prisons -- issues -- political prisoner home page
--political prisoner listing -- David Gilbert --
SDS/WUO
SDS/WUO: Students for a Democratic Society and the
Weather Underground
David Gilbert
These essays were originally written for ONWARD
newspaper (Spring and Summer 2001), a journal of
anarchist news, opinion, theory, and strategy of today
(www.onwardnewspaper.org). They have been slightly
revised.
"We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is
precisely because of our love of life, because we
revel in the human spirit, that we became freedom
fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist
system."
From David's court statement
September 13, 1982 after his arrest.
In 1965, David Gilbert was the founding chairman of
the Vietnam Committee and a founding member of the SDS
chapter at Columbia University, New York City. In
1967, he wrote the first national SDS pamphlet on
"U.S. Imperialism." He participated in the Columbia
strike of 1968 and later joined the underground
resistance as a member of the Weather Underground
(WUO) in 1970. He is doing a life sentence after being
busted for his support role in an expropriation by a
unit of the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 "Brinks
case".
Introduction
We study the past to draw lessons to help us liberate
the future. Today's young activists are to be
commended for showing much more interest than my 1960s
generation did in learning from earlier movements.
Still, I want to alert you to two characteristic
errors in such study.
1) In looking at victorious revolutions in other
countries, we mechanically applied lessons from far
more advanced levels to our own embryonic stage.
2) In looking at past U.S. struggles, we saw errors as
mainly the result of wrong ideas in the heads of the
leaders of the day. Thus, we implicitly flattered
ourselves as outstanding individuals who would
naturally be more principled and intelligent. This
approach way underestimates the material forces --
such as the depth of white supremacy or the repressive
powers of the state -- that produce repeated errors.
This brief two-part history is neither detailed nor
definitive. It is written by a participant and
partisan, with the goal of contributing to today's
struggles.
Students for a Democratic Society
The U.S. was rocked by widespread and tumultuous
protests in the 1960s. SDS was the organization at the
hearts of the radical movement among predominantly
white college students. It drew special vitality from
its close relationship to the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the mainly Black
youthful and militant civil rights group doing the
most courageous field work in the South. SDS also
became the spearhead for what became a massive
movement against the war in Vietnam by organizing the
first national demonstration against it on 4/17/65.
Back then, it was unheard of to challenge "our"
government's "foreign policy," so just to call for
such a protest was radical, and the turnout of 20,000
people was very impressive. The work for that march
also led to a defining break from SDS's parent
organization, the League for Industrial Democracy,
when we defied their orders to exclude Communists.
SDS, founded in 1960, received its early definition
from The Port Huron Statement of 1962. The core
concept was participatory democracy: beyond electing
leaders, people need to directly participate in
discussing and determining the decisions that affect
their lives, including in the economic sphere. The
compelling issues were the Civil rights movement and
peace (opposing the cold war and nuclear bombs). The
defining early work of SDS, along with its alliance
with SNCC, was the Economic Research and Action
Project (ERAP). Students went to live in poor
communities to "build an interracial movement of the
poor." While organizing success was limited, the
experience was profound.
SDS hummed with a youthful vibrancy. Most of us
rejected both red-baiting and the Soviet model of
"socialism." Both red (communist) and black
(anarchist) flags flew at our conventions. And we
tried to apply participatory democracy to our own
organization, with mixed results. The challenge to
hierarchy felt liberating, even if often chaotic and
inefficient. But there was a real problem of "the
tyranny of structurelessness," where decisions are
made in an informal and thereby unaccountable way.
The escalations of the war in Vietnam and SNCC's
dramatic advance, in the summer of 1966, from civil
rights to Black power posed new challenges and led to
some tension between the old guard, steeped in ERAP,
and newly activated student militants. SDS wasn't
prepared for how the anti-war movement would mushroom,
but did provide a radical and militant presence within
the much broader coalition. SDS still naively defined
the system as "corporate liberalism" as we grappled to
put together our anti-racism and anti-war impetus with
an economic critique.
