An introduction to "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
2009 March
The following text of "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" was transcribed by MIWS directly from New Left Notes, June 18, 1969. This has some differences from another copy of the same essay that was available on the Web.
Today, organizations both to the right of Weatherman, later the Weather Underground, (loosely, "the Weathermen") and to its supposed left are spreading falsities about the Weathermen's line for sectarian organizational purposes and to recruit individuals on historical, Liberal and unscientific bases. These include social-democrats, and nihilist crackpots either claiming to be original or claiming to have rediscovered the most advanced Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s. Though MIWS does not care about those purposes specifically and those individuals, it is necessary clarify what the Weathermen thought by publishing its own words. The social-democrats and crackpots draw from historians and commentators influenced by social-democratic and Trotskyist myths about the Weathermen and whose readers often won't read the primary sources the historians and commentators claim to describe. In this preface of sorts to "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," this writer offers an evaluation of the Weathermen's method and theory from the standpoint of contemporary Maoism.
Obviously, 2008 U.$. presidential campaigning made use of the Weathermen. Even Barack Obama benefited, indirectly by attracting the support of people who were college students and professors in the 1960s and 1970s -- intellectuals and people who became "progressive" Democrats or stayed pre-scientific-communist. Other sixties-radical supporters of Obama aside, Bill Ayers is an intellectual associated with the most promising of historical Euro-Amerikan radicalism, and to some extent the juxtaposition of Obama and Ayers regardless of details is assuring for whites with radical pasts and people with vacillating petty-bourgeois intellectual ideas who might otherwise feel less confident about supporting Obama. Though McCain supporters used Bill Ayers to rally Republicans and attract Archie Bunker-type Democrats old enough to remember the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), MIWS is not trying to recruit Republican activists, Archie Bunker or the pre-scientific intelligentsia to the Maoist cause.
Ironically, the U.$. presidential campaign noise around Ayers may make it easier for people to study the Weathermen without arousing suspicion of being attracted to terrorism, so much so that reactionary activists utilizing the Weathermen as a pariah may have done the most to bring the Weathermen's writings to the Internet -- a sad statement on the English-speaking so-called communist movement. This also means that more people will be studying Students for a Democratic Society, and 1960s and 1970s Amerikan radicalism, than Third World progressive movements -- an opening for more racist possibilities in the international supposed communist movement.
Contrary to the impression dishonest white-nationalist pseudo-socialists aka fascists are trying to create that the Weathermen was an insignificant blip even by size-ist standards, thousands of U.$. whites supported the Weathermen at one point after the Revolutionary Youth Movement had split. At the same time, it has to be said that most of those people ended up as revisionist/social-democrat, Democrats, lifestyle-centered, or post-modernist/post-structural academics. Some, highly politicized and the most gung-ho of the countercultural movement, ended up in U.$. imperialist circles wanting to bring the sexual revolution and hip music to Muslim proletarians, in Afghanistan and other places. It could only be said that the whole of Euro-Amerikan proletarian internationalism was a blip, not just the Weathermen.
One cliché in talking about the Weathermen is to say that some of the Weathermen's ideas or intentions were correct, but that its strategy was wrong. By contrast, the present writer would argue that the Weathermen's theory was wrong on crucial points (though better than the backwards-ass white-nationalists with whom they struggled), but aspects of the Weathermen's practice were correct -- and I am not talking about the blowing-up-buildings part. 1) The Weathermen took responsibility for its actions in general as a white organization and did not try to create an impression of itself as being multinational -- for example, with tokens or by forming loose and watery relationships with Third World individuals, and by making those associations public instead of emphasizing anonymity -- or pretend to be Third World people themselves. (The Weather Underground Organization was sociologically and by its own description a white organization. This writer intends no ad hominem by talking about the Weathermen as a white organization.) 2) In connection to the previous point, the Weathermen had a particular understanding of the integrationism problem, which it did not try to solve by uniting with fascists like others did, and pointed to the connection between multinational co-organization and integrationism in the United $tates. The Weathermen's practice in this regard is looking better than ever, even though degeneration of Revolutionary Youth Movement I (RYM I) people may have contributed to postmodernism and liquidationism, in contexts where white parties did not form and where non-party organizations of whites were still viewed as useless. The Weathermen associated integration in society with continued Black-white differences, and integration in organizing with white paternalism; today, integration without internal colony liberation is clearly super-profit integration, multicultural imperialist parasitism and war, and permanent multinational vanguard organizations in the United $tates as MIWS would argue are based primarily on integrationism. Also, multinational co-organizing, particularly in organizations that have not read and understood Joreen on informal structure, in white-majority English-speaking parasite countries may lead to racist sectarianism and backstabbing when struggle is difficult. Near the end of its existence, after the Vietnam War had ended, the Weather Underground was moving toward multinational party-building and away from its previous approach.
Early in its existence, the predecessor organization of the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA, had a position on Black-white co-organizing closer to the Weathermen's, in the context of the Black Panther Party. Now, alleged offshoots of the Revolutionary Communist Party may be found denying that party's whiteness to the point of blaming some of its reactionary ideas existing since the 1970s on Black and Latino members, even though internal colony vanguard leaders had shot down those ideas, dividing oppressed nationalities and the united front. The term "multinational proletariat" and a history of assimilation of non-white groups in the 1970s are in effect used as a cover for Euro-Amerikan counterrevolution. So, in addition to a general accountability problem, there are line accountability issues. The U.$. fascist party puts forward white saviors and their biographies and uses SDS, RYM and Sixties history to bolster its image, but has problems being accountable either individually, or organizationally and historically.
It is easy for scientific communists to criticize a 1969 text from today's 2009 vantage point. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" is a fragrant flower in comparison with the racist shit that was coming from anti-nationalist social-democrats and so-called communists. However, it is important to know what was wrong with Weatherman's line and consider the similarities, if any, between Weatherman's line and the line of contemporary revisionists. The international communist movement has had four decades to develop since 1969, and one could expect the rhetoric of the left wing of parasitism to have moved closer to Weatherman's positions in order to infiltrate the proletarian movement and lead people back to the labor aristocracy and white-nation chauvinism via the most advanced-looking guises. Contemporary revisionists are in fact closer to Weatherman's line than one might expect, with the corollary that communists like MIWS are farther away from Weatherman than one might think.
In regard to Weatherman's theory, MIWS notes the following mainly in the context of the "You Don't Need a Weatherman" statement, keeping in mind that the Weathermen ended up having moved away from some of the positions in the statement, particularly in regard to party-building issues.
The "Weatherman" theory
Political economy
1) People will notice that pictures of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin and Mao Zedong adorn the pages of the "Weatherman" statement in New Left Notes -- in that order -- and they are the only pictures besides a silhouette of three armed people on foot repeatedly used. Yet, neither the word "aristocracy" nor "bureaucracy" appears anywhere in the text. "You Don't Need a Weatherman" talks about the great privilege of U.$. workers in general, but calls only a minority of U.$. workers "enemies: ""middle strata" who are not petit bourgeoisie, who may even technically be upper working class, but who are so privileged and tightly tied to imperialism through their job roles that they are agents of imperialism." "This section includes management personnel, corporate lawyers, higher civil servants, and other government agency, army officers, etc. Because their job categories require and promote a close identification with the interests of the ruling class, these strata are enemies of the revolution." "Weatherman" talks about who may be friends and enemies when revolution comes to the United $tates, ignoring that at least some imperialist country workers are already enemies at the present. The (proto-) Weather people's theoreticians knew damn well that Lenin wrote on opportunism and imperialist country worker counterrevolution in connection to super-profit and called the labor aristocracy enemy agents of imperialism, but rather than discussing the labor aristocracy explicitly in the context of the privilege that "Weatherman" identifies, "Weatherman" suggests that only a small minority of U.$. workers, highly privileged globally, is labor aristocracy, essentially people in management and administration. The effect is either to confuse the labor aristocracy with just managers and administrators on payroll, or deny that the labor aristocracy is enemy. This writer is able to explain this only as conscious revisionism -- an opportunism -- on the part of whomever prepared the statement. In this statement that supposedly has something to do with Lenin and is not just an agitation piece, Lenin's ideas are ignored and not addressed scientifically; at the same time, a contrary idea is put in their place.(1) "Weatherman" co-author Jim Mellen, in an article published a month earlier (New Left Notes, vol. 4, no. 18, 1969 May 13), had called on the left to study "a deal of sorts . . . struck between the labor bosses and the ruling class" in the context of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), Lenin, and imperialist bribery as a possible material basis of the low "class consciousness" of U.$. workers.
Although MIWS has noted that Lin Biao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War!" that "You Don't Need a Weatherman" quotes does not address the internal class structure of the United $tates, this is not entirely the defect that it might appear to be. If Lin was not going to talk about the internal class structure of the United $tates, the labor aristocracy, in relation to international exploitation and imperialist country privilege, then it is good that Lin said nothing at all about that in "Long Live the Victory of People's War," rather than saying something significantly incorrect. Weatherman was in the United $tates and did talk about the internal class structure, and got it wrong, though their half-assed analysis was better than the Progressive Labor Party's eighth-assed one. "Weatherman" addresses, in general terms, differences of degree between Black and white workers and political implications. Weatherman opposed the PLP's racist slanders about colonial struggles and the PLP's utter chauvinism, but did not oppose the whole concrete class basis of labor aristocracy reaction.
Another distortion is where "Weatherman" deals with unproductive-sector workers. When Marx, Lenin and Mao talked about the industrial proletariat, they did so in the context of agriculture, petty artisan production, handicraft industries, workers employed by merchant's capital, and poor peasants, and a process of centralization and concentration of production and the development of manufacturing. Marx, Lenin and Mao did not talk about the industrial proletariat in distinction from some proletariat made up of a concentration of millions of scientists, engineers, university employees, cashiers, accountants, etc. Unfortunately, "Weatherman" presents an example of how words lose their meaning even among the most radical in white-nation politics. Instead of paying attention to the productive-unproductive labor difference and surplus value as the specific feature of capitalist oppression, "Weatherman" focuses on the category of the industrial proletariat, seems to equate the industrial proletariat with production workers, and finds service workers in general, "but also some secretaries, clerks, etc.," among a larger proletariat "heavily oppressed." It is as if the term "industrial proletariat" as used in "Weatherman" is inviting people to look for a non-industrial proletariat in the increasingly large unproductive sector, where in actuality "industrial proletariat" has always been an ascendant category, corresponding to the development of capitalism. The small size of anything resembling an industrial proletariat in the First World today is indicative of parasitism, not some kind of new non-industrial proletariat. The development of the capitalist mode of production in the First World has for the most part ceased in the vertical sense; there is just change within parasitism.
The context of "You Don't Need a Weatherman" was that some people were saying to concentrate on organizing workers in mining and/or manufacturing. In a way, "Weatherman" is correct to lump U.$. service workers with U.$. production workers, because they were in fact similar -- similar in terms of privilege relative to the Third World. It's funny how science develop sometimes. They are similar also in that the relatively few productive-sector workers that do exist in the United $tates acquire some of the political characteristics of the unproductive-sector workers surrounding them.
"Weatherman" explicitly includes so-called intellect workers among "proletarianized or semi-proletarianized" workers and, also, says that "[t]here is no clearly marked dividing line between the previous section and this one." That's convenient, because there are no percentages in "Weatherman" either, not even rough, ballpark ones, in regard to the relative sizes of the so-called lower and upper stratas of the U.$. white working class that aren't enemy. They could be anything, while "Weatherman" says that there are millions of whites in the lower strata, and that the "long-range class interests of this strata, like the previous section of more oppressed workers, are for the revolution and against imperialism."
Percentages do appear in Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism (Communications Co., 1974), where the Weathermen says that the Rockefeller family, millionaire corporate executives and 1.6% of the population owning 32% of the personal wealth are oppressors of "forty million poor whites" (curiously more than four times the number of below-poverty-level whites in 1973 and 1974 claimed by the U.S. Census bureau and at a time when the number of whites in the United $tates was 170-175 million, though the Weathermen claims "one third of the US people are considered poor by the government's figures"). (p. 110) "In the US the imperialists stand opposed to the huge majority of poor and working people who have no control over the fruits of our labor" (p. 111). "Medical care is inadequate and inaccessible to most people" (p. 112). "People who must sell their labor power in order to survive make up the large and growing US proletariat (working class)" (p. 115). "The great mass of the white collar workers, clericals, service people, teachers and professionals are underpaid, exploited and profoundly bored by the daily dullness of their routines. They comprise the majority of the US work force at home." (p. 117) Contemporary revisionist practice of flattering Madison Avenue (if not Wall Street) professionals and uniting with Democratic candidates for health care unfortunately has some reflection in the Weathermen.
Despite some vague words connecting U.$. majority privilege to plunder, "Weatherman" shows more effort put into thinking about unemployment in the context of the U.$. majority than exploitation and claims that chauvinism perpetuating imperialist country privilege hurts the U.$. population -- an attempt to recruit the labor aristocracy by appealing to its economic interests and telling it that its conditions are declining: "While the control and use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country, if the goal is not clear from the start we will further the preservation of class society, oppression, war, genocide, and the complete emiseration of everyone, including the people of the US."
Despite what "Weatherman" says, Mike Klonsky made this implicit criticism of Weatherman appearing in New Left Notes, August 29, 1969:
"There has long been a myth in this country of the "bought-off" working class in the US, fat and happy and living comfortably off the riches stolen from the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This myth of the affluent working class has been pushed by rich people in this country in order to pacify potentially insurgent forces. It is a myth that all too often has been picked up and carried by the student movement especially on the big university campuses and mostly by students who had never experienced the day to day oppression of working people in this country. It is a myth which must be destroyed if we are ever going to be able to bring the war to the masses of people in this country and show them that it is not in any way in their interest, either in the short run or in the long run. Working people, black, white, and brown, suffer imperialism and the war in a thousand ways. Often false consciousness has led them to support the war both in uniform on the front line and on the job (loading ships, building missiles, etc...). However, it is plain that whenever they have done this, they have suffered as they have never suffered before."
This is interesting, for two reasons. It shows that there was a line floating around to the left of Weatherman's, even if only as a supposed straw man: that the white working class has been bought off more or less permanently. (It is not clear to this writer whether Klonsky had studied John Pepper and Comintern line struggles, but if he had it would make Klonsky a liar for his ad hominem argument against the line of individuals who were students. Klonsky's ideas denying exploitation -- parasitism and the extent of exploitation of colonial workers -- had their own material basis, but it is not the material basis that makes those ideas incorrect.) And it shows that Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II) leaders have been attacking lines similar to MIWS's as a counterrevolutionary enemy line using the same shitty arguments for four decades unchanged, even as the U.$. economy has become even more parasitic -- arguments that put strategy before theory and distort analysis with dogma to the point of denying the facts about white workers' outlook and the coincidence between war and increased living standards in the United $tates. Politicians glorifying the Amerikan system and its living standards weren't calling the working class bourgeois, but they were reacting to a reality. (Readers may also find it interesting that in the same statement by Klonsky, Klonsky equates Weatherman's rejection of labor aristocracy privilege with the PLP's opposition to the national bourgeoisie -- oddly comparing the national bourgeoisie to the working class stratum that Lenin called enemy.) Mark Rudd's and Terry Robbins' response (in the same August 29 issue) to the above paragraph by Klonsky, however, was not to own the point about the bought-off working class, but to say that white workers benefited from imperialism in the short run while insisting that they are serving the white working class and suggesting that the proletarian vanguard should educate the labor aristocracy about its privilege, rather than overcome the labor aristocracy. Increased privilege for white workers was detrimental to white workers' revolutionary struggle in Weatherman's view, but Weatherman still considered the white working class potentially progressive. Weatherman's closing paragraph telling Klonsky to prove what he is saying in practice itself reveals a commitment to the labor aristocracy, in the form of youth:
"In the end, practice will prove what's what. Klonsky should go out and hold rallies in working-class neighborhoods, and Weatherman people should continue organizing a fighting anti-imperialist working class youth movement. Enough said."
