Kasama: What are political questions you see posing themselves around SDS, both during the recent convention and into the future? Freddy: I think some of the fault-lines are going to be questions over revolution itself. A lot of SDS'ers define themselves as radicals or revolutionaries and people know what that means - social transformation, etc. But no one knows how that's going to look like and there are a lot of political fault-lines around that. People are arguing everything from armed revolution to peaceful movement or some sort of a cultural revolution - so those things are out there. There are also going to be political divisions on questions of the class struggle in the United States. A lot of the people in SDS are in the IWW for example. It's an organization that I like, but I don't do work with it because I fundamentally don't think the work it's doing will solve the questions in our country, or worldwide. At the convention, on Friday, there was an interactive workshop on class. There was actually a lot of political stuff that went down there. There was a lot of challenging people upon what "class" meant, the question of "intersectionality" became part of it or in other workshops from what I know. The question of "coordinator class" and Parecon by Michael Albert came up, which is a different sort of view. And there's a lot of challenging based on ideology: like Marxist class analysis vs. identity politics vs. Parecon and just things like that. Those sort of questions are going to come up. Basically a lot of the political basis for discussion are going to be a lot of the fault-lines that are currently on the left. SDS is currently a grouping of young people that are influenced broadly by left-wing politics and are very eclectic but don't have a real center. Kasama: How do you think such political controversies will mature and resolve? Freddy: I came out of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade [RCYB, the RCP's youth organization] and our view of organizing anything amongst youth was like: You put out the politics and they gravitate towards it. Or you go out to a high school and you sell the paper or something like that, organize a showing of something. I don't think that fundamentally that's how SDS is going to work. I don't think it's good for organizing students. SDS is an organization that is going to immanently come through its consciousness, like the leap of consciousness from the second convention to the third convention, or the first convention even. The first convention was dominated was dominated by young crusty-punks. The second convention was much different but yet you still had sort of like, "Well we don't want a student organization on the level of a national office." The structure that we even got was like "We're going to stop everything before it happens," you know. "We're going to stop the PLP before it comes." That way of thinking. The third convention was just this huge turnaround where people were like "All the shit we said last year was just fucked up. It's not how things fundamentally work." People started realizing that, and I think that's the way politics is going to evolve in SDS for a while. These political debates come forth: These debates about how we're going to organize, what view or vision we're going to put forward, etc., and people are going to address them as they come forward. There's a place for putting something forward about Nepal for example. [editor: where there is a Maoist revolution struggling to seize power.] But if you fundamentally take that character away from immanently going through the stages of consciousness amongst youth, then you're not actually going to create revolutionary consciousness amongst them. Kasama: How would you situate SDS in the context of the left? Freddy: Well, what is "the left"? The left is such a diffuse, weak strain of things. No one really relates to "the left" on the level of work besides projects like Iraq Moratorium or various environmental projects or whatever happens on a local level. There are all these other student organizations like CAN [Campus Antiwar Network] for example. All these other student organizations, or youth organizations are pretty much (I don't want to be bad about this) are led politically from centers. Like CAN is from the political center of ISO [International Socialist Organization]. SDS is interesting in the sense that you had a call from a couple of high schoolers in 2006 and you had an explosion of movement without any centrally defined character to it. The people who put out that call were people from World Can't Wait. It showed at a fundamental level young people wanting to define their own organization; young radicals wanting to find their own organization. But I think that's been fundamentally lacking in the left for a long, long time. You always have a center-defined group and you give character to its youth wing which is not a bad thing because you're always going to have young people who agree with a particular party organization. But the fact that there is no level of accessibility and discussions among young radicals themselves is fundamentally going to lead to the same sort of dichotomy and diffusion among the left itself, where you just have stupid splits like between the Troops Out Now Coalition and A.N.S.W.E.R. where they don't meet together ever and they plan things out differently and it fucks up the anti-war movement. So I think SDS's relationship is one that's basically critical of the left altogether about organizing the youth. It's basically saying "Listen, we don't need partisanship on that level. We need partisanship on the level of doing work in unity, on issues of the war, on issues of the environment, on issues of worker organizing." Struggling to build multi-racial organization Kasama: This SDS convention, like the previous ones, debated important issues around racism, white supremacy and what it means to develop multi-racial organization. Can you tell us about that? Freddy: There's been a lot of struggle in the People of Color Caucus because what's a "person of color"? That's a fundamental question in the People of Color Caucus and I'm probably not the best person to talk about that since I'm not in the Caucus. However I think it's popping up because it's really hard to define especially with bi-racial people. "Am I a person of color?" "What is national oppression?" "Does a white Puerto Rican person face national oppression in the United States" - that's a question that's always brought up. There's been points when people who are Armenian joined the People of Color Caucus because Turkey carried out genocide against them. I don't think people have a fundamental answer yet. I think there are broadening questions around it. Kasama: The original SDS was overwhelmingly white, because during the 1960s and later, there was a great deal of organization along separate lines, because of the influence of Black nationalist politics and groups like SNCC and the Panthers. Freddy: Yeah, and