Jeremy Varon (20 page)

These are striking reflections from an intellectual who, in his sweeping criticisms of humanism and modern morality, did so much to retire the vision of “existential man” that informs his description of the Tunisians. Like American militants, he attributes integrity and “realness” to risk and physical courage; he indicts abstraction as a sign of inauthenticity and privilege; and he yearns to commit himself politically in a
total, physical
way that honors the great sacrifice of others. The Weathermen, radicalizing each of these views, made violence the measure of authenticity. Doing so, they appeared to champion Sartre’s provocative dictum that revolutionary violence “is man re-creating himself,” with the Days of Rage serving as a dramatic occasion for that recreation.96 Following the action, Jones insisted that “carrying out acts of armed resistance against the state [is the mark of ] the highest form of human being.”97

Despite such statements, the Weathermen never saw militancy as an autonomous value, fully divorced from political goals. It remained a means to a revolutionary end, not an end in itself. When later admitting to having glorified violence, they would speak primarily of being caught up in a “Debrayist myth” that led them to grossly misstate the benefits of actions like the Days of Rage.98 Given Weatherman’s concern with strategy, the denunciations of the Days of Rage as a political failure appear fitting responses. Indeed, militancy of Weatherman’s sort threatened to shut down political reflection, render the message of the movement incomprehensible to those outside it and many within it, and make protesters even more vulnerable to attacks by the state. Marcuse, though able to sympathize with even “unintelligent action,” cautioned that “escalation is built into the system” and “accelerates the counterrevolution,”

which might end up crushing the New Left’s rebellion.99

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Some critics went so far as to charge that, in insisting that fighting was the
only
relevant political act, the
only
expression of genuine commitment, Weatherman had corrupted the movement’s values. The middle-aged pacifist Dave Dellinger was no stranger to militancy. He had been arrested numerous times for protest, and he repeatedly defended young militants against the admonitions of older leftists. Yet he urged the Weathermen to see that militancy did not have to be violent to be effective, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had shown. Greg Calvert, a gay man admirably critical of the sexism suffusing the New Left, insisted:

Socialism isn’t about trying to “prove” one’s manhood. . . . Socialism is about the discovery and struggle of a new manhood and a new woman-hood in which proving, warriors and domination become irrelevant rel-ics. . . . Revolution is an act and process of love in which people become whole again because . . . passion and gentleness, human need and human possibility become so integrally merged that there is nothing left to “prove.”100

Such responses to Weatherman were not, however, the final word on what was best for the movement. With their abundant calls for more political education, organizing, and coalition-building, critics seemed to offer few
existentially
compelling alternatives to the group. As if trying to answer Weatherman’s passion, RYM II spoke of feeling “high on the people” (a phrase of Hampton’s) when rallying with strikers and marching with blacks and Puerto Ricans. In unity, one RYM II partisan insisted, the left experienced the true meaning of militancy. Praising this kind of militancy for the
absence
of violence at RYM II events, he explained:

“When we don’t have to fight, when the pigs are afraid to attack, it’s a victory, not a defeat.”101 Yet the RYM II demonstrations were notewor-thy to many for their blandness, as they featured the standard fare of marching, chanting, and speech-making. RYM II’s rapid demise following the October actions testifies, in part, to its failure to speak to people’s passion and anger.102 The
Guardian
seemed to want to put the genie of militancy back in the bottle altogether, as it condemned the Weathermen for doing their best to turn what should have been “the year of the heroic organizer” into the “year of the heroic fool.”103 Its recommendation of more grassroots organizing may have represented a rationally appropriate statement of What Was to Be Done for a movement sorely lacking adherents. But it did not appeal to the militant spirit responsible for much of the New Left’s success. And if there was something far-fetched about 104

The Importance of Being Militant

the notion of Weatherman leading an army of working-class youths, there was an equal measure of implausibility to student radicals, often bred in more than modest comfort, serving as humble champions of the American masses.