Even by 1974, the Weathermen was still saying that Third World people's struggles were radicalizing white workers, in Prairie Fire, though Prairie Fire includes the term "labor aristocracy," identifying it with the American Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO, and Chilean workers paid higher wages: " . . . multinationals were able to pay Chilean copper workers higher wages than most other Chilean industries. They used this to attempt to create a labor aristocracy in Chile, a force to oppose the interests of other Chilean workers. AFL-CIO organizers were sent in by the US to help organize anti-communist unions." (p. 83) The identification of the AFL-CIO with a labor aristocracy is something even most revisionists will admit and so is nothing spectacular. The Weathermen interestingly saw imperialism as introducing a labor aristocracy into the Third World, but said that the white working class in the United $tates was being impoverished -- foreshadowing modern labor aristocracy complaints about "globalization." The "You Don't Need a Weatherman" youth line is further confirmation of problems in Weatherman's class analysis as MIWS will discuss next.
Page 4 of New Left Notes, June 18, 1969, bearing Lenin's image
Page 6 of New Left Notes, June 18, 1969, with Mao's image
The youth question
2) The youth line of "You Don't Need a Weatherman." Some later movements presented considerably more clarity on the youth question. However, this writer does not want to be too critical of the "Weatherman" youth line concentrating on working youth. If Weatherman was not going to talk about youth in terms of patriarchy, then it is good that it tried to focus on economic issues such as non-employment and the status of people entering occupations. If young people (or some sub-group thereof) are not a gender or a social group in gender relations, then they could be a kind of class because of, for example, schooling that happens particularly under capitalism. (Mike Klonsky's "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" dismisses the idea that youth may be a class.) Vague discussion of youth rebellion hinting at both class oppression and gender oppression and demographic effects without explicitly discussing oppression of young people as a group are often opportunist -- attempts to jazz people up for youth participation, or jazz high school and college students up for revolution, or lip service to youth participation, that undermine scientific thinking on both gender and class. "Weatherman" is supposed to be a party-building document, not something designed to encourage the public to sympathize with an imminent revolution (in which case all manner of oppressed-people psychological warfare against privileged whites, including youth, would be appropriate).
Despite exhibiting a certain focus, the "Weatherman" youth line seems to smuggle the labor aristocracy in via youth. Not only does the statement speak of a focus on organizing both lower- and upper-strata working class white youth; it explicitly says that making the organizing of youth a priority is a way to reach the white working class as a whole. In trying to explain why youth would support revolution for themselves, in their own collective interests (a question debated in SDS), the Weather people ended up pointing to the interests of labor aristocracy youth. The December 1968 SDS National Council resolution "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" prefigured this by impelling SDS to become more class-conscious and integrated with working people, instead of being confined to a student identity with corresponding narrow self-interests, and saying that youth were the road to workers. Moving away from narrow student self-interest and rejecting university student privileges, but identifying with surrounding class interests, meant descending ideologically and organizationally into the labor aristocracy.
It is important to remember that the Weathermen itself was rooted among people considered youth, most obviously SDS. Though Bill Ayers, for example, had run a children's school by his twenties, in 1969 Ayers was still around an age to be in a communist party's youth organization. It is going to be easier for college students, even people in their mid-twenties, to interact with and lead classmates and teenagers than lead forty-, fifty-year-old working people who are not their peers. Because of this, one needs to know the extent to which Weatherman's youth focus was separate from some kind of cohort effect. If Weatherman was not going to organize forty-year olds anyway, proletarian or not, then for it to say that the focus should be on organizing working-class youth, including upper-strata working-class youth, was not really a break from labor aristocracy politics. Weatherman was still prioritizing the labor aristocracy, just within a certain age cohort.
For that matter, people who were "youth" in the 1960s and 1970s are now obviously adults. Focusing on youth in the 1960s because one was herself a youth and then exaggerating the revolutionary potential of the labor aristocracy in general because one is now an adult in 2009 does not seem outside the realm of possibility. Sixty-year-old professors probably would have difficulty organizing teenagers, except in quasi-anonymous Internet discussion groups. Lines on youth and ways in which communists relay to youth may reflect the organizing abilities and preconceptions of people. Where substance is lacking, a certain line on youth may reflect something other than the scientific practice of the proletarian class.
In "Weatherman," the idea is raised (and in Prairie Fire more explicitly) that young people function as a reserve army of labor. The gist of this is not something that cannot be found in Marx's writing with language analogous to that used to discuss adult female labor. Since Marx's comments on female labor do not constitute a theory of patriarchal oppression of females, this suggests the limitations of the "Weatherman's" thinking on youth from the standpoint of both gender theory and considering the class characteristics of youth (particular groups of youth or youth in general). If (biological) wimmin should be considered separately from their husbands' roles in the capitalist system, the same should be true for children and youth unless one takes things for granted. To put it even more generally, there needs to be a class or gender theory of youth, not just a zoological theory of youth emphasizing capitalism's enervating effects on the young of a species, in this case Homo sapiens, impacting the species' survival chances, and youth as a thing present, but exogenous to social relations. Discussion of youth emphasizing their biological and psychological development, but not as a social group in a class system or gender system, is typically an attempt to articulate a zoological theory or (a non-theoretical approach) an act of pragmatic strategizing based on proximity or empirical observation. To say that youth entering any occupation have less seniority and have been indoctrinated for less time than older people in the same occupation is just a factual observation that would be true on average anywhere.
"Weatherman" mentions parenthetically that young people have fewer family obligations, with no children of their own. Though young people who are not young children can be new parents with even greater family obligations than older people with children, this is more along the lines of saying that youth are specially gendered. The ability to choose whether or not to own children is a form of gender privilege that belongs even to First World adult females, who typically do not face indigence if they don't have children. It is not that husbands will replace them with other wives because they need children to inherit the farm or business, for example. The freedom to choose whether to have and own children is not just a biological fact of reproductive adulthood (zoology), but is an expression of leisure time that many young people do not have at their disposal and itself represents an oppression (of children) and gender privilege and benefit that gender oppressors can lose.
What is not specific to youth is having less to lose. The whole proletariat is already supposed to have nothing to lose. And, there are older people who have less to lose than the average U.$. workers -- the elderly. The elderly are either retired or have jobs where they are not expecting further career advancement. Most white elderly people do not have children to take care of. Many elderly people are dependent on others, but this is even more true of youth, and nobody says that youth are particularly conservative because of that (although, many have suggested that housewives are conservative, supposedly being adverse to change). A stereotype of white elderly people as being bored Republicans sitting around in retirement homes (with an accompanying rose-colored view of warmongering Democrats) is unfortunate for distracting from a better understanding of the commitments and investments of youth as they relate to their revolutionary potential.
Though it is used to flatter youth for recruiting, the idea that youth are more open to different ideas (with an accompanying notion about creativity) might as well be a zoological fact, so devoid is it of any concreteness or connection to any particular social relationship. Youth are also open to fascist ideas. That youth are open to new ideas is not controversial, being a fact of development and typically understood in this way despite attempts to make the idea sound new. Whether youth specifically are more open to revolution depends only on the time and place, unless one is saying that youth are oppressed in some way.
On an economic level, "Weatherman" supposes that youth have less to lose because they are not yet old enough to have all the positions and privileges of older people, which the begs the question. Since development is a fact and youth will grow up to have those things, why would they support the revolution. "Weatherman" resorts to the argument that the economic conditions of the white working class in general are becoming worse, in other words, that working class youth can expect have less if capitalism still exists when they are older. In making this argument, "Weatherman" refers to declining real wages in the short term using language indistinguishable from today's social-democrats'.
In theory, the relative surplus population does increase, and it would be reasonable to think that this expresses itself first as unemployment and lower wages among young people. Concretely, capitalism is a world system, and the relative surplus population increases on a world scale and in the long run. In the parasitic First World, instead of a growing relative surplus population, there has been a growing unproductive sector. Instead of an increasing mass of unemployed people, there is cyclical change in unemployment and employment in an increasingly large unproductive sector based on international exploitation. "Weatherman" actually takes a step backward from the "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" SDS resolution in this context, because "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" at least mentioned "affluence" as a cause of the prolonged period of pre-employment affecting youth. (Jim Mellen made a similar point later in "More on Youth Movement," New Left Notes, May 13, 1969, saying that "[v]ast investments in the system of higher education . . . defer the entrance of surplus labor into the labor force," resulting in "severe alienation.")
U.$. teenagers in the "Halo Nation" aren't necessarily more revolutionary that people around retirement age, unless those youth have a good chance of being drafted into the military anyway, which is not the case in 2009. But, if there were a reason to concentrate on organizing youth, and not just because they are quantitatively less reactionary than older people in the same locale, it would because young people are oppressed as a social group -- children. Because children as a social group does overlap with the reality of development, and also because children are prevented from developing intellectually as much as they are potentially able to and are allowed considerably less mobility as individuals than adults, the basis for organizing children is weak as long as the apparatuses of the imperialist-patriarchal state are strong. This is a paradox that people who believe younger youth are oppressed, but also believe correctly that communist parties in the First World at this time must be parties of intellectuals, perhaps need to address more thoroughly.
"Weatherman" answers whether youth are an oppressed social group in an implicit way:
"In all of this, it is not that life in America is toughest for youth or that they are the most oppressed. Rather, it is that young people are hurt directly--and severely--by imperialism. And, in being less tightly tied to the system, they are more "pushed" to join the black liberation struggle against US imperialism."
A theme throughout "Weatherman" is that youth of certain groups (the working class, the Black nation) are oppressed by imperialism in particular ways, and other youth are impacted by imperialism in various ways. This echoes "Toward a Revolution Youth Movement," which states:
"This perspective doesn't see youth as a class or say that youth will make the revolution by itself. Neither does it say that youth are necessarily more oppressed than older people, simply that they are oppressed in different ways. There are contradictions that touch youth specifically."
While white youth are not and were not the most oppressed people in U.$. society and youth intersect with various groups, in actuality younger people within each class and nation in North America are among the most oppressed within the class or nation, and the reason is the oppression of children by patriarchy. Failure to understand this leads to obscuring the oppression of children as a group, and its structural basis, in the pursuit of reforms, self-determination, and "revolutionary" consciousness-raising around reforms.
It is hard to read "Weatherman" on schools with a straight face knowing where the energetic thinking on youth and education went. The movement in education that Bill Ayers helps to lead -- when its ideas trickle down to the paid professionals, adults, who are in charge of the majority of classrooms and schools that exist in the United $tates, the result is precisely teachers who are more kindly cops, the most watery social-democratic ideology, more-refined paternalism, tokenism within the classroom with students and at the administration and teaching staff levels, compradorism and disguised compradorism, and Martin Luther King integrationism (multicultural U.$. patriotism and preparation for integrated parasitic life). (Another result of anti-authoritarianism that did not end up in a successful revolution is parents who are more kindly cops.) In U.$. higher education, the result -- in addition to postmodernism and identity politics arising partly from an interest in Third World people, an interest that did not spark revolution in the United $tates and accommodated to the lack of change in the United $tates -- is easier-going professors, Liberalism, and "democracy" practiced with classroom majorities that are Amerikans, imperialist country parasites -- good for tuition-paying Amerikan college students with career interests and lesser-known professors wanting cults for themselves. No offense to Ayers for being an educator; it's not like there are many other occupations for exploiters in a parasite economy. But there are limits to what can be accomplished without supportive social structures. After Students for a Democratic Society and SDS-derived organizations evaporated or shrunk, people still needed to make money, and many pursued careers in compulsory and higher education. Instead of seeing these as just sources of income, some justified their particular jobs by dressing them in the language of "social justice" -- in an odd way fulfilling Louis Althusser's statement: "All the agents of production, exploitation and repression . . . must in one way or another be 'steeped' in this [ruling] ideology in order to perform their tasks 'conscientiously' . . . ."(2) And this one:
"But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced. The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is . . . lay), where teachers respectful of the 'conscience' and 'freedom' of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their 'parents' (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their 'liberating' virtues.
"I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they 'teach' against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the 'work' the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as 'natural', indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was 'natural', indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago."
Capitalism was not overthrown in the United $tates in the 1960s, nor the 1970s, nor the 1980s. So what happens -- sympathetic ideas about various groups, including young people and females, get sucked into education, political and even State Department and CIA careers, because there is an energetic attempt to make progress in regard to those groups while the white working class is not making revolution, with the assumption that the majority of whites are still a social base for progress. It is sociologically important and not just a matter of Ayers' (or Mike Klonsky's) biography that youth "motion" of the 1960s and attention to youth, after radicalism declined, ended up in reformism, liberalism, corporations' catering to youth, MTV, MySpace & Facebook, anti-communist, anti-Catholic and now anti-Islamic films about youth, etc., etc. What was lacking was a line on children as being oppressed as their own social group and a clear recognition of both parasitism and that children's oppression could not be ended within the capitalist framework. Today, there are still "free schools," there are so-called child-centered classrooms, and there are strong youth cultures and identities, but the idea that children are oppressed is treated as a loony fringe idea, and even alleged scientific communists have difficulty approaching the concept. There are educators and ex-educators with a strong position on children's social oppression, but obviously there is a disconnect between critical education movements and the communist line on children and patriarchy.
Typically referring to teenagers, college-age people and sometimes people younger than thirty, young children are less frequently included in the "youth" category in actual conversations; it is clear from context whom "youth" encompasses. This indicates a preoccupation with a certain set of whiny lifestyle-related complaints and "alienation," which affects even rich adults. For some, the height of oppression is that authorities won't let them smoke weed and have orgies. Wilhelm Reich suggested that what was specific to youth oppression was a stifling of (hetero-) sexuality. By contrast, MIWS would say that even preschoolers are oppressed, and youth are oppressed even if they don't have sexuality (as difficult as that may be for Freudians to wrap their minds around). It is not that the oppression of youth starts only when they become adolescents or start asserting and wanting to express themselves as individuals -- a Liberal view. Youth are oppressed as youth, not as young adults.
College students are closer to children mentally than older people if such a linear comparison makes sense. It might seem that a line on youth oppression would lead to organizing college students particularly, perhaps because 18-to-25-year old people have stronger memories of childhood experiences than older people or have outlooks similar to children's. An understanding of age-ism is helpful in organizing college students (and a line on children's oppression may come with more intense awareness of age-ism against college students), but once one gets over the fact that college students can have better lines than older people with SDS experience, it is necessary to properly conceptualize any youth movement: is it based on youth oppression issues, petty-bourgeois economic issues, liberal-humanist education issues, or something else. At the moment, people in their late teens and early twenties in the United $tates are wondering about unemployment, how to pay for college, and whether they can go on buying imports with credit cards, but to base a youth movement on that today would be to build the youth organization of a fascist party.
There are pragmatic reasons, involving age, for college students and high school students to in organizations by themselves, but not that a separate "youth" party is necessary to address youth oppression in particular. There is no reason why an organization of older people inherently cannot arrive at a correct line on youth (and there is every reason to believe that an organization of younger people that has bad policies can end up with a line objectively opposed to ending children' oppression and oppression in general).
Bossed around for most of their life, college students interacting with more adults than before are naturally suspicious of anything resembling authority. This is analogous to how some wimmin, having seen how men have used militancy and structure in society, may be suspicious of militancy and structure in a communist party. At the same time, because of how young people have trained to be submissive to intimate authority (which could be someone sitting face-to-face with others in a discussion group), an aura may surround an older persyn who seems to have wisdom and claims to have experience. So, one problem with a mixed (in terms of large age difference) organization may be a combination of resentment and adulation of guru-like figures. This is harmful to a process of scientific unity and struggle.