The impact when the Black Panther Party burst onto the
national scene in the fall of 1966 was electric. Their
armed self-defense of their community from police
brutality and their community self-help programs (free
breakfast for schoolchildren, free clinics, free
schools) provided a living example of revolutionary
nationalism and self-determination for oppressed
people. Several other revolutionary nationalist
groups, all drawing on the teachings of Malcolm X,
emerged in this period. At the same time, the first
photos were published of Vietnamese children burned by
U.S. napalm bombs -- which drove us crazy about
stopping the war. SDS slogan became "from protest to
resistance," with a focus on draft resistance.
Meanwhile, the inspiration of the civil rights
movement, the key and assertive work of women in it,
and the problems of sexism within the left, all led to
a re-birth of women's liberation. An early example was
SDS's first ever all women's workshop at our 6/67
national convention. The air crackled with the energy
and creativity the women generated. But their report
to the plenary got a raucous reception -- including
catcalls and paper airplanes -- from many SDS men.
Given there had been little history of struggle, it
isn't surprising that men were still very sexist, but
such blatant hostility was shocking for an
organization that prided itself on always siding with
the oppressed. That debacle was an example of the
problems that pushed many women to leave the "left"
and contributed to an unfortunate tension between
anti-imperialism and feminism, which weakened both.
Many principled women -- strengthened by the often
unsung examples and leadership of women of color --
continued to struggle on both fronts, but it took an
Amazonian effort to do so.
A high tide of struggle crested in 1968, with the
Vietnamese's powerful Tet offensive and over 100
ghetto uprisings in the U.S. after Martin Luther King,
Jr., was assassinated. These events inspired SDS-led
student strikes that shut down scores of colleges. We
began to name and analyze the system as "imperialism."
Che Guevara's slogan of "2, 3, many Vietnams" pointed
to how such a colossus could be overextended and
eventually defeated. The Black rebellion was
accompanied by militant upsurges of Native Americans,
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Asians in the U.S.
The government's response was a vicious campaign of
disruption and violence, called COINTELPRO for
counterinsurgency program (See Agents of Repression by
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall). More than 30
Panthers were killed in 1968-71, and over 1,000 were
jailed. Many other groups and activists were attacked
as well. While that level of repression generally
wasn't used against whites, we did experience
harassment, arrests and the threat of a wartime draft.
More importantly, we identified with the Panthers and
had vowed to stand by them. As rapidly as the movement
had grown, we were still a small minority in white
America. We had started out thinking all that was
needed was to "shake the moral conscience of America."
We now found ourselves confronting the most powerful
government in world history.
Under this tremendous pressure, SDS split apart along
the basic fault-line of the U.S. bedrock of white
supremacy: between the desire for a potential majority
base among white Americans and the exigent need for
militant solidarity with Black and other third world
struggles. One side (invoking a Eurocentric Marxism)
said that revolution was about the working class, and
used that as a left cover for retreat from fighting
alongside Vietnam and the Panthers, claiming "all
nationalism is reactionary." The other side (inspired
by Marxist-led third world struggles) rightly saw
solidarity with national liberation as a priority for
any revolutionary movement worthy of that name.
However, we wrongly abandoned efforts to organize
significant numbers of white people, which also
limited our base for anti-racist activism.
While the split moved along the horns of a real
dilemma, there was a chance -- although it certainly
would have been difficult to achieve -- for a larger
and more working class movement base without pandering
to racist trade union traditions. That strategy would
have entailed reaching the growing youth rebellion
with anti-imperialist politics, as well as allying
with the emerging women's movement.
We were too overwhelmed by the stark life-and-death
challenges, combined with our own inexperience and
weaknesses, to implement such a strategy in practice.
SDS splintered apart in 1969-70. One result was a
series of formations that more or less reproduced the
traditional white left opportunism toward the white
working class. Another result was the Weather
Underground Organization, an unprecedented, if
seriously flawed group that carried out six years of
armed actions in solidarity with national liberation
struggles.
Weather Underground Organization
In a society where every single movie and TV program
showed that the FBI "always got their man," the
Weather Underground eluded capture and sustained armed
action for six years. In white supremacist Amerika
where historically just about every promising radical
movement among whites (populism, women's suffrage,
trade unionism) slid into compromising with racism,
the WUO was known, at least at it's best, for
solidarity with national liberation. In a world where
"legitimate" governments bombed villages and
assassinated activists but decried any armed
resistance as "terrorist," the WUO carried out more
than 20 bombings against government and corporate
violence without killing anyone or so much as
scratching a civilian.
