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. SDS Button Logo The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States founded in 1959. ... The Progressive Labor Party (originally the Progressive Labor Movement, sometimes still referred to simply as PL) is a communist political party based in the United States. ... The term working class is used to denote a social class. ... Manual labor is a term used for physical work done with the hands, especially in an unskilled manual job such as fruit and vegetable picking, road building, or any other field where the work may be considered hard or arduous, which has as its objective the production of goods. ...

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 New Left is a term used in political discourse to refer to radical left-wing movements from the 1960s onwards. ... // Nationalism is an ideology that holds that (ethnically or culturally defined) nations are the fundamental units for human social life, and makes certain cultural and political claims based upon that belief; in particular, the claim that the nation is the only legitimate basis for the state, and that each nation... The tertiary sector of industry, also called the service sector or the service industry, is one of the three main industrial categories of a developed economy, the others being the secondary industry (manufacturing and primary goods production such as agriculture), and primary industry (extraction such as mining and fishing). ... Class consciousness is a category of Marxist theory, referring to the self-awareness of a social class, its capacity to act in its own rational interests, or measuring the extent to which an individual is conscious of the historical tasks their class (or class allegiance) sets for them. ... Rhetoric from Greek ρήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is the art or technique of persuasion, usually through the use of language. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ...

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. SDS Button Logo The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a student activist movement in the United States founded in 1959. ... The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) was the section of Students for a Democratic Society that opposed the Worker Student Alliance of the Progressive Labor Party. ... Weather Underground redirects here. ...