From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
Worker Student Alliance
(WSA) in the
United States
was the section of
Students for a Democratic Society
led by the
Progressive Labor Party
. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the
working class
, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on and off the campuses. In practice, that usually meant students enrolled in school would get jobs as cafeteria hands and other
manual labor
jobs at those schools.
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Organizational history
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The WSA explicitly rejected the rest of the
New Left
's insistence that it would be various combinations of 'progressive'
nationalism
and popular rebellion that would jump-start the revolution; rather, the WSA said the catalyst would be organized workers in various
industries
and the
service sector
, and that students could best help spread and deepen workers'
class consciousness
by really being among the workers themselves, rather than just using their class designation in
rhetoric
to appear more
Marxist
.
The WSA faction took about 900 of the approximately 1400 representatives in the split at the 1969
SDS
convention in Chicago. The other 500, who had been the
Revolutionary Youth Movement
, left to form
a myriad of other groups
. SDS chapters around the country then split along these same lines, or disbanded entirely.
Both the RYM and the WSA kept the SDS name, but the
Weatherman organization
continued to hold the SDS National Office and all the SDS membership lists; thus it was able to assume effective "command" of the name and public face of SDS despite its inferior size. Nearly immediately post-conference, Weatherman led their "Days of Rage" Chicago riots of 1969 and other sporadic acts of violence ? all under the SDS name ? until 1970, when
Mark Rudd
and a few other Weathermen decided to close the SDS National Office and drop the SDS name. PL, however, continued to keep its SDS for several more years. Since all active SDS chapters after 1970 were SDS-WSA, the "WSA" initials were dropped.
In 1974 PL's SDS voted to dissolve itself and join the
Committee Against Racism
which PL had helped to form at a conference at
New York University
in November 1973. The CAR eventually expanded to several other countries and added "International" to its name to become InCAR, but InCAR was in many respects another "mass organization" led and directed by the PLP, with separate publications and staff, but always with a goal of winning InCAR members to support PLP. By 1996, this strategy was too much to maintain, and PLP elected to pursue pure and open communist activity again, using only its own party as an organizational structure.
References
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