Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest
by Steven Kelman
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 1970, 287 pp. pb

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For a long time this was one of the few books if not the only book about SDS available. In this sense, today, one feels a sense of gratitude to have this book. It was by a Harvard undergraduate of the class of 1970 who was there when Harvard students voted to shutdown the university. Unfortunately, author Kelman is another perfect proof that the anti-communist social-democrat is the profound enemy of progress. The main debate in April, 1969 was not whether to shut it down but how long. "With six thousand voting, the stadium meeting came within thirteen votes of calling for an indefinite strike." (p. 267) Kelman was active pushing the student government to push for no strike at all, but he failed. Kelman freely admits that the Maoists of SDS and the Black Panthers took the vast majority of support among students. Yet, he opposed them and still called himself a socialist, while thanking Vietnam war supporter Michael Harrington and getting kudos from Seymour Martin Lipset. In 1966, SDS sponsored a talk by an English man teaching at Peking University on the Cultural Revolution. Without knowing anything about the talk, Kelman resisted it in advance: "'How can SDS sponsor a speaker supporting the purge in China?'"(p. 67) It did not occur to Kelman that the Cultural Revolution was actually the first experience of tens of millions of people with "free speech" in a society ruled for hundreds of years by a monarchy. When other students told him about the big character posters appearing in China, Kelman went right on with his dogmatic and reflexive social-democracy. Within a few years, and while still at Harvard before graduating in 1970, here is what it was like for Kelman: "What is psychologically very difficult to cope with is that our friends are potential executioners and commissars, or PR men for the executioners and commissars."(p. 106) At the time, the u$A was bombing millions of Vietnamese to death, and that is what oh-so-moral-and-democratic Kelman had to say--that the protestors were like executioners. What seemed like five Progressive Labor (PL) people changed very quickly: "My worst nightmares about the future of SDS, dreamable only in vague and horrifying outlines during my freshman year, have become reality now. Had I predicted them then, I would have even thought myself insane. It's not so much that Harvard SDS has been taken over by Progressive Labor as I feared then-- although it has been, the entire Harvard sixty-man delegation to the 1969 SDS convention pandemonium and side show having consisted of PL people. But even worse, the ideology of the non-PL people, who came to be known as the chapter split into opposing factions as the 'New Left caucus,' has itself been transformed into something just as bad."(p. 108) When social-democrat Kelman is having such nightmares, it's a good sign for the revolutionary movement. Kelman goes on, "the ideological wars between the two factions within SDS are conducted via quotations from the Little Red Book, each side claiming to be the truer Maoists."(p. 109)