and end violence and neoliberal exploitation.

17

The Spread of Maoism: A Story

Bárbara Selfridge

(UC Berkeley)

Listen, ludicrous things happen to the young and Maoist. Believe me, I was there myself, in right up to the nuts for over a semester. But just because I describe some of that ludicrosity, it doesn’t mean I want to offend anybody. Especially not Ellen, and that’s what I want to make real clear, right off the bat, because even though she was the butt of the whole thing in some ways, in other ways Timur and I were the butts and the real point is that some scenes like the one at Dave’s Diner have just got to be told. They’re classics.

Okay, a little background. After a while Nixon started parroting LBJ’s “light at the end of the tunnel,” but back in the spring of ’70 he was bombing the shit out of Southeast Asia, and we were all going a little nutso trying to stop him. I was at NYU, twenty, red-blooded, extremely draftable, and suddenly it seemed inevitable for me to fly out to Berkeley. Everybody was nutso in Berkeley.

I knew two people out there: Chris Mott, who used to page with me at the New York Public Library, and Chris’s friend Ellen. Chris and Ellen were freshmen dorm-mates except not really because Chris spent all her time over with Jimmy Kirk in this animal hole he had above the Berkeley Barb offices. Jimmy, Chris, and Ellen were all fresh recruits to the campus Maoists—also known as (AKA, as it says in the police reports) PL, Progressive Labor, the assassins of SDS, the Stalinist assholes, the closet Trots, etc. Jimmy Kirk’s of no significance whatsoever, but Chris Mott and I at one time would have been lovers except that right at that moment her father practically walks in on us.

Chris and Ellen go way back, so I met Ellen the first time when she was visiting Chris over Christmas ’68, and then again summer ’69 in Europe. Imagine this scene, will you: I’m in my penzione room in Rome, alone with Ellen, and suddenly she pulls her dress off over her head and proceeds to wash it out in my sink. Even puffed up with Italian pasta, Ellen’s body drives me berserk, and for about two hours she stands there scrubbing with her ass jiggling and her tits half out of her bra and pointing at me in the mirror.

“You don’t mind, do you?” she asks, looking up about five minutes into the exhibition. No clue on what she expects of me, and basically I spend the entire next year pissed at her for it.

Then finally that spring I asked her about it, point blank: “Which was it: to make or not to make?”

Ellen just stares at me like I’m some kind of pervert.

“Hey, baby,” I say, “don’t look at me like that!” (Let me explain. I get away with the ‘‘baby” stuff because I said there was an Ellen in my second grade who made me really hate the name. It was just a line—no such person but Ellen’s like that: a sucker for any line.)

But anyway, I tell Ellen, “You’ve got to admit that two hours is a fucking long time to wash one dress.”

”Oh, Frank, no!” Ellen never cops to anything. “That dress was filthy! It started changing color—patch by patch—and I couldn’t stop. Not till it was all done.”

Ellen’s a sweet kid, though, even if she is a goddamn cock-tease exhibitionist. She assumes automatically that I’ll stay with her in the dorm room: and every night she uses Chris’s meal card to bring me “sick trays” from the dining hall. So, of course, who was I to object to having to sneak showers in the all-female bathroom at the end of the hall? Anyway, by the time I got to Berkeley, Chris, Jimmy, and Ellen were already hard-core fanatics, scheduled up to their asses in meetings, demonstrations, leaflets, and other shit-work for PL. It was all right though, because the rest of the campus was all running around just as fanatic. That was the spring of the big anti-ROTC offensive, the Postal Workers’ wildcat, Kent State, Jackson State, all that shit, and it got to the point where anytime Nixon lifted a finger or more likely a bomber—we hit the streets.

My job, I saw right away, was to provide a little comic relief for the troops. I went along when they rented the bullhorns, painted the banners, etc., and I’d sing songs, crack jokes, whatever it took to remind my fellow fanatics that the revolution isn’t just for robots.

So like if I stayed up all night with Chris, running off ten thousand fliers for the next day’s demo, I’d pick one up and pretend to read it:

With trembling fingers, Sid tore her dress. She bit his ear in a frenzy of passion. Take me, she screamed, her hot breath exciting him to new heights of want and desire.

