Jeremy Varon (3 page)

However counterintuitively, anti-imperialism allowed for an indigenous revolutionary critique of
affluent
societies that had satisfied many of the traditional material demands of socialism.

Armed struggle was only one, highly controversial approach to political change. America’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—for years the New Left’s most important organization—split in the summer of 1969 over strategies for broadening the appeal and increasing the power of the student movement. One wing asserted the importance of organizing the industrial working class by conventional means. The

“Weatherman” faction, hoping initially that violence would awaken working-class youths to revolution, advocated armed struggle. In Ger-8

many, the student movement dissolved in 1969 along similar lines, giving rise to a host of small, Marxist-Leninist parties and an armed struggle wing, led by the RAF.

The bifurcation of the leadership of the American and West German New Left has been widely recorded as the moment of the New Left’s self-destruction in each country.11 The intense factionalism precipitating the split left many New Leftists dispirited and unwilling to identify with any of the organized alternatives. My understanding of the split calls for appreciating the gravity of the dilemma faced by the New Left at the decade’s end. Some New Leftists in each country had become so convinced of their societies’ corruption that they saw revolution as the only answer. But the New Left in the United States and West Germany remained small. Politically isolated and facing overwhelming state power, New Leftists had both a political and a broadly psychological need to secure at least a body of theory or a set of narrative resources—

a model or paradigm for change—ensuring that revolution was indeed possible.

Rejecting the antiquated Marxism of the sectarian left, proponents of violence appealed to Third World examples such as Cuba, where a small band of guerrillas had incited “the masses” to a near-spontaneous revolt. Weatherman and the RAF concluded that the assertion of revolutionary will could create a revolutionary situation where its “objective”

determinants were lacking. Though this vision of their struggle was clearly errant, it did not result simply from naïveté or hubris. It also reflected the dizzying sense of possibility of the late 1960s—inspired, above all, by the implausible success of the Vietnamese resistance to the U.S. military—

that tempted radicals to think the unthinkable, in defiance of established models of how social change happens.

Armed struggle was more than an approach to the daunting task of making revolution. It was also a vivid expression of the importance of militancy for New Leftists. At a political level, militancy sought to correct for the apparent ineffectiveness of conventional forms of protest. In an ethical register, it responded to conditions of moral emergency caused most forcefully by the destruction in Vietnam and the state’s often violent response to domestic protest. In existential terms, militancy provided a way of expressing outrage and living the substance of one’s values.

Weatherman and the RAF also exemplified the hazards of militancy. Both groups, for a time, declared all opposition to armed struggle to be counterrevolutionary and embraced danger as a way of showing the depth of their sacrifice. Taken to extremes, militancy turned into a kind of mili-Introduction

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tarism that divided the left into a crude hierarchy of virtue based on one’s readiness to “pick up the gun.”

In addition, armed struggle was to function as the chief medium for forging new, revolutionary subjects who transcended their prior socialization and dedicated themselves
totally
to political struggle. In service of this ambition, Weatherman and the RAF engaged in radical experi-ments in self–re-creation. Their belief in the capacity of violence to transform its agent gave rise to a conspicuous tension that went to the heart of contradictions within the New Left. On the one hand, they saw violence as an act of extreme transgression or defiance. Objectively, it challenged the state’s power. Subjectively, it promised to free them from internal psychic restraints and provide an experience of politics in its most vital form. The guerrilla, within the mythology of each group, was an anti-authoritarian icon who embodied the mystique of the outlaw. On the other hand, Weatherman and the RAF aspired to overcome the individualism and decadence they saw as integral to consumer capitalism.

In their views, the New Left itself reproduced these qualities in its libertine spirit and at times narrow concern with personal freedom. As an antidote, they sought to cultivate an appreciation of the collective enterprise and of the kinds of discipline required for their dangerous political work.

