Jeremy Varon (11 page)

Fighting imperialism, American activists were able to transcend their national identities and affiliate with a movement of world-historical importance and great moral force. In implying the possibility of
global
emancipation, anti-imperialism spoke powerfully to the utopian longings at the heart of the New Left. Believing that the world’s liberation required not only revolt in the Third World but also militant and even violent rebellion in the centers of imperialist power, the Weathermen made themselves bearers of the possibility of perfect, global justice. Jim Mellen, speaking in the radical parlance of the times, explained, “We [the Weathermen] figured ourselves a small leadership group of a mass movement which could have a critical role in the development of the history of imperialism: That is very heavy stuff.”103

American activists’ connection to anti-imperialism was often rooted in experience. Neufeld had visited Cuba in December 1968 on the tenth anniversary of the Cuban revolution and marveled at the “unbelievable gains” Cuban society had made with America “sitting on top of it.”104

Other American activists, among them a great many Weathermen, had similar experiences traveling with the “Venceremos Brigades”—the teams of young people who, starting in 1969, made trips to Cuba to cut sugarcane and learn about Cuba and the world. Face-to-face encounters with Vietnamese proved equally inspiring. In 1967, Dohrn had traveled with an SDS delegation to Bratislava, Yugoslavia, where she met North

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Vietnamese and NLF representatives. The Vietnamese utterly “captivated,” “dazzled,” and, ultimately, “sobered” the Americans. Many of the Vietnamese had traveled for weeks on foot through jungles and battle zones just to attend the meeting; their pathos made an overwhelming impression on Dohrn, who described the American delegation as “serious,” but also “exuberant and into having fun.” The Vietnamese urged the young activists to adopt a “big picture strategy” in their opposition to the war and kept asking, to their great annoyance, what their
parents
thought about the conflict. The Vietnamese also patiently explained why, given their resolve and military approach, an American victory was impossible. As a result, Dohrn boasted, “we were able to predict the subsequent failure of every U.S. military and political strategy.” Dohrn then went to Prague and Frankfurt, where she met activists from across the world. The whole experience was “a big dose of internationalism” that gave her and the other Americans “a mission, a purpose . . . and a sense of what our role was” in the global movement.105

Anti-imperialism, finally, offered an antidote to a central frustration of New Left radicals, namely, the indifference or hostility of workers to the message of revolution. To some avowed anti-imperialists, the problem remained one of “false consciousness,” wherein the meager privileges and ideological conditioning of American workers blinded them to their exploitation. To Weatherman, which insisted that the benefit of imperialism to American workers was great, the problem was largely one of
true
consciousness. Weatherman tried to confront a possibility it felt the New Left was unwilling to face: that a more equal distribution of global wealth required that citizens of the First World, workers included,
give something up materially;
to preach otherwise, Weathermen believed, was to sell out the Third World and mislead Americans.106 To Scott Braley, who “didn’t know a political tendency from a fog” when he joined the group, this aspect of Weatherman’s message made intuitive sense. “We were up front about that,” he explained. “A lot of left groups at that point said, ‘Oh no, we just want to end the war and it’s not going to mean anything to you.’ Well it is going to mean something to you. You’re not going to have two cars [and] gasoline that costs a quarter of what it does for everybody else in the world. . . . Sorry, but you’re not.” More and more, Braley found discussions about the war that did not mention

“the ‘I’ word” “tortured.”107

However much rooted in experience or the desire for a better world, Weatherman’s statement was plagued with profound difficulties that haunted the group throughout its life. One was Weatherman’s basic mode 54

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of conceptualization. The group transposed onto a global stage obsolete Marxist understandings of class struggle within a single capitalist economy. Instead of the explosive contradiction between capitalists and proletariat, Weatherman posited a near-mythic conflict between imperialist oppressors and Third World oppressed. It thus substituted a new reductive dualism for an older one and collapsed the complexities of radical politics into a single choice for or against the world’s (would-be) liberators. In truth, neither the “imperialist powers” nor those resisting them were as unified as their vision implied. Failing to see this, Weatherman fell prey to the seductive optimism of global voices like Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung, who insisted, in ways both romantic and severe, that revolution was the direction of world history, making victory near certain.

The group also risked idealizing movements whose actions often belied their emancipatory rhetoric. Years later, Neufeld conceded that he and other American radicals had “greatly underestimated” the “difficulty of Third World countries in building genuinely democratic revolutions.”108

When discussing the means of revolution in the United States—and especially the role of blacks in it—the Weatherman again translated potentially constructive judgments into contradictory and untenable theses. Roth, like others in the group, had grown up with an abiding interest in race. From an early age, he recalls, “My sense of justice . . . and the person I wanted to be were inextricably linked to what happened with African Americans.”109 As he became involved in antiracist struggles, a consistent message to white activists emerged from blacks, whether students at Columbia or national figures like Malcolm X. It held, in essence:

“There are all these racists out there, they’re white. We’re not going to organize them. You have to organize them. . . . [D]on’t worry about organizing black people and being our saviors in that way—we can lead our own movement.”110 For Roth, part of the attraction of Weatherman was precisely its understanding of how deeply this kind of condescension ran. But it was one thing, as Roth urged, to respect the autonomy of blacks and work to overcome racism in one’s community; it was another to assert on the basis of a false assumption about blacks’ “centrality to the economy,” as the Weatherman statement had done, that blacks could somehow defeat American imperialism
by themselves.
With this position, the Weathermen plainly idealized blacks, imputing to them capacities they could not possibly possess.

