A Participant's History of the Students for a Democratic Society with Gil Schaeffer
Cosmopod · Cosmonaut Magazine
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Show Notes
Luke joins Gil Shaeffer, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of "You Can't Use Weatherman to Show Which Way the Wind Blew" to talk about the SDS, the New Left, and the centrality of democratic republicanism to Marxism. Gil discusses his path to joining SDS in the late 1960s, the impact of figures like C Wright Mills, the little-remembered March on Fort Dix, and the meaning of "participatory democracy." He explains how SDS and the New Left are presented in popular histories (including the work of Kirkpatrick Sale), and the motivation behind writing his history of the period. Gil ends by discussing the present moment and the ongoing struggle for a democratic revolution.