Yes, that thread and another, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1209454/posts, I posted the research from Leonard Magruder of the VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM, about the signers of the“People’s Peace Treaty.”
His piece showed the auxiliary connections of the SDS, DSA, Not in Our Name, ANSWER and all. This is another piece too that shows the auxiliaries.
Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society was the most influential socialist youth group in American history. It began life as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a student group affiliated with the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). In January of 1960, SLID changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), so as to have a broader appeal among students. The group started small, in 1960 it only had nine chapters on various campuses.
At a 1962 convention in Port Huron, Michigan, SDS delegates worked on a draft originally written by Tom Hayden which would become the Port Huron Statement. Michael Harrington from LID, SDS's parent organization, attended the convention and fought with the SDS members over the statement, especially what he considered its softness on being anti-communist, as well as SDS allowing an observer associated with the Communist Party youth organization to be present at the convention. When the convention was over, the fight between SDS and LID continued, with LID even locking the doors of SDS's New York office, but SDS and LID managed to patch things up. Some consider this convention as the break between the Old Left and the New Left. The Port Huron Statement found an audience on much of the student left such as with the National Student Association.
In September 1963, SDS began the Economic Research and Action Program (ERAP), where college students would go into poor areas and organize. One of the program's first successes was organizing in Chester, Pennsylvania near Swarthmore College. Eventually hundreds of college students would move into the ghettoes and organize.
On October 4, 1965, SDS was growing, becoming more radical, and more involved in anti-war work as the Vietnam War escalated.
In February of 1966 members of the May 2nd Movement (M2M), which the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) exercised great control over, disbanded M2M, and many of the M2M members joined SDS, in an attempt to recruit SDS members into the PLP. SDS began feeling the influence of the M2M members (PLP) almost immediately.
SDS had began shunning formal structure in 1965, which carried into the 1966 SDS convention in Clear Lake, Iowa. Steering committees and formal hierarchy was shunned, and consensus and "prairie power" was emphasized. Boston SDS'er John Maher made a proposal at the convention which indirectly targeted the Progressive Labor (PL) SDS'ers - A February/March 1967 article in Progressive Labor by Jeff Gordon suggested a worker-student alliance.
On April 23, 1968, 19 days after the assassination Martin Luther King, Jr., a student strike began at Columbia University, many of the leaders of which were "action faction" SDSers. This would be followed by student strikes on other universities in the coming days, months and years throughout the country (and throughout the world - students went on strike in France a month later, almost bringing the French government down when the strike spread to become a general strike among workers).
At the SDS convention in June 1968 at Michigan State in East Lansing, Michigan, the PL-affiliated SDS'ers began to try to openly dominate SDS. Following democratic centralism, in a manner some said was even stricter than CPUSA democratic centralism, they were a united front in SDS. They were also well-organized, and their Marxist theory was well-worked out as opposed to "vaguer" ideas and theories presented by non-PLers. The anti-PL "new working class" SDSers caucused at the convention.
After the convention, the SDS PL'ers began pushing the Worker-Student Alliance (WSA) idea more. The PL'ers were not much involved in what became militant protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois which many SDS'ers participated in. In a December 1968 SDS National Council meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, PL-WSA succeeds in passing its Marxian resolution on racism (which said that racism is a byproduct of the class war). Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement by an anti-PL faction which would become called Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) passed as well.
From June 18-22 of 1969, SDS held its ninth annual convention at the Chicago Coliseum, mostly because it was unable to find a meeting place on any Mid-western college campus. At this convention, fighting between the PL-WSA faction and the anti-PL faction (collected together as the Revolutionary Youth Movement) came to a head. On June 21, Saturday night, hundreds of RYMers marched out of the coliseum, permanently splitting with PL-WSA. This more or less was the end of SDS - the two largest, but still relatively small factions, PL-WSA and RYM continued to exist as the rest of SDS, much of whom were marginally attached students, disintegrated.
The Revolutionary Youth Movement, which had always been a loose group united in their oppositon to PL-WSA, split up into the two groups it had been more or less composed of - RYM I, which would become the Weathermen, and RYM II, which included members of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union and other groups. In a month or two, the rift between RYM I and RYM II became permanent, after which RYM II itself began breaking up into different groups. They went on to form the Democratic Socialists of America, provisionally named "The Alliance".
"Organization" was too limiting a term for The Alliance because it seeks to become much more than a conventional action organization or coalition. Rather, it seeks to become a decentralized and highly democratic yet well-organized network of progressive individuals and organizations seriously dedicated to cooperating with each other in a variety of ways to wrest power away from large corporations and to put it in the hads of ordinary people. The Alliance's ultimate goal is to become, or to become part of, an international democratic citizens' movement.
So, in essence, the National Alliance is the Al Qaeda of the progressive movement.
Thanks. I remember that thread--that was a good one :-) As I'm rereading it I see some things now in a new light. That connection you stumbled onto between the World Peace Council, the British Peace Council October-November 1969 protests, and the October-November 1969 VMC protests is very interesting.
Anyway, getting back to the current thread, I was following you on the connections between LID/SLID, SDS, DSA, NON, ANSWER, etc. Where I was getting lost was the connection from that to the National Alliance and the National Socialist Party. I see now where you're getting the "Alliance" part from, but it looks to me like the Alliance you mention in this post in relation to RYM and DSA was a different group than the National Alliance you were linking to in Post 23.