About Students for a Democratic Society:

New School SDS is a cross-divisional student-run leftist group, open to any member of the University community. We are a chapter of National SDS, which is a national youth activist network.

We have between 10-20 members currently, and we are constantly growing.

We were started in the fall of 2006 A.D., as the legend goes, by several freshmen at the New School, who wanted a hand in bringing real change to their society.

We work to break the chains of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, discrimination of all sorts, and anything we see as getting in the way of our brand of radical change. We see our world as a globe; with each place affecting its neighbor and each person beholden to the great powers of the earth: the State and the Corporate Body.

We fight for the radical transformation of our communities, and society as a whole. We believe it is necessary to develop a critical analysis of the world in which we live, present viable alternatives to oppressive institutions, and to build a movement for the attainment of human liberation. We specifically see a lack of a national
non-sectarian activist network, one which is oriented toward students -- a particularly activist-prone demographic.

We are not just an anti-war group, although the war figures greatly into our vision of the world. We see the war in Iraq as a symptom of a corrupt State War Machine based on achieving maximum profit, regardless of its bloody cost (or the body count).

As Carl Oglesby once said, "We do not say that these men are evil. We say, rather, that good men can be divided from their compassion by the institutional system that inherits us all. Generation in and out, we are put to use. People become instruments. Generals do not hear the screams of the bombed; sugar executives do not see the misery of the cane cutters: for to do so is to be that much less the general, that much less the executive."

Let's stare our situation coldly in the face. We refuse to be a single issue group which looses its relevance after the end of the immediate issue. Instead, our concept of the world we desire is based upon fixing the myriad problems which face its peoples, issues, places, entities, and all of their intersections and interrelations. There is no one glaring evil to point our fingers at, only symptoms of the cancer which is devouring our society from the inside. It is this destruction, this needless consumption and violence, that we pledge ourselves to fight against, until we are either victorious or we are silenced. The people have the power, and we must either exercise this power for positive change, or we will suffocate under the burden of helplessness.