Janet Weiss
Template:TOCnestleft Janet Weiss
Stanford SDS
The expulsion of a small group of Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) members from an Students for a Democratic Society meeting circa early February 1970 ago marked the surfacing at Stanford University of antagonistic factions within the student radical movement.
Since that time ousted WSA members have formed a “new” SDS chapter. The last meeting of the “old” Stanford SDS was held off campus to insure that WSA members could not attend.
Internal strife within the national organization culminated at last June’s SDS National Convention, when a unified Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction walked out claiming that it had expelled the Progressive Labor Party (PLP or PL) and the WSA caucus from the SDS. Further splitting occurred after the walk-out. The unified RYM faction broke down into two groups, Weatherman and RYM 11. Another group, composed largely of WSA members, established itself as the National SDS and set up headquarters in Boston.
Locally, the Stanford SDS, though officially independent of any national organization, voted this summer to exclude PL-WSA members from their ranks. At the time though there were no WSA members at Stanford.
In a letter published to the Daily earlier this month Students for a Democratic Society members Janet Weiss, Mark Weiss, John Keilch, and Bob Hagen explained the reasoning behind the WSA expulsion.
“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. ...”
“Locally, they are bad-mouthing the April Third Movement, opposing an anti-imperialist line in the anti-ROTC movement, and refusing to participate in the New Moratorium. 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.”
“We felt that an elitist atmosphere had developed at SDS meetings which prevented new people from contributing,” Hagan wrote.
Concerning the SDS charge that WSA and PLP had denounced the Ho Chi Minh and Black Panther leadership, a WSA member stated “This was a distortion, but not a lie.”
The PL-WSA stand on the Panthers, Ho Chi Minh, and the National Liberation Front is based on PLP’s position that “all nationalism is reactionary.” This position was a major factor in the polarizing radical camps which resulted in the walk-out at the SDS National Convention.
Ivo Banac, a WSA member at Stanford and a candidate member of PL, explained the PL stand on nationalism. “We look on nationalism as a class outlook of the bourgeoisie. All aspects of bourgeoisie ideas are reactionary. Nationalist struggles have been turned around to serve capitalist interests. The revolutionary struggle can only be led by workers.” [1].
Venceremos
Katherine Barclay, Bradford Dowden, Geraldine Foote, Michael Fox, H. Bruce Franklin, Jane Franklin, Andrea Holman, Michael Holman, Chris Katzenbach, Don Lee, Aaron Manganiello, Merle Rabine, Theresa Ramirez, Ted Smith, Janet Weiss, Sharon Winslow, Jeffrey Youdelman were all members of Venceremos at Stanford University in 1971.[2]