People Power

Review: “Giving More Power to the People” by Daniel Tasripin, Hunter SDS

What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library
Roz Payne Archives / Newsreel (AK Press)

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service: 1967-1980
David Hilliard (Atria)

When SDS relaunched, I must admit that the initial reaction I felt (as did a number of people of color comrades from the circles I travel in), was one of skepticism. For myself and many others, the organizations that launched us into our trajectory were not those that were descended from SDS, or for that matter the mostly white anti-war movement. We were instead, more interested in the organizations of the 1960’s that had formed the original Rainbow Coalition: the Black Panther Party mostly, but also the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement, the Chican@ Brown Berets, the Chinese and Asian-American organizations like the Red Guards and I Wor Kuen.

That skepticism was, in retrospect, born out of a frustration many from my generation of “movement” people of color. Perusing the predominant historians of the Sixties – the “Boomerologists” as I call them – there’s a clear narrative: there’s the “Good Sixties”, when the terms of the Civil Rights and anti-war struggle were defined by attempts to compromise rather than settle the underlying questions decisively; then there’s the “Bad Sixties” in which first the black youth of the Civil Rights movement stopped being conciliatory, and then the white youth of the anti-war movement started to wonder whether the Vietnam War was worth winning in the first place.

Autonomy

Book Review: Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life by Daniel Meltzer, DC SDS

Delving into movement theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism as well as providing a case study in autonomous politics in post-industrial Europe, Georgy Katsiaficas has written an important book for emerging movements in the 21st century. Katsiaficas excoriates Marxist Leninist models, criticises the New Left for self-marginalizing into covert guerilla action, and embraces the autonomous movements of Western Europe from the late 70s to today. He doesn’t shy from pointing out the movement’s weaknesses, eccentricities and outright alienating factors, but finds their models of resistance to be promising breakthroughs in resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and the state.Marxist-Leninists are portrayed as stodgy and prudish across Europe. Discouraging the working class from self-organization, they consistently made themselves arbiters between classes or between movements and the state. When pressed for opinions on emerging squatting movements in Italy, they declared “[real] workers don’t break the law.” Their stale “revolution” was dowdy and full of antiquated modernist thinking, preaching uniformity and the “new” ideas of a century before. Katsiaficas blames the death of the New Left era in countries like the United States in part on the ill-fitting adoption of modernist Leninist forms in the post-modern era. In contrast, continuing revolutionary movements in West Germany after the New Left era could be attributed to East Germany, which “provided ample daily evidence of the bankruptcy” (215) of Soviet bureaucracy.