There are power differences between younger people, even college students, and older people that can influence struggle within a mixed organization. In terms of privileges, people usually think of the legal drinking age and things like age restrictions pertaining to renting a car. Relatively (and legally in some cases) speaking, in comparison with people who are younger, older people also have more access to state power, financial resources to fund private investigators and other spying, weapons and the know-how to use them (whether because of military service, gun culture, organizational policy or legacy, or something else), and gossip and intelligence networks, and have had more time to build friendship and other networks. All of that can be used as leverage. Some younger people will avoid struggling with older people intensely, for fear of getting on their bad side, not just losing a relationship or love from the guru. They may just sense that a charismatic older persyn who has been around for a long time has some power. Individualist Westerners in general really are that egotistical that they can form deep-seated grudges against people who oppose them in line and leadership struggles, grudges that can develop in a violent direction -- a reality that requires a scientific generalization, not disconnected anecdotes about personality conflicts and people with egos. There is no civil war in the First world and most so-called communists do not know what communist power struggle in exploiter-majority countries is, so guess what all that individual parasite power ends up being used for. In the absence of science, some people will do anything to hold onto an organizational or social position, including behaving in threatening ways, without any principle except the ego.
Like it or not, many college students will join a radical organization as a socializing opportunity, if that is where they perceive some of their age and intellectual peers are. At the same time, some people who are getting old and have something that they need to prove within a decade or two decades may either be set in their ways and thinking, or have such an attachment to social networks of which they've been a part, that they will put priority on maintaining their position or maintaining those networks. Contradictory social and egocentric needs (and confluent ones in the case of younger people's needing some kind of interaction and older people's providing it) may warp the process of unity and struggle.
Perhaps the best reason to have separate organizations for college students and other younger people is that older people often belong to different histories than younger people do -- not that older people are more "experienced" or that they are more advanced. Older people may have relationships and histories that younger comrades may not be even be aware of and which may not even be relevant to questions at hand (and do not prove having an incorrect, or a correct, line), but which become relevant as the organization needs to go in one direction, and an older persyn feel that the organization needs to go in another or that he or she needs to maneuver in some way. Whether because of a lack of discernment or because of a lack of capability, not all levels of politics are accessible to everyone -- this is one thing, but another thing is that the relationships older people have may get in the way of an organization's natural development, disrupting the accumulation of scientific knowledge and unity based on struggle and shared practice. It's another reason there should not be too much emphasis on inter-organizational struggle, because pre-existing relationships between individuals may be a factor. In the United $tates, the number of communists with a sustained, detailed and vocal intellectual interest in anti-CPUSA, anti-revisionist Marxism (even if just for posing) at any one time in the English language is small, probably enough to fit on a tennis court without suffocating. It's a "small world." When a youth in the United $tates enters an organization or environment with people who have been around for decades, there may -- without the youth's seeking anyone in particular out -- be only two degrees of separation and even just one degree between themselves and people who are important in SDS and related history, for example, people who are part of a certain cohort politically speaking and have intimate knowledge of organizational details, past struggles, and each other's associations. In contexts where older people are personal friends and also belong to organizations that consider each other to be an opponent, friendships networks can influence struggle. So can the opposite of friendship networks: constellations of people with personal conflicts and rivalries. The size of an organization relative to the sizes of friendship and other networks intersecting with the organization is a factor. Small organizations are potentially more sensitive to influences from overlapping networks, and changes in small networks can generate large changes in entangled organizations, depending on how they are structured. If people do not understand how small the group of active older communists is in a country like the United $tates, do not understand that even just 2% with incidental or ulterior motives can cause problems, and also they do not know or care that the United $tates has admitted to having enough intelligence agency employees to sell out more than one baseball stadium, most of whom have graduate or college degrees, they will make a mistake.
No organization will be free of dissimilarity, but if organizations in the First World at this time do not consist of relatively similar people in their origins, unnecessary conflicts will arise. There is nothing wrong with high school youth being in an organization with just other high school youth if size-ism and location opportunism do not underlie that and there is really is a potential for scientific unity and growth, which is not to say that youth do not need to study SDS history, etc.
A drawback of not having mixed organizations is that there are fewer opportunities for younger people to be seen as leaders. Younger persyns can lead or be more advanced than older persyns. That is something that people need to understand. They need to absorb it, forget about it, and move on. MIWS has not claimed to be youth and is anonymous, but strangely people have claimed to have decades more experience than MIWS. It's interesting because those people also act like idiots, at the same time they use flowery and stilted language and posture. There is nothing on MIWS that cannot be understood by teenagers with good reading habits, basic algebra education, and patience, which goes to show what is possible -- no graduate degree in economics or sociology necessary, though what MIWS is saying is not dealt with in most U.$. undergraduate economics and sociology courses, not even "Marxism" ones. Sure, Sixties people will have a larger range of experience, but they offer little that could not be found in ten autobiographies already, and studies of SDS and COINTELPRO. Charisma can be found anywhere, and youth can get their own experience practicing organizing in a variety of organizations. If there is some kind of experience that can't be articulated in a document, then what use is it to the proletarian movement and why would it claim to be universally relevant. And, what is the point of Sixties experience if people are just going to use that experience to obscure past struggles and manipulate current struggles toward predetermined ends. For some reason, it is taking a dinky Web site in 2009, not claiming to have SDS experience, to bring certain things to light about the Weathermen, while others' practice in relation to Weather history has been opportunist in one way or another. Some older people do have experience and can think multiple chess moves ahead, but they use this knowledge in opportunist and counterrevolutionary ways. Youth need to understand that, after studying Arghiri Emmanuel's work, J. Sakai's book Settlers, etc., and SDS and post-SDS history (and/or the history of line struggle in whatever country they're in), and reading various writers and learning to discern revisionism and Trotskyism, they can be on par with older people and also put a stop to older people's games and overthrow them if necessary.
Another, related drawback of not having mixed organizations is that youth may be seen as not ready to be in a communist party, but still be kept around in the form of a non-party youth organization or something else. This even has security consequences as one tactic of state intelligence agencies and police is to carry out spying via younger people, who are tolerated for a reason analogous to why females who spy are tolerated (sexism or political correctness connected to First Worlder female-biology adult privilege and advancement), a self-defeating kind of age-ism. Problems are dismissed as youthfulness, nothing too serious. This suggests that while youth-only party organizations are justified, parties that do have older people should be inclusive of younger people and have the same responsibilities and requirements for younger people as for older people.
If that last sentence seems inequitable because youth have school and family obligations, people should think about the structural implications of mixed organizations with lower requirements for younger people. It is not obvious what having the same amount of voting power or say as older people in an organization means if the younger comrades are less influential in the organization because they do less work, have less insight about what is going on, and have weaker networks with others in the organization. Lower requirements for some could mean those people's having less power (and more spying, through the youth who are let in). If democratic centralism can't be a established in a mixed organization, with a large number of youth, claiming to be communist, then non-mixed organizations or mixed organizations with a smaller number of youth may be better. Third World people are already excluded from First World organizations by borders and having to work twelve, fifteen hours a day; the absence of some unprepared youth from First World communist parties that need to be composed of scientists, but usually turn out to be revisionist anyway, would be nothing to cry over.
If these issues discussed seem moot because one could apply Joreen on formalizing structure (even if only to make it clear that the guru is running things and cut the false-egalitarian bullshit), great. However, if "The Tyranny of Structureless" is correct, it is correct for additional reasons today -- white privilege and white networks, and privilege and networks of older people -- or needs to be updated to account for those things; even if one did apply Joreen, informal structure allowing problems to be expressed might remain. If people are not going to put Joreen's main points into practice, then it would make some sense to have a younger-people-only organization for some specified group of younger people (high school students, college students, etc.). Weatherman may have had a good practice in regard to youth (as much as this can be separated from their emphasis on labor aristocracy youth) in part, but for the wrong reasons.
The emergence of Internet access in ordinary family homes brought new opportunities for the state and counterrevolutionary First Worlders, and for problems related to adult-youth co-organizing to manifest in supposedly anonymous Internet settings. Not only do adults interact with youth under false pretenses to influence their discussions, and not only do they put themselves out there as individuals with biographies and encourage youth to do so (despite themselves using pseudonyms and disinformation and knowing better), enabling various problems. Imperialist country state agencies exploit minors by involving them in intelligence operations, including youth barely out of elementary school -- a crime even by Liberal standards and potentially offensive even to white taxpayers with children. Although interaction outside the Internet is also much overrated in most cases in the modern imperialist country context, it is questionable whether there is any benefit to interacting with individuals over the Internet, as opposed to reading anonymous Web pages, from the viewpoint of being part of a developing scientific communist movement. The pseudo-anonymity of the Internet, where people claim no identity or claim identities falsely, allows adults to run circles around youth unprepared for international- and national-level struggle and dominate. To the extent that the Internet is not anonymous, there are other problems. Comparisons of the Internet to local high school discussion groups are mistaken. The Internet is a relatively new reality whose consequences for politics, both positive and negative, communists have not fully studied.
United front
3) The point about the Black nation revolution in particular not needing a stage of New Democracy because of the characteristics of the Black petty-bourgeoisie existing in 1969 is a debatable strategic point. The Weathermen was accepting the Black Panther Party's position there (contrary to the white reactionary lie that the Black Panthers didn't have anything critical to say about Black capitalists). (There was a specific debate among SDS on Black New Democracy, which won't be dealt with here.) What is not just a matter of strategy is the idea that there cannot be a united front or a stage of New Democracy in North America. That is a residual dogma ignoring the development of imperialism in the twentieth century. If Germany had to be invaded by an international united front consisting even of imperialist country bourgeois forces, one does need to conceive of the possibility of an intermediate stage of struggle between the defeat of Euro-Amerikan imperialism, and socialism, in North America. While "Weatherman" speaks in favor of accepting Black and Third World people's leadership, it is not clear that this extends to allowing for an offensive into North America by foreign forces.
The question of New Democracy in North America concerns not just the internal colonies, but has to do with the point of view from which the whole question of revolution is considered, even though not every united front is a united front for New Democracy. If the white working class is the progressive subject of revolution, not a recipient of proletarian dictatorship, then of course it makes no sense to suggest New Democracy in the context of the Euro-Amerikan nation internally. In fact, such a supposedly post-imperialist capitalism would be fascism most likely. However, the Euro-Amerikan nation is a bourgeois settler nation in the midst of oppressed and proletarian nations. If the white working class did make revolution, it would be fascist "revolution" and not because there was an alternative, socialism, that Euro-Amerikans failed to bring about and could have realized. Blacks should not have to wait around for whites to catch up, says "You Don't Need a Weatherman" correctly, but what is the nature of what is holding the white workers back, temporary problems or a relatively permanent super-profit problem, a labor aristocracy enemy class existence problem?
It is more correct to say that there should not be a united front in the Euro-Amerikan nation, which has only bourgeois or semi-bourgeois classes and some lumpen people. An international united front extending into North America as the battle front moves across U.$. and Canadian borders is a real possibility. United fronts by definition consist of different classes and a least one non-proletarian class, and so there could be a stage of struggle (that may involve reparations) between the military defeat of U.$. imperialism and the establishment of a joint dictatorship of the proletariat of oppressed nations. This is not analogous to saying that Euro-Amerikan imperialism will be replaced with some kind of non-imperialist Euro-Amerikan capitalism.
It is important to know what "Commemorate the Victory Over German Fascism! Carry the Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Through to the End!" adds to "Long Live the Victory of People's War!".(3) "Long Live the Victory of People's War!" (LLVPW) is quoted in "Weatherman," but there is reference explicit or indirect in "Weatherman" to the ideas particular to "Commemorate the Victory Over German Fascism! Carry the Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Through to the End!". Although "Weatherman" puts forward determining friends and enemies on the basis of whether they fight U.$. imperialism and seems to emphasize some united front, "Weatherman" seems to interpret "Long Live the Victory of People's War!" as saying that the development of the principal contradiction promotes the proletarian struggle of whites against U.$. imperialism, who can contribute to the torrent of opposition to U.$. imperialism, and that the struggle of the white working class has just stalled for some reason and is waiting for an external shock, not that the white working class might be an overall-reactionary class at a given time. Within a few paragraphs, "Weatherman" moves quickly from a consideration of friends and enemies on an international plane to a consideration of friends and enemies within the United $tates.
Though the Weathermen has a reputation as being the most anti-racist prominent Euro-Amerikan communist movement connected to SDS, the racist consequences of the aforementioned ignorance of issues pertaining to international united fronts need to be explored. Verbally supporting people's wars geographically encircling the United $tates, and the idea of having another "Vietnam" in North America -- that all sounds great in the abstract. Concretely, there are not always two revolutionary streams of any comparable quality, one in the imperialist countries and one in the oppressed nations. In 1969, hundreds of thousands of U.$. whites would have claimed to support domestic armed struggle against the United $tates. Then, one could have spoken of a revolutionary stream in the imperialist countries, and an emerging revolutionary stream in the First World. To do so now, even to speak of the First World communist movement and the Third World communist movement as part of one, global revolutionary stream (in the case of Trotskyists and crypto-Trotskyists claiming to be Maoist), is self-deluding nostalgia for the Sixties or racism, the same old white savior bullshit. If the pitifully few and scattered communists in the First World constitute a revolutionary stream, then one should speak of multiple revolutionary streams in comparison, one in every Third World country. Because of a lack of science and also because of the difficulty of doing specifically proletarian actions behind First World borders, the majority of First World communists are only nominally, verbally communist, while even various individual bourgeois-led Third World struggles are doing more to contribute to the demise of U.$. imperialism than the entirety of the First World communist movement. The alternative to tasks assuming the existence of a revolutionary stream in the First World is to focus on tactics of dividing exploiters in the First World.
There is no need to call Third World leaders revolutionary, much less proletarian, where they are not revolutionary. However, even in 1969, the evidence was not solid that the white labor aristocracy had more revolutionary potential than the vacillating national bourgeoisie. The labor aristocracy can be more reactionary than the vacillating national bourgeoisie. Yet, "Weatherman" raises that it is Blacks' and the white working class' role to overthrow the "whole existence" of U.$. imperialism, and that it is the national bourgeoisie's role only to "drive it [imperialism] out" of the Third World country. The underlying reason why "Weatherman" is against united fronts with the petty-bourgeoisie "[a]s far as people within this country are concerned" is not so much that "Weatherman" recognizes particularly important international differences existing at this time or characteristics of the U.$. petty-bourgeoisie, as that "Weatherman" holds that the white working class will eventually overthrow U.$. capitalism and rule as a proletarian class. "Weatherman" clings to the dogma of revolution by each country's working class, a dogma intersecting with racism in the long run as contrary evidence accumulates, and as it becomes necessary to have double standards and chase after white workers heading toward war to prop up white living standards supposedly based on white labor.
There are two ways to understand "Weatherman" on the united front (and other topics). 1) One is in the context of the whole international communist movement, not just one organization, SDS -- the international communist movement in which "Commemorate the Victory Over German Fascism! Carry the Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Through to the End!" and John Pepper appeared. (On Pepper, see MIM Theory, Number 10, 1996, pp. 21-44.) 2) The other is in the context of others in SDS. MIWS does not use approach #2 as much in this article, because that kind of approach tends to involve personalities and be individualist in method. It was a relatively tiny group that led SDS and exerted disproportionate influence over changes in its ideology. The second approach could also be provincialist. The Weathermen's practice was in relation to the practice of others in the world communist movement and those who came before the Weathermen, not just the practice of others in and around SDS. If contextualizing the development of the Weathermen's line with the internal struggles of SDS is necessary, though, MIWS should add that the Weather people were struggling with RYM II people, not just the PLP. RYM II people were putting forward the idea of a united front including Euro-Amerikans of different classes. This was in a context where the Weather people believed the objective conditions for socialist revolution had arrived, and Euro-Amerika did not have a peasantry and was not an oppressed nation. It seemed that RYM II people were dogmatically applying foreign experiences, such as the Chinese. Many RYM II people ended up supporting Barack Obama, so Weatherman's ideas against united front in the United $tates do deserve some credit. (Some of the same RYM II people invoked Cultural Revolution slogans as some kind of justification for that, so one can wonder whether it was really a good thing for the Amerikans in RYM II to be so interested in the Cultural Revolution. These RYM II people objectively used Mao Zedong's language to infiltrate the communist movement and inject it with social-democratic and Trotskyist ideas that have become more apparent over time. Some RYM I people supported Barack Obama, too, but they didn't use Maoist rhetoric as much in doing so.)