The springboard for these advances was the historical
context. The 60s and 70s were unprecedented in world
history for the number of revolutions in a short time,
as national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and
Latin America overthrew colonialism and
neocolonialism; it was also a high tide of Black and
other third world struggles within the U.S. These
events spurred growing radicalism among white people.
The WUO was not formed as a narrow conspiracy but
instead was a focal point within a much broader surge
of anti-war militancy, as thousands of military
buildings and Bank of America branches were burned to
the ground and as hundreds of thousands of people
joined demonstrations that broke government windows,
disrupted meetings of bigwigs and resisted arrest.
Weather's exciting breakthroughs coexisted with costly
mistakes. The earliest and most visible came during
the first six months (late 69 to early 70), while we
were still aboveground; our sickening and inexcusable
glorification of violence, which grievously
contradicted the humanist basis for our politics and
militancy. We thereby handed effective ammunition to
all who wanted to discredit our priority on third
world struggles and our move toward armed struggle
(AS). To this day, almost all "history" about the WUO
makes the mania of those six months the whole story,
without looking at our correcting of that error and
the ensuing six years of solid and humane
anti-imperialist action.
In my opinion, the basis for our early aberration was
in the life-and-death crisis that split apart SDS. We
were white middle class kids who -- witnessing
saturation bombings of Vietnam and the murder of the
Black Panthers we admired -- felt compelled to make
the leap into AS. Instead of admitting our fear and
inexperience and developing a suitable transitional
strategy, we psyched ourselves up by glorifying
violence and with macho challenges about individual
courage. This frenzy was accompanied by basic related
errors: 1) Sectarianism -- a scathing contempt for all
who wouldn't directly assist AS (the sectarianism was
mutual as most of the white left vehemently sought to
discredit AS) 2) Militarism -- making the military
deeds and daring of the group all important rather
than the political principles and the need to build a
movement on all levels.
Early Weather's grave sins of commission were
glaringly visible. The opposite movement sins of
omission, that usually aren't even noticed, can be
even more lethal. The terrible passivity of most of
the white left to the early attacks on the Panthers
gave the government a signal that it would not face
widespread political costs for proceeding with its
full-fledged COINTELPRO campaign, which killed scores
and jailed thousands of Black, Native and Latino
activists.
Weather's militarism culminated in 3/6/70 when a
frantic bomb-making effort, including anti-personnel
weapons, resulted in an accidental explosion in a
safehouse (known as the Townhouse explosion) that
killed three of our own beautiful, young comrades.
This tragedy set off intense internal struggle that
resulted in a qualitative change to a more integrated
use of AS to help mobilize and radicalize a potential
mass base among white youth. Just two months later,
young people poured into the streets over a million
strong in angry response to the state's killing of
four anti-war protesters at Kent State University, and
student strikes occurred on nearly 1,000 campuses
across the U.S. At the same time, the dire need for
anti-racist leadership was painfully revealed by the
failure to respond in a similar way when the police
killed two Black students at Jackson State.
The WUO's recovery from militarism didn't magically
put everything into perfect balance. While seeing a
potential base in youth culture was right, we quickly
repeated traditional missteps based in white
supremacy. For example: 1) Our dearth of material aid
for Black, Latino and Native armed groups (even
underground, whites had much greater access to
resources and faced much less danger of random police
harassment); 2) To appeal to white youth, we endorsed
"soft drugs" (pot and LSD), with little appreciation
of drugs as a form of chemical warfare against the
ghettos and barrios; 3) We failed to respond to the
Panther 21's very constructive criticism of our
initial backsliding on drugs and militancy; 4) There
were subsequent moments of awful inaction, such as
during the Native American occupation and government
siege of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Not surprisingly, our other major internal weaknesses
were based in sexism, heterosexism and class. Women's
participation and percentage of leadership were very
strong, but in practice, a woman had to be part of a
heterosexual couple to be a top leader. We had little
program around women's liberation, and we failed to
make a serious effort for the needed alliance between
anti-imperialism and feminism. Internal struggle on
sexism was very inadequate, which dovetailed with a
defacto homophobic culture. While many lesbian and gay
comrades felt the strength to come out while
underground, there wasn't real space for an affirming
L/G culture; out L/Gs didn't make it to leadership
positions; and we had no political program around L/G
issues. Similarly, our middle class background meant
we did a poor job at outreach to more working class
sectors of youth.
