First Published: Frontline, Vol. 6, No. 15, February 13, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The words probably didn’t come easy even though it’s 20 years later. “The destruction of SDS and the rise of Weatherman – no matter how inevitable they were – were historical crimes,” former Weatherman leader Mark Rudd wrote in a Guardian opinion piece January 18. “Not only did we end up killing three of our own people, but even worse we helped murder the organized antiwar movement at the height of the war .... By arguing for violence in 1969 and 1970 the Weathermen unwittingly did the work of the FBI. We helped destroy the largest national organization of the radical student movement – with chapters in over 350 campuses – when it was needed the most. .. ”
Rudd certainly wasn’t very popular back then – even among the tens of thousands of young activists who considered themselves revolutionaries. Weatherman’s “bring the war home” politics stood out as infantile posturing even by the ultra-left standards of the time. Likewise for the group’s “we’re tough” style and its romanticization of violence, which Rudd himself – catapulted to national prominence as leader of the Columbia University SDS chapter during the 1968 campus strike – did much to promote. (Just before the Weathermen went underground 10 December,1969 he proclaimed, “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig; it must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.”)
But Rudd is hardly the only activist who said and did backward things in the tumultuous 1960s; who of us wouldn’t do a lot of things differently given the benefit of hindsight? And to his credit, Rudd certainly makes good use of the opportunity for re-evaluation-all, the more so because his frank self-criticism wasn’t issued as it mawkish mea culpa whose only purpose is to make the author feel better. Rather, Rudd – active today in Central America solidarity work in New Mexico – wrote the article to impact a debate over tactics in the anti-intervention movement.
The current dispute echoes the heated controversies of the 1960s, with Rudd this time on the opposite side – and is a pointed reminder of the powerful pull moralism still exerts on activists struggling to stop brutal government policies.
The immediate issue concerns the value of protest actions that are “more militant” than non-violent civil disobedience. At a broadly based mass demonstration against U.S. intervention in EI Salvador at the Pentagon last October, a small group engaged in what they called “active resistance” – such as setting fires to block traffic and trying to “unarrest” people from police custody. When these tactics were widely criticized as divisive and provocative their advocates responded with a defense of “militant defiance” as a more advanced form of struggle especially rooted in the vitality of students and youth. Their most vehement argument – that it was a “subtle form of racism” to “grant the people of El Salvador, the right to employ methods other than non-violent civil disobedience“ while “denying that right to movements in the U.S.”. (letter by Bruce Nestor and Becky Minnich, Guardian Nov. 16)
It was that particular point which prompted Rudd to offer his opinion, declaring that Nestor and Minnich were “recycling Weatherman’s old guilt-based, idealistic arguments.” Rudd refutes both their 1960s and 1980s versions, saying they badly mis-assess real conditions in the U.S., the political consciousness of the U.S. population, and what approach can build an effective mass movement.
His arguments are not new, but they have particular force coming from an individual who has intimate experience with the damage that can be done by reckless adventurism justified by moral self-righteousness.
Indeed, the scale of engagement in adventurist tactics during the 1960s far exceeds experimentation with them today. That’s not any surprise: the ’60s were a period of tremendous mass upheaval, with the nightly news showing U.S. government sponsored carnage from the rice fields of Southeast Asia to the ghettos and barrios of the U.S. Broad layers of people – not just a few on the ideologically motivated left – came to the conclusion that “the system” had blocked all channels for reform or redress of grievances. Under those circumstances moralistic arguments seemed to have a credible political cover. Rudd’s Weathermen were the extreme, but it was hardly they alone who overestimated the actual breadth of the ’60s radical movement and the durability of its support for revolutionary politics, or who underestimated the flexibility and resilience still left in U.S. capitalism.
What is a bit more puzzling is why adventurist tactics have attraction for fresh faces coming to radical activism today. As Rudd points out, such tactics don’t have a social base in any “mass rising” comparable to the upheavals of the ’60s. To the contrary, the main motion of mass progressive politics in the present period is in the electoral arena, with a concerted effort underway to consolidate a progressive trend in U.S. political life.
What remains true, however, is that there is a stark contrast between the “business as usual” mode of mainstream U.S. politics and the depth of social misery and devastation caused by U.S. government policies. From EI Salvador to the West Bank Washington is sponsoring murder and repression. And it’s not just aggression abroad: reactionary policies toward the homeless, the drug epidemic, AIDS, the overall crisis-state of U.S. minority communities and numerous other issues produce death and hardship right here at home. It is inevitable that some number of people will feel moral outrage in response. This is a positive, not a negative, thing – not least when that outrage propels young people to take up political activism and move toward the left. It only becomes a problem when moral sentiments are directly translated into a guide to practical activity, instead of serving as motivation to develop an accurate (that is, materialist and class-based) analysis and effective strategy, and to dig in for a long haul.
One of the tragedies of the 1960s was that far too few of the political generation radicalized in that decade were able to make the transition from moral outrage to mature left politics. The cost was not only in serious mistakes which hurt the movement at the time, but in the loss to ongoing left activism of thousands of energetic and creative people. Let’s hope Rudd’s self-criticism, a product of bitter personal experience, helps minimize the damage and losses in the present and future.