Jeremy Varon (9 page)

To Meinhof, the Easter protests marked the passage of the German movement from “protest to resistance.” Paraphrasing an unnamed African-American radical, she explained: “Protest is when I say this or that doesn’t suit me. Resistance is when I ensure that what doesn’t suit me no longer occurs.”66 Meinhof conceded that the demonstrators fell far short of eliminating the injustices they had targeted. But she lauded the new militancy as an expression of the New Left’s refusal to be any longer “a powerless opposition that disturbs nothing and no one.”67 Another act drew Meinhof’s praise. On April 2, just days before the shooting of Dutschke, Gudrun Ensslin, the charismatic ruffian Andreas Baader, and two others started small fires in Frankfurt department stores as an act of protest. (The fires were quickly put out, causing no injuries and minimal property damage.) The arsonists were captured a few days later.

Meinhof, though judging the action politically misguided, asserted: “The progressive moment in the burning of a department store doesn’t lie in the destruction of commodities but in the criminality of the act, its breaking of the law.”68

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“Agents of Necessity”

The arson was significant in other senses. At their high-profile trial in October 1968, the defendants described it as an effort to “light a torch for Vietnam” in “protest against indifference toward the war” and “monopoly capitalism.”69 Conceived in these terms, it sought to illuminate the connection between First World consumption and the exploitation of the Third World. As a political act, the arson was also fantastically reductive, at once pathetic and quixotic. Critics of advanced industrial society such as the theorists of the Frankfurt School argued with great sophistication that consumer capitalism was responsible, not only for economic exploitation, but also for the near-total degradation of subjectivity, culture, and critical reason. Young leftists, in keeping with this view, saw “the system” as a repressive totality, rooted in a commodity fetishism that exerted a pervasive
“Consumterror”
(“terror of consumption”). But how, some puzzled, did one strike out at this totality, whose power was at once overwhelming and diffuse? The arsonists appeared to answer this question with stunning literal-mindedness: destroy goods in a department store!

The arson also signaled a new level of militancy, whose justification demanded a new vocabulary. At the trial, Baader defended the act by invoking the “natural right of resistance” described by Marcuse in his 1965

essay “Repressive Tolerance,”70 which argued that the ideal of tolerance had been perverted in advanced industrial societies such as the United States and West Germany. Its original purpose had been to enable the discovery of ethical truths by promoting open discussion and the expression of dissident views. However, in societies predicated on the “institutionalization of inequality,” tolerance is extended overwhelmingly to “policies, conditions and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.”71 This tolerance “towards that which is radically evil” reflected, according to Marcuse, the stranglehold on public consciousness by political and corporate forces intent on preserving their domination.72

As a remedy, Marcuse advocated active
intolerance
—including censorship—toward views and behavior that serve the oppressive status quo. In addition, Marcuse identified a “‘natural right’ of resistance for repressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones prove to be inadequate” to compel social change.73 Such resistance could even
legitimately
take a violent form. Lamenting that “nonviolence is normally not only preached to, but extracted from the weak,”

he insisted that “to refrain from violence in the face of vastly superior

“Agents of Necessity”

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force is one thing, to renounce a priori violence against violence, on ethical or psychological grounds (because it may antagonize sympathizers) is another.”74 By the late 1960s, student movements throughout the developed world claimed the right of extreme resistance, evident in Baader’s appeal.

Marcuse’s ideas had special resonance among Germans. Not only was he a German Jew, an impassioned opponent of Nazism, and, after the war, an ardent critic of both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, but his sketch of contemporary repression, which he elaborated in celebrated lectures in Frankfurt and West Berlin in 1967, closely matched the perceptions of young Germans. Toward the decade’s end, the West German New Left saw itself precisely as a “repressed and overpowered minority” fighting a system of “absolute evil” within an im-poverished public sphere. The protests against the Springer papers tapped powerfully into Marcusean themes. In their defamations and willful misrepresentation of events, the papers were a clear barrier to rational debate and a source of physical danger to the student movement. The destruction of actual newspapers as an act of protest—something virtually unthinkable in the United States, however great the anger of radicals, by virtue of the near-sacred status of “free speech” in America—seemed an expression of the kind of intolerance Marcuse sanctioned.

The spring of 1968 represented, in sum, a decisive transformation in the West German New Left’s relationship to violence—one that closely paralleled the evolution of the American New Left. In a June 1968 essay in
konkret
titled simply “Gewalt” (“Violence”), a group of intellectuals that included Dutschke and his closest collaborators spelled out that relationship. Reflecting on the Easter demonstrations, they insisted: Only since we have begun, however cautiously, to speak the language of the system have we made ourselves understandable to workers and a danger to Springer. That language is violence. The system speaks it, because the system is constituted by violence. . . . It is not accidental that the attack on Rudi Dutschke was the spark. Dutschke is distinguished among us for maintaining from the outset that it is not a purely moral-intellectual choice that compels us to fight our system; rather, our physical and spiritual existence is threatened by this system, which we cannot reform but must destroy. . . .

[One must distinguish] between
mediated
(latent) and
unmediated
(manifest) violence. The idiotic sentence that suppresses this difference runs: “We are against all forms of violence in political life.” . . . But our oft-praised free and democratic system . . . is itself a gigantic act of violence[, which] manifests itself only reluctantly and in exceptional situations with batons and guns. In its daily and normal occurrence, it flourishes in “independent”

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“Agents of Necessity”

newspapers, in value-free science, in “humane” culture, in “friendly” workplace environments, in church, fashion, and sports. . . . Violence is integral to capitalism, just as the police are integral to private property, and so long as capitalism exists, violence will not disappear.75

The statement is striking for how thoroughly violence dominates the authors’ understanding of their society and the task of changing it. The goal, unequivocally, is revolution, waged against a system itself grounded in violence. The “latent” violence that shapes consciousness is no less real or important than forms of “manifest” violence (though the authors concede that they suffer primarily from alienation—not exploitation or deprivation—rendering their “oppression” far less severe than that experienced by the poor and by racial minorities like American blacks).76

The system, they explain, “chooses” between the two forms of violence based on how severely its power is threatened.77 The purpose of protest violence, then, is to make the latent violence of the system apparent either by provoking state repression or, at least, by inspiring public reflection on the complex nature of violence. Protest violence therefore aims

“to enlighten”
(aufklären).
A dimension of that enlightenment is internal: “When we employ violence, we change not only our objective world, but also our subjective world . . . we break the stranglehold of the norms we have internalized.”78

.

