Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

A Letter In Reply


Published: The Stanford Daily, Volume 157, Issue 6, 9 February 1970. 
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Editor, THE DAILY:

Progressive Labor Party (PL) and Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) are now trying the same scab tactics at Stanford that they’ve been using nationally for some time. Their latest antic is an attempted rip-off of the SDS name, and an effort to set up a rival “SDS” chapter along PL’s counter-revolutionary lines. We want to make clear that this group does not represent SDS or have any right whatsoever to the name SDS. PL-WSA was kicked out of SDS not only nationally, but twice by the Stanford chapter: unanimously last summer, and with only members of PL-WSA and 1 or 2 others opposed in January. The reason for the expulsion is that PL-WSA is objectively counter-revolutionary. They viciously slander the Black Panther Party; call Ho Chi Minh a “puppet” and a “traitor,” and a part of “the Hanoi-Washington-Moscow axis”; and refuse to support North Vietnam, the NLF, or the PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government, the only legitimate government in South Vietnam). This is while claiming to follow Mao Tse-tung, who says “In wars of national liberation patriotism (nationalism) is applied internationalism.” In the Bay Area, PL-WSA turned on the San Francisco State strike they had helped to build and denounced it; they sabotaged the militant anti-GE recruiter demonstration at San Jose State by holding a counter-demonstration; at the Pittsburgh-Des Moines steel strike instead of taking part in the mass demonstration desired by strikers, they called their own demonstration at another time; and striking workers threw them off the GE picket line in San Jose for trying to distribute anti-union propaganda. Locally, they are bad-mouthing the April Third Movement (which practically none of them happened to be around for), opposing an anti-imperialist line in the anti-ROTC movement, and refusing to participate in the New Moratorium, even scheduling their meetings to conflict with Moratorium meetings. When Stanford SDS expelled them, they refused to leave the meeting and hung around for two hours trying to provoke a fight, by their noisy disruption preventing any work from being done at that meeting. This is not a revolutionary, anti-imperialist or even left group, and Stanford SDS utterly repudiates it.

Janet M. Weiss
John Keilch
Mark Weiss
Bob Hagen