you had third world Marxists. I think that kind of focus is going to define a lot of the character of student organizations altogether. If you look at student groups now, you have a lot of Asian American student groups that are quite good in their politics. I'll just name a few like NAASCon [National Asian American Students Convention]. For example. I have some differences with their worldview but a lot of people gravitate towards that because they address a lot of concerns of Asian Americans students and are really doing good work. Here at Hunter College we have a similar grouping called CRAASH (Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter.) I don't think SDS wants to have this relationship of competition with political student organizations of people of color. We also don't want to tail those groupings because sometimes they can put out really fucked up shit. Sometimes. It's a question of SDS wanting to build a multi-racial student organization. It doesn't want to be just a white-bound student organization and there was a lot of discussion about that at the convention itself because people kept referring to SDS as a white organization, fundamentally ignoring all the people of color in this group that are here right now. So I think that's always going to fundamentally shape the character of any student organization just because there are plenty of groups around. But I think if you put forward a certain politics to people that are good, and by that I mean ones that express support for national liberation struggles, etc., I think we could get more support from people of color but I'm not sure about that exactly. Kasama: What is the breakdown of nationalities within SDS now? Freddy: I think there were only a few Black students at the whole convention. There were a lot more Latinos and Asians. There's people of bi-raciality. I would like to say I'm one of them because I'm part Latino, part Italian -- but I'm obviously white. I think a lot of people are like that in SDS. I think that's the character of colleges altogether -- more people of color are coming into colleges. I think this important because college can be in itself a radically transforming experience for oppressed peoples, and can turn them into organic radicals. SDS, though, has still a national character that is bound to white culture and activist culture and I think it limits us to a certain extent. Debate Over the Elections Kasama: What were the campaigns the convention agreed upon? Freddy: There were two different ideas proposed that had to deal with some level of work around the election coming up. Those two were: (1) one hundred days of pressure on Obama and social priorities, and (2) the other one was Protest McCain. Basically these were two directions of trying to relate somehow to young people who are going to be disenfranchised with Obama. However among SDS there is a certain level of people not knowing how to do that. Everyone agrees: Obama's an imperialist. He's not really anti-war. He's just going to re-assert it in Afghanistan. A lot of people know this but they don't know how to define what sort of relationship they're going to have to the presidential race. They don't want to have a character of typical bad ultra-leftism where "Elections are fucked up and we're going to do our own thing and you're just being fooled." But I'm obviously not going to be involved in the campaign itself. Those proposals both failed. It just showed the level of political disunity around the question and not knowing how to address the question altogether. Kasama: So was it political or tactical disunity? You said they agreed that Obama was imperialist. Freddy: There's a certain amount of tactical disunity, and there's politics involved here. The people with the "hundred days, social priorities" thing I felt were too soft on the Obama thing. It was so vague and open it gave the chapter the potential to do anything, which basically meant maybe they'll go and support Obama, like who knew what that campaign proposal actually meant? The Protest McCain one was really about "We'll be on the streets protesting McCain's imperialism and then we'll show the contradictions to the Obama supporters with their candidate." But then people thought that was too soft on Obama too. So there was really no way of resolving it. People didn't understand how to solve it and there were certain politics that were dividing line that said "what kind of relationship can we have with bourgeois electoral politics" so they don't know. Kasama: A proposal about accessible education did pass. What exactly is that? What did that proposal call for? Freddy: Quite honestly it's student syndicalist. I disagree with it. However, there's a certain level of truth to it. At Hunter College, for example, tuition issues are always going to arise and it's something you should always step up and fight against. These issues of student debt in private schools are big issues, people are emerging out of college paying almost twenty years of student debt, which is ridiculous. However I just fundamentally don't see how that's going to work out in the end because the student debt question, student tuition question is so big and frustrating because of the complexities of public school vs. private school, and private schooling just being a sprawling matter of arbitrariness of whatever school you're at, so I fundamentally don't see how it's going to work on a national level. But people want to do something about it. And it's just going to happen on a local level I guess. People want the whole campaign proposal itself to be just giving a mandate allowing SDS'ers to work on it at a local level. Basically, on the electoral thing: Neither side got a mandate to do whatever they want to on the local level in the name of national SDS, whereas the student accessible education one did get that mandate from the national student body. It's like "Yes, this is an issue facing students and we have to do something about it nationally." * * * * * Kasama: Is there anything you want to say that I didn't ask? Freddy: Yes: Why should revolutionary communists join SDS? Kasama: Well, why should they? Freddy: I think you have here a mass organization that has rapidly taken on a radical consciousness nationally. I think you have here an organization and a form to address a larger, younger organization with revolutionary communist politics and change people's views towards that aim. As I said before, a lot of people in SDS, the majority probably, define themselves as revolutionaries they just don't know what that means or how that's going to look, and that sort of vision's lacking in SDS. it's like we all agree: social transformation, anti-oppression, collective liberation, whatever they want to say it is - but they don't know what that is effectively going to look like and how we're going to do it. So we need that political leadership in SDS. * * * * * This interview originally appeared on the website of the Kasama Project (http://kasamaproject.org)