Worker Student Alliance
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The Worker Student Alliance (WSA) in the United States was the section of Students for a Democratic Society led by the Progressive Labor Party. The WSA argued that the best way to build a movement in the working class, like SDS wanted, was for students to become involved in workers' struggles both on and off the campuses. In practice, that usually meant students enrolled in school would get jobs as cafeteria hands and other manual labor jobs at those schools.
The WSA explicitly rejected the rest of the New Left's insistence that it would be various combinations of 'progressive' nationalism and popular rebellion that would jump-start the revolution; rather, the WSA said the catalyst would be organized workers in various industries and the service sector, and that students could best help spread and deepen workers' class consciousness by really being among the workers themselves, rather than just using their class designation in rhetoric to appear more Marxist.
The WSA faction took about 900 of the approximately 1400 people in the split at the 1969 SDS convention in Chicago. The other 500, who had been the Revolutionary Youth Movement, left to form a myriad of other groups. The WSA briefly tried to keep the SDS name, but this proved impossible as the Weathermen usurped it. In the early 1970s the WSA was officially dissolved and its participants continued in other PLP projects.
