I was assigned to review this book. How many people really want to go over the
history of the Weather Underground? No
one? Well, I’m going to do it
anyway. After all, I’ve been assigned.
Ron Jacobs says he was a political activist who ‘floated’
through various left organizations during the period in question. His word, not
mine. He found “Weather’s” positions on
racism, imperialism and sexism ‘influential.’ Jacobs calls the organization “Weather” in
this book, which seems a bit much, so I’ll just use “WU.”
Full disclosure.
During part of this period I was in SDS and the Worker/Student Alliance,
Committee Against Racism, and the Progressive Labor Party (“PL”). I later quit them to join the anti-ultra-left
OCIC or “Trend” in the mid to late 70s, and then moved through several
Trotskyist organizations like the Global Class War Tendency and Socialist
Action, entered into the Communist Party, and then the Labor Party of the late 90s. Now I am an independent Marxist, and have
absorbed all that.
First off Jacobs attacks PL, as every good RYM member should
– even though he was never in RYM. PL
was the main pro-Maoist organization in the U.S., and had split from the
Communist Party in the 50s. “RYM” stood
for the people in SDS who wanted to start a “Revolutionary Youth Movement,” which
is sort of a new left formulation. This
is what the RYM factions held up in 1969 at the SDS convention against the old
‘working class crap’ that PL was pushing.
Bernadine Dohrn made a hysterical speech expelling PL and the WSA from
SDS at that convention – but not by a vote.
They took their minority of 500 delegates (out of 2000 attendees) and just
left. (Does this smack of another
Russian minority we might know about?) Unspoken
by Jacobs, SDS/WSA continued in Minnesota
and nationally until about 1974 under the leadership of PL. RYM actually destroyed SDS as a large united
front organization because they could not abide by a vote.
Pretty funny that totalitarian attitudes were used by
nuevo-Stalinists against old-line Stalinists. But not really funny.
Eventually, as Jacobs shows, Klonsky and others in RYM II broke
with the counter-culture politics of WU, and eventually so did the WU. The split in the WU in 1976 that virtually
ended that organization was also over being pro-labor or not. You see, white people are in unions. Only a group in the Bay Area continued to
insist that white workers were the enemy, and the New York WU were accused of
selling out. The odd thing is that as the book goes on, some of the positions
of the early PL – anti-drug, pro-working class, anti-racist, against
adventurism, in support of some reforms, not putting the only focus on 3rd
World support, that the revolution was not happening now – seem somehow
rational. But of course not coming out
of the mouth of PL, but only later out of Jacobs or the Panthers or Klonsky
or most nearly anyone else. So be
it.
As Jacobs shows, all the factions coming out of SDS were
flawed, and so was PL. Don’t get me started.
But the WU was the most flawed of all.
Jesus Christ. This is a group
that made so many mistakes that every single one of their public proclamations
contained self-criticism of their rather large errors in the past. According to Jacobs, this is a group that
joined a GE picket line saying that the NLF would kill GE workers. This is a group that ran through high schools
unannounced, throwing leaflets around and telling kids to join the revolution. This is a group that thought they could beat
up the Chicago
police with pipes and football helmets. This is a group that took LSD for
‘self-criticism’ sessions and allowed leaders to have sex with whomever they
wanted to, in order to break down ‘monogamy.’ This is a group that believed it could go it
alone against the whole U.S.
police state. This is a group that did
not believe in any reforms or tactics like voting. This is a group that
initially said it didn’t understand the ‘women question’ yet called itself
‘communist.’ For their information, the Bolsheviks had instituted an ERA in
1917. This is a group that was
explicitly white, and was dedicated to supporting black organizations. This is a group that unconditionally praised
the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), if anything an organization even more
fucked up than the WU.
This is a perfect example of an ultra-leftist organization. Any
period of class and social conflict brings out ultra-leftists, so there is a
lesson in this. Something like the WU will return.
It should be noted that during the same period the German Red
Army Faction / Baader-Meinhof group, the Italian Red Brigades, the Japanese Red
Army, the Uruguayan Tupamaros, the Argentine Montoneros, etc. all were more
competent and had more of an impact than the WU. The WU specialized in bombing bathrooms in federal
government offices. Their most
successful action was freeing Timothy Leary from jail. They did get a bomb in a Pentagon bathroom
once and in the prosecutor’s office bathroom after the bloody Attica
slaughter. They did blow up that damned
cop statue at Haymarket in Chicago
twice. And they did free one BLA member,
I think. The rest of those bombings were pinpricks.
So what was their class basis? Well even WU said they had to beat the
upper-class whiteness out of themselves.
Let’s take Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two of the most
well-known. Ayers is now a very white retired
professor of Education at the U of Illinois, and was the son of the CEO of
Comm. Ed., the most hated utility in Illinois. Dohrn is now a very white professor of Law at
Northwestern University
and grew up in an upper-middle class suburb of Milwaukee.
She got a JD from the University
of Chicago before
becoming the most radical Ms. Dohrn. These
two married each other. Dohrn was the
main WU spokesperson. So you tell me who led this bunch.
Jacobs is somewhat myopic in his admiration for the WU, as
if they were the only people bombing anything.
Even here in Minneapolis, or in Madison, WI,
far from any WU cell, bombings were semi-regular. I.E. you don’t need a Weatherman to know which
way the bomb blows. He also seems not to
be aware of the activities of the rest of the left except his tiny area of
it. No mention is made of the
revolutionary union work of black workers in Detroit under the various DRUMs, for
instance. He is totally unaware of SWP/ SL/
WWP/ PL/The Trend/CP or any of the many ‘Marxist-Leninist’ groups outside his 3rd
World radical orbit. As a result he
understates the number of leftists and overstates the influence of WU continually. But then that is a failing of some leftists
who see part of the elephant, but not all in their histories. (See review of “Revolution
in the Air,” below)
Most of the WU members eventually rose from the underground,
the last one 25 years after the 1969 ‘Days of Rage’ in Chicago, spending short times in prison or on
probation or with fines. Some that
didn’t went on to other groups. Several
attempted robbing a Brinks truck in 1981 and were sent to jail for many years
due to that botched job.
The benefit of the WU – though no one with half a brain
needed the WU to tell them this – is that any revolutionary organization or working-class organizations will
have to break the law at times. That a
revolutionary organization will have non-public and illegal activities. That workers will
probably have to use violence to defend themselves.
As Malcolm X said, ‘By any means necessary.” But he didn’t say ‘at all times
necessary.’ The timing and organization
of any of this has to be done with care and attention, not away from movements, but as part of them.
WU only belatedly understood this, and was eventually ended like a goldfish
out of water.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
November 1, 2013
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