Hard Times for S.D.S.

After the radical Students for a Democratic Society split into angry factions at the organization's convention last June, the question was whether any of them could mount an effective "fall offensive." The answer is no. By last week, S.D.S. had fallen on extremely hard times. Items:

> At Fordham University, 400 students turned out for a mass rally called by the Committee to Abolish S.D.S. Angered by the violent tactics that S.D.S. had used to protest ROTC at Fordham, the students called on the university's president, Father Michael Walsh, to bar the organization from the campus.

> At Harvard, militant black students briefly cooperated with S.D.S. raiders in occupying the office of Dean Ernest May to protest the university's allegedly racist employment practices. The black-white alliance broke down when the white radicals insisted on holding May captive. Arguing that such a move would serve no useful purpose, the black students ushered the dean through the S.D.S. ranks and out of the building.

> Also in Cambridge, police arrested 15 young men and nine women said to be members of the supermilitant Weatherman faction of S.D.S. Raids on three apartments netted a small arsenal: one shotgun, three rifles and nearly 1,000 rounds of ammunition. All 24 were charged with conspiracy to commit murder by firing two shots through the front window of the Cambridge police station earlier this month.

> In Washington, a Moratorium leader Stephen Cohen, accused Weatherman leaders of trying to "shake down" his committee by demanding $20,000 in return for pledging nonviolence during the peace demonstrations. "We politely told them to get lost," said Cohen. The Weathermen say that they asked for help in paying the massive legal fees that have piled up in Chicago, where more than 200 of their members are coming to trial for rioting last month. But they deny that it was a shakedown, claiming that Moratorium leaders issued the story to discredit them. When the violence did come in Washington, the Weathermen were in the thick of it (see THE NATION).

Ways and Means. S.D.S. is broken into so many factions on most campuses that its energies are being dissipated by internal haggling. Although distinctions between the S.D.S. factions are blurry, there are three principal wings: the Worker-Student Alliance, the Revolutionary Youth Movement 1 (Weatherman) and the Revolutionary Youth Movement 2. All are committed to the notion of a more or less violent revolution in America, but they differ over ways and means.

Taking a Marxist-Leninist line borrowed from the Progressive Labor Party, the Worker-Student Alliance insists that students subordinate themselves to workers as the vanguard of the revolution. Though W.S.A. thinks that Negro laborers will ultimately lead the movement, it hedges on the primacy of black workers at the start. As a result, the other factions label W.S.A. racist. In turn, W.S.A. criticizes the rest of S.D.S. for looking down on workers and existing labor organizations.

The Weathermen,* led by former Columbia Student Mark Rudd, take a more mystical and violent approach. Larry David Nachman, a radical political theorist at City University of New York, calls them "Marxist-Romantics." The Ruddites insist that the true revolutionary vanguard will emerge from underprivileged youth. To that end, the Weathermen desperately try to act tough in ways that supposedly appeal to the machismo of street kids. The Weathermen actually believed that their "Days of Rage" in Chicago last month would touch off such a contagion of disorder that the "pig power structure" would tremble, if not collapse.

White-Skin Privileges. R.Y.M. 2 is an indefinable refuge for S.D.S. regulars fleeing the crazed R.Y.M. 1. A grab bag of left-liberals and radicals who abhor the Weathermen, R.Y.M. 2 believes that young people should act as the "revolutionary consciousness" of the working class. R.Y.M. 2 stresses the racism of white workers and asks them to renounce "white-skin privileges" in deference to their revolutionary black brothers. R.Y.M. 2 emphatically shares the Black Panther view that adventures like last month's Weatherman rampage are suicidal and "Custeristic."

Then there are growing divisions within divisions. The W.S.A.-controlled chapter at San Francisco State stridently denounced the Moratorium as "a phony," thus isolating itself from a popular campus cause. The W.S.A. chapter at Harvard grudgingly supported the Moratorium but quickly found another popular student cause to oppose: the recent demonstrations against the Instrumentation Laboratory at M.I.T., which they felt would take jobs away from workers.

By their own estimate, the Weathermen number only 1,000 members--more than the W.S.A. and probably R.Y.M. 2--and they control at least half of the S.D.S. campus chapters. Despite their problems, which they claim include growing harassment by police, the Weathermen clearly intend to carry on their maniacal drive for revolution. That prospect threatens to give protest a bad name generally and betray the majority of students who yearn for effective and peaceful reform of U.S. social problems.

* The name is taken from a line in Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues: "You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows."

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