The Weather Underground
posted to www.marxmail.org on June 21, 2003
Currently showing at the Film Forum in New York City,
"The Weather Underground" now joins "Rebels With a Cause"
as a worthy and unstinting documentary about the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS). In this case, the focus is on the ultra-ultraleft faction that
evolved from scatterbrained street confrontations with the cops into terrorist
bombing attacks on government buildings.
Naming itself after the line "You don't need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows" in Bob Dylan's
"Subterranean Homesick Blues", the group was trying to convey its
belief that global revolution was an inescapable fact. That, at least, was the
way things seemed in 1970. Implicitly, the choice of this line betrayed the
middle-class impressionism of a layer of the student movement that preferred
raw action to theory and long-term strategic thinking. Despite lip service to
the Cuban, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, these activists had never
advanced beyond the unsophisticated New Left ideology of the early SDS. In the
final analysis, the Weathermen were simply involved in moralistic protests that
used bombs instead of candles.
The film effectively crosscuts interviews with veterans of
the Weather Underground and stock footage of their press conferences from the
1970s, when they were in the news as much as the Black Panthers or the Yippies.
With no exceptions, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert,
Bill Ayers, Naomi Jaffe, Todd Gitlin and Laura Whitehorn--now all in their
fifties and sixties--come across as rueful, chastened and ashamed. While none
have turned to the right, they give the impression of people who are more or
less politically exhausted.
Unfortunately, co-directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel, have
drawn upon former SDS leader Todd Gitlin to provide commentary on the sad
spectacle of the Weather Underground. While many of his points seem
unexceptionable, the implicit message is that he was an alternative to the
course that they took. As most people are aware, Gitlin was never a radical to
begin with and denounced the antiwar movement for not supporting Hubert
Humphrey in 1968. Today his main claim to fame is writing articles in the
bourgeois press attacking the ANSWER coalition, the Nader candidacy for
president and any other outbursts of radicalism to the left of the Democratic
Party.
When Naomi Jaffe first appeared on the screen, I was startled to see how much she looked like her mother who lived in the next village from me in the 1950s. The Jaffes were part of a small progressive milieu in the next village that included the Communist parents of her neighbor Allen Young, who became a New Left leader himself. After launching Liberation News Service, he became a pioneer gay activist. When we were in high school, other villagers viewed the Jaffes, the Youngs et al with suspicion. Not only were some reputed to be pro-Soviet, they were also rumored to have inter-racial parties at their homes, where blacks and whites danced with each other.
Although I never really had much contact with her, I used to
see Naomi Jaffe at the New School in New York City in 1965 to 1967, when she
and I were graduate students. I distinctly recall her hanging out with SDS'ers
in the cafeteria where every other word out of their mouths seemed to be about
revolution. When I began to become radicalized, I had little interest in idle
chatter and found myself drawn to the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and
the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), groups that seemed much more
disciplined and serious.
When I discovered that PLP's main area of activity was SDS,
I naturally chose to join the SWP since they were spearheading the antiwar
coalitions. Even though SDS organized the first antiwar demonstration in 1965,
they had decided within a year or so that this was not radical enough. At
least, this is what leaders like Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd thought.
Many rank-and-file SDS'ers continued to organize demonstrations on local
campuses, paying scant attention to the empty bombast of their leaders.
Frustration with the inability of the mass demonstrations to
end the war led to an escalation of tactical militancy. This was the signature
of the Weathermen, even before they went underground. The film shows Bill Ayers
walking along the street in a wealthy Chicago neighborhood that the Weathermen
chose as their battleground during the Days of Rage back in 1969. Proclaiming
that thousands of angry youth would join their window-breaking rampage, less
than 200 hard-core Weathermen and their supporters were beaten senseless by the
cops, while six were shot.
Ayers explains why they organized such an adventurist
action. He says that they were tired of playing by the cops' rules, which meant
getting a parade permit, staying within designated routes, etc. It was
necessary to challenge all this in a kind of tug-of-war between
"revolutionaries" and the forces of law and order. Victory would not
be measured by the size of the demonstration or the numbers of working people
won to the antiwar movement, but by the numbers of windows broken.
Unfortunately, this sort of illogic has never completely
disappeared. In a Counterpunch article, Benjamin Shepard, who had already
written a misty-eyed review of Bill Ayers' memoir in Monthly Review, complains:
"Instead of involving itself in any of the exciting or
fresh direct action stuff which involves not getting a police permit or lining
up speakers to preach to the converted, ANSWER was doing their best ground hog
day routine pushing for its third march in DC in six months."
While Shepard is not as addled as the black block types, who
seem intent on elevating "Days of Rage" tactics to a principle, he
doesn't seem to understand the purpose of demonstrations. They are not designed
to raise the adrenaline level of participants, but to convince others to take
part. It was only when antiwar demonstrations in the USA reached a critical
mass in the USA during the late 1960s and early 1970s that imperialism was
forced to retreat from an all-out military solution. If none of the
demonstrations seemed "exciting" or "fresh" to some
autoworker watching at home on his or her television, this was besides the
point. The whole point was to make it as *easy* as possible for them to
participate. While tear gas and billy club attacks might make for breathless
"I was there" type narratives in ensuing weeks, they are not
calculated to win fresh troops for the cause. If anything, it was the
exhaustion of tactical street militancy that led the Weathermen to opt for
bombing attacks.
When all this was going on, we Trotskyists felt a certain
kind of smug vindication. The Weathermen were being driven into the underground
and obscurity, while we had over 1500 members and branches in every city in the
country. While the Weathermen had failed to appreciate the importance of the
antiwar movement, we were capitalizing on it and poised for future growth.
If the failure to effectively put an end to the Vietnam War
had caused a section of the New Left to implode, the end of the Vietnam War
eventually led my own movement to implode as well. Leaving the Film Forum, I
meditated on the tendency of leftwing groups to go haywire. What did the SDS
and the SWP have in common? It is now clear to me that they shared an utter
inability to view themselves critically. If the SDS Weathermen could not
objectively assess the political impact of their ultraleftism, the SWP was not much
better. Announcing in 1976 that the working class in the USA was more radical
than at any time in the 20th century, the party leaders--who were as pigheaded
in their own way as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn--dispatched the membership
into factories and out of the mass movement, where they had been so effective.
By the late 1970s virtually the entire Weather Underground
had resurfaced and surrendered to the
cops. This was exactly the same moment that the American Trotskyist movement
had decided to go underground metaphorically speaking. In revolutionary
politics, fantasy is a deadly enemy, whether it is about "bringing the war
home" or about "lines of march" involving an industrial
proletariat that has not even begun to move.
Links:
1) Review of Rebels With a Cause:
(http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/rebels_with_a_cause.htm)
2) Ben Shepard Counterpunch article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/shepard06102003.html
3) Ben Shepard MR review of Bill Ayers memoir:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0202shepard.htm
4) Perceptive review of Ayers by Cathy Wilkerson, another
Weather Underground veteran:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/dec01wilkerson.htm