It is correct that there is no united front with the Euro-Amerikan petty-bourgeoisie against imperialism; there is no united front with the labor aristocracy Euro-Amerikan working class against imperialism either. There is just no united front within Euro-Amerika against imperialism, because united fronts are composed of classes, and none of the classes in Euro-Amerika as classes have a basis to fight imperialism at this time. That does not mean anything short of engaging in armed struggle in the United $tates or building revolutionary consciousness among whites is reactionary. Weatherman knew it was behind enemy lines, but did not stress division tactics. There is also a use for petty-bourgeois mass anti-war organizations in Euro-Amerika if Euro-Amerika as a whole is going to be reactionary anyway, no need to try to turn them into revolutionary internationalist organizations. It's just that bad in Euro-Amerika, better luck for gregarious Euro-Amerikan communists in the next life who have a warped sense of purity.
One document this writer has more agreement with on a certain point is "Everyone Talks About The Weather...." (in Weatherman, Ramparts Press, Inc., "[p]art of a packet given out at the National War Council," December 1969):
"We are fucked over in schools, jobs, in every social relationship, robbed of our humanity and the political power on which that must be built. We are oppressed because of class origin, as youth, as women, but not as a nation. We are a nation only in doing the shitwork and ripping off the world and accepting the privileges the rip-off produces. In white Amerika nationalism can be nothing other than a reactionary ideology, a basis for the further oppression of the world's people. Our task is not to seize state power for ourselves, but to destroy the imperialist order. What replaces it must be internationalist, with its highest priority the destruction of racism and great nation privilege and chauvinism, and restitution for Amerika's crimes through internationalization of resources, etc." (p. 441, emphasis added)
A critical Liberation News Service article printed in Weatherman ("Stormy Weather," pp. 341-350), which seems to distort various Weather positions, indicates that the idea of a state guided by international interests "after the defeat of the US imperialism abroad" was not raised just casually at the war council. Allegedly, Ted Gold, speaking at the council, allowed the possibility of a Third World state repressing white people if Euro-Amerikans couldn't make the Euro-Amerikan revolution, after a critic raised the idea. (Although, the alleged off-the-cuff response by Gold permitting "fascism" could be read in two ways: an international dictatorship over white reactionaries or a white minority dictatorship over those reactionaries. The Weathermen viewed itself as trying to recruit youth some of whom were in violent racist white youth mobs, so the possibility cannot be discounted that fascism had more significance in the Weathermen's practice than just being a provocative use of language. The class that the PLP and RYM II were trying to prod into revolution was reactionary and supported violence against non-whites, too.) The LNS article insinuates that Weatherman wants to carry out a "holocaust" against whites, "except perhaps the four hundred people in the room and the few street kids or gang members who might run with them."
Nonetheless, an article by Weather persyn Shin'ya Ono's, "A Weatherman: You Do Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows" (pp. 227-274 in Weatherman, Ramparts Press), appearing in Leviathan around the time of the war council, asserts:
"On the one hand, by the classical Marxist definition, the overwhelming majority of whites belong to the working class in the sense that they neither own nor control the means of production. Furthermore, they are materially, psychologically, and in every other way, concretely oppressed by the imperialist political economy and by its concomitant superstructure. This implies that the destruction of imperialism and socialist revolution are objectively in the interests of the vast majority of white Amerikans."
People can raise all kinds of concepts, abstractions, and possibilities, but at the end of the day there is an analysis, a practice, and a theory. There is no concept of an exploitive or labor-aristocracy- or petty-bourgeois-majority imperialist nation working class in "Weatherman," and while the Weathermen may written off some white workers in the short term, it didn't write off the white working class as a permanently or relatively permanently bought-off class. The Weathermen sought to stir up the white working class from a "superstructure" that it ultimately said was "oppressing" whites in general and invoked petty-bourgeois Liberal ideology in doing so. The Weathermen discussed imperialist country working class privilege in a general way, even identified the white working class as a tiny privileged stratum within the international working class, opposed dogmatism on the centrality of industrial workers (in the context of imperialist country industrial workers and their privilege), and saw the pursuit of more privilege for whites (whom it still believed were exploited) as harmful to the development of revolutionary consciousness of those whites, but it had an objectively white-utopian line and practice like others in the Euro-Amerikan "Left." The white-utopianism was a problem of the Weathermen's political economy, not just strategic error. The remark Shin'ya Ono makes about superstructure is not casual, but something Ono defends in a theoretical way by pointing to "crisis" involving "surplus absorption and reproduction" as being more decisive than the "classical contradiction at the point of production" in the development not only of the U.$. economy, but also of revolutionary consciousness in Euro-Amerika. Instead of writing off the Euro-Amerikan classes as classes and being done with them, people today use or abuse Althusser, "Marxian" crisis and monopoly capitalism theorists, and even Schumpeter, to come up with reasons why socialism can still come to the United $tates without a domestic exploited working class, but without an international dictatorship. The Jim Mellen article to which Ono refers ("More on Youth Movement," New Left Notes, vol. 4, no. 18, 1969 May 13) claims that youth in schools and the military are part of the proletariat and can play a stronger role than employed industrial workers; in opposing the PLP and RYM II on focusing on industrial workers in general, Mellen resorts to claiming that Marx and Lenin did not say the most oppressed proletarians would lead the socialist revolution, so youth supposedly not being the most oppressed could still lead the revolution. Mellen puts forward that the "struggle of Third World peoples for liberation is primarily a nationalist struggle," but says that crisis will impact and move people (youth in particular, but also other groups of white people) in the direction of revolution through "a gradual deterioration of the social structure."
(There is more to say about the Jim Mellen's "More on Youth Movement," specifically in regard to the development of class society, class structure, crisis, and wage increases. The main purpose of the present article is not to revisit the intricacies of the debate between Mellen, the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, and others. This writer would take a position against both Mellen's and the BARU's. The most oppressed were obviously in the Third World and already fighting U.$. imperialism, so the whole discussion of whether youth, in spite of not being the most oppressed, or the industrial proletariat was the vanguard in the United $tates had subjectivist implications in the first place. When proto-Weather people and RYM II people were arguing about the "industrial proletariat" in the United $tates and sometimes the industrial proletariat in the abstract, the industrial proletariat was actually concentrated in the Third World. A mixture of abstract and concrete questions, combined with the dogma about there needing to be some social revolutionary vehicle in every nation, led to contradictions in Weather people's positions and those of their critics.)Females and gender
4) The youth question aside, the most striking thing about "You Don't Need a Weatherman" in the gender area is the lack of a worked-out gender analysis, by the document's own admission. Yet, there is the feeling that not only a majority of males in the labor aristocracy, but also the majority of Euro-Amerikan females, are potential allies of Third World people. "Weatherman" raises that "Long Live the Victory of People's War!" is compatible with trying to educate and lead the majority of people in the United $tates, and its gender discussion is further confirmation that "Weatherman" does this. "Long Live the Victory of People's War" did not assert any conclusion about parasitism or gender privilege, despite any correct strategic or political conclusions in it.
Equality for Amerikan parasites, including female-biology adults, and verbal support for, and CIA-style infiltration of, Third World struggles deemed important and which the PLP at least rejected openly -- that is one possibility that RYM II people did take up. By contrast, the Weathermen ultimately and essentially came through as stressing that females could and should undertake armed struggle to assist the Vietnamese, because of the principal contradiction, and sacrifice class or imperialist country privilege to do so. Eventually, the Vietnam War ended through the Vietnamese people's efforts, and the Weather Underground fizzled. The WUO did not leave behind a developed gender theory, and the critique of bourgeois feminism in Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism is mostly abstract. Ideas floating around about uncovering herstory, child care, reproduction and female empowerment entered into the careerist and white-chauvinist academy, for-profit day care centers, the Democratic Party, campus and neighborhood policing, and the military. (Obviously, the parasitic assimilation of feminist rhetoric has other origins, but radical movements set a standard, and it's not that the Weathermen didn't use the word "revolution" enough in their rhetoric when talking about female-biology people. Despite tying things to revolution in a loose way, the kind of feminist rhetoric the Weathermen had -- strings of facts and demands without theory, celebratory remarks about cultural changes involving a majority without leadership, a prolonged anti-sexist emphasis on celebrating female participation and collaboration with males -- left itself open to co-optation, particularly in a highly privileged country such as the United $tates without feudal remnants.)
The concept of an enemy gender aristocracy politically comparable to the labor aristocracy that Lenin discussed did not arise until after the Weather Underground Organization was gone. So was the the concept of a majority of a country's adult females being overall gender oppressors also not around for years after the WUO. The less-controversial idea that white, bourgeois and middle-class females have privilege and prejudices has been available since the beginnings of so-called second-wave feminism.
"Weatherman" raises: "since World War II the differential between men's and women's wages has increased." Unlike "Weatherman," Prairie Fire discusses class privilege of "ruling-class" females, describing those "committed to their class interests" as "enemies" who "sustain and take part in the [class] oppression of women around the world" (pp. 130-131). "Weatherman" critiques the pursuit of better conditions for individual females, but this has no more significance for gender privilege than the critique of individual solutions to workers' class oppression (shared by everyone under the sun talking about workers' solidarity) does for labor aristocracy privilege.
The Weathermen ended up tailing youth culture and encouraging youth to be "freaks" sexually (when that had connotations including non-monogamous ones). The discussion of women in "Weatherman" emphasizes change in general, the breakdown of the family (in keeping with Weatherman's ideas about crisis and the deterioration of superstructure not resulting primarily from social struggle), females' identity and motions, and recruiting females to strengthen the anti-U.$. cause, more than relational and structural issues and what it would mean concretely and socially (and not just politically for one anti-imperialist movement) for First World females to pursue "liberation" for themselves without revolution. The Weathermen was seeking recruits from liberal youth and female cultures, and certain controversial positions would have alienated those people. This is part of what was going on in the background of the Weathermen's poverty of theorizing on gender.
Contemporary comparisons with the Weathermen
Weatherman's line was better than that of the morass from which it emerged. Weatherman arose at a time when people were saying that supporting the struggles of Third World people such as the Vietnamese would alienate white workers from the anti-capitalist struggle, for example. Another context was reformism, economism, and defeatism, reflecting a lack of confidence in the global majority of the oppressed, and attempts to win whites to the revolution not by telling the truth, but through "magical acts of trickery" as Weatherman once put it. However, four decades have passed since the appearance of the "Weatherman" statement, and there needs to be the recognition that there is nothing proletarian about mortgage-holders' crying about the mansions of millionaires, for instance. They are pigs getting in the way of global progress. The U.$. labor aristocracy doesn't just have crumbs larger than the molecules Third World workers have. It has the whole cupcake, if anyone has a whole cupcake. Not only are the majority of U.$. people and U.$. workers exploiters; most don't produce any value at all, and the context of this is a system of plunder and war, and continuous high living standards, without manual labor, encouraging an identification with capitalism and its most parasitic aspects.
Of course, contemporary claimants to Mao's mantle emphasize the so-called "multinational proletariat" of the United $tates, not Black leadership of struggle within the United $tates. But, readers should ask themselves whether "Weatherman" would really be better today than statements by crypto-Trotskyists talking about parasitism and white supremacy using rhetoric and verbiage that can sound radical at times, but attracts people to a firmly established counterrevolutionary program that preserves First Worlder class, gender and national privilege. (Of course nobody seriously takes every word of "Weatherman" as true for today, but if one were to uphold "Weatherman" as a contemporary line, it might mean that Black people should lead the left wing of parasitism. This seems only marginally better than Bob Avakian's chauvinist line existing since the early 1970s opposing any idea of revolution that did not include the so-called white industrial proletariat in its leadership.) Readers should also compare "Weatherman" with revisionist and Trotskyists statements on youth.(4)
The pre-scientific followers, most of them willfully or blissfully ignorant, of the Revolutionary Communist Party=U$A are kept in the dark about what that party was saying decades ago and line struggles from that time, sometimes in order to represent opposing contemporary lines as more peculiar than they actually are. A joint statement appearing right after "You Don't Need a Weatherman" in the same issue of New Left Notes ("Take the war to the people and bring it home!") is signed by Marv Treiger of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union and says that the U.$. white working class as a whole was "objectively scabbing on the rest of the world proletariat." Of course, it is a problem that the resolution even counts the whole white working class as part of the proletariat, and like "Weatherman" it says that Third World people's struggles are waking up the white working class, but something that is a matter of fact and which various supporters of Third World struggles could concede in 1969 -- that the white working class was (and still is) allied with the imperialists the RCP now papers over. It is inevitable that people who note various evident facts -- such as the non-revolutionary character of the white working class at a given time, and inflation and taxes -- but for years do not analyze those facts using a systematic and consistent method, will end up in revisionism.
When it suited its argument favoring the role of the so-called industrial proletariat in the United $tates, as to opposed to youth whom some in SDS were trying to classify as working-class, Bob Avakian's movement did not have a problem trying to use statistics, admitting that not all paid people who did not own means of production were proletarian, distinguishing unproductive from productive labor, seeing political significance in the extraction of surplus value "at the point of production," and pointing to the importance of relating the "internal class structure" of the imperialist country to the exploitation of productive workers in the rest of the world.(5) For decades, though (including in "Revolutionary youth and the road to the proletariat"), the RCP has been in denial about the vast majority of the size of the U.$. labor aristocracy, to the point of engaging in pig activity against people who raised the same elementary concepts the RCP's leadership raised long ago. There are some very smart people in the leadership of the RCP, a phenomenon of the labor aristocracy that scientific communists need to study as a part of the history of white counterrevolution and U.$. parasitism. They are just conscious revisionists and racist shits. It is the epitome of sectarianism. The Bay Area Revolutionary Union was competing with the people who became Weatherman for recruits, and the RCP knows damn well that the ideas it is deliberately confusing people about and obscuring today are related to those struggles and bases its line on what is expedient for recruiting and for organizing Amerikans to extract surplus value from Third World nations. The effect is disruption of the scientific process.
It is one thing coming from the social-fascist leaders' mouths when it comes to white workers in 1969, another thing when it comes to Third World workers in the 1990s and later and when there are fewer Euro-Amerikan industrial productive workers than in 1969 -- racist, despicable. The internal class structure of Euro-Amerika changed even between 1969 and 1989. By the 1980s, the U.$. unproductive sector had grown to an even larger size, and the large youth movements of the 1960s were gone, making contrasts between youth and the "industrial proletariat" less relevant. So, in addition to justifying acting as if there were still a mass revolutionary movement in the United $tates despite not having those student and youth movements, it became necessary for the social-fascists to argue that white unproductive sector workers and net-exploiter productive sector workers were proletarian using the same reasoning it was rejecting in 1969. It evens leads to a lack of explanation of why counterrevolution happened in the Soviet Union. If a group of Slavic workers with high living standards and privileged positions in the division of labor in the 1950s were a social base of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union as "Revolutionary youth and the road to the proletariat" suggests, it is even more true that the majority-exploiter Euro-Amerikan working class today is a social base of counterrevolution -- unless one is a fucking Anglo racist.