The debate surrounding the Days of Rage reveals the New Left at a profound impasse. To many, the Weathermen had taken militancy to a point of diminishing and even dangerous returns. Yet New Left 1969 had few resources besides its militant spirit. “We have created the slogan ‘All Power to the People,’”Calvert lamented. “We have not organized or catalyzed ‘People’s Power.’”104 After nearly a decade, the New Left had barely begun to build a genuinely popular revolutionary movement.

Calvert answered Weatherman’s vision of violent insurrection with his own wishful scenario. He advocated “the revolution which does not need vanguards because it is so deeply grounded in the lives of the majority of the people that the governing classes will have lost before they know what happened to their power.”105 Concentrating agency in the left’s own

“silent majority”—awakened to revolution through diligent organizing—

Calvert envisioned a seamless transition of power. For others, lacking confidence in the prospects of a Velvet Revolution in America, militancy remained the favored way.

The debates that raged in the late 1960s reflected not only political divisions within the New Left but also a crisis in its understanding of reality. Weatherman, RYM II, PL, and countless other groups debated, in essence, what the
real
nature of the system was, what constituted
real
revolutionary politics,
real
militancy,
real
solidarity, and who the
real
SDS

were. Feminists, growing in numbers and momentum, charged that pa-triarchy was the real source of oppression, rendering irrelevant much of the New Left’s analysis. People of color accused all manner of white activists of neither understanding nor adequately confronting the reality of racism, both in society and in their own organizations. As if in an infinite regress, each perspective pushed reality beyond the reaches of its rivals. The instability of the very construct “reality” was evident in the New Left’s language. According to Larkin and Foss, young radicals employed the word “really” almost compulsively, sometimes in serial repetition or to begin and end a single sentence (i.e., “Like, that’s really really fucked,” and “Really, you know that’s bullshit, really”).106 The intended effect of this linguistic intensifier was to add weight to one’s views—to drive home where things were
really
at. Yet “the semantic impact of this redundant usage of ‘really’ was the communication—or in-The Importance of Being Militant

105

tersubcultural fortification—of a sense of nebulosity, that is, the uncertainty as to just what ‘really’ was or wasn’t.” Larkin and Foss thus disclose an autodeconstructive quality to the discourse of New Leftists: the more insistently they invoked notions of reality, the more the concept (or its referent) eluded them, with debilitating results. Endless political and ideological debates did not yield anything like a consensus analysis of the system or ultimately clarify the movement’s task. On the contrary, it went hand in hand with the dizzying multiplication of revolutionary factions, ideologies, manifestos, and strategies, and the breakdown of a sense of common purpose.

Others within the protest culture did not try to mask confusion about

“reality” with ideology. Instead, they openly testified to and even celebrated reality’s uncertain or illusory quality. Larkin and Foss cite the Beatles’ 1968 “Strawberry Fields Forever”—in which John Lennon professes,

“Nothing is real / It’s nothing to get hung about”—as a prime expression of the “deepening ambiguity” of reality, reinforced by the song’s

“dissonantly hideous conclusion.” The Beatles, one might add, amplified this effect with their entirely dissonant “Revolution 9” and chaotic “Helter Skelter.” Both became anthems for Charles Manson, who felt they foretold an imminent apocalypse, which his “family” would hasten with its murderous rampage. The songs were recorded in 1968, not long before SDS’s collapse, the fraying of the antiwar movement, Altamont, and other events that appeared to turn the dream of the 1960s into a nightmare that refracted “reality” through the disorienting prisms of disillusionment, cynicism, and hate.

Within the psychedelic subculture—which was highly critical of the hyperseriousness of the “ideological” left—there had for several years been a form of testing that explored the ambiguity of the real. In the mid 1960s, the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters held bacchana-lian LSD parties, called “Acid Tests.”107 The motto of these events, and the explicit challenge they issued to their participants, was “Can You Pass the Acid Test?” The differences between the Acid Test and gut check as two kinds of personal trials are striking.

