Having been deeply critical of Katha Pollitt recently, I have to agree with just about everything she said about Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and the totally self-indulgent, self-centered, violent thrill seeking and megalomania the Weather Underground was.
I was going to leave the impromptu series I've been engaged in looking at the disaster that the anarchist, Marxist, Trot, generally atheist "left" has been for the real left, but I wanted to bring it more up to date. Since "the left" such as I'm talking about has pretty much been on hiatus for the past forty-six or so years, that's what I'll end it with for now.
The destruction of the old Socialist Party, even as it was having some, though limited, success in politics in 1919 has figured heavily in this series. The temptation is to type out some long description of that disaster, massively complex and convoluted as things with the play-left always are. I think the frequently petty, personality based fracturing and forming of "parties" on that left is a sobering warning against the dangers of "third party" politics, if the Italian and Israeli governments aren't enough of a discouragement of those fantasies. If there were a successful third party on the left, it would probably contain the same idiots who could be counted on to ruin all the good work in a bid for power or just attention over some minor point of theory. Though I think these days it's unlikely to be be on the orders of someone like Lenin as it was back then.
But, as it happens, there is a model that repeated some of the worst features of that disaster of almost a century ago in the more recent past. The destruction of the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, wasn't quite as much of a political disaster, the actual political success of SDS being very little, none, actually, as compared to what the Socialists accomplished in the early decades of the last century, but it was as much of a disaster for the anti-war and, certainly, the civil rights movements. The results coming from it were pretty much a total disaster for the real left. The same people who comprised the Weather Underground were some of the most repulsively self-indulgent, attention seeking tools of the military-industrial-banking complex who have ever pushed real leftists out of the camera shot. As Katha Pollitt pointed out in her column linked to above, they're still at it. I recall reading about Ayers and Dohrn holding court among college students, most of whom probably know absolutely nothing about their claim to infamy other than what they read in his book. I think a more objective and accurate reading of it is necessary as the real left has to understand that danger to avoid repeating such things over and over again.
Here, from The Long Detour by James Weinstein, in the aptly titled chapter called Fronts, Decay Amnesia and A New Left :
Events of the early 1960s ate away young people's innocence. One early SDS community organizer, for example, observing that blacks were segregated against in the North despite their attainment of formal rights, commented that "civil rights gets the Negro in the South no more than a Harlem". And in 1961, when the Kennedy administration denied its responsibility for the CIA planned and directed invasion of Cuba, people's faith in John F. Kennedy's professions of support for national independence and self-determination was undermined. In the mid-'60s the war against Vietnamese independence swept away their belief in American virtue and brought many in the New Left to imagine themselves as revolutionaries. Facing an array of opponents that included not only the corporate media and the Republican and Democratic parties, but even the leaders of the trade union movement, students fighting against the war came face-to-face with the entire American establishment. This created a unique consciousness, for not only did this make the New Left the first "revolutionary" movement in modern times to exclude the working class -- and even to be hostile to "hard hats" -- but it also made it appear (to the few that thought about such things) that their only allies were in the ghettos of the North and in the Third World. Fundamental social change, many began to think, would come about only as a result of action outside the United States, and in urban ghettos.
Of course, having no theory of class (and being mostly middle class) they could think of themselves as revolutionaries only so long as they faced the entire establishment. So, in 1968, when popular pressure against the war grew strong enough to allow some Democrats openly to oppose the war, it created a crisis for the New Left. Jerry Rubin's nightmare now became real. even if the war would not end, liberals would now become the popular leaders of the anti-war movement. Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy was the first to challenge President Lyndon Johnson. He almost won the New Hampshire primary, which led Senator Robert F. Kennedy to enter the anti-war ranks. These events resulted in a rush of anti-war forces back into the Democratic Party and foretold the end of New Left illusions of popular revolution.
It also led to chaos in the remnants. Since 1966, the Progressive Labor Party - a Maoist offshoot of the American Communist Party 0 had been trying to gain a foothold in SDS. In 1966 and 1967, when the new working class theorists were in the leadership of SDS, PL had tried to gain recruits based on its theory that the "old" working class (industrial workers) was the "key" revolutionary agent. That had little appeal. Indeed, it simply led to a debate with the new working-class theorists about which working class was the key to left success - as if there were two working classes. In any case, neither working-class theory had much of a following among the more active students. But when McCarthy and Kennedy entered the anti-war fray, they undermined SDS's revolutionary bona fides. PL and its Maoism (and identification with China and the Third World) suddenly posed a real threat to the leadership in the SDS national office. Now PLers' open espousal of communism and its waving of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book suddenly began to attract radical students who sought more than an end to the war. This, in turn, led the remaining SDS leaders to revolutionary one-up-manship in the hope of heading off PL.