In the first place, the notion out there that the Weathermen were opposed to the labor aristocracy reflects, to a great extent, a wishful interpretation of a social-democratic myth that the Weathermen hated white workers. It is necessary for people looking for some kind of size-ist validation in history for their line in opposition to parasitism to separate social-democratic myth from reality. The Weather Underground Organization was focoist, but it's not that Cuban focoists thought that Cuban workers or the Cuban people were enemies. Rather, the Weathermen felt that the white proletariat needed to be woken up from false consciousness; national chauvinism, white supremacy and calmness in daily life were supposedly getting in the way of white workers' natural solidarity with colonial workers, as was male chauvinism, impacting anti-imperialist organizations' numbers and effectiveness. It is possible to say that the Weather people were nation traitors because they were Euro-Amerikans, but the same rhetoric showing their opposition to the imperialist state and corporations also has them saying that their actions are in the long-run interests of the great majority of Euro-Amerikans, which is not just an abstract statement, but a matter of practical orientation. The Weather people said repeatedly that their actions were in the joint interests of the Third World and U.$. internal colony masses and the Euro-Amerikan so-called masses. Because of certain approach to organizing-related struggle and knowledge production, some of the least correct aspects of the Weathermen's line ended up being preserved in the lines of people who were struggling with the Weathermen for recruits, but didn't absorb the lessons that emerged during the line debates that took place. Sustained advancement didn't happen.
In addition to those whose were not too dissimilar from the Weathermen and whose theory and method differences from the RYM I they have exaggerated, there is a significant number of people who still consider themselves influenced by the Weathermen and the Weathermen's line to be a precursor of their own line. Of these, MIWS is not one. There is a historical relationship between the Weathermen, which stressed the urgency of internationalism, and older North American pro-Mao organizations claiming to be militantly internationalist today (even if just a loose moral one), and the Maoist Internationalist Movement that began in North America MIWS considers an ideological inspiration of its line, but the Weathermen is not a precursor of MIWS's line any more than Peking Review, an international publication that contained Lin Biao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War," is. Others do consider the Weathermen their predecessor. This is significant in that the Weathermen's political economy never recognized the white working class as bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, or even semi-proletarian or labor aristocracy. The Weathermen ended up saying that even the white petty-bourgeoisie could be woken up from complacency, because the white petty-bourgeoisie experienced so-called alienation, and there is a reflection of this even in the June 1969 "Weatherman" statement: "The content of its independent class interests--anti-monopoly capital but for capitalism rather than socialism--gives it a political character of some opposition to "big government," like its increased spending and taxes and its totalitarian extension of its control into every aspect of life, and to "big labor," which is at this time itself part of the monopoly capitalist power structure" (emphasis added). To a limited extent, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" echoes the early liberal-humanist rhetoric of SDS.
The point of writings like MIWS's is not that people should hate white workers and make the white "middle class" (people who are middle-income among whites or in the United $tates) their organizing focus. For that matter, this writer is sick and tired of people calling rural and low-income white Amerikans stupid and racist while they flatter urban whites who are the social base of the police state in oppressed nation communities and the vanguard of global imperialist aggression and counterinsurgency. The whole of Euro-Amerika is reactionary; it is an oppressor nation whose different domestic classes are bourgeois. Yet, that is what people both with negative and with positive views of the Weathermen (if not their focoism) have done in practice: treat the white middle class as progressive. Some of these, including cops who claimed to agree most white workers were not proletarian to infiltrate the Maoist movement, have come up with reasons, supposedly pertaining to large groups of Euro-Amerikans, why non-exploited Euro-Amerikans are still oppressed or able to ally with the oppressed, such as "alienation."
The Weathermen had some words against "submerging the principled revolutionary question of women's liberation." In retrospect, though, the Weathermen comes off as giving the impression that the international principal contradiction (which the Weathermen said was between the imperialists headed by the United $tates and the Third World masses) made having a gender theory unnecessary, except as rhetoric for recruiting females or even decadent male youth. This is another area where the Weathermen continues to exert influence, or where there is unfortunately too much similarity with the Weathermen. On the one hand, you have crypto-Trotskyists acting like nothing has changed since the sixties and nighttime assaults on females by strangers should be a hot-button issue among the white so-called masses. On the other hand, various nihilist crackpots and sectarian selective nitpickers suggest that having a worked-out gender theory is not necessary because of the principal contradiction, with Liberalism left to fill in the blanks by default where a gender theory should be. There must be no room for the gender aristocracy and the labor aristocracy, and their representation in the imperialist-patriarchal state, to maneuver.
There has to be more to say about Robin Morgan and Hillary Clinton, and for that matter Barack Obama as someone who believes that Amerikan workers are exploited, than just they don't understand the principal contradiction. At the same time, the empirical observations that First World females act like the males sometimes and that First Worlders have high living standards aren't really controversial. Going from a string of facts to a revolutionary practice -- not a reformist, sub-reformist or counterrevolutionary practice -- requires a scientific theory.
There is no draft in the United $tates today -- that is another reason it is necessary to go beyond "Weatherman" and what is said about youth. There is the stop-loss policy, but the number of soldiers who have been retained annually since September 11, 2001, is a fraction of those drafted annually (before the draft ended) during the Vietnam War, when the U.$. population was smaller. It is ironic that at the time of this writing the Wall Street Journal is claiming that the Army is ending its stop-loss practice, so that soon may not be a factor, either: "The widespread use of the policy during the Iraq War became a heated political issue. In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry likened it to a "backdoor draft."" "Mr. Gates said the Army would also give all soldiers who are affected by stop-loss a $500-a-month bonus, with the payments made retroactive to soldiers serving involuntarily as of Oct. 1, 2008."(6)
Telling youth to be freaks would (for different reasons) not have the same impact in the United $tates that it did in the 1970s when the Weathermen said it. Regardless, MIWS isn't telling youth to be freaks, and it isn't telling youth to give in to authority either. The communist approach to youth, as with other groups, has to be consistent in a way that may be alienating at times to many people in the First World: focused on systemic structure and the concrete, not chasing after people in various subcultures and fixated on new fads, and tailing people with various narrow concerns, nor focused on celebrating individuals' lifestyles. The lack of advance on the youth question where people are saying the same things about Amerikan youth in 2009 that people were saying about Amerikan youth in 1969, and Russian youth in 1909 during the decay of feudalism, is indicative of a lack of science on an important question pertaining (by first approximation) to 25% of the U.$. population and two billion people. To imitate the Weathermen here represents a regression.
Notes
1. The use of Marx's, Lenin's and Mao's images and Marxist phraseology was not some casual thing. Besides an increasing number of articles in previous issues of New Left Notes containing Marxist rhetoric and argumentation, Dan Berger states in Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, California: AK Press, 2006):
"Thus, many issues were in motion, from the seeming imminence of global revolution to the growing repression within the United States, when SDS met for what turned out to be its final convention in Chicago in June 1969. To set the tone for the coming battles, RYM distributed a packet to the delegates prior to the conference containing works by Lenin on imperialism and by Chinese communist Lin Piao on People's War." (p. 80)
Seemingly in case anyone might have missed it otherwise, Mao Zedong's "Combat Liberalism" appears on the front page of New Left Notes, December 23, 1968 (vol. 3, no. 39), the same issue in which "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement" appears.
2. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-186.
3. http://maoist.ws/archive/classics/cvgf.html
4. "1938 Trotskyist Resolution on Youth," resolution of International Conference of Youth of the Fourth International, 1938 September 11, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/youth/youth02.htm
5. "Revolutionary youth and the road to the proletariat," 1969, http://depts.washington.edu/labpics/repository/v/antiwar/studentmisc/revyouth_ocr_op.pdf.html
6. Yochi J. Dreazen, "Army Is Phasing Out Stop-Loss for Soldiers," 2009 March 19, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123741885685978043.html
Bibliography
"Letter from S.D.S. Leadership" with comments by MC5, http://web.archive.org/web/20030309082735/http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/wim/wyl/text.php?mimfile=sdsonplp.txtAt the time of this writing, this document wasn't accessible at prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext because of a query-string-related problem.
Prairie Fire : The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism : Political Statement of the Weather Underground (San Francisco: Communications Co., 1974).
Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs (Ramparts Press, Inc., 1970).
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Source: New Left Notes, vol. 4, no. 22, 1969 June 18, pp. 3-8
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows
(Submitted by Karin Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis) I. INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTION "The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world. The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole world against US imperialism and its lackeys." -- Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People's War! People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about? Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy? The overriding consideration in answering these questions is that the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it. This is essential in defining political matters in the whole world: because it is by far the most powerful, every other empire and petty dictator is in the long run dependent on US imperialism, which has unified, allied with, and defended all of the reactionary forces of the whole world. Thus, in considering every other force or phenomenon, from Soviet imperialism or Israeli imperialism to "workers struggle" in France or Czechoslovakia, we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it. So the very first question people in this country must ask in considering the question of revolution is where they stand in relation to the United States as an oppressor nation, and where they stand in relation to the masses of people throughout the world whom US imperialism is oppressing. The primary task of revolutionary struggle is to solve this principal contradiction on the side of the people of the world. It is the oppressed peoples of the world who have created the wealth of this empire and it is to them that it belongs: the goal of the revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interests of the oppressed peoples of the world. It is in this context that we must examine the revolutionary struggles in the United States. We are within the heartland of a world-wide monster, a country so rich from its world-wide plunder that even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world. The US empire, as a world-wide system, channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. The relative affluence existing in the United States is directly dependent upon the labor and natural resources of the Vietnamese, the Angolans, the Bolivians and the rest of the peoples of the Third World. All of the United Airlines Astrojets, all of the Holiday Inns, all of the Hertz's automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree, to the people of the rest of the world. Therefore, any conception of "socialist revolution" simply in terms of the working people of the United States, failing to recognize the full scope of interests of the most oppressed peoples of the world, is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology. While the control and use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country, if the goal is not clear from the start we will further the preservation of class society, oppression, war, genocide, and the complete emiseration of everyone, including the people of the US. The goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism. Winning state power in the US will occur as a result of the military forces of the US overextending themselves around the world and being defeated piecemeal; struggle within the US will be a vital part of this process, but when the revolution triumphs in the US it will have been made by the people of the whole world. For socialism to be defined in national terms within so extreme and historical an oppressor nation as this is only imperialist national chauvinism on the part of the "movement." II. WHAT IS THE BLACK COLONY? Not every colony of people oppressed by imperialism lies outside the boundaries of the US. Black people within North America, brought here 400 years ago as slaves and whose labor, as slaves, built this country, are an internal colony within the confines of the oppressor nation. What this means is that black people are oppressed as a whole people, in the institutions and social relations of the country, apart from simply the consideration of their class position, income, skill, etc. as individuals. What does this colony look like? What is the basis for its common oppression and why is it important? One historically important position has been that the black colony only consists of the "black belt nation" in the south, whose fight for national liberation is based on a common land, culture, history and economic life. The corollary of this position is that black people in the rest of the country are a national minority but not actually part of the colony themselves; so the struggle for national liberation is for the black belt, and not all blacks; black people in the north, not actually part of the colony, are part of the working class of the white oppressor nation. In this formulation northern black workers have a "dual role"--one an interest in supporting the struggle in the South, and opposing racism, as members of the national minority, and as northern "white nation" workers whose class interest is in integrated socialism in the north. The consistent version of this line actually calls for integrated organizing of black and white workers in the north along what it calls "class" lines. This position is wrong; in reality, the black colony does not exist simply as the "black belt nation", but exists in the country as a whole. The common oppression of black people and the common culture growing out of that history are not based historically or currently on their relation to the territory of the black belt, even though that has been a place of population concentration and has some very different characteristics than the north, particularly around the land question. Rather, the common features of oppression, history and culture which unify black people as a colony (although originating historically in a common teritory [sic --MIWS] apart from the colonizers, i.e. Africa, not the North) have been based historically on their common position as slaves, which since the nominal abolition of slavery has taken the form of caste oppression, and oppression of black people as a people everywhere that they exist. A new black nation, different from the nations of Africa from which it came, has been forged by the common historical experience of importation and slavery and caste oppression; to claim that to be a nation it must of necessity now be based on a common national territory apart from the colonizing nation is a mechanical application of criteria which were and are applicable to different situations. What is specifically meant by the term caste is that all black people, on the basis of their common slave history, common culture and skin color are systematically denied access to particular job categories (or positions within job categories), social position etc. regardless of individual skills, talents, money or education. Within the working class, they are the most oppressed section; in the petit bourgeoisie, they are even more strictly confined to the lowest levels. Token exceptions aside, the specific content of this caste oppression is to maintain black people in the most exploitative and oppressive jobs and conditions. Therefore, since the lowest class is the working class, the black caste is almost entirely a caste of the working class, or positions as oppressed as the lower working class positions (poor black petit-bourgeoisie and farmers); it is a colonial labor caste, a colony whose common national character itself is defined by their common class position. Thus, northern blacks do not have a "dual interest"--as blacks on the one hand and "US-nation workers" on the other. They have a single class interest, along with all other black people in the US, as members of the Black Proletarian Colony. III. THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALIST SELF-DETERMINATION The struggle of black people--as a colony--is for self-determination, freedom, and liberation from US imperialism. Because blacks have been oppressed and held in an inferior social position as a people, they have a right to decide, organize and act on their common destiny as a people apart from white interference. Black self-determination does not simply apply to determination of their collective political destiny at some future time. It is directly tied to the fact that because all blacks experience oppression in a form that no whites do, no whites are in a position to fully understand and test from their own practice the real situation black people face and the necessary response to it. This is why it is necessary for black people to organize separately and determine their actions separately at each stage of the struggle. It is important to understand the implications of this. It is not legitimate for whites to organizationally intervene in differences among revolutionary black nationalists. It would be arrogant for us to attack any black organization that defends black people and opposes imperialism in practice. But it is necessary to develop a correct understanding of the Black Liberation struggle within our own organization, where an incorrect one will further racist practice in our relations with the black movement. In the history of some external colonies, such as China and Vietnam, the struggle for self determination has had two stages: (1) a united front against imperialism and for New Democracy (which is a joint dictatorship of anti-colonial classes led by the proletariat, the content of which is a compromise between the interests of the proletariat and nationalist peasants, petit bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie); and (2) developing out of the new democratic stage, socialism. However, the black liberation struggle in this country will have only one "stage"; the struggle for self-determination will embody within it the struggle for socialism. As Huey P. Newton has said, "In order to be a revolutionary nationalist, you would of necessity have to be a socialist." This is because--given the caste quality of oppression-as-a-people-through-a-common-degree-of-exploitation--self-d etermination requires being free from white capitalist exploitation in the form of inferior (lower caste) jobs, housing, schools, hospitals, prices. In addition, only what was or became in practice a socialist program for self-determination--one which addressed itself to reversing this exploitation--could win the necessary active mass support in the "proletarian colony." The program of a united front for new democracy, on the other hand, would not be as thorough, and so would not win as active and determined support from the black masses. The only reason for having such a front would be where the independent petit bourgeois forces which it would bring in would add enough strength to balance the weakening of proletarian backing. This is not the case: first, because much of the black petit bourgeoisie is actually a "comprador" petit bourgeoisie (like so-called black capitalists who are promoted by the power structure to seem independent but are really agents of white monopoly capital), who would never fight as a class for any real self-determination; and secondly, because many black petit bourgeoisie, perhaps most, while not having a class interest in socialist self-determination, are close enough to the black masses in the oppression and limitations on their conditions that they will support many kinds of self-determination issues, and, especially when the movement is winning, can be won to support full (socialist) self-determination. For the black movement to work to maximize this support from the petit bourgeoisie is correct; but it is in no way a united