Then I’d look up: “Say, are you sure you want the masses reading this stuff?”

Ellen’s favorite bit was the song about the Red Squad, the three plain-clothed pigs named—no joke—Casey, Lacy, and Spacey, who were specifically assigned to hassle campus radicals. I said I’d heard them down in the Sproul Hall police station, singing their own version of Funiculi, Funicula:

Last night,
I stayed up late to masturbate.
It felt so good.
I knew it would.
Last night,
I stayed up late to masturbate.
It felt so nice.
I did it twice.
Swing it, fling it,
Up against the wall.

Mash it, bash it,
Do anything at all.
Some say to copulate is really grand,
But for all-around enjoyment,
There is nothing like a hand.

Ellen’s so nuts. She doesn’t have anybody, I don’t have anybody, we’re staying alone in the same fucking dorm room, and I, for one, am whacking off every fucking night, but you ask Ellen why she likes that song, and she says: “Because it’s anti-pig.”

Swear to god.

At that time Ellen had trouble just going two sentences without saying struggle or build a base. Build a base, I love that one. “Chris is on the phone building a base,” Ellen says, no comprehension that she’s not speaking English. She means recruitment: that Chris is talking to some poor slob, pushing Progressive Labor’s line, trying to “win” his agreement.

Likewise this “winning” agreement is what Ellen means in the line she repeats all the time: Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.

Luckily for me, Ellen gets the idea that I’m Chris’s base and since it’s wrong to poach on somebody else’s base, she gives up struggling with me. Struggle is hard on Ellen anyway, because basically she’s got zilch in the theory department.

But see, this could look like I’m making fun of Ellen, which I’m not. In her own way Ellen was a wonderful little communist, running out there with her papers, smiling at every goddamn GM worker in Fremont and telling them to “Unite and Fight the Bosses!” Of course, they only buy the paper because she’s wearing a miniskirt and smiling and if any workers bother to read it they find out instantly what self-important bullshit PL is, but that’s not Ellen’s fault.

Basically it’s hard to imagine a worse torture than selling PL’s illiterate rag. “Challenge! The communist paper! Only a dime for a paper that tells the truth about working people!” What a lie that was. It’s embarrassing even now to admit that I actually sold it myself.

“Why did you?” my sociology prof asked when I got back to New York and copped a free dinner off him. My friends put it a little cruder: “Anything to get some left-wing pussy, eh, Frank?”

None of them would have accepted that I’d done it out of belief. Not after I’d spent the evening exercising my wit at the expense of PL. I answered “Boredom” to my prof; and “Damn straight” to my friends.

You won’t believe this, but I was tempted to point out the male chauvinism in the pussy comments. I really was. How could I, though? Basically, they were true. I only sold the fucking Challenges to get past Ellen’s defenses, so what was I supposed to deny? It was already ludicrous enough that I was doing all that garbage and not getting any pussy.

Male chauvinism was one of t...

Table of contents

• You Say You Want a Revolution?
• We Danced Everywhere
• A Revolutionary Journey
• My Sister, Lynn
• I Was More BaptistThan John the Baptist
• My SDS Activist Years in New Orleans
• “On Strike! Shut It Down!”
• A New World Opens
• Toward Revolutionary Art
• The Stakes Were Higher Than We Knew
• I Might Have to Kill Vietnamese People
• PL and Me
• PL, the Struggle at Columbia,and the Road to Irrelevance
• The East Was Red
• The (Broken) Promise of the Worker-Student Alliance: Building a Base in Iowa
• Movement Learning: The Good,the Bad, and the Ugly
• A Life on the Left
• The Spread of Maoism: A Story
• “Princeton’ll Straighten You Out!”
• Growing Up in the ’60s:From Introvert to Organizer
• PL Reconsidered
• Global Boston
• The Harvard Strike of ’69and What Happened Next
• A Texas Republican’s Pathto SDS-WSA and PL
• Acknowledgments
• Resources