.

.

The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

Bob Dylan, “The Times

They Are A-Changin’”

Conscious of the barriers they faced, activists serious about revolution turned with great urgency in the late 1960s to the questions of what constituted revolutionary agency, what class or other group might be the

“revolutionary subject,” and how it could best be activated or supported.

It is from this field of questions that Weatherman and the RAF emerged.

Each group offered what it felt was a way for the New Left to transcend its limits and build, in Weatherman’s phrase, a “strategy to win” in the face of imposing odds.

However confidently American and German activists may have identified themselves as revolutionaries, they made up only small segments of their societies and had little apparent means of actually threatening state or corporate power. More fundamentally, societies like the United States

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45

and West Germany seemed to preclude in their very structures the possibility of revolution—a condition Marcuse spelled out in his 1964 book
One-Dimensional Man.
Marcuse observed that gross exploitation no longer defined advanced industrial societies, and that they therefore lacked the foundational “contradiction” between capital and wage labor that had served as the “objective” basis for revolutionary socialist politics. On the contrary, the relatively low levels of social antagonism the two countries experienced in the 1950s and early 1960s reflected in part their “objective” achievements, chiefly their “increased standard of living” and “overwhelming efficiency” from a technological and organizational standpoint.79 In the face of these achievements, Marcuse lamented,

“the very idea of qualitative change recedes.”80 With few exceptions, citizens extended their loyalty to “the whole,” to the entire system they credited for their prosperity, security, and comfort.

Given the affluence of postwar society, any widespread revolt would have to be largely a moral and aesthetic response to the various conditions that served the interests of “domination.” Chief among them were the perpetuation of unnecessary forms of alienated labor; the persistence of poverty amid immense wealth; racial inequality (in the United States); the maintenance of peace with the Soviet Union by constant preparation for war; the degradation of the environment; and the restriction of autonomy by administration and “one-dimensional” forms of thought and culture. To the extent that he had hope, Marcuse vested it in the possibility that some would engage in a “Great Refusal” of the entire system.

Such a refusal, as the source of hope for those “without hope,” was most likely to come from the “outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and colors” who were largely excluded from the benefits of advanced industrial society.81 The rebellion of blacks and other people of color in the mid 1960s showed Marcuse’s prescience and affirmed his hope. By the late 1960s, Marcuse also saw a hint of genuine revolutionary promise in the New Left, whose activism derived largely from ethical and existential bases.82 Yet student and youth activism had failed to break the identification of millions with capitalist systems that, despite growing tensions, continued to deliver very real rewards. Unable to win the allegiance of the masses, the New Left appeared to have reached the structural limit of its revolt.

For the New Left to transcend this limit, new approaches were required. In America, ideological and strategic debates were carried out most strenuously within SDS, where Marxism had become the common coin of political discussion. Some SDSers took to Marxism with striking 46

“Agents of Necessity”

zeal, as if they had discovered a previously hidden language that promised to make transparent the deep structure of their society. Yet in the rush to tap its analytical power, activists often applied Marxism with little sophistication or willingness to revise assumptions that squared poorly with contemporary realities. This was conspicuously true of those who, like the Progressive Labor Party (commonly called PL), clung to the idea that the industrial working class was the exclusive agent of revolutionary change.

PL, which had started as a small Maoist group in the mid 1960s, vied by the end of the decade for control over national SDS. With its members’ tactical skill and talent for Marxist exegesis, PL gained a foothold in important campus chapters, among them Harvard SDS, and considerable influence in the organization as a whole. PL argued that the duty of students was to enhance workers’ struggles. As its main initiative, it tried to build “worker-student alliances” on campuses, while condemning militancy—and violence especially—as dangerous expressions of

“left-wing adventurism” divorced from “mass struggle.” Yet PL largely failed to create lasting alliances between students and workers, underscoring both the weaknesses of its political vision and the New Left’s isolation.

In its dogmatism and dour affect, PL elicited considerable criticism and even ridicule within the New Left. The future Weatherman Russell Neufeld had graduated in 1968 from Vermont’s Goddard College and then entered graduate school at Harvard. He recalls the Harvard PL chapter arguing that “there’s no such thing as black culture and white culture [but] only working-class culture and bourgeois culture.” “It occurred to me,” he joked years later, “that you could only say that in Harvard Yard.”83 The radical journalist Andrew Kopkind was unsparing in his derision, concluding in 1969: “PL peoples a Tolkein middle-earth of Marxist-Leninist hobbits and orcs, and speaks in a runic tongue intelli-gible only to such creatures. It is all consistent and utterly logical within its own confines. But that land at last is fantasy. The real world begins where PL ends.”84

PL’s chief national rival in SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM, pronounced “rim”), emerged in late 1968, beginning less as a formal faction than as a group of activists and friends with a similar political outlook and a shared dislike of PL. Those forming RYM coalesced in the Michigan-Ohio region of SDS, home to a new breed of SDS militant. Jim Mellen, immersing himself in the student organization upon his return from Africa, joined ranks with Bill Ayers, Diana Oughton, and