front where it is clear that the Black Liberation Movement should not and does not modify the revolutionary socialist content of its stand to win that support. IV. BLACK LIBERATION MEANS REVOLUTION What is the relationship of the struggle for black self-determination to the whole world-wide revolution to defeat US imperialism and internationalize its resources toward the goal of creating a classless world? No black self-determination could be won which would not result in a victory for the international revolution as a whole. The black proletarian colony, being dispersed as such a large and exploited section of the work force, is essential to the survival of imperialism. Thus, even if the black liberation movement chose to try to attain self-determination in the form of a separate country (a legitimate part of the right to self-determination), existing side by side with the US, imperialism could not survive if they won it--and so would never give up without being defeated. Thus, a revolutionary nationalist movement could not win without destroying the state power of the imperialists; and it is for this reason that the black liberation movement, as a revolutionary nationalist movement for self-determination, is automatically in and of itself an inseparable part of the whole revolutionary struggle against US imperialism and for international socialism. However, the fact that black liberation depends on winning the whole revolution does not mean that it depends on waiting for and joining with a mass white [p. 4] movement to do it. The genocidal oppression of black people must be ended, and does not allow any leisure time to wait; if necessary, black people could win self-determination, abolishing the whole imperialist system and seizing state power to do it, without this white movement, although the cost among whites and blacks both would be high. Blacks could do it alone if necessary because of their centralness to the system, economically and geo-militarily, and because of the level of unity, commitment, and initiative which will be developed in waging a people's war for survival and national liberation. However, we do not expect that they will have to do it alone, not only because of the international situation, but also because the real interests of masses of oppressed whites in this country lie with the Black Liberation struggle, and the conditions for understanding and fighting for these interests grows with the deepening of the crises. Already, the black liberation movement has carried with it an upsurge of revolutionary consciousness among white youth; and while there are no guarantees, we can expect that this will extend and deepen among all oppressed whites. To put aside the possibility of blacks winning alone leads to the racist position that blacks should wait for whites and are dependent on whites acting for them to win. Yet the possibility of blacks winning alone cannot in the least be a justification for whites failing to shoulder the burden of developing a revolutionary movement among whites. If the first error is racism by holding back black liberation, this would be equally racist by leaving blacks isolated to take on the whole fight--and the whole cost--for everyone. It is necessary to defeat both racist tendencies: (1) that blacks shouldn't go ahead with making the revolution, and (2) that blacks should go ahead alone with making it. The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don't have to do whole thing alone. Any white who does not follow this third path is objectively following one of the other two (or both) and is objectively racist. V. ANTI-IMPERIALIST REVOLUTION AND THE UNITED FRONT Since the strategy for defeating imperialism in semi-feudal colonies has two stages, the new democratic stage of a united front to throw out imperialism and then the socialist stage, some people suggest two stages for the US too--one to stop imperialism, the anti-imperialist stage, and another to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, the socialist stage. It is no accident that even the proponents of this idea can't tell you what it means. In reality, imperialism is a predatory international stage of capitalism. Defeating imperialism within the US couldn't possibly have the content, which it could in a semi-feudal country, of replacing imperialism with capitalism or new democracy; when imperialism is defeated in the US, it will be replaced by socialism--nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power--the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage. To talk of this as two separate stages, the struggle to overthrow imperialism and the struggle for socialist revolution, is as crazy as if Marx had talked about the proletarian socialist revolution as a revolution of two stages, one the overthrow of capitalist state power, and second the establishment of socialist state power. Along with no two stages, there is no united front with the petit bourgeoisie, because its interests as a class aren't for replacing imperialism with socialism. As far as people within this country are concerned, the international war against imperialism is the same task as the socialist revolution, for one overthrow of power here. There is no "united front" for socialism here. One reason people have considered the "united front" idea is the fear that if we were talking about a one-stage socialist revolution we would fail to organize maximum possible support among people, like some petit bourgeoisie, who would fight imperialism on a particular issue, but weren't for revolution. When the petit bourgeoisie's interest is for fighting imperialism on a particular issue, but not for overthrowing it and replacing it with socialism, it is still contributing to revolution to that extent--not to some intermediate thing which is not imperialism and not socialism. Someone not for revolution is not for actually defeating imperialism either, but we still can and should unite with them on particular issues. But this is not a united front (and we should not put forth some joint "united front" line with them to the exclusion of our own politics), because their class position isn't against imperialism as a system. In China, or Vietnam, the petit bourgeoisie's class interests could be for actually winning against imperialism; this was because their task was driving it out, not overthrowing its whole existence. For us here, "throwing it out" means not from one colony, but all of them, throwing it out of the world, the same thing as overthrowing it. VI. INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY AND THE BLACK VANGUARD What is the strategy of this international revolutionary movement? What are the strategic weaknesses of the imperialists which make it possible for us to win? Revolutionaries around the world are in general agreement on the answer, which Lin Piao describes in the following way: "US imperialism is stronger, but also more vulnerable, than any imperialism of the past. It sets itself against the people of the whole world, including the people of the United States. Its human, military, material and financial resources are far from sufficient for the realization of its ambition of domination over the whole world. US imperialism has further weakened itself by occupying so many places in the world, over-reaching itself, stretching its fingers out wide and dispersing its strength, with its rear so far away and its supply lines so long." -- Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People's War, p. 122 The strategy which flows from this is what Che called "creating two, three, many Vietnams"--to mobilize the struggle so sharply in so many places that the imperialists cannot possibly deal with it all. Since it is essential to their interests, they will try to deal with it all, and will be defeated and destroyed in the process. In defining and implementing this strategy, it is clear that the vanguard (that is, the section of the people who are in the forefront of the struggle and whose class interests and needs define the terms and tasks of the revolution) of the "American Revolution" is the workers and oppressed peoples of the colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Because of the level of special oppression of black people as a colony they reflect the interests of the oppressed people of the world from within the borders of the United States; they are part of the Third World and part of the international revolutionary vanguard. The vanguard role of the Vietnamese and other Third World countries in defeating US imperialism has been clear to our movement for some time. What has not been so clear is the vanguard role black people have played, and continue to play, in the development of revolutionary consciousness and struggle within the United States. Criticisms of the black liberation struggle as being "reactionary" or of black organizations on campus as being conservative or "racist" very often express this lack of understanding. These ideas are incorrect and must be defeated if a revolutionary movement is going to be built among whites. The black colony, due to its particular nature as a slave colony, never adopted a chauvinist identification with America as an imperialist power, either politically or culturally. Moreover, the history of black people in America has consistently been one of the greatest overall repudiation of and struggle against the state. From the slave ships from Africa to the slave revolts, the Civil War, etc., black people have been waging a struggle for survival and liberation. In the history of our own movement this has also been the case: the civil rights struggles, initiated and led by blacks in the South; the rebellions beginning with Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965 through Detroit and Newark in 1967; the campus struggles at all-black schools in the south and struggles led by blacks on campuses all across the country. As it is the blacks--along with the Vietnamese and other Third World people--who are most oppressed by US imperialism, their class interests are most solidly and resolutely committed to waging revolutionary struggle through to its completion. Therefore it is no surprise that time and again, in both political content and level of consciousness and militancy, it has been the black liberation movement which has upped the ante and defined the terms of the struggle. What is the relationship of this "black vanguard" to the "many Vietnams" around the world? Obviously this is an example of our strategy that different fronts reinforce each other. The fact that the Vietnamese are winning weakens the enemy, advancing the possibilities for the black struggle, etc. But it is important for us to understand that the interrelationship is more than this. Black people do not simply "choose" to intensify their struggle because they want to help the Vietnamese, or because they see that Vietnam heightens the possibilities for struggle here. The existence of any one Vietnam, especially a winning one, spurs on others not only through consciousness and choice, but through need, because it is a political and economic, as well as military, weakening of capitalism, and this means that to compensate, the imperialists are forced to intensify their oppression of other people. Thus the loss of China and Cuba and the loss now of Vietnam not only encourages other oppressed peoples (such as the blacks) by showing what the alternative is and that it can be won, but also costs the imperialists billions of dollars which they then have to take out of the oppression of these other peoples. Within this country increased oppression falls heavier on the most oppressed sections of the population, so that the condition of all workers is worsened through rising taxes, inflation and the fall of real wages, and speedup. But this increased oppression falls heaviest on the most oppressed, such as poor white workers and, especially, the blacks, for example through the collapse of state services like schools, hospitals, and welfare, which naturally hits the hardest at those most dependent on them. This deterioration pushes people to fight harder to even try to maintain their present level. The more the ruling class is hurt in Vietnam, the harder people will be pushed to rebel and to fight for reforms. Because there exist successful models of revolution in Cuba, Vietnam, etc., these reform struggles will provide a continually larger and stronger base for revolutionary ideas. Because it needs to maximize profits by denying the reforms, and is aware that these conditions and reform struggles will therefore lead to revolutionary consciousness, the ruling class will see it more and more necessary to come down on any motion at all, even where it is not yet highly organized or conscious. It will come down faster on black people, because their oppression is increasing fastest, and this makes their rebellion most thorough and most dangerous, and fastest growing. It is because of this that the vanguard character and role of the black liberation struggle will be increased and intensified, rather than being increasingly equal to and merged into the situation and rebellion of oppressed white working people and youth. The crises of imperialism (the existence of Vietnam and especially that it's winning) will therefore create a "black Vietnam" within the US. Given that black self-determination would mean fully crushing the power of the imperialists, this "Vietnam" has certain different characteristics than the external colonial wars. The imperialists will never "get out of the US" until their total strength and every resource they can bring to bear has been smashed; so the Black Vietnam cannot win without bringing the whole thing down and winning for everyone. This means that this war of liberation will be the most protracted and hardest fought of all. It is in this context that the question of the South must be dealt with again, not as a question of whether or not the black nation, black colony, exists there, as opposed to in the north as well, but rather as a practical question of strategy and tactics: Can the black liberation struggle -- the struggle of all blacks in the country -- gain advantage in the actual war of liberation by concentrating on building base areas in the South in territory with a concentration of black population? This is very clearly a different question than that of "where the colony is," and to this question the "yes" answer is an important possibility. If the best potential for struggle in the South were realized, it is fully conceivable and legitimate that the struggle there could take on the character of a fight for separation; and any victories won in that direction would be important gains for the national liberation of the colony as a whole. However, because the colony is dispersed over the whole country, and not just located in the black belt, winning still means the power and liberation of blacks in the whole country. Thus, even the winning of separate independence in the South would still be one step toward self-determination, and not equivalent to winning it; which, because of the economic position of the colony as a whole, would still require overthrowing the state power of the imperialists, taking over production and the whole economy and power, etc. VII. THE REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH MOVEMENT: CLASS ANALYSIS The revolutionary youth movement program was hailed as a transition strategy, which explained a lot of our past work and pointed to new directions for our movement. But as a transition to what? What was our overall strategy? Was the youth movement strategy just an organizational strategy because SDS is an organization of youth and we can move best with other young people? We have pointed to the vanguard nature of the black struggle in this country as part of the international struggle against American imperialism, and the impossibility of anything but an international strategy for winning. Any attempt to put forth a strategy which, despite internationalist rhetoric, assumes a purely internal development to the class struggle in this country, is incorrect. The Vietnamese (and the Uruguayans and the Rhodesians) and the blacks and Third World peoples in this country will continue to set the terms for class struggle in America. In this context, why an emphasis on youth? Why should young people be willing to fight on the side of the Third World peoples? Before dealing with this question about youth, however, there follows a brief sketch of the main class categories in the white mother country which we think are important, and indicate our present estimation of their respective class interests (bearing [p. 5] in mind that the potential for various sections to understand and fight for the revolution will vary according to more than just their real class interests). Most of the population is of the working class, by which we means not simply industrial or production workers, nor those who are actually working, but the whole section of the population which doesn't own productive property and so lives off the sale of its labor power. This is not a metaphysical category either in terms of its interests, the role it plays, or even who is in it, which very often is difficult to determine. As a whole, the long-range interests of the non-colonial sections of the working class lie with overthrowing imperialism, with supporting self-determination for the oppressed nations (including the black colony), with supporting and fighting for international socialism. However, virtually all of the white working class also has short-range privileges from imperialism, which are not false privileges but very real ones which give them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the imperialists, especially when the latter are in a relatively prosperous phase. When the imperialists are losing their empire, on the other hand, these short-ranged privileged interests are seen to be temporary (even though the privileges may be relatively greater over the faster-increasing emiseration of the oppressed peoples). The long-range interests of workers in siding with the oppressed peoples are seen more clearly in the light of imperialism's impending defeat. Within the whole working class, the balance of anti-imperialist class interests with white mother country short-term privilege varies greatly. First, the most oppressed sections of the mother country working class have interests most clearly and strongly anti-imperialist. Who are the most oppressed sections of the working class? Millions of whites who have as oppressive material conditions as the blacks, or almost so: especially, poor southern white workers; the unemployed or semi-employed, or those employed at very low wages for long hours and bad conditions, who are non-unionized or have weak unions; and extending up to include much of unionized labor which has it a little better off but still is heavily oppressed and exploited. This category covers a wide range and includes the most oppressed sections not only of production and service workers, but also some secretaries, clerks, etc. Much of this category gets some relative privileges (i.e. benefits) from imperialism, which constitute some material basis for being racist or pro-imperialist; but overall it is itself directly and heavily oppressed, so that in addition to its long-range class interest on the side of the people of the world, its immediate situation also constitutes a strong basis for sharpening the struggle against the state and fighting through to revolution. Secondly, there is the upper strata of the working class. This is also an extremely broad category, including the upper strata of unionized skilled workers and also most of the "new working class" of proletarianized or semi-proletarianized "intellect workers." There is no clearly marked dividing line between the previous section and this one; our conclusions in dealing with "questionable" strata will in any event have to come from more thorough analysis of particular situations. The long-range class interests of this strata, like the previous section of more oppressed workers, are for the revolution and against imperialism. However, it is characterized by a higher level of privilege relative to the oppressed colonies, including the blacks, and relative to more oppressed workers in the mother country; so that there is a strong material basis for racism and loyalty to the system. In a revolutionary situation, where the people's forces were on the offensive and the ruling class was clearly losing, most of this upper strata of the working class will be winnable to the revolution; while at least some sections of it will probably identify their interests with imperialism till the end and oppose the revolution (which parts do which will have more to do with more variables than just the particular level of privilege). The further development of the situation will clarify where this section will go, although it is clear that either way we do not put any emphasis on reaching older employed workers from this strata at this time. The exception is where they are important to the black liberation struggle, the Third World, or the youth movement in particular situations, such as with teachers, hospital technicians, etc., in which cases we must fight particularly hard to organize them around a revolutionary line of full support for black liberation and the international revolution against US imperialism. This is crucial because the privilege of this section of the working class has provided and will provide a strong material basis for national chauvinist and social democratic ideology within the movement, such as anti-internationalist concepts of "student power" and "workers control." Another consideration in understanding the interests of this segment is that, because of the way it developed and how its skills and its privileges were "earned over time," the differential between the position of youth and older workers is in many ways greater for this section than any other in the population. We should continue to see it as important to build the revolutionary youth movement among the youth of this strata. Thirdly, there are "middle strata" who are not petit bourgeoisie, who may even technically be upper working class, but who are so privileged and tightly tied to imperialism through their jobs roles that they are agents of imperialism. This section includes management personnel, corporate lawyers, higher civil servants, and other government agents, army officers, etc. Because their job categories require and promote a close identification with the interests of the ruling class, these strata are enemies of the