There were related problems in our internal life. We
embraced the theory of democratic-centralism; but in
practice, the organization was very hierarchical.
Leadership tended to become manipulative and
commandist, while cadre tended to curry favor with
leadership. Criticism/self-criticism was used to
compete and maneuver for power rather than to build
people. While a strong organization was key to
survival (and lone fugitives had a much harder time),
that reality made social ostracism a potent bludgeon
against political dissent. As far as I know, there is
still no clear-cut successful model for combining the
two critical needs of a fully democratic internal
process and of tight discipline for fighting a
ruthless state.
To me, a crucial lesson is that activists must
consciously grapple with the powerful pull of ego that
can lead us to put our own position and leadership
above advancing the interest and power of the
oppressed. Organizationally, we need to strive to live
our political ideals -- anti-racism, feminism,
democracy, humanism -- in our personal relationships.
Despite these serious weaknesses, six years of
impressive successes resulted from what was right
about anti-imperialism. Contrary to the spy movie
mystifications that are all about sophisticated
techniques and technology, our survival underground
was based on popular support from radical youth and
the anti-war movement. That was the key to solving
needs such as ID, money and safehouses. There were
moments when the FBI hunt was breathing down our neck,
but popular support meant that information was kept
from the state and instead flowed to the guerrillas.
Our stage of struggle was "armed propaganda," with no
illusion of yet contending for military power.
Instead, the purposes of actions were to: 1) draw off
some of the repressive heat concentrated on Black,
Native and Latino movements, 2) create a leading
political example of white solidarity with national
liberation, 3) educate about key political issues, 4)
identify the institutions most responsible for
oppression, and 5) encourage others to intensify
activism despite state repression. We also provided
examples of non-armed struggle (i.e. spray painting),
pursued dialogue with the aboveground movement by
writing to and reading responses in radical
newspapers, and even developed our own underground
print shop. We wrote and published the book Prairie
Fire, a well-developed statement of the politics of
revolutionary anti-imperialism.
The WUO's more than 20 bombings included the U.S.
Capitol Building after the U.S. expanded the war in
Indochina by invading Laos in Febuary 1971; the NY
State prison headquarters after the 9/71 massacre at
Attica; and Kennecott Copper Company on the
anniversary of the bloody 1973 coup against democracy
in Chile. Every action was accompanied by a
well-reasoned communiqué articulating the political
issues. While there are no 100% guarantees, we placed
the highest priority on avoiding civilian casualties,
and fortunately succeeded.
The FBI never broke the WUO, but in 1976-77 we
imploded from our own weaknesses. The downfall came
from drifting back into the traditional failures of
the white left, with the politics of the
"multinational working class," and a plan to surface
from the underground to be central to "leading" the
"whole U.S. revolution." These positions negated the
independent and leading role of people of color within
the U.S. and at the same time undercut autonomous
women's formations. When those forces sharply
criticized us, we -- with our vitality sapped by the
lack of internal democracy -- couldn't deal with it
and instead split apart amid harsh recriminations.
The WUO was born in the era of the breathtaking rise
of national liberation, in opposition to the U.S.
foundation of white supremacy and on the heels of
exciting movement victories met by fierce government
repression. Our demise was also rooted in heavy
historical realities: 1) COINTELPRO (along with
internal weaknesses) had decimated the Black, Native
and Latino leadership that had inspired progressive
motion among whites; 2) our strongest base, the
anti-war movement, shrank drastically after the U.S.'s
1973 withdrawal from Vietnam; 3) we didn't realize
that we hadn't done nearly enough to develop anti-war
consciousness into a deeper anti-racism and
anti-imperialism.
In learning from history, we need to break from the
mainstream culture that defines people as either
purely "good guys" or purely "bad guys," which can
lead to the self-delusion that getting certain basics
down guarantees that everything else we do is right.
The WUO made giant errors along with trailblazing
advances. Hopefully both are rich in lessons for a new
generation of activists.
Note: These essays, plus introductory notes and
timeline, can be ordered as a pamphlet from AK Press
(pamphlet published by AG Press).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
prisons -- issues -- political prisoner home page --
political prisoner listing -- David Gilbert
This page is maintained by the Prison Activist
Resource Center.