Their efforts, however, proved far from liberating. Weatherman initially used psychologically brutal rituals to suppress the individuality of its members in hopes of turning them into “tools of the revolution.”12

The RAF, declaring that “the guerrilla is the group,” saw the revolutionary as a fully collectivized subject who had transcended the self in his or her complete submission to the demands of guerrilla warfare.13 The RAF toggled between an oppressive group-think and vindictive infighting. Both groups, at their worst, were rigidly hierarchical. Along with their rebel images, then, they projected a hyperdiscipline and severity jarring to many in the New Left. At root, Weatherman and the RAF embodied the peculiar unity of transgression and submission, self-expression and self-renunciation. But here the groups were only an extreme expression of competing desires in the New Left as a whole—the desire for radical autonomy, enacted through resistance to the norms of their societies, and the desire to dedicate oneself to a higher,
collective
purpose that demanded rigorous loyalty.

The American and West German armed struggles failed for essentially the same reasons. Like their Marxist-Leninist rivals, Weatherman and the RAF horribly misread their domestic scenes. The United States and 10

West Germany lacked the seething mass discontent and the near-total denial of democratic rights—both prerequisites for armed struggle according to its Third World theorists—that made revolutionary violence in some Third World countries transparently legitimate to so many of their citizens. Both groups fell victim to equally flawed, contradictory assumptions, between which they oscillated. In one emphasis, defined by an exaggerated pessimism, they saw imperialism as a monolith. Its power to absorb, delude, and dispirit its subjects was so great that no sustained internal resistance was possible. Effective rebellion could come only externally from Third World struggles, or, internally, from American blacks. Within this understanding, the New Left’s armed struggle was an ethical stand that answered a moral imperative of resistance and solidarity, and whose integrity
did not depend on its political success or
failure.
Weatherman and the RAF thus removed political efficacy as a criterion for evaluating their efforts. The guerrillas’ “victory” lay simply in existing.

In a second emphasis, driven by an exaggerated optimism, the Weathermen and the RAF saw imperialism as on the brink of collapse. Resistance was everywhere—in the Third World certainly, but also in the institutional fabric of their own societies: in the schools, the military, the factories, the bureaucracies, halfway houses, ghettos, and working- and middle-class homes. Their violence, in this model, needed only to light the spark to ignite mass discontent into revolutionary conflagration. Both views, despite their apparent polarity, had the same effect: to discourage the difficult work of addressing, through redoubled efforts to educate and organize ambivalent populations, possibilities that lay somewhere in between.

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If the armed struggles in the United States and West Germany had similar origins, their courses quickly diverged. In the United States, violence crested in the spring of 1970 in the wake of the killing of student demonstrators at Kent State and Jackson State universities, but then steeply dropped. The Weathermen, shaken by the deaths in March 1970 of several members making bombs in a New York City townhouse, abandoned plans for assaults on military personnel and police. Though the Weather Underground survived into the mid 1970s, it was not able to reestablish momentum on the left for violence. Never “broken” by the FBI, it disbanded voluntarily in 1976.

In West Germany, the armed struggle began in earnest with the formation in 1970 of the RAF, which along with other groups committed bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. In response, the state waged a comprehensive war on domestic terrorism that entailed the killing of fugitives in shoot-outs, harsh treatment of RAF prisoners, and controversial measures to destroy what it saw as the intellectual and cultural roots of left-wing violence. The fall of 1977 was the high point of the conflict.

The Deutscher Herbst (“German Autumn”), as it is often called, culminated in the hijacking of a German plane by Palestinian guerrillas demanding the release of RAF prisoners, the storming of the plane by German commandos, the apparent suicide in prison of several of the RAF’s founders, and the RAF’s murder of a leading economic official, whom it had kidnapped six weeks earlier. For much of the 1970s, the group was at the center of a grueling, high-stakes public drama in which West Germans played out their ambivalent relationship to democracy and authority. Only in 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification, did the RAF announce its cessation of violence.14

The group finally disbanded in the spring of 1998, declaring in a public statement what had for years been obvious: that it had long outlived its political relevance.15

New Left violence in West Germany was, in sum, more deadly, more divisive, and longer-lasting than that in the United States. The very different trajectories of Weatherman and the RAF reveal how each group was shaped by and responded to its national context. When the New Left faded as a global phenomenon in the early 1970s, those contexts became all the more important in defining the destinies of individual New Left movements.

