You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in Building a Worker-Student Alliance

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 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 achieve 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.

“This is ... a jewel of a collection of US revolutionaries’ memoirs that captures and recreates the period like no other. Each story is unique and mesmerizing, as well as being heartbreaking and funny, which taken as a whole clarifies the overall failure of revolutionary goals while suggesting what is to be done. This is truly political literature at its best, rarely seen in the United States.” — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 and An Indigenous People’s History of the United States

“An important component of 1960s radical history, thoughtfully recounted by the activists who lived it.” — Max Elbaum, author ofRevolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che

“In this collection of SDS memoirs, the Progressive Labor Party, an essential player of sixties history too often stepped over, is critically put back into the center of things. If there is lasting inspiration to be had here, it is the expansive humanity of those who were part of PL and its associated groups, brought to life in these candid, insightful, and thoughtful recollections.” — Aaron J. Leonard, author of Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists

“These activists offer personal accounts of major moments in the New Left movement that peaked in the 1960s. Their memories of specific events, disputes, and personalities offer invaluable insights and guidance in understanding the emotional and intellectual vigor of that time.” — Dan Georgakas, co-author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying

“The East was red and the wind was rising, or so it seemed in the 1960s to young radicals drawn to SDS’s Worker-Student Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party, who look back here on their radical lives. They are men and women who defied a travel ban to visit Cuba where they debated Che and played ping pong with Fidel; Baptist Sunday school teachers who started reading Lenin and Marx; men who, on party orders, joined the US Army to “raise a ruckus” from within; who led successful student strikes, and generally put their passions into changing the world. All tell of how they fell in—and later mostly out of—love with PL’s dogmatic brand of communism. John F. Levin and Earl Silbar’s collection of often soul-searching memoirs is a much-needed addition to the history of an era.” — Tom Robbins covered crime and politics in New York for more than thirty years as a reporter and columnist for the New York Daily News andVillage Voice