revolution. Fourthly, and last among the categories we're going to deal with, is the petit bourgeoisie. This class is different from the middle level described above, in that it has the independent class interest which is opposed to both monopoly power and to socialism. The petit bourgeoisie consists of small capital--both business and farms--and self-employed tradesmen and professionals (many professionals work for monopoly capital, and are either the upper level of the working class or in the agents-of-imperialism category). The content of its independent class interests--anti-monopoly capital but for capitalism rather than socialism--gives it a political character of some opposition to "big government," like its increased spending and taxes and its totalitarian extension of its control into every aspect of life, and to "big labor," which is at this time itself part of the monopoly capitalist power structure. The direction which this opposition takes can be reactionary or reformist. At this time the reformist side of it is very much mitigated by the extent to which the independence of the petit bourgeoisie is being undermined. Increasingly, small businesses are becoming extensions of big ones, while professionals and self-employed tradesmen less and less sell their skills on their own terms and become regular employees of big firms. This tendency does not means that the reformist aspect is not still present; it is, and there are various issues, like withdrawing from a losing imperialist war, where we could get support from them. On the question of imperialism as a system, however, their class interests are generally more for it than for overthrowing it, and it will be the deserters from their class who stay with us. VIII. WHY A REVOLUTIONARY YOUTH MOVEMENT? In terms of the above analysis, most young people in the US are part of the working class. Although not yet employed, young people whose parents sell their labor power for wages, and more important who themselves expect to do the same in the future--or go into the army or be unemployed--are undeniably members of the working class. Most kids are well aware of what class they are in, even though they may not be very scientific about it. So our analysis assumes from the beginning that youth struggles are, by and large, working class struggles. But why the focus now on the struggles of working class youth rather than on the working class as a whole? The potential for revolutionary consciousness does not always always [typo --MIWS] correspond to ultimate class interest, particularly when imperialism is relatively prosperous and the movement is in an early stage. At this stage, we see working class youth as those most open to a revolutionary movement which sides with the struggles of Third World people: the following is an attempt to explain a strategic focus on youth for SDS. In general, young people have less stake in a society (no family, fewer debts, etc.), are more open to new ideas (they have not been brainwashed for so long or so well), and are therefore more able and willing to move in a revolutionary direction. Specifically in America, young people have grown up experiencing the crises in imperialism. They have grown up along with a developing black liberation movement, with the liberation of Cuba, the fights for independence in Africa, and the war in Vietnam. Older people grew up during the fight against Fascism, during the cold war, the smashing of the trade unions, McCarthy, and a period during which real wages consistently rose--since 1965 disposable real income has decreased slightly, particularly in urban areas where inflation and increased taxation have bitten heavily into wages. This crisis in imperialism affects all parts of the society. America has had to militarize to protect and expand its Empire; hence the high draft calls and the creation of a standing army of three and a half million, an army which still has been unable to win in Vietnam. Further, the huge defense expenditures--required for the defense of the empire and at the same time a way of making increasing profits for the defense industries--have gone hand in hand with the urban crisis around welfare, the hospitals, the schools, housing, air, and water pollution. The State cannot provide the services it has been forced to assume responsibility for, and needs to increase taxes and to pay its growing debts while it cuts services and uses the pigs to repress protest. The private sector of the economy can't provide jobs, particularly unskilled jobs. The expansion of the defense and education industries by the State since World War II is in part an attempt to pick up the slack, though the inability to provide decent wages and working conditions for "public" jobs is more and more a problem. As imperialism struggles to hold together this decaying social fabric, it inevitably resorts to brute force and authoritarian ideology. People, especially young people, more and more find themselves in the iron grip of authoritarian institutions. Reaction against the pigs or teachers in the schools, welfare pigs or the army is generalizable and extends beyond the particular repressive institution to the society and the State as a whole. The legitimacy of the State is called into question for the first time in at least 30 years, and the anti-authoritarianism which characterizes the youth rebellion turns into rejection of the State, a refusal to be socialized into American society. Kids used to try to beat the system from inside the army or from inside the schools; now they desert from the army and burn down the schools. The crisis in imperialism has brought about a breakdown in bourgeois social forms, culture and ideology. The family falls apart, kids leave home, women begin to break out of traditional "female" and "mother" roles. There develops a "generation gap" and a "youth problem." Our heroes are no longer struggling businessmen, and we also begin to reject the ideal career of the professional and look to Mao, Che, the Panthers, the Third World, for our models, for motion. We reject the elitist, technocratic bullshit that tells us only experts can rule, and look instead to leadership from the people's war of the Vietnamese. Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Temptations brought us closer to the "people's culture" of Black America. The racist response to the civil rights movement revealed the depth of racism in America, as well as the impossibility of real change through American institutions. And the war against Vietnam is not "the heroic war against the Nazis"; it's the big lie, with napalm burning through everything we had heard this country stood for. Kids begin to ask questions: Where is the Free World? And who do the pigs protect at home? The breakdown in bourgeois culture and concomitant anti-authoritarianism is fed by the crisis in imperialism, but also in turn feeds that crisis, exacerbates it so that people no longer merely want the plastic '50s restored, but glimpse an alternative (like inside the Columbia buildings) and begin to fight for it. We don't want teachers to be more kindly cops; we want to smash cops, and build a new life. The contradictions of decaying imperialism fall hardest on youth in four distinct areas--the schools, jobs, the draft and the army, and the pigs and the courts. (A) In jail-like schools, kids are fed a mish-mash of racist, male chauvinist, anti-working class, anti-communist lies while being channelled into job and career paths set up according to the priorities of monopoly capital. At the same time, the State is becoming increasingly incapable of providing enough money to keep the schools going at all. (B) Youth unemployment is three times average unemployment. As more jobs are threatened by automation or the collapse of specific industries, unions act to secure jobs for those already employed. New people in the labor market can't find jobs, job stability is undermined (also because of increasing speed-up and more intolerable safety conditions) and people are less and less going to work in the same shop for 40 years. And, of course, when they do find jobs, young people get the worst ones and have the least seniority. (C) There are now two and a half million soldiers under thirty who are forced to police the world, kill and be killed in wars of imperialist domination. And (D) as a "youth problem" develops out of all this, the pigs and courts enforce curfews, set up pot busts, keep people off the streets, and repress any youth motion whatsoever. In all of this, it is not that life in America is toughest for youth or that they are the most oppressed. Rather, it is that young people are hurt directly--and severely--by imperialism. And, in being less tightly tied to the system, they are more "pushed" to join the black liberation struggle against US imperialism. Among young people there is less of a material base for racism--they have no seniority, have not spent 20 years securing a skilled job (the white monopoly of which is increasingly challenged by the black liberation movement), and aren't just about to pay off a 25-year mortgage on a house which is valuable because it's located in a white neighborhood. While these contradictions of imperialism fall hard on all youth, they fall hardest on the youth of the most [p. 6] oppressed (least privileged) sections of the working class. Clearly these youth have the greatest material base for struggle. They are the ones who most often get drafted, who get the worst jobs if they get any, who are most abused by the various institutions of social control from the army to decaying schools, to the pigs and the courts. And their day-to-day existence indicates a potential for militancy and toughness. They are the people whom we can reach who at this stage are most ready to engage in militant revolutionary struggle. The point of the revolutionary youth movement strategy is to move from a predominant student elite base to more oppressed (less privileged) working class youth as a way of deepening and expanding the revolutionary youth movement--not of giving up what we have gained, not giving up our old car for a new Dodge. This is part of a strategy to reach the entire working class to engage in struggle against imperialism; moving from more privileged sections of white working class youth to more oppressed sections to the entire working class as a whole, including importantly what has classically been called the industrial proletariat. But this should not be taken to mean that there is a magic moment, after we reach a certain percentage of the working class, when all of a sudden we become a working class movement. We are already that if we put forward internationalist proletarian politics. We also don't have to wait to become a revolutionary force. We must be a self-conscious revolutionary force from the beginning, not be a movement which takes issues to some mystical group--"THE PEOPLE"--who will make the revolution. We must be a revolutionary movement of people understanding the necessity to reach more people, all working people, as we make the revolution. The above arguments make it clear that it is both important and possible to reach young people wherever they are--not only in the shops, but also in the schools, in the army, and in the streets--so as to recruit them to fight on the side of the oppressed peoples of the world. Young people will be part of the International Liberation Army. The necessity to build this International Liberation Army in America leads to certain priorities in practice for the revolutionary youth movement which we should begin to apply this summer.... IX. IMPERIALISM IS THE ISSUE "The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletariat of different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole." (Communist Manifesto) How do we reach youth; what kinds of struggles do we build; how do we make a revolution? What we have tried to lay out so far is the political content of the consciousness which we want to extent and develop as a mass consciousness: the necessity to build our power as part of the whole international revolution to smash the state power of the imperialists and build socialism. Besides consciousness of this task, we must involve masses of people in accomplishing it. Yet we are faced with a situation in which almost all of the people whose interests are served by these goals, and who should be, or even are, sympathetic to revolution, neither understand the specific tasks involved in making a revolution nor participate in accomplishing them. On the whole, people don't join revolutions just because revolutionaries tell them to. The oppression of the system affects people in particular ways, and the development of political consciousness and participation begins with particular problems, which turn into issues and struggles. We must transform people's everyday problems, and the issues and struggles growing out of them, into revolutionary consciousness, active and conscious opposition to racism and imperialism. This is directly counterposed to assuming that struggles around immediate issues will lead naturally over time to struggle against imperialism. It has been argued that since people's oppression is due to imperialism and racism, then any struggle against immediate oppression is "objectively anti-imperialist," and the development of the fight against imperialism is a succession of fights for reforms. This error is classical economism. A variant of this argument admits that this position is often wrong, but suggests that since imperialism is collapsing at this time, fights for reforms become "objectively anti-imperialist." At this stage of imperialism there obviously will be more and more struggles for the improvement of material conditions, but that is no guarantee of increasing internationalist proletarian consciousness. On the one hand, if we, as revolutionaries, are capable of understanding the necessity to smash imperialism and build socialism, then the masses of people who we want to fight along with us are capable of that understanding. On the other hand, people are brainwashed and at present don't understand it; if revolution is not raised at every opportunity, then how can we expect people to see it in their interests, or to undertake the burdens of revolution? We need to make it clear from the beginning that we are about revolution. But if we are so careful to avoid the dangers of reformism, how do we relate to particular reform struggles? We have to develop some sense of how to relate each particular issue to the revolution. In every case, our aim is to raise anti-imperialist and anti-racist consciousness and tie the struggles of working class youth (and all working people) to the struggles of Third World people, rather than merely joining fights to improve material conditions even though these fights are certainly justified. This is not to say that we don't take immediate fights seriously, or fight hard in them, but that we are always up front with our politics, knowing that people in the course of struggle are open to a class line, ready to move beyond narrow self-interest. It is in this sense that we point out that the particular issue is not the issue, is important insofar as it points to imperialism as an enemy that has to be destroyed. Imperialism is always the issue. Obviously, the issue cannot be a good illustration, or a powerful symbol, if it is not real to people, if it doesn't relate to the concrete oppression that imperialism causes. People have to be (and are being) hurt in some material way to understand the evils of imperialism, but what we must stress is the systematic nature of oppression and the way in which a single manifestation of imperialism makes clear its fundamental nature. At Columbia it was not the gym, in particular, which was important in the struggle, but the way in which the gym represented, to the people of Harlem and Columbia, Columbia's imperialist invasion of the black colony. Or at Berkeley, though people no doubt needed a park (as much, however, as many other things?), what made the struggle so important was that people, at all levels of militancy, consciously saw themselves attacking private property and the power of the state. And the Richmond Oil Strike was exciting because the militant fight for improvement of material conditions was part and parcel of an attack on international monopoly capital. The numbers and militancy of people mobilized for these struggles has consistently surprised the left, and pointed to the potential power of a class-conscious mass movement. The masses will fight for socialism when they understand that reform fights, fights for improvement of material conditions, cannot be won under imperialism. With this understanding, revolutionaries should never put forth a line which fosters the illusion that imperialism will grant significant reforms. We must engage in struggles forthrightly as revolutionaries, so that it will be clear to anyone we help to win gains that the revolution rather than imperialism is responsible for them. This is one of the strengths of the Black Panther Party Breakfast for Children Program. It is "socialism in practice" by revolutionaries with the "practice" of armed self-defense and a "line" which stresses the necessity of overthrowing imperialism and seizing state power. Probably the American Friends Service Committee serves more children breakfast, but it is the symbolic value of the program in demonstrating what socialism will do for people which makes it worthwhile. What does it mean to organize around racism and imperialism in specific struggles? In the high schools (and colleges) at this time, it means putting forth a mass line to close down the schools, rather than to reform them so that they can serve the people. The reason for this line is not that under capitalism the schools cannot serve the people, and therefore it is silly or illusory to demand that. Rather it is that kids are ready for the full scope of militant struggle, and already demonstrate a consciousness of imperialism, such that struggles for a people-serving school would not raise the level of their struggle to its highest possible point. Thus, to tell a kid in New York that imperialism tracks him and thereby oppresses him is often small potatoes compared to his consciousness that imperialism oppresses him by jailing him, pigs and all, and the only thing to do is break out and tear up the jail. And even where high school kids are not yet engaged in such sharp struggle, it is crucial not to build consciousness only around specific issues such as tracking or ROTC or racist teachers, but to use those issues to build toward the general consciousness that the schools should be shut down. It may be important to present a conception of what schools should or could be like (this would include the abolition of the distinction between mental and physical work), but not offer this total conception as really possible to fight for in any way but through revolution. A mass line to close down the schools or colleges does not contradict demands for open admissions to college or any other good reform demand. Agitational demands for impossible, but reasonable, reforms are a good way to make a revolutionary point. The demand for open admissions by asserting the alternative to the present (school) system exposes its fundamental nature--that it is racist, class-based, and closed--pointing to the only possible solution to the present situation: "Shut it down!" The impossibility of real open admissions--all black and brown people admitted, no flunk-out, full scholarship, under present conditions--is the best reason (that the schools show no possibility for real reform) to shut the schools down. We should not throw away the pieces of victories we gain from these struggles, for any kind of more open admissions means that the school is closer to closing down (it costs the schools more, there are more militant blacks and browns making more and more fundamental demands on the schools, and so on). Thus our line in the schools, in terms of pushing any good reforms should be, "open them up and shut them down!" The spread of black caucuses in the shops and other workplaces throughout the country is an extension of the black liberation struggle. These groups have raised and will continue to raise anti-racist issues to white workers in a sharper fashion than any whites ever have or could raise them. Blacks leading struggles against racism has made the issue unavoidable, as the black student movement leadership did for white students. At the same time these black groups have led fights which traditional trade-union leaders have consistently refused to lead--fights against speed-up and for safety (issues which have become considerably more serious in the last few years), forcing white workers, particularly the more oppressed, to choose in another way between allegiance to the white mother country and black leadership. As white mother country radicals we should try to be in shops, hospitals, and companies where there are black caucuses, perhaps organizing solidarity groups, but at any rate pushing the importance of the black liberation struggle to whites, handing out Free Huey literature, bringing guys out to Panther rallies, and so on. Just one white guy could play a crucial role in countering UAW counter-insurgency. We also need to relate to workplaces where there is no black motion but where there are still many young white workers. In the shops the crisis in imperialism has come down around speed-up, safety, and wage squeeze--due to higher taxes and increased inflation, with the possibility of wage-price controls being instituted. We must relate this exploitation back to imperialism. The best way to do this is probably not caucuses in the shops, but to take guys to city-wide demonstrations, Newsreels, even the latest administration building, to make the movement concrete to them and involve them in it. Further, we can effect consciousness and pick up people through agitational work at plants, train stops, etc., selling Movements, handing out leaflets about the war, the Panthers, the companies' holdings overseas or relations to defense industry, etc. After the Richmond strike, people leafleted about demonstrations in support of the Curacao Oil workers, Free Huey May Day, and People's Park. SDS has not dealt in any adequate way with the women question; the resolution passed at Ann Arbor did not lead to much practice, nor has the need to fight male supremacy been given any programmatic direction within the RYM. As a result, we have a very limited understanding of the tie-up between imperialism and the women question, although we know that since World War II