August 2, 2003
--political prisoner listing -- David Gilbert --
SDS/WUO
SDS/WUO: Students for a Democratic Society and the
Weather Underground
David Gilbert
These essays were originally written for ONWARD
newspaper (Spring and Summer 2001), a journal of
anarchist news, opinion, theory, and strategy of today
(www.onwardnewspaper.org). They have been slightly
revised.
"We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is
precisely because of our love of life, because we
revel in the human spirit, that we became freedom
fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist
system."
From David's court statement
September 13, 1982 after his arrest.
In 1965, David Gilbert was the founding chairman of
the Vietnam Committee and a founding member of the SDS
chapter at Columbia University, New York City. In
1967, he wrote the first national SDS pamphlet on
"U.S. Imperialism." He participated in the Columbia
strike of 1968 and later joined the underground
resistance as a member of the Weather Underground
(WUO) in 1970. He is doing a life sentence after being
busted for his support role in an expropriation by a
unit of the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 "Brinks
case".
Introduction
We study the past to draw lessons to help us liberate
the future. Today's young activists are to be
commended for showing much more interest than my 1960s
generation did in learning from earlier movements.
Still, I want to alert you to two characteristic
errors in such study.
1) In looking at victorious revolutions in other
countries, we mechanically applied lessons from far
more advanced levels to our own embryonic stage.
2) In looking at past U.S. struggles, we saw errors as
mainly the result of wrong ideas in the heads of the
leaders of the day. Thus, we implicitly flattered
ourselves as outstanding individuals who would
naturally be more principled and intelligent. This
approach way underestimates the material forces --
such as the depth of white supremacy or the repressive
powers of the state -- that produce repeated errors.
This brief two-part history is neither detailed nor
definitive. It is written by a participant and
partisan, with the goal of contributing to today's
struggles.
Students for a Democratic Society
The U.S. was rocked by widespread and tumultuous
protests in the 1960s. SDS was the organization at the
hearts of the radical movement among predominantly
white college students. It drew special vitality from
its close relationship to the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the mainly Black
youthful and militant civil rights group doing the
most courageous field work in the South. SDS also
became the spearhead for what became a massive
movement against the war in Vietnam by organizing the
first national demonstration against it on 4/17/65.
Back then, it was unheard of to challenge "our"
government's "foreign policy," so just to call for
such a protest was radical, and the turnout of 20,000
people was very impressive. The work for that march
also led to a defining break from SDS's parent
organization, the League for Industrial Democracy,
when we defied their orders to exclude Communists.
SDS, founded in 1960, received its early definition
from The Port Huron Statement of 1962. The core
concept was participatory democracy: beyond electing
leaders, people need to directly participate in
discussing and determining the decisions that affect
their lives, including in the economic sphere. The
compelling issues were the Civil rights movement and
peace (opposing the cold war and nuclear bombs). The
defining early work of SDS, along with its alliance
with SNCC, was the Economic Research and Action
Project (ERAP). Students went to live in poor
communities to "build an interracial movement of the
poor." While organizing success was limited, the
experience was profound.
SDS hummed with a youthful vibrancy. Most of us
rejected both red-baiting and the Soviet model of
"socialism." Both red (communist) and black
(anarchist) flags flew at our conventions. And we
tried to apply participatory democracy to our own
organization, with mixed results. The challenge to
hierarchy felt liberating, even if often chaotic and
inefficient. But there was a real problem of "the
tyranny of structurelessness," where decisions are
made in an informal and thereby unaccountable way.
The escalations of the war in Vietnam and SNCC's
dramatic advance, in the summer of 1966, from civil
rights to Black power posed new challenges and led to
some tension between the old guard, steeped in ERAP,
and newly activated student militants. SDS wasn't
prepared for how the anti-war movement would mushroom,
but did provide a radical and militant presence within
the much broader coalition. SDS still naively defined
the system as "corporate liberalism" as we grappled to
put together our anti-racism and anti-war impetus with
an economic critique.