One attempt to outmaneuver PL was put forward by Mike Klonsky, SDS national secretary in 1968-1969, Klonsky merged PL's working-class theory and an identification with "revolutionary youth." This had the virtue of moving to coopt Progressive labor while retaining youth as a key revolutionary force. It meant, Klonsky argued, that SDS "struggles must be integrated into the struggles of working people." This formulation was similar enough to PL's own Worker-Student Alliance to appeal to many of the same students, but different enough to appeal also to many youth-culture adherents. In itself, Klonsky's approach probably would not have sufficed to head off PL. But just in time PL lent a helping hand in its own demise by condemning black nationalists as reactionary and by specifically condemning black student groups and the Black Panther Party.
[ I will interject that in the years involved, I am confident that 99.999% of working class people had never heard of any of these groups, would certainly never have agreed to them representing their interests, and would have thought their theories and plans for them in their dialectical board game were incredibly stupid, condescending, arrogant, patronizing and irrelevant to their lives and their own ideas and choices. Something that can safely be said about just about everything elite "leftists" have ever said about the "working class". None of their activities did anything to end the United States war in Vietnam, they almost certainly prolonged it by discrediting the anti-war movement and helping to elect Richard Nixon, whose cynical appeal to working class people's resentment of the condescension and insults of the elite "left" was one of his major means of gaining power.]
Meanwhile, the National Office Collective was developing an alternative proposal that stressed anti-imperialism and identification with the Black Panthers. This group, which came to be known as the Weathermen, was led by the SDS internationalization secretary, Bernardine Dohrn. She had developed close relations with the Black Panthers in Chicago where Panther leader Fred Hampton (later murdered in cold blood by the Chicago police) worked closely with SDS. In March 1969, at the SDS national council meeting, the Black Panthers were officially recognized as "the vanguard force" in the black liberation movement. The identification of revolutionary white youth - seen as the key force among white Americans - with the Panthers and revolutionary nationalists in Cuba, Vietnam, and other Third World countries temporarily sufficed to distinguish the national office collective from PL. It gained membership support as the best means of ridding SDS of the threat of a PL takeover.
[ You have to appreciate that at the time we're talking about Progressive Labor was not even one of the "big" tiny communist parties around then. If SDS was in serious danger of a takeover from a tiny, splinter "party" such as PL, its talk about leading the "working class" or anything else was childish fantasy. As you can see from this account, ALL of its focus was on its own internal fights over the tiny little pieces of turf and "power" resources that were all important for them. Like all of the post 1919 radical groups led by relatively affluent white people, it was never about actual political change. ]
Still, at SDS's last convention, in June 1969, PL came with the largest bloc of delegates. As I described the situation in "Ambiguous Legacy, the Left in American Politics," the national office collective delegation, desperate at the prospect of losing control, called on the Panthers for help and they responded by appearing at the convention to denounce PL. For a few moments, it appeared that PL was finished. But then the Panther spokesman started talking about "pussy power." He explained that the women's role was to deny sex to men who were not sufficiently revolutionary and then defended the notion in the face of an overwhelmingly shocked response - and PL- led the cheers to "fight male chauvinism." In the face of this uproar, the Panthers found it necessary to retreat, but they soon returned with a pronouncement from Bobby Seale stating badly that any movement that included the Panthers had no room for PL. This gave Klonsky and the Weathermen a pretext for walking out of the convention and reassembling in an adjoining hall. There they proceeded as if they had expelled PL from SDS.
All of this tactical maneuvering was justified by "theoretical" arguments [which, being college students they'd learned to value over reality and real things in real life. Saying "theory" means never having to do anything real.] though the last thing that any of the factions wanted was a serious open discussion of any question. Mystification and the ritual language were the order of the day, as the split between Weatherman "theory" and its actions soon demonstrated. Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, a Columbia University student militant, proclaimed that the blacks were the vanguard of the revolution, as they allegedly had been of radical social forces throughout American history, and that white workers and the white middle class were racist and corrupted by "white skin privilege." This excused the Weathermen from organizing among whites, not only because it was a waste of time (which it certainly would have been.) but also because doing so would have been "objectively" racist. In the light of this contempt for the great mass of working Americans, the order of the day, Rudd concluded in a pathetically revealing slogan, was the martyrdom of "two, three, many John Browns."
