Socialist Alliance, the junior branch of the Socialist Workers Party; the proCuban, pro-Viet Cong May 2 1ovement; and the violently anti-American Youth Against War and Fascism. By late 1966, some SDS leaders spoke of their "non-exclusionary policy"-their willingness to form a popular front with everyone from liberals to Maoists to achieve radical changes. SDS's openness and new revolutionary mood attracted an increasing number of other middle-class youths: young Bohemians, or hippies, who loathed bourgeois life; apocalyptic religious idealists; anarchists who despised authority, largescale organizations, and power in any form; and the psychologically Jppressed, those who felt that they were being "brainwashed" by the ubiquitous influence of television, advertising, the capitalist press, and government propaganda. To develop a mass base for the revolution was a harder problem. But the Berkeley upheaval of 1964 led a few SDS actives to think that such a base could be found in America among college and high school students and young alumni and drop-outs, especially since 35 per cent of American youth now go on to higher education of some sort. The traditional Marxian revolutionary proletariat could be replaced by a new middle-class army of exploited "workers." (Of note is that several studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of revolutionary guerilla leaders, in Latin America
and elsewhere, are of middle-class or upper-class origins.) The indispensable document for the new SDS position is Carl Davidson's remarkable 18-page The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class ( 1967), which sells for 15 cents at SDS literature tables. Davidson, a national secretary of SDS, an ex-philosophy major at Penn State, and an admirer of Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, C. Wright Mills, and Andre Gorz, argues that students are "the new working class" who can and will usher in a new age. (What the new age will be like, concretely, is something that Davidson, like nearly all other campus radicals does not bother to say. The New Left "movement" is a movement away from present forms, not a movement toward any better order that has been conceived. "We must be life-affirming," says Davidson, which is about as close as he comes to specifying positive new goals.) In The Multiversity, which is written like a term paper, complete with a contents page and 42 footnotes, Davidson contends that modern universities are little more than the training and research branches of the capitalistimperialist system. They are "knowledge factories" that absorb young people and prepare them for obedience and bureaucratic tasks through objective, value - free, technique - oriented courses. The senior professors spend most of their time as well-paid ~'eearchers for the "innovation industry,"
SDS political rally at the Sundial on College Walk in April 1966. David Gilbert '66, then chairman of Columbia's SDS chapter, holds aloft a sign. The group drifted from dissent to resistance to rewlutian in the last two years.
an "aspect of corporate capitalism," ::>r for the government leaders Or the military. What little teaching, intellectual discussion, and joint inquiry there is left in the insti tutions is done by fledgling instructors and teaching assistants. Proof of the fact that U.S. universities have shifted their purpose from helping young people become independent, creative, sensitive intellectuals to turning out cogs in the system is manifold: liberal education is collapsing everywhere; professors hate to teach and prefer to "produce"; the undergraduate college is more and more considered to be "the intellectual slum of the campus"; and, "throughout the educational apparatus, the bureaucratic mentality prevails." "What is the reality of American education?" asks Davidson. "Contrary to our commitment to individualism, we find that the day-to-day practice of our schools is authoritarian, conformist, and almost entirely status-oriented." For college students, present-day higher education produces boredom, a feeling of alienation, and a sense of irrelevance. They feel powerless, manipulated. Students are like the exploited factory-hands of the 19th century sweatshops. "The core of the university, with its frills removed," says Davidson, "has become the crucible for the production, formation, and socialization of the new working class." The choices open to students are conformity, dropping out, or rebellion. According to Davidson, more and more students are choosing rebellion. "What we are witnessing and participating in is an important historical phenomenon: the revolt of the trainees of the new working class against the alienated and oppressive conditions of production and consumption within COl'pOl'ate capitalism." In another place Davidson asserts, echoing Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting our universities-the spectre of a radical and militant nationally co-ordinated movement for studen t power." In order to "liberate" the modern university, however, an overthrow of the entire U.S. government and economy is necessary. "'We should always remember that we cannot liberate the university without radically changing the rest of society." Therefore, says Davidson, "Every attempt should be made 5