The impact when the Black Panther Party burst onto the
national scene in the fall of 1966 was electric. Their
armed self-defense of their community from police
brutality and their community self-help programs (free
breakfast for schoolchildren, free clinics, free
schools) provided a living example of revolutionary
nationalism and self-determination for oppressed
people. Several other revolutionary nationalist
groups, all drawing on the teachings of Malcolm X,
emerged in this period. At the same time, the first
photos were published of Vietnamese children burned by
U.S. napalm bombs -- which drove us crazy about
stopping the war. SDS slogan became "from protest to
resistance," with a focus on draft resistance.
Meanwhile, the inspiration of the civil rights
movement, the key and assertive work of women in it,
and the problems of sexism within the left, all led to
a re-birth of women's liberation. An early example was
SDS's first ever all women's workshop at our 6/67
national convention. The air crackled with the energy
and creativity the women generated. But their report
to the plenary got a raucous reception -- including
catcalls and paper airplanes -- from many SDS men.
Given there had been little history of struggle, it
isn't surprising that men were still very sexist, but
such blatant hostility was shocking for an
organization that prided itself on always siding with
the oppressed. That debacle was an example of the
problems that pushed many women to leave the "left"
and contributed to an unfortunate tension between
anti-imperialism and feminism, which weakened both.
Many principled women -- strengthened by the often
unsung examples and leadership of women of color --
continued to struggle on both fronts, but it took an
Amazonian effort to do so.
A high tide of struggle crested in 1968, with the
Vietnamese's powerful Tet offensive and over 100
ghetto uprisings in the U.S. after Martin Luther King,
Jr., was assassinated. These events inspired SDS-led
student strikes that shut down scores of colleges. We
began to name and analyze the system as "imperialism."
Che Guevara's slogan of "2, 3, many Vietnams" pointed
to how such a colossus could be overextended and
eventually defeated. The Black rebellion was
accompanied by militant upsurges of Native Americans,
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Asians in the U.S.
The government's response was a vicious campaign of
disruption and violence, called COINTELPRO for
counterinsurgency program (See Agents of Repression by
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall). More than 30
Panthers were killed in 1968-71, and over 1,000 were
jailed. Many other groups and activists were attacked
as well. While that level of repression generally
wasn't used against whites, we did experience
harassment, arrests and the threat of a wartime draft.
More importantly, we identified with the Panthers and
had vowed to stand by them. As rapidly as the movement
had grown, we were still a small minority in white
America. We had started out thinking all that was
needed was to "shake the moral conscience of America."
We now found ourselves confronting the most powerful
government in world history.
Under this tremendous pressure, SDS split apart along
the basic fault-line of the U.S. bedrock of white
supremacy: between the desire for a potential majority
base among white Americans and the exigent need for
militant solidarity with Black and other third world
struggles. One side (invoking a Eurocentric Marxism)
said that revolution was about the working class, and
used that as a left cover for retreat from fighting
alongside Vietnam and the Panthers, claiming "all
nationalism is reactionary." The other side (inspired
by Marxist-led third world struggles) rightly saw
solidarity with national liberation as a priority for
any revolutionary movement worthy of that name.
However, we wrongly abandoned efforts to organize
significant numbers of white people, which also
limited our base for anti-racist activism.
While the split moved along the horns of a real
dilemma, there was a chance -- although it certainly
would have been difficult to achieve -- for a larger
and more working class movement base without pandering
to racist trade union traditions. That strategy would
have entailed reaching the growing youth rebellion
with anti-imperialist politics, as well as allying
with the emerging women's movement.
We were too overwhelmed by the stark life-and-death
challenges, combined with our own inexperience and
weaknesses, to implement such a strategy in practice.
SDS splintered apart in 1969-70. One result was a
series of formations that more or less reproduced the
traditional white left opportunism toward the white
working class. Another result was the Weather
Underground Organization, an unprecedented, if
seriously flawed group that carried out six years of
armed actions in solidarity with national liberation
struggles.
Weather Underground Organization
In a society where every single movie and TV program
showed that the FBI "always got their man," the
Weather Underground eluded capture and sustained armed
action for six years. In white supremacist Amerika
where historically just about every promising radical
movement among whites (populism, women's suffrage,
trade unionism) slid into compromising with racism,
the WUO was known, at least at it's best, for
solidarity with national liberation. In a world where
"legitimate" governments bombed villages and
assassinated activists but decried any armed
resistance as "terrorist," the WUO carried out more
than 20 bombings against government and corporate
violence without killing anyone or so much as
scratching a civilian.