(I [James Weinstein] attended this convention, as I had a few others, as a friend of SDS and a partisan of the anti-PL groups. As I sat at the Weathermen meeting a story about Louis Boudin -exactly fifty years earlier - kept going through my mind. As David Shannon recounted it in The Socialist Party of America, Boudin, a left-winger and an eminent legal scholar, had attended the Socialist Party's 1919 emergency convention at the Machinists' Hall in Chicago. When the majority refused to seat the left-wing delegates, Boudin walked out with them and reassembled downstairs to form the Communist Labor Party. A few hours later, after an argument with John Reed, he walked out again, explaining, when asked by reporters why he had done so, that he had "not quit a band or crooks to join a band of lunatics." That was irony enough, but more came later. Boudin was the great-uncle of Kathy Boudin, one of the two women who ran naked from the Greenwich Village townhouse bombing, and who was later a member of an underground revolutionary group that robbed a Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York, and murdered three guards. As of this writing, she is still serving a twenty-year sentence for participating in that action.)
Only four weeks after the June convention, the Weathermen's theory was tested in action when the Black panther Party held a meeting of its own in Oakland, California, and called for a "United Front Against Fascism." Reminiscent of the Communists' shift to the politics of the popular Front against fascism in 1935, the Panther's effort was called to mobilize support for the party in the face of FBI and local police efforts to disrupt and destroy it. The Panthers called for a traditional civil libertarian effort. They asked for legal aid and financial support and for community control of the police. And they suggested other measures designed to stop of slow down the lethally illegal attacks coming from the FBI and other government agencies. [ What did I say the other day about the difference actually having a real stake in something makes. ]
Not surprisingly - given the help that the Panthers had given SDS in ridding it of PL, and in light of statements by Weathermen leaders that the Panthers were the revolutionary vanguard - the Panthers expected SDS to support its initiative. But since the Panthers had failed to live up to the revolutionary image assigned to them by Dohrn, the Weathermen refused to support their erstwhile partners in such a liberal endeavor. It was not the first time in relation to the left that blacks had been put forward as the leading force until they took some initiative of their own (something like this had also happened in 1942 when A. Philip Randolph led a march for civil rights that was attacked by the Communists as weakening the war effort). In any case the Weathermen were now on their own and they proceeded to act out Mark Rudd's cry for martyrdom.
The failure of the New Left to study history or reflect on the failures of its predecessors, doomed the student radicals to a farcical recapitulation of earlier tragedies. Less than a year later, a bomb factory in the basement of a townhouse on fashionable West Eleventh Street in Manhattan blew up and the building collapsed. At least three Weathermen were killed, and, as noted above, two women escaped and ran naked into a nearby building, from which they then disappeared. The weathermen then continued in their adolescent fantasy for a few more years. As former Weatherleader Bill Ayers boasted in his recent memoir, Fugitive Days, they even exploded a pipe bomb at the Pentagon. But the only thing they succeeded in destroying was the hope of a democratic left in the United States. In its place, in the absence of a left based on universal principles, many little lefts for which the New Left had acted as a catalyst survived and went their own ways. Of these, the women's movement and the gay and lesbian movements were the most significant. Many of these single-issue groups won important victories in the following years. Still, the hope of a left based on universal principles that had raised its head in the early sixties was dead and buried.
I disagree with Weinstein's attribution of the women's and LGBT movements as coming out of the new left. The women's movement predates it and so did parts of the early LGBT struggle. I think the Civil Rights Movement, extending far earlier than the 1960s, is the real inspiration for those movements. For my part, I was never that impressed with the "new left" thinking large parts of the "old left" were more likely to do something and I wasn't nearly as impressed with it as I was the civil rights movement of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other such groups which pushed through the most significant legislation of the left in the 1960s as even the old left of the type Weinstein wrote about so authoritatively were entirely impotent and their presence frequently counter-productive and the new left, ultimately destructive of the left.
The new left was, if anything, as useful to the Republicans and other corporate oligarchs in destroying the Democratic coalition that passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, passed Johnson's Great Society and other legislation. The Nixon administration expanded the war in Vietnam into Cambodia, multiplying the huge number of dead, maimed, damaged people in those countries and began to install a Supreme Court which is, even today, continuing a wrecking campaign against The Great Society, The New Deal and even Progressive era and 19th century reforms. The most significant legacy of the "new left" the Marxist left, and the atheist left, in general, has been the part it played in splitting the left, alienating the natural allies who could win elections and change laws and overturn the Republican radicals on federal and state courts who are as cynical and materialistic as the atheist left, but who have power.
It should be the least part of our ambition to stop repeating the mistakes made in the past century. Part of that is admitting that the tiny fraction for whom hatred of religion is and will always be their primary focus, whose materialism will inevitably undermine, hollow out and defeat the goals of liberalism in the traditional, American meaning of that word. Materialism is inevitably destructive of the very foundation of those. As their first-cousins, the Republican materialists are proving, egalitarian democracy and self-government itself are endangered by materialism.
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