Yeah, didn't Lenin say something to the effect that adventurist armed struggle and social democracy are two sides of the same coin...

It's unfortunate that a new generation of student activists may be influenced by Rudd's revisionist history of the 1960s student movement and his erasure of the student movement since then.

It's frustrating when people who play such an important leadership role at one point in history (in Rudd's case, the Columbia U takeovers in 1968 that made SDS a household name in the U.S.), who then became ultraleft in the 1970s and advocated armed struggle irrespective of conditions (Weather) can become so politically off later on and throw the baby (revolutionary politics) out with the bathwater (their erroneous strategic line). Rudd is warning young people against militancy at precisely the historical moment when militancy and escalation of the antiwar movement is most called for.

Because of Rudd's fame at a key historical moment, he is now being quoted about the resurgent student movement and he gets to put out his counterproductive analysis. Todd Gitlin has made a career out of being the critic of the left who has left "credentials" (from 40 years ago...). Bobby Seale has done something similar with the Black Panthers history, running the rap that the Panthers were basically just a group working for electoral and community reforms and hadn't really even read Marx or the Red Book but just sold that stuff to dopey white students. In the case of the Panthers it's most unfortunate that Huey Newton degenerated and then passed away, leaving Seale to rewrite Panther history, writing the revolutionary socialist politics that were at its core out of it entirely.

For Rudd to say there has been no student movement since the 1960s is just ridiculous. Rudd is either being dishonest or he is losing his memory, since if I remember correctly he personally debated with leaders of the student movement from the Progressive Student Network in the 1980s in a series of letters to the (now defunct) Guardian newspaper about the appropriateness of advanced tactics in the context of the direct action in 1988 to blockade the Pentagon in protest of U.S. military intervention in Central America. So for him to say there has been no student movement since the 60s, and then to criticize the radicalization of the 1960s student movement as a warning to today's students to not 'make the same mistakes', is unfortunate to say the least.

For a better history of the 1960s from an SDS participant I recommend the beginning section of Max Elbaum's book 'Revolution in the Air', which takes on this whole "good 60s/bad 60s" historiography which argues that everything was peachy in the early 60s but then the movement supposedly went off track when anti-imperialism and Marxism gained widespread influence in the movement in the late 60s. Elbaum demolishes that version of history in a thorough way that upholds the revolutionary turn of the later 1960s.