The Weathermen turned to violence largely in opposition to the Vietnam War and out of their desire to help militant blacks like the Black Panthers. These commitments lent an immediacy to their violence, irrespective of the group’s larger revolutionary ambitions. With its bombings of military and police targets, Weatherman was able to provide at least moral and political censure of the war in Vietnam and the state’s assaults on people of color in the United States. The group, in short, could moderate its approach to, and eventually withdraw from, violence with some sense of accomplishment. Former members typically concede that violence failed miserably as a revolutionary tactic but defend its integrity and limited utility as a response to the Vietnam War and to institutional racism.

Issues of identity contributed to the group’s restraint in another sense.

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Weatherman’s desire to match the sacrifices of blacks and Vietnamese fueled the group’s initial belief in the singular value of violence. Weatherman’s violence, in this aspect, was a volatile and often vexed effort of members of the white middle class to confront and somehow renounce their structural privilege. In the mid 1970s, the Weathermen broadened their conception of revolutionary politics and reassessed what kind of practice would be most beneficial, given their backgrounds. Chiefly, they recognized the need to organize other whites, for which nonlethal violence and the distribution of conventional propaganda was a more promising approach than a literal guerrilla war. By the time the group asserted the need to build a mass movement, it was far too small and too isolated to play a leading role on the left. Nonetheless, by revising their sense of mission, the Weathermen avoided mistaking
themselves
for the causes they meant to serve.

West Germany, by contrast, was only very indirectly involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War and lacked a highly visible and vocal oppressed racial minority. Though German New Leftists bitterly opposed the war, they never felt as intense a sense of identification with the Vietnamese or responsibility for their fate as did American activists. As the number of immigrant workers increased in the Federal Republic in the 1970s, the RAF did little to make growing German resentment of foreigners an object of its protest. The RAF’s armed struggle therefore always had a more abstract and protean quality than that of its American counterparts. Frustrated in its ambition of violent, communist revolution in western Europe, the RAF had few ways of claiming any real successes. Lacking a national subject of emancipation, the RAF also lacked a structure of accountability. This circumstance contributed to the group’s strikingly self-referential quality, wherein the RAF saw itself as the sole wager of meaningful political struggle in West Germany. With the emergence in the mid 1970s of the “free-the-guerrilla guerrilla,” whose chief aim was to extort the release of jailed comrades, the RAF’s campaign degenerated into what one critic called a “private war” with the state security apparatus.16

Weatherman and the RAF differed also in their ways of negotiating a tension between excess and limits. The Weathermen, on the verge of attacking human targets, instituted a prohibition on lethal actions. The Germans repeatedly crossed the threshold of lethal violence. Far more than a tactical difference, Weatherman’s and the RAF’s approaches to political murder constitute profound differences—perhaps the most important differences—between the two groups. Their comparison elicits a basic question of political morality: when and under what conditions may one Introduction

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assume dominion over life and death and kill another human being on behalf of a political ideal or goal?

The Weathermen claimed to represent the promise of a society that would be more just and humane than the one they sought to destroy. At times, however, their rhetoric and actions belied this claim. In their early days, the Weathermen spun grisly fantasies of limitless destruction and planned attacks that would almost certainly harm “civilians.” Behind Weatherman’s recklessness lay a fascination with transgression and a desire to shock. Within a logic of excess, political murder could be seen as the ultimate transgressive act. But by contemplating or engaging in acts of brutality, the Weathermen reproduced qualities they attributed to their enemy and that they ostensibly opposed. The group’s challenge, then, was to develop an internally constrained practice. The Weathermen responded to the 1970 townhouse explosion by imposing limits on their violence. In short, they made the conscious decision not to be killers.