no shit
By shag carpet bomb • May 10th, 2009 • Category: Antiwar Movement, History, Outlaws of America, Researchwhen i asked lbo-talk members what their criticisms of Weather Underground were about, Dennis Perrin chose not to actually elaborate his ideas but, instead, pointed to the Web site of Mark Rudd. Perrin didn’t explain if he agreed with everything Rudd said or just part of it. So, it was a little irritating, that response. Great, so you like Mark Rudd’s thoughts. So what do *you* think about Mark Rudd’s thoughts.
But anyway, trying to make sure I don’t end up kvelling about the Weather, that I don’t get caught up in this book to much, and to force a check on myself because, after all, if people I admire are critical, then there must be a good reason, right? So I skimmed Rudd’s web site.
There’s an article he posted, from Peter Marin, which Rudd bills as “The best thing ever written about the Weathermen”. Or maybe Marin used the title himself. Don’t know. Doubt it. Why would you write a letter, publish it in Harper’s and call your own article “the best thing ever written”?
Anyway, the article was pretty good and I have to say, “NO shit” to this part:
Does this justify or explain their tactics? Maybe not. But remember this: Few of those who criticize the Weathermen or counsel other tactics actually practice other tactics or effect change in other ways. I know (as you do) all the criticisms of the Weathermen, and I can recite, also, the tactics for change that all agree are superior to their violence: patience, politics, reason, passive disobedience, peaceful protest, education, exhortation, etc. But we also know (though we pretend we do not) that none of these approaches has accomplished very much, save in the area of civil rights. And meanwhile lives end and bodies pile up, and how is it possible to be fully aware of this, and not be tempted to violence against those responsible or complicitous?
and a double no shit to this part:
I say all this reluctantly, simply trying to follow the thought through. I am by nature pacific - I can afford to be. But I do not know whether that is evidence of superior “wisdom” (compared, say, to the Weathermen) or merely the fact that my sense of immediacy and the presence of evil is not as sharp as their’s. Nor may my heart be quite as exposed or vulnerable to human suffering. Too much of our present day wisdom is simply exhaustion, complicity, and a taste for comfort. Had the Weathermen existed in other nations, we might have understood them better. But because they were Americans, their behavior called into question the whole issue of what the rest of us, as Americans, should be doing; and I suspect that there is something self-justifying and self-indulgent in the way we see the Weathermen today. What we say about them may be true, but we do not say it because it is true, if you see what I mean. (My emphasis added)
triple no shit.
to me, it’s especially galling when the critics are usually doing utterly nothing themselves. and by that I mean, they are not involved *with other fucking people* building something.
anyway, i’ve got to get to work. i’m getting irked just thnking about how true Marin’s essay is.
shag carpet bomb is
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“none of these approaches has accomplished very much”.
Presumably he means in the U.S. during the 60s an 70s. Ignoring the anti-war movement, at a minimum. but if you look around the world over the last 150 years, this conclusion is just ignorant.
Pardon me for not going into LBO, But on the significance of Mao for the RYM, the meaning of “focused on the primary contradiction and never got to the secondary contradiction’ is less what contradictions she may have had in mind than this source of her method.Scroll down to Section IV.
Sorry to go on about this topic. The phrase “their tactics” misrepresents the actions of the WU. Those actions did not result from tactical thinking, they embodied a strategy. That strategy rested on assumptions that were profoundly mistaken and led to equally flawed conclusions. Consider the largest, best known action conducted by the WU, the ‘Days of Rage.
All WU’s thinking followed from the analysis that U.s. society was in a revolutionary crisis, when it was not even close. In that setting, they assumed violence had the potential to mobilize thousands and to open tens of thousands up to revolutionary propaganda. Check the numbers, they expected twenty-five thousand. They got 200. Make repression that much harder for the government? The state with its resources spent $173,00 dollars in its response to the riot. The WU with less than 400 members spent $243,00. Distract the state from repression of revolutionary POC organizations? Fred Hampton decries the action because he anticipates the exact opposite.
And for the icing on the cake, the words of the man who advocated this action, “show them … how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically.” At the time, I was just as ignorant as any Weatherman and dangerously ultra-leftist myself, but even then without the advantage of even a week’s hindsight let alone four decades this bombast appeared more delusional than rational.
I’m sure you’re tired of it. In fact last night I outlined what more I would want to say on the question. The outline was two pages longs. So that amounts to a short paper. Fortunately it turned out I had other things to do tonight.
But in brief, no ‘violence’ per se is not the issue, although I know I sort of made it sound that way. There are three pretty closely connected issues: the superficial analysis of relationship of forces internationally and in the U.S., the organizational form of ‘revolutionary collectives,’ and the strategy of ‘guerilla war.’
The analysis of the ‘class position’ of the ‘white working class’ dismisses the ‘point of production’ and consequently overlooks real relations/contradictions of race and consciousness in the class as a whole and overlooks the varying composition and potential of specific sectors. What you might call ‘overgeneralizations.’
The form of ‘revolutionary collectives’ guaranteed a dogmatic and sectarian outcome. The struggle against monogamy as a struggle against male chauvinism. The description of bussing to Chicago for the Days of Rage, “… no one was allowed to stay out of these collective discussions. … Those who fell asleep were woken up.” Or more abstractly, “revolutionary collectives that demand total, wholehearted commitment of the individual to struggle against everything that interferes with the revolutionary struggle.” And people criticize Lenin for suggesting that a worker in the revolutionary organization become a ‘professional agitator, organizer, propagandist, literature distributor … .” He didn’t try to tell them how to have sex. Intense though it may have been, the Weather collectives were not open and friendly to people who were brand to these questions and did not prepare their cadre to work in that way.
Last, that question of ‘guerilla war.’ They seem not to have noticed that three varieties of ‘guerilla’ strategy they draw on, Mao, Guevara and Tupamaru pose three very different, and incompatible, political strategies. Only Mao reflects classic Marxists principles, armed defense of the militant, expansive practice of democratic rights and struggles. Of course, establishing regions of self-government in the absence of a central state power and defending them militarily against local ruling class powers and foreign occupiers - well, not on the agenda in the U.S. So you end up with vandalism and hoopla.
Oh shit, I wasn’t going to say anything about the race theorizing. but if the question is ” … which segments of the white working class are least privileged, or have the least stakes and roots in the system of privilege, and are most immediately and acutely oppressed?” then we’re talking identity politics after all. And this analysis leads to a strategy of affronting racism, “What Weatherman is about is breaking through the racism and chauvinism at its core by forcing white people to grapple with the existence of a white fighting force that understands that this imperialist mother country will come down … .” For instance, by carrying Viet Cong flags in anti-war demonstrations. Apparently assuming people would see the flag, be upset, and then grasp their distress, because they would first and foremost Weatherman as ‘white’ and identify with them on the basis of ‘whiteness.’ I cannot say I find that reasoning persuasive.
For the record, I’m quoting here from a document “A Weatherman: You Do Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” Reprinted in Weatherman. Ed. Harold Jacobs. 1970. Ramparts Press.
heh. sorry. i’m not tired of what you’re writing, just burnt out on weather underground and am in process of hoeing out my crap, so not focused on reading — tho, damn, i’d like to just sit on my ass and read!
more later. i have to get back upstairs and keep at it. if i keep sitting on my ass, i’ll never get it done. xo