The purpose of gut check was for an individual to overcome fear and, through confrontation, embrace the violence at the foundation of capitalist society. The challenge of the Acid Tests, by contrast, was to withstand the massive disorientation induced by the drug and the chaotic environment—to endure and even revel in the decomposition of the psychic and sensory frames of reference through which one con-106

The Importance of Being Militant

ventionally apprehended reality. As potentially harrowing psychological and quasi-spiritual ordeals, they could induce a “death trip” all their own—one that demanded its own kind of courage to survive.108

One possible insight from the experience was that reality— contrary to what the “normal” mind perceived—was at root chaotic; or one might sense that reality was a matter of perspective and could be creatively refashioned. For some, this revelation had political implications. Abbie Hoffman claimed that he made the decision to become a full-time activist while on an LSD trip, the drug having imbued him with a sense of near-infinite power and possibility.109 And, in the ultimate experience of danger, one could take the drug in such a way as to combine the spirit of gut check and the Acid Tests. Hoffman reports that he took several hits of acid on the most violent night of the 1968 Democratic convention. The drug made the encounter with the raw power of the state all the more terrifying and exhilarating—a sensation that Hoffman, who suffered from mental illness, likened to the rush of manic depression.110

The New Left’s politics of reality, much like militancy, was a source of both strength and weakness. On the one hand, the efforts of young leftists to define and connect with reality reflected their core desire to break out of what seemed an artificial world of superficial comforts and estrangement from their political and moral potential. Trying to discern

“reality” behind the haze of the ideology of the status quo, they sought to find in politics and life something truer and more meaningful than what mainstream society offered them. On the other hand, the very attempt to demarcate reality with dogmatic certainty disempowered the New Left.

So many in the movement contrasted to the “inauthentic” world they rejected some purportedly definitive understanding of the true nature of

“the system.” This effort, as it tended toward ideological absolutism, militated against an appreciation of the sheer complexity of a society like the United States, as well as of the monumental challenge of changing it. The result was a loss of humility and, with it, of the healthy sense of pluralism that had once been the New Left’s hallmark. Such a pluralism, had it survived the late 1960s, might have encouraged New Leftists to see the value of a variety of approaches to political change. The tragic aspect to the dissolution of the New Left, in this light, was not so much the erosion of an always tenuous unity as the loss of its ability to deal constructively with diversity in its ranks.

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The wheel is turnin’ and you can’t slow it down

Can’t let go and you can’t hold on

Can’t go back and you can’t stand still

If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will

The Grateful Dead,

“The Wheel” (lyrics by Robert Hunter)

The challenge of what to make of the Days of Rage was greatest for the Weathermen themselves. They had in advance assigned the action a decisive place within a projective mythology of revolution in America. Yet rather than reassessing their fantastic expectations in light of the disastrous results, the Weathermen mostly tried to force perceptions of the Days of Rage back in line with their expectations. The result was a tortured blend of exuberant claims of victory, frank admissions of failure, and subtle revisions in their self-understanding that made possible Weatherman’s entire history as an “armed struggle” group. Weatherman had come to Chicago hoping that violence would somehow speak for itself—transcend, as a form of pure practice, the realm of language or representation. Weatherman’s own conflicted response to the Days of Rage shows, however, that violence was itself an ambiguous text, whose meaning the Weathermen could not fully master.

After the Days of Rage, Weatherman collectives held intense criticism-self-criticism sessions to analyze the event. The first public pronouncement on the action came on October 21 in the SDS newspaper. Weatherman shortened the title of the last edition,
The Fire Next Time,
to simply
FIRE!
With this change, the group suggested that the Days of Rage were just the conflagration it had desired. Consistent with its neofuturist aesthetic of speed and raging chaos, Weatherman favored images over words to tell its exploits. The single-sheet issue was designed as a wall poster that featured pictures from the action, including protesters smashing windows and a Weatherman hitting a policeman. A cartoon word bubble had the fighting Weatherman saying, “Taste the Sweetness of Destiny, Racist Pig!!” with the words “Bloody Melee,” “Rampage in Loop,” and