The springboard for these advances was the historical
context. The 60s and 70s were unprecedented in world
history for the number of revolutions in a short time,
as national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and
Latin America overthrew colonialism and
neocolonialism; it was also a high tide of Black and
other third world struggles within the U.S. These
events spurred growing radicalism among white people.
The WUO was not formed as a narrow conspiracy but
instead was a focal point within a much broader surge
of anti-war militancy, as thousands of military
buildings and Bank of America branches were burned to
the ground and as hundreds of thousands of people
joined demonstrations that broke government windows,
disrupted meetings of bigwigs and resisted arrest.
Weather's exciting breakthroughs coexisted with costly
mistakes. The earliest and most visible came during
the first six months (late 69 to early 70), while we
were still aboveground; our sickening and inexcusable
glorification of violence, which grievously
contradicted the humanist basis for our politics and
militancy. We thereby handed effective ammunition to
all who wanted to discredit our priority on third
world struggles and our move toward armed struggle
(AS). To this day, almost all "history" about the WUO
makes the mania of those six months the whole story,
without looking at our correcting of that error and
the ensuing six years of solid and humane
anti-imperialist action.
In my opinion, the basis for our early aberration was
in the life-and-death crisis that split apart SDS. We
were white middle class kids who -- witnessing
saturation bombings of Vietnam and the murder of the
Black Panthers we admired -- felt compelled to make
the leap into AS. Instead of admitting our fear and
inexperience and developing a suitable transitional
strategy, we psyched ourselves up by glorifying
violence and with macho challenges about individual
courage. This frenzy was accompanied by basic related
errors: 1) Sectarianism -- a scathing contempt for all
who wouldn't directly assist AS (the sectarianism was
mutual as most of the white left vehemently sought to
discredit AS) 2) Militarism -- making the military
deeds and daring of the group all important rather
than the political principles and the need to build a
movement on all levels.
Early Weather's grave sins of commission were
glaringly visible. The opposite movement sins of
omission, that usually aren't even noticed, can be
even more lethal. The terrible passivity of most of
the white left to the early attacks on the Panthers
gave the government a signal that it would not face
widespread political costs for proceeding with its
full-fledged COINTELPRO campaign, which killed scores
and jailed thousands of Black, Native and Latino
activists.
Weather's militarism culminated in 3/6/70 when a
frantic bomb-making effort, including anti-personnel
weapons, resulted in an accidental explosion in a
safehouse (known as the Townhouse explosion) that
killed three of our own beautiful, young comrades.
This tragedy set off intense internal struggle that
resulted in a qualitative change to a more integrated
use of AS to help mobilize and radicalize a potential
mass base among white youth. Just two months later,
young people poured into the streets over a million
strong in angry response to the state's killing of
four anti-war protesters at Kent State University, and
student strikes occurred on nearly 1,000 campuses
across the U.S. At the same time, the dire need for
anti-racist leadership was painfully revealed by the
failure to respond in a similar way when the police
killed two Black students at Jackson State.
The WUO's recovery from militarism didn't magically
put everything into perfect balance. While seeing a
potential base in youth culture was right, we quickly
repeated traditional missteps based in white
supremacy. For example: 1) Our dearth of material aid
for Black, Latino and Native armed groups (even
underground, whites had much greater access to
resources and faced much less danger of random police
harassment); 2) To appeal to white youth, we endorsed
"soft drugs" (pot and LSD), with little appreciation
of drugs as a form of chemical warfare against the
ghettos and barrios; 3) We failed to respond to the
Panther 21's very constructive criticism of our
initial backsliding on drugs and militancy; 4) There
were subsequent moments of awful inaction, such as
during the Native American occupation and government
siege of Wounded Knee in 1973.
Not surprisingly, our other major internal weaknesses
were based in sexism, heterosexism and class. Women's
participation and percentage of leadership were very
strong, but in practice, a woman had to be part of a
heterosexual couple to be a top leader. We had little
program around women's liberation, and we failed to
make a serious effort for the needed alliance between
anti-imperialism and feminism. Internal struggle on
sexism was very inadequate, which dovetailed with a
defacto homophobic culture. While many lesbian and gay
comrades felt the strength to come out while
underground, there wasn't real space for an affirming
L/G culture; out L/Gs didn't make it to leadership
positions; and we had no political program around L/G
issues. Similarly, our middle class background meant
we did a poor job at outreach to more working class
sectors of youth.
