The Worker Student Alliance (WSA) in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

was the section of

Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships ...

led by the Progressive Labor Party. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the

working class The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colo ...

, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on and off the campuses. In practice, that usually meant students enrolled in school would get jobs as cafeteria hands and other

manual labor Manual labour (in Commonwealth English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by machines and working animals. It is most literally work done with the hands (the word ''manual ...

jobs at those schools.

Organizational history

The WSA explicitly rejected the rest of the New Left's insistence that it would be various combinations of 'progressive'

nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...

and popular rebellion that would jump-start the revolution; rather, the WSA said the catalyst would be organized workers in various industries and the service sector, and that students could best help spread and deepen workers'

class consciousness In Marxism, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that a person holds regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their class interests. According to Karl Marx, it is an awareness that is key to ...

by really being among the workers themselves, rather than just using their class designation in rhetoric to appear more Marxist. The WSA faction took about 900 of the approximately 1400 representatives in the split at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago. The other 500, who had been the

Revolutionary Youth Movement In the United States, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) is the section of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Most of the national leadership of SDS joined th ...

, left to form a myriad of other groups. SDS chapters around the country then split along these same lines, or disbanded entirely. Both the RYM and the WSA kept the SDS name, but the Weatherman organization continued to hold the SDS National Office and all the SDS membership lists; thus it was able to assume effective "command" of the name and public face of SDS despite its inferior size. Nearly immediately post-conference, Weatherman led their "Days of Rage" Chicago riots of 1969 and other sporadic acts of violence — all under the SDS name — until 1970, when

Mark Rudd Mark William Rudd (born June 2, 1947) is an American political organizer, mathematics instructor, anti-war activist and counterculture icon who got involved with the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Rudd became a member of the Columbia Unive ...

and a few other Weathermen decided to close the SDS National Office and drop the SDS name. PL, however, continued to keep its SDS for several more years. Since all active SDS chapters after 1970 were SDS-WSA, the "WSA" initials were dropped. In 1974 PL's SDS voted to dissolve itself and join the Committee Against Racism which PL had helped to form at a conference at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

in November 1973. The CAR eventually expanded to several other countries and added "International" to its name to become InCAR, but InCAR was in many respects another "mass organization" led and directed by the PLP, with separate publications and staff, but always with a goal of winning InCAR members to support PLP. By 1996, this strategy was too much to maintain, and PLP elected to pursue pure and open communist activity again, using only its own party as an organizational structure.

Footnotes

Student political organizations Movements for civil rights Progressive Labor Party (United States) {{poli-org-stub