The inevitable happened: on Saturday, March 21, the national headquarters of the West German SDS (Socialistischer Deutscher Studentbund German socialist students union) gave a statement to the press, which eagerly lapped it up, and informed in that way the the numerous SDS chapters in Germany of the dissolution of the SDS. This act was high-handed and bureaucratically arrogant and led to widespread protests inside the different SDS chapters. It nevertheless only established finally and officially a fact which had already been reality for over a year: for at least 15 months a nationally-organised SDS had not existed any longer in West Germany.
This revolutionary student organisation, which after the split with the German Social Democratic Party started with some 500 members, grew until spring 1968 to several thousand members, and was undoubtedly in the European forefront of ideological analysis on the university field and in theoretical Marxist studies. It started with its "long march through the institutions"-as Rudi Dutschke called it— on transitional demands at university level, and culminated in spring 1968, after the attempt on Rudi Dutschke's life, in a mass movement of several tens of thousands of students and young workers in the streets all over West Germany.
Until this point, the SDS had been able to draw into the movement more and more activists; it had also been able to stay on a semispontaneist basis. After the upsurge of Easter 1968, the influence of the revolutionary May events in France which followed closely, the German economic recession and first signs of unrest among workers which resulted from it, this basis was no longer sufficient for revolutionary activists, and the SDS started to progressively disintegrate into tendencies: it started on a process of "groupusculation". The SDS leaders of 1967-68 who had been so proud of keeping this movement togethermostly through avoiding all political and especially international questions which could divide it-while in other countries the groupuscules were at their peak, and who were totally unprepared for this process, started to withdraw from direct intervention, leaving the field wide open to the rising Maoist forces within the SDS to assemble more and more young comrades on a neo-Stalinist line as a Tw. reaction to the former spontaneist one. Since these older and experienced comrades and cadres either refused to determine their standpoint on a high level, or started to discuss it when it was too late, these Maoist tendencies grew rapidly on a very primitive level, taking over what was left of the organisational framework, especially in the former strongholds of the SDS, Berlin and Frankfurt.
This then led to the disintegration of the SDS on a national scale and to the final official dissolution of the organisation as such.
The bourgeois press, however, which sees in the statement of the SDS national office the withering away of the revolutionary left in general in West Germany is very much mistaken The revolutionary movement in West Germany is still there and very much alive. Certainly, for the time being, several so-called "Communist Parties", all Maoist influenced, are gaining through this process. Certainly, had the former leaders of the SDS understood that, after experiences in mass struggles in the streets and first contacts with workers in unrest, a purely student organisation was insufficient for revolutionary activists-if they had understood this and turned towards the constitution of a revolutionary organisation, a broad "united front" student movement because that's what the SDS was in the past two years-would have had its place beside such a revolutionary organisation. Since this was either not understood, or understood too late, the present situation had to come about, but it will certainly not last. The movement in West Germany has too high a level to tolerate such disintegration and the strengthening of primitive Maoist groups for a longer period. The discussion with Mao-Stalinist revisionism will be carried out with the same strength as the dispute which took place and is finished amongst the revolutionary left with KruschevStalinist revisionism One can already observe the first signs of the serious wish of revolutionary Marxist forces to assemble themselves anew. After the experiences they have been through in the last five years, the best of these forces will assemble themselves in the university and outside to build the nucleus of the future revolutionary party.
Gisela Mandel