There were related problems in our internal life. We
embraced the theory of democratic-centralism; but in
practice, the organization was very hierarchical.
Leadership tended to become manipulative and
commandist, while cadre tended to curry favor with
leadership. Criticism/self-criticism was used to
compete and maneuver for power rather than to build
people. While a strong organization was key to
survival (and lone fugitives had a much harder time),
that reality made social ostracism a potent bludgeon
against political dissent. As far as I know, there is
still no clear-cut successful model for combining the
two critical needs of a fully democratic internal
process and of tight discipline for fighting a
ruthless state.
To me, a crucial lesson is that activists must
consciously grapple with the powerful pull of ego that
can lead us to put our own position and leadership
above advancing the interest and power of the
oppressed. Organizationally, we need to strive to live
our political ideals -- anti-racism, feminism,
democracy, humanism -- in our personal relationships.
Despite these serious weaknesses, six years of
impressive successes resulted from what was right
about anti-imperialism. Contrary to the spy movie
mystifications that are all about sophisticated
techniques and technology, our survival underground
was based on popular support from radical youth and
the anti-war movement. That was the key to solving
needs such as ID, money and safehouses. There were
moments when the FBI hunt was breathing down our neck,
but popular support meant that information was kept
from the state and instead flowed to the guerrillas.
Our stage of struggle was "armed propaganda," with no
illusion of yet contending for military power.
Instead, the purposes of actions were to: 1) draw off
some of the repressive heat concentrated on Black,
Native and Latino movements, 2) create a leading
political example of white solidarity with national
liberation, 3) educate about key political issues, 4)
identify the institutions most responsible for
oppression, and 5) encourage others to intensify
activism despite state repression. We also provided
examples of non-armed struggle (i.e. spray painting),
pursued dialogue with the aboveground movement by
writing to and reading responses in radical
newspapers, and even developed our own underground
print shop. We wrote and published the book Prairie
Fire, a well-developed statement of the politics of
revolutionary anti-imperialism.
The WUO's more than 20 bombings included the U.S.
Capitol Building after the U.S. expanded the war in
Indochina by invading Laos in Febuary 1971; the NY
State prison headquarters after the 9/71 massacre at
Attica; and Kennecott Copper Company on the
anniversary of the bloody 1973 coup against democracy
in Chile. Every action was accompanied by a
well-reasoned communiqué articulating the political
issues. While there are no 100% guarantees, we placed
the highest priority on avoiding civilian casualties,
and fortunately succeeded.
The FBI never broke the WUO, but in 1976-77 we
imploded from our own weaknesses. The downfall came
from drifting back into the traditional failures of
the white left, with the politics of the
"multinational working class," and a plan to surface
from the underground to be central to "leading" the
"whole U.S. revolution." These positions negated the
independent and leading role of people of color within
the U.S. and at the same time undercut autonomous
women's formations. When those forces sharply
criticized us, we -- with our vitality sapped by the
lack of internal democracy -- couldn't deal with it
and instead split apart amid harsh recriminations.
The WUO was born in the era of the breathtaking rise
of national liberation, in opposition to the U.S.
foundation of white supremacy and on the heels of
exciting movement victories met by fierce government
repression. Our demise was also rooted in heavy
historical realities: 1) COINTELPRO (along with
internal weaknesses) had decimated the Black, Native
and Latino leadership that had inspired progressive
motion among whites; 2) our strongest base, the
anti-war movement, shrank drastically after the U.S.'s
1973 withdrawal from Vietnam; 3) we didn't realize
that we hadn't done nearly enough to develop anti-war
consciousness into a deeper anti-racism and
anti-imperialism.
In learning from history, we need to break from the
mainstream culture that defines people as either
purely "good guys" or purely "bad guys," which can
lead to the self-delusion that getting certain basics
down guarantees that everything else we do is right.
The WUO made giant errors along with trailblazing
advances. Hopefully both are rich in lessons for a new
generation of activists.
Note: These essays, plus introductory notes and
timeline, can be ordered as a pamphlet from AK Press
(pamphlet published by AG Press).
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August 2, 2003
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