Wow. You really do like marxist terminology.
It is fairly useful when talking about class relationships, let me expound for you.
Personally I'm mostly interested in the vibes in SDS which supported "fuck the army" or that became radical amerika and the associated attempt to embed into industry.
I am interested in these two groups because their reaction to the situation in the United States was based, much more like Nixon's reaction, on the total balance of class forces. These two groups didn't exclude the blue collar industrial working class or the low skilled white collar working class from their conception. They thought about and tried to deal with fellow workers as fellow workers. They didn't lecture of hector. They didn't tell fellow workers what was "right," like preachers or ministers. Instead they learnt with other workers by doing things with them.
In related societies, like Italy, a similar situation called "operaismo" or "autonomia" happened. This movement incorporated a fairly large unskilled working class base and created something of a new fruitful revolutionary alliance.
However in both cases a double enclosure, in the Marxist sense, had occurred. Much of the university trained sds were freshly proletarianised highly skilled white collars, children of petite bourgeois or haute bourgeois professionals. These skill segments were newly proletarianised, ie reduced to "wage labour" from stipendiary professional positions. The other half were newly elevated white collar workers, children of skilled or semi skilled white collar workers, where society had newly defined an AB or BA as an essential part of being paid at the full skill level.
People who weren't workers were forced by economic circumstances to become workers. And a new group of workers were created. People who previously controlled what they did in life were now bossed. Workers who were previously bossed in one way at lower pay, were now bossed in a different way at higher pay. These moments are interesting because they create new situations for reactions. They're also very difficult for new groups of workers as the "old" systems of demanding and getting what they want usually don't work.
The first group, newly bossed, used to be paid for work but their pay was so high that they weren't being paid for working. They were being paid to control processes of bossing. This leads to a group identity based on their social role that involves hectoring or preaching. It also creates the idea that the biggest bosses and government will listen to the content of what they say. Does this remind you of SDS's strategy in relation to social change?
The second group were children of people paid for their work and bossed. However, the University system in the US had expanded after the second world war. More engineers were needed to beat the Russians into the air and space and chemicals. More historians were needed to write CIA background material on Russian controlled countries. More nurses and teachers were needed so that assembly line workers would be healthy enough to do their job and educated enough to do their job. These workers viewed themselves as entitled to a better life, their country needed them and was willing to pay for them. They saw themselves as essential, as better than others, as worth more than others. Again this leads towards a politics of hectoring.
At University they suffered from the withholding of their labour being readily substitutable by semi-skilled labour or quality reductions in commodities that enhanced labour power indirectly (health, education, social work.) correspondingly the repressive functions of these jobs could be substituted by Chicago policing or the national guard. Compare to Hungary or Czechoslovakia where the threat of radical engineers was an immediate threat to profit and state stability, and where students were waged for their labour power exertion.
If US university students went on strike or dropped out or stopped studying the US as an economy could replace them. Instead of better health and education, the US could tolerate the existing levels of health and education. Instead of more sociologists they could hire more non-degree qualified police to control unskilled workers.
This was not the case in other societies, such as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, which both had revolutionary moments with a large student base. In these soviet-style societies students were irreplaceable because of a lack of engineers, and because the soviet-style economies paid students to study and bossed them at this "work."
In the workforce they suffered from their own gross incompetences to organise where they were at as workers. (Old red and pink workers embedded for life, especially women, accounted for health and education worker organising into the mid 1970s).
They were bad trade unionists. In the areas of most concern and most employment, health and education, workers who entered the workforce in the late 1940s to mid 1960s were the core of union and cooperative working class organising.
When they "went to industry" except for the industrial Maoists and libertarian communists they suffered from incompetent appeals to liberal ideology rather than concrete experience. And the practical reds were as incompetent as ordinary blue collar organisers. A union is for life, not term break.
Some SDS students had a fantasy from Maoism or Trotskyism or social progressivism that they should work as unskilled workers. Most of these students thought that they could be the "new bosses" of a working class movement in the factories. They came with ideas and expected others to do what they said. This never works well.
Some SDS students had real knowledge of factory organising from Maoism or syndicalist type anarchisms or some Trotskyisms. This is where you join a working class community for life, learn how things are, and work with fellow workers to make them better. These ex-students were no better at organising than the non-University educated workers in the communities they joined or other communities. They were as good as the average working class unionist or organiser.
Correspondingly with the split between conscientious officer and Specialist/SNCO objectors, and the German bases go slows or Vietnam field mutinies and fraggings.
A similar thing happened in the US military. There was a movement of University or other tertiary educated officers, technical experts and senior non-commissioned officers. They objected to US policy. Some of them were courts-martialled. Others quietly individually sabotaged things.
A similar thing happened with soldiers sailors and airmen of other ranks. Their disagreement with army policy was not influenced by the ideas of university educated people lecturing them.
Class war incomprehensible to liberals, and a desire to "bring the war home," as if the "Vietcong" offered liberation from an imagined senior head teacher or matron. In these circumstances "urban focismo madness" made sense to romantic idealist liberals who thought themselves red.
SDS fundamentally mis-understood the working class in the United States, which they were a highly privileged part of. Nixon had a better comprehension of how to organise blue collar workers than they. The SDS's mis-understanding was grounded in their belief that if they said the right things and told other people to do the right things that right things would happen because they were good and well educated people. This is not how social change in the United States happened.
Some of the SDS's broad fantasies included the Vietcong as a jesus-like figure who would save them from the moral corruption and their fantasy of their boss in the United States. This was a fundamental misunderstanding of the DRVN / PRG / NFL / VWP / Vietnamese revolution.
As a result of viewing US policy change as a result of changing ideas in the elite by saying the right things and telling workers how to do things, some of the SDS got trapped in pretty bad thinking. The elite wouldn't listen to nice arguments. Workers wouldn't obey university trained young people. How to create social change when elites create change, but won't listen? How to create social change when the working class in general won't act as a moral pressure group for you? They saw "foquismo" or "foco," as an alternative. This, to the Weather Underground, meant bombing unattended government buildings and blowing themselves up. The idea was that this would pressure the government into change and change working class attitudes. It was fundamentally a bad idea.
It would take a Labourist protective apparatus like TUC/Labour/CPGB or ACTU/ALP/CPA to protect SDS from their own madness. Labourism in the US is a change beyond my imagination.
Two societies where the "new left" in the SDS sense, not in the EP Thompson sense, did create lasting change were the United Kingdom and Australia. These societies had strong conservative labour movements with large organisations for working class self-protection, and "pet" communist parties that were tolerated because of the high quality of their industrial organising. If the SDS existed in this situation then more interesting things than a few small "operaismo" groups, and a few small self-exploding groups of bombers might have happened. As noted above, Italy was an example where new kinds of left organising led to a changed social situation. Italy had a very large Socialist and Communist Party with traditions of shop floor militance. However, similarly to the Australian or British example, the "new left" in Italy started with the Hungarian revolution of 1956 amongst communist and communist aligned workers. These new lefts always had a safety rope which held them to the working class movement in general.
The United States lacked these characteristics.
yours,
Sam R.