the differential between men's and women's wages has increased, and guess that the breakdown of the family is crucial to the woman question. How do we organize women against racism and imperialism without submerging the principled revolutionary question of women's liberation? We have no real answer, but we recognize the real reactionary danger of women's groups that are not self-consciously revolutionary and anti-imperialist. To become more relevant to the growing women's movement, SDS women should begin to see as a primary responsibility the self-conscious organizing of women. We will not be able to organize women unless we speak directly to their own oppression. This will become more and more critical as we work with more oppressed women. Women who are working and women who have families face male supremacy continuously in their day-to-day lives; that will have to be the starting point in their politicization. Women will never be able to undertake a full revolutionary role unless they break out of their woman's role. So a crucial task for revolutionaries is the creation of forms of organization in which women will be able to take on new and independent roles. Women's self-defense groups will be a step toward these organizational forms, as an effort to overcome women's isolation and build revolutionary self-reliance. The cultural revolt of women against their "role" in imperialism (which is just beginning to happen in a mass way) should have the same sort of revolutionary potential that the RYM claimed for "youth culture." The role of the "wife-mother" is reactionary in most modern societies, and the disintegration of that role under imperialism should make women more sympathetic to revolution. In all of our work we should try to formulate demands that not only reach out to more oppressed women, but ones which tie us to other ongoing struggles, in the way that a day-care center at U of C enabled us to tie the women's liberation struggle to the black liberation struggle. There must be a strong revolutionary women's movement, for without one it will be impossible for [p. 7] women's liberation to be an important part of the revolution. Revolutionaries must be made to understand the full scope of women's oppression, and the necessity to smash male supremacy. X. NEIGHBORHOOD-BASED CITY-WIDE YOUTH MOVEMENT One way to make clear the nature of the system and our tasks working off of separate struggles is to tie them together with each other: to show that we're one "multi-issue" movement, not an alliance of high school and college students, or students and GI's, or youth and workers, or students and the black community. The way to do this is to build organic regional or subregional and city-wide movements, by regularly bringing people in one institution or area to fights going on on other fronts. This works on two levels. Within a neighborhood, by bringing kids to different fights, and relating these fights to each other--high school stuff, colleges, housing, welfare, shops--we begin to build one neighborhood based multi-issue movement off of them. Besides actions and demonstrations, we also pull different people together in day-to-day film showings, rallies, for speakers and study groups, etc. On a second level, we combine neighborhood "bases" into a city-wide or region-wide movement by doing the same kind of thing; concentrating our forces at whatever important struggles are going on and building more ongoing interrelationships off of that. The importance of specifically neighborhood-based organizing is illustrated by our greatest failing in RYM practice so far--high school organizing. In most cities we don't know the kids who have been tearing up and burning down the schools. Our approach has been elitist, relating to often baseless city-wide groups by bringing them our line, or picking up kids with a false of understanding of "politics" rather than those whose practice demonstrates their concrete anti-imperialist consciousness that schools are prisons. We've been unwilling to work continuously with high school kids as we did in building up college chapters. We will only reach the high school kids who are in motion by being in the schoolyards, hangouts and on the streets on an every-day basis. From a neighborhood base high school kids could be effectively tied in to struggles around other institutions and issues, and to the anti-imperialist movement as a whole. We will try to involve neighborhood kids who aren't in high schools too; take them to anti-war or anti-racism fights, stuff in the schools, etc.; and at the same time reach out more broadly through newspapers, films, storefronts. Activists and cadres who are recruited in this work will help expand and deepen the movement in new neighborhoods and high schools. Mostly we will still be tied in to the college-based movement in the same area, be influencing its direction away from campus-oriented provincialism, be recruiting high school kids into it where it is real enough and be recruiting organizers out of it. In its most developed form, this neighborhood-based movement would be a kind of sub-region. In places where the movement wasn't so strong, this would be an important form for being close to kids in a day-to-day way and yet be relating heavily to a lot of issues and political fronts which the same kids are involved with. The second level is combining these neighborhoods into city-wide and regional movements. This would mean doing the same thing--bringing people to other fights going on--only on a larger scale relating to various blow-ups and regional mobilizations. An example is how a lot of people from different places went to San Francisco State, the Richmond Oil Strike, and now Berkeley. The existence of this kind of cross-motion makes ongoing organizing in other places go faster and stronger, first by creating a pervasive politicization, and second by relating everything to the most militant and advanced struggles going on so that they influence and set the pace for a lot more people. Further, cities are a basic unit of organization of the whole society in a way that neighborhoods aren't. For example, one front where we should be doing stuff is the courts; they are mostly organized city-wide, not by smaller areas. The same for the city government itself. Schools where kids go are in different neighborhoods from where they live, especially colleges; the same for hospitals people go to, and where they work. As a practical question of staying with people we pick up, the need for a city-wide or area-wide kind of orientation is already felt in our movement. Another failure of this year was making clear what the RYM meant for chapter members and students who weren't organizers about to leave their campus for a community college, high school, GI organizing, shops or neighborhoods. One thing it means for them is relating heavily to off-campus activities and struggles, as part of the city-wide motion. Not leaving the campus movement like people did for ERAP stuff; rather, people still organized on the campus participating in off-campus struggles, the way they have in the past for national actions. Like the national actions, the city-wide ones will build the on-campus movement, not compete with it. Because the movement will be defining itself in relation to many issues and groups, not just schools (and the war and racism as they hit at the schools), it will create a political context that non-students can relate to better, and be more useful to organizing among high schools students, neighborhood kids, the mass of people. In the process, it will change the consciousness of the students too; if the issues are right and the movement fights them, people will develop a commitment to the struggle as a whole, and an understanding of the need to be revolutionaries rather than a "student movement." Building a revolutionary youth movement will depend on organizing in a lot of places where we haven't been, and just tying the student movement to other issues and struggles isn't a substitute for that. But given our limited resources we must also lead the on-campus motion into a RYM direction, and we can make great gains toward city-wide youth movements by doing it. Three principles underly this multi-issue, "cross-institutional" movement, on the neighborhood and city-wide levels, as to why it creates greater revolutionary consciousness and active participation in the revolution: (1) Mixing different issues, struggles and groups demonstrates our analysis to people in a material way. We claim there is one system and so all these different problems have the same solution, revolution. If they are the same struggle in the end, we should make that clear from the beginning. On this basis we must aggressively smash the notion that there can be outside agitators on a question pertaining to the imperialists. (2) "Relating to Motion": the struggle activity, the action, of the movement demonstrates our existence and strength to people in a material way. Seeing it happen, people give it more weight in their thinking. For the participants, involvement in struggle is the best education about the movement, the enemy and the class struggle. In a neighborhood or whole city the existence of some struggle is a catalyst for other struggles -- it pushes people to see the movement as more important and urgent, and as an example and precedent makes it easier for them to follow. If the participants in a struggle are based in different institutions or parts of the city, these effects are multiplied. Varied participation helps the movement be seen as political (wholly subversive) rather than as separate grievance fights. As people in one section of the movement fight beside and identify closer with other sections, the mutual catalytic effect of their struggles will be greater. (3) We must build a movement oriented toward power. Revolution is a power struggle, and we must develop that understanding among people from the beginning. Pooling our resources area-wide and city-wide really does increase our power in particular fights, as well as push a mutual-aid-in-struggle consciousness. XI. THE RYM AND THE PIGS A major focus in our neighborhood and city-wide work is the pigs, because they tie together the various struggles around the state as the enemy, and thus point to the need for a movement oriented toward power to defeat it. The pigs are the capitalist state, and as such define the limits of all political struggles; to the extent that a revolutionary struggle shows signs of success, they come in and mark the point it can't go beyond. In the early stages of struggle, the ruling class lets parents come down on high school kids, or jocks attack college chapters. When the struggle escalates the pigs come in, at Columbia, the left was afraid its struggle would be co-opted to anti-police brutality, cops off campus, and said pigs weren't the issue. But pigs really are the issue and people will understand this, one way or another. They can have a liberal understanding that pigs are sweaty working-class barbarians who over-react and commit "police brutality" and so shouldn't be on campus. Or they can understand pigs as the repressive imperialist state doing its job. Our job is not to avoid the issue of the pigs as "diverting" from anti-imperialist struggle, but to emphasize that they are our real enemy if we fight that struggle to win. Even when there is no organized political struggle, the pigs come down on people in everyday life in enforcing capitalist property relations, bourgeois laws, and bourgeois morality; they guard stores and factories and the rich and enforce credit and rent against the poor. The overwhelming majority of arrests in America are for crimes against property. The pigs will be coming down on the kids we're working with in the schools, on the streets, around dope; we should focus on them, point them out all the time, like the Panthers do. We should relate the daily oppression by the pig to their role in political repression, and develop a class understanding of political power and armed force among the kids we're with. As we develop a base these two aspects of the pig role increasingly come together. In the schools, pig is part of daily oppression--keeping order in halls and lunch rooms, controlling smoking--while at the same time pigs prevent kids from handing out leaflets, and bust "outside agitators." The presence of youth, or youth with long hair, becomes defined as organized political struggle and the pigs react to it as such. More and more every-day activity is politically threatening, so pigs are suddenly more in evidence; this in turn generates political organization and opposition, and so on. Our task will be to catalyze this development, pushing out the conflict with the pig so as to define every struggle--schools (pigs out, pig institutes out), welfare (invading pig-protected office), the streets (curfew and turf fights)--as a struggle against the needs of capitalism and the force of the state. Pigs don't represent state power as an abstract principle; they are a power that we will have to overcome in the course of struggle or become irrelevant, revisionist, or dead. We must prepare concretely to meet their power because our job is to defeat the pigs and the army, and organize on that basis. Our beginnings should stress self-defense--building defense groups around karate classes, learning how to move on the street and around the neighborhood, medical training, popularizing and moving toward (according to necessity) armed self-defense, all the time honoring and putting forth the principle that "political power comes out of the barrel of a gun." These self-defense groups would initiate pig surveillance patrols, visits to the pig station and courts when someone is busted, etc. Obviously the issues around the pig will not come down by neighborhood alone; it will take at least city-wide groups able to coordinate activities against a unified enemy--in the early stages, for legal and bail resources and turning people out for demonstrations, adding the power of the city-wide movements to what may be initially only a tenuous base in a neighborhood. Struggles in one part of the city will not only provide lessons for but materially aid similar motion in the rest of it. Thus the pigs are ultimately the glue--the necessoty [sic --MIWS]--that holds the neighborhood-based and city-wide movement together; all our concrete needs lead to pushing the pigs to the fore as a political focus: (1) making institutionally oriented reform struggles deal with state power, by pushing out struggle till either winning or getting pigged. (2) using the city-wide inter-relation of fights to raise the level of struggle and further large-scale anti-pig movement-power consciousness. (3) developing spontaneous anti-pig consciousness in our neighborhoods to an understanding of imperialism, class struggle and the state. (4) and using the city-wide movement as a platform for reinforcing and extending this politicization works, like by talking about getting together a city-wide neighborhood-based mutual aid anti-pig self-defense network. All of this can be done through city-wide agitation and propaganda and picking certain issues--to have as the central regional focus for the whole movement. XII. REPRESSION AND REVOLUTION As institutional fights and anti-pig self-defense off of them intensify, so will the ruling class's repression. Their escalation of repression will inevitably continue according to how threatening the movement is to their power. Our task is not to avoid or end repression; that can always be done by pulling back, so we're not dangerous enough to require crushing. Sometimes it is correct to do that as a tactical retreat, to survive to fight again. To defeat repression, however, is not to stop it [p. 8] but to go on building the movement to be more dangerous to them; in which case, defeated at one level, repression will escalate even more. To succeed in defending the movement, and not just ourselves at its expense, we will have to successively meet and overcome these greater and greater levels of repression. To be winning will thus necessarily, as imperialism's lesser efforts fail, bring about a phase of all-out military repression. To survive and grow in the face of that will require more than a larger base of supporters; it will require the invincible strength of a mass base at a high level of active participation and consciousness, and can only come from mobilizing the self-conscious creativity, will and determination of the people. Each new escalation of the struggle in response to new levels of repression, each protracted struggle around self-defense which becomes a material fighting force, are part of the international strategy of solidarity with Vietnam and the blacks, through opening up other fronts. They are anti-war, anti-imperialist and pro-black liberation. If they involve fighting the enemy, then these struggles are part of the revolution. Therefore, clearly the organization and active conscious participating mass base needed to survive repression are also the same needed for winning the revolution. The Revolutionary Youth Movement speaks to the need for this kind of active mass-based movement by tying city-wide motion back to community youth bases, because this brings us close enough to kids in their day-to-day lives to organize their "maximum active participation" around enough different kinds of fights to push the "highest level of consciousness" about imperialism, the black vanguard, the state and the need for armed struggle. XIII. THE NEED FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY The RYM must also lead to the effective organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution. A revolution is a war; when the movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war. This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres, and an integrated relationship with the active mass-based movement. To win a war with an enemy as highly organized and centralized as the imperialists will require a (clandestine) organization of revolutionaries, having also a unified "general staff"; that is, combined at some point with discipline under one centralized leadership. Because war is political, political tasks--the international communist revolution--must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a "Marxist-Leninist" party. How will we accomplish the building of this kind of organization? It is clear that we couldn't somehow form such a party at this time, because the conditions for it do not exist in this country outside the black nation. What are these conditions? One is that to have a unified centralized organization it is necessary to have a common revolutionary theory which explains, at least generally, the nature of our revolutionary tasks and how to accomplish them. It must be a set of ideas which have been tested and developed in the practice of resolving the important contradictions in our work. A second condition is the existence of revolutionary leadership tested in practice. To have a centralized party under illegal and repressive conditions requires a centralized leadership, specific individuals with the understanding and the ability to unify and guide the movement in the face of new problems and be right most of the time. Thirdly, and most important, there must be the same revolutionary mass base mentioned earlier, or (better) revolutionary mass movement. It is clear that without this there can't be the practical experience to know whether or not a theory, or a leader, is any good at all. Without practical revolutionary activity on a mass scale the party could not test and develop new ideas and draw conclusions with enough surety behind them to consistently base its survival on them. Especially, no revolutionary party could possibly survive without relying on the active support and participation of masses of people. These conditions for the development of a revolutionary party in this country are the main "conditions" for winning. There are two kinds of tasks for us. One is the organization of revolutionary collectives within the movement. Our theory must come from practice, but it can't be developed in isolation. Only a collective pooling of our experiences can develop a thorough understanding of the complex conditions in this country. In the same way, only our collective efforts toward a common plan can adequately test the ideas we develop. The development of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective formations which undertake this concrete evaluation and application of the lessons of our work is not just the task of specialists or leaders, but the responsibility of every revolutionary. Just as a collective is necessary to sum up experiences and apply them locally, equally the collective inter-relationship of groups all over the country is necessary to get an accurate view of the whole movement and to apply that in the whole country. Over time, those collectives which prove themselves in practice to have the correct understanding (by the results they get) will contribute toward the creation of a unified revolutionary party. The most important task for us toward making the revolution, and the work our collectives should engage in, is the creation of a mass revolutionary movement, without which a clandestine revolutionary party will be impossible. A revolutionary mass movement is different from the traditional revisionist mass base of "sympathizers." Rather it is akin to the Red Guard in China, based on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle. It is a movement diametrically opposed to the elitist idea that only leaders are smart enough or interested enough to accept full revolutionary conclusions. It is a movement built on the basis of faith in the masses of people. The task of collectives is to create this kind of movement. (The party is not a substitute for it, and in fact is totally dependent on it.) This will be done at this stage principally among youth, through implementing the Revolutionary Youth Movement strategy discussed in this paper. It is practice at this, and not political "teachings" in the abstract, which will determine the relevance of the political collectives which are formed. The strategy of the RYM for developing an active mass base, tying the city-wide fights to community and city-wide anti-pig movement, and for building a party eventually out of this motion, fits with the world strategy for winning the revolution, builds a movement oriented toward power, and will become one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to the many Vietnams which will dismember and dispose of US imperialism. Long Live the Victory of People's War!