A number of individuals within the SDS network have recently come out against the idea of building a national organizational structure. As we understand it, they have posed the choice facing SDS as essentially being one between building vibrant, autonomous campus chapters or a strong national organization. We believe this is a false choice. Not only is it possible to build both, but individual chapters can only benefit from being part of a strong national network if the strength of a national organization stems from the power of its base.

Given the dismal and often brutal legacy of left-wing political organizations in the 20th century, it is fitting that many people within SDS would be wary of building a national organization. But the nation-state we live in is home to the best-organized and most brutal ruling class in the world. If we’re serious about social change, the question is not whether we build an organization but how to build a different kind of organization, one that embodies the idea of participatory democracy and where power goes from the base (chapters) up rather than from the top down. Are we going to contest power with one hand tied behind our backs, coordinating only intermittently and on an ad-hoc basis or build the kind of infrastructure necessary to articulate an alternative on the national level? Another world is possible, but the route to it is collective action—and without sustainable organization, effective collective action is impossible.

The rulers of the world would love for us to remain ineffective and confined to small radical or activist “scenes”. But one of the many important tasks of SDS should be to help break the student wing of the movement out of this impasse. This entails not railing at other groups for not being radical enough or being what we consider more authoritarian but building bases and coalitions, providing a vision of how to move forward and using concrete, effective tactics that put this vision into practice.
What we have encountered on our campuses is not a sense of apathy, but of disillusionment. People care about the world they live in and once again believe that a better world is possible, but they also feel powerless to change it. By effective organizing, we can show people their own power. Each campus and location is different and organizing must accordingly take a different form at each in order to be relevant and effective, however many policies such as the Iraq war or the corporatization of the university are national in scope and an effective opposition to them must be articulated on this level.

While many national organizations have historically been too centralized, which we should be on guard against, representative institutions and centralization are not inherently negative. An accurate sense of the state of the campuses and the possibilities for organizing can only come from actual attempts to organize on various campuses across the country, not any abstract analysis. Centralizing and disseminating this information will help allow all chapters to grow by more equitably distributing our shared experiences. Instead of chapters being thought of as the local units of a national organization, the national and regional organization should be conceived of as a tool to help develop chapters effectively. Their role should be to facilitate the sharing of experiences and skills, make sure no chapter is isolated, and articulate a strategy and analysis on the national level—both coming out of and being put into practice by the local chapters.

Building a national organization would also allow us to make leadership accountable and develop the leadership capacities of all members. In any group, there are differences in political education, articulateness, confidence, available time, experience, etc. In an unstructured national network such as SDS, this means the emergence of an ad-hoc, effective leadership of those who talk to the press and coordinate among chapters—a process perhaps best described by 2nd-wave feminist Jo Freeman in her essay on the “Tyranny of Structurelessness”. Refusing to build a national organization doesn’t mean that hierarchy and divisions will somehow be abolished; it means that there is no institutionalized way to choose, develop and make accountable the leaders who do emerge—thus far, mostly white males.

Democracy in Practice
If we return to the Greek, “democracy” literally means something like “rule of the people”. But in popular discourse, “democracy” has been defined in terms of a procedure: competitive, fair elections. Thus we get “representative democracy”, a phenomenon that is neither genuinely representative nor democratic. We believe that Students for a Democratic Society should stand for an alternate, participatory conception of democracy. This is an understanding of democracy as a practice, not a procedure: people democratically making the decisions and structures that affect their lives.
Such a vision will be difficult to implement in a large, complex society. However, we think it betrays a distinct lack of confidence in this vision of participatory democracy to forsake building a national structure for SDS. If we can’t build an organization that genuinely embodies participatory democracy among a network of thousands of people committed to the idea, how can we seriously propose participatory democracy as a workable model for even a small city or neighborhood? We believe that one of the tasks of SDS is to explore a different way of organizing society, and provide an example of a new world within the shell of the old. Any constitution adopted should be viewed only as an outline within which such an experiment in bottom-up democracy can occur. Its true nature will appear in its interpretation in practice.

Endorsers:
Matt Wasserman, Reed College SDS
Adam Sanchez, Lewis & Clark College SDS
Brian Kelly, Pace University SDS
Pat Korte, New School SDS
Joshua Russell, San Francisco SDS
Robin Blanc, Reed College SDS
Daniel Tasripin, Hunter College SDS
William Woodson, Reed College SDS
Aric Miller, Detroit SDS
Patrick Dunn, University of Chicago SDS
John Cronan Jr., Pace University SDS
David Bradley, University of Texas SDS
Paul Buhle, Brown University MDS
Marcus Duskin, San Francisco MDS
Andrew Whitaker, Ole Miss SDS
Meaghan Linick, Pace University SDS

To endorse this statement send your information to adam@lclark.edu.