This view of revolution forced Weatherman into wild reversals on the crucial question of agency. In one voice, Weatherman suggested that whites could at best play only an auxiliary role in a struggle in which

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they were ultimately unnecessary. In another, it anointed young working-class whites and their militant leaders—the Weathermen themselves—

important players in the revolutionary crusade. In a similar vein, Weatherman suggested that white American workers were irreversibly on the side of imperialism, only to stipulate that once imperialism was on the verge of toppling, they would discover that their “long-term interests” had actually favored its defeat.111 Finally, Weatherman’s belief that in a just world, working-class whites would have to cede some measure of their wealth may have had a certain logic; but it was a poor basis for actually organizing them.

Weatherman’s cynicism about the working class drew sharp attacks from the left. One indignant critic concluded that Weatherman’s message “is not that workers are robbed by the capitalist class of the sur-plus value they create . . . [but] that the workers themselves are robbers.”112 Some of Weatherman’s initial allies objected so strongly to this position that immediately following SDS’s June convention, they formed the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II).113 Holding that “the leading force” of the revolution “must eventually be the proletariat,”

RYM II called for the creation of a Leninist vanguard party.114 Less dogmatic critics speculated that Weatherman had abandoned the hope of organizing a mass movement and, hence, the democratic values of the New Left.115 Still others accused Weatherman of being unable to rationally assess the movement’s actual capabilities. “We are not now free to fight the revolution except in fantasy,” Carl Oglesby, a former president of SDS, declared.116

The problems with Weatherman’s statement went beyond its assumptions and conclusions. It was so steeped in sectarian concerns that it largely failed to resonate within the movement, let alone outside. The New Left “appears to have utterly and decisively freaked out,” the New Leftist Paul Breines lamented. “Normal and intense factional debate has . . . been replaced by a blaring carnival of fetishized and mind clogging rhetoric. . . . It is as if there were a self-propelling mechanism which brings everyone into the general reduction of the
entire terrain
of debate and consciousness to the level of retail sanity within wholesale madness.”117 A combination of insecurity and exaggerated self-importance, Breines thought, had led to the New Left’s “self-alienation” and “self-mystification.”118

Yet the precarious position of the New Left at the end of the 1960s was itself a potent source of its destructive in-fighting. Marxism, as a

“science” of social change, has always been reluctant to view historical 56

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processes as subjective or contingent, positing instead structural “laws”

and the clash of “objective” class interests as the primary motors of social transformation. The challenge of the revolutionary, then, is to “seize destiny” and help realize historical possibilities that have a momentum not reducible to human will. The New Left had good reason to adopt this perspective. If revolution were
only
the function of moral choice or political will, then the New Left’s revolutionary endeavor would be dis-concertingly subjective. Given the massive imbalance of power between the movement and “the system,” that prospect could be frightening. “We went from being young kids with a moral vision, to realizing we were up against the heaviest power structure in the world,” David Gilbert recalled.

“There was [a] sense [that] . . . either we get a power base or retreat. And so people looked for almost what I considered magical solutions, because it was scary.”119

New Leftists generated a number of such “solutions”—from the Vietnamese to American blacks, industrial workers, and working-class youths—over which they sharply divided. They imputed to each not only implausible powers but also “objective” reasons as to why its revolutionary potential was so great. In this way, New Leftists tried to compensate for their political weakness. At times, Weatherman presented revolution as a process that already had inexorable momentum. In late September 1969, a reporter asked Mark Rudd, who had just declared that the “primary purpose” of the Weathermen was to fight, how exactly the tiny group planned to defeat capitalism. “It doesn’t make any difference what you or I say or what I want to see,” Rudd replied. “The only significant thing that bears on this question of revolution is that it has already started. The Vietnamese have made the revolution against the U.S. . . . [Y]ou and I don’t have a choice.”120

Weatherman’s statement paved the way for the group’s next task: molding itself into a “white fighting force” that would open up the United States as a “second front” in the worldwide struggle against imperialism. What was needed was militant leadership that would demonstrate to American youth the need for violent insurrection. Weatherman was to provide that leadership.

Drawing on the theory of Régis Debray, a young, well-educated member of the French elite who had become deeply involved through journalism in revolutionary movements in Latin America, the Weathermen held that the experiences of Third World guerrillas had special relevance for the United States. In the mid 1960s, in consultation with Fidel Castro, Debray wrote
Revolution in the Revolution?
to communicate the

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lessons of the Cuban revolution. Though addressed specifically to Latin Americans, the book was read by leftists all over the world. Debray stressed that the Cuban revolution had not been made by a mass movement led by a communist party but by a small band of guerrillas using light weapons to attack military and political targets. Rooted in the aspirations of the Cuban people, the guerrillas’ violence soon instigated a mass revolt; Cuba had thus “skipped” the protracted phase of mass mobilization that many Latin American revolutionaries had thought necessary.121 In Debrayism, Weatherman found an alternative to the “base-building” approach of much of the American left, as well as a rationale for engaging immediately in violence. According to Jeff Jones, the Weathermen concluded from Debray that “a small group of very politically advanced, ideologically committed militant people can carry out revolutionary actions that will serve as an inspiration for other people.”122

Debrayist violence, in short, was
exemplary
violence and did not have to produce tactical victories to be successful. The Weathermen need not, therefore, be deterred by their tiny numbers and “military” inexperience.

The Weathermen spent the summer of 1969 preparing to turn their Debrayist vision into reality. Part of their effort was to transform themselves into disciplined cadres capable of committing “exemplary” violence. Here Weatherman drew on Che Guevara’s
foco
theory, which called for the building of small, semi-autonomous cells guided by a central leadership. Weatherman set up collectives of one to several dozen members in a number of cities, among them New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston, Seattle, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago (some of these had been established by RYM at the beginning of the summer, prior to the formal creation of Weatherman in June). Weatherman’s leadership, calling itself the “Weatherbureau” and based at the SDS National Office in Chicago, guided the five hundred or so people belonging to the group.