Mark Rudd's Web Page

Good Article for Left Turn Magazine by Doug Viehmeyer on the New SDS

Mark — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:47:52 +0000

From Bar Mitzvah to Barricades

Mark — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:37:30 +0000

Protected: From the Bar Mitzvah to the Barricades: A Conversation with Mark Rudd about 1968, Militancy, and Palestine/Zionism. by Doug Viehmeyer of the new SDS in ASAP! Magazine

Good Interview on Nonviolence

Mark — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:20:32 +0000

Interview by Anne Sullivan: On Violence and Non-violence (Satya Magazine, Mar. 2004)

Links

Mark — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 19:13:02 +0000

Check out the following links.

Home

Mark — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:04:36 +0000

Who is Mark Rudd?

Mark Rudd was a leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike against the Vietnam War and racism, the last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest radical student organization in the country in 1969, and a founder of the Weather Underground, a revolutionary guerilla group in the seventies. He was a federal fugitive for seven and a half years, until 1977. He is currently an activist and teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Read more about Mark.

Speech at MDS meeting

admin — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:17:14 +0000

On the death of SDS, nonviolence, and the war

Feb. 17, 2007

Part I: The Death of SDS

I come before you this morning as one of the principle authors, almost forty years ago, of a totally failed strategy. In the course of things, my little faction seized control of the SDS national office and several of the regional offices. We then made the tragic decision—in 1969, at the height of the war—to kill off SDS because it wasn’t revolutionary enough for us. I am not proud of this history.

So there is no reason in the world why you should want to listen to me, except for the fact that over the last thirty seven years I’ve reflected continually about the complex of errors that led to the death of SDS and also on my part in this historical crime. As a result I’ve come up with some hard-won conclusions.

I often read references in historical literature and commentary to SDS “self-destructing.” This seems to refer to a constellation of generalized forces including Maoist sectarian infiltration, the development of various brands of Marxist dogmatism among the “regulars,” the drive toward hyper-militancy, violent confrontation, and ultimately “armed struggle,” all within a bitter context of government repression. In some renditions of the death of SDS story there is the consoling air of historical inevitability—no matter what we in the national leadership would have done, SDS was destined (by the God of History, I suppose) to implode.

But I don’t agree. I remember a certain meeting with no more than ten people present—out of a national membership of 12,000 and perhaps ten times that many chapter members—at which we in the Weatherman clique running the NO decided to scuttle SDS. I remember driving a VW van with Teddy Gold from the NY Regional Office in the basement of 131 Prince St. to the Sanitation Dept. pier at the end of W. 14^th St., just a few blocks from here, and dumping the addressograph mailing stencils and other records from the Regional Office onto a barge. These were insane decisions which I and my comrades made unilaterally, to the exclusion of other, much better, choices. We could have, for example, fought to keep SDS in existence so as to unite as many people as possible against the war (which is what the Vietnamese had asked us to do) while at the same time educating around imperialism. I often wonder, had we done so, where we would have been a few months later, in May, 1970, when the biggest student protests in American history jumped off? Or today, when imperialist war rages yet again, would we have had to reinvent the anti-imperialist movement almost from scratch?

Alas, with all the best intentions of promoting revolutionary solidarity with the people of the world, the Weatherman faction by killing off SDS did the work of the FBI for them. Assuming we weren’t in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.

Obviously this is a harsh critique. But it gets even worse: our hyper-militancy and armed struggle line created a deep division which weakened the larger anti-war movement and demoralized many good people. This was totally unnecessary. Also we provided a gold-plated gift to the media and the government enabling them to characterize the entire movement as violent and therefore deranged. As a tragic coda, three of our own beloved comrades were accidentally killed by bombs they were making just two blocks from here, in the townhouse on West 11^th St.

The subsequent Weather Underground did not, of course, lead to the growth of a revolutionary movement in this country. It led to isolation and defeat. The guerilla foco did not help build either a revolutionary army or a mass movement. One thing I’m absolutely certain of, having learned the hard way, is that political violence in any form can never be understood in this society.

No amount of rhetoric around revolutionary heroism and solidarity with the Third World can mask the Weather strategy as anything other than sure revolutionary suicide. Revolutionary suicide may serve some psychological or existential function, but politically it produces nothing.

So the greatest lesson I draw from my disastrous history is the left must absolutely stay away from violence or any talk of violence. The government is violent, we oppose their violence.

Let’s jump ahead almost forty years to the current war on terrorism. Right now six people are in prison for violation of the 1992 Animal Enterprise Protection Act, the forerunner of a law which last year was broadened and renamed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, related to PATRIOT II. Their crime was advocating an economic boycott and direct action against companies doing business with the Huntingdon Life Sciences Lab, which does animal testing. Under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, terrorism is defined as causing $10,000 or more economic damage to a company dealing in animals, including even loss of business. Look how the government and the corporations it serves have narrowed legal political activity: classical nonviolent tactics, such as a boycott, which have been used for generations in the labor and civil rights and national liberation and anti-nuclear and feminist and gay and disabled and environmental movements are now labeled as terrorism. And the confused public doesn’t say a word.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that elements of both the animal liberation and earth liberation movements have insisted on their right to destruction (or liberation) of property. The FBI, thrilled with this gift, has labeled them the #1 domestic terrorist threat, which is utter nonsense of course, but useful for the purpose of repression.

Another case: two broken windows at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, one at a Nike store, the other at a Starbucks, constituted the entire justification for fifteen million dollars of anti-terrorist police funding and for a complete city-wide lockdown during the Free Trade Area of the Americas demonstrations in Miami in 2003. The New York Times for years repeated the lie of violence and mayhem in the streets of Seattle, even when shown evidence to the contrary.

To this day anarchist groups defend their right to commit property destruction, as if the morality of this form of self-expression (which, by the way, I don’t dispute) trumps the political damage. Last week I picked up a zine produced by an SDS chapter and there it was again: an argument for property destruction based on the apparently moral principle that it’s legitimate to use a small amount of violence to stop a larger violence. The writer even intelligently tells an old parable about the Buddha killing a really bad guy to prove her point. However, this timeless argument, which I myself used uncounted times back in 1969, includes no recognition of the practical reality that any sort of violence stemming from the left—or talk of violence— is guaranteed to get us isolated and smashed.

Our goal is always to build a mass movement. SDS and MDS have to repeat tirelessly, again and again and again and again, that our movement is completely, 100% committed to nonviolence, that we will never use violence. The reason: we have no desire to commit suicide. This is a long struggle and the repression will only get more intense. So let’s not play into the hands of the enemy.

Note please that I am advocating here for total nonviolence solely on practical grounds, not even touching on other quite valid moral, ethical, and spiritual arguments.

Part II: It’s the War, Stupid!

In its infinitely long and involved seven year odyssey from Port Huron, 1962 to Chicago, 1969, SDS sought first of all to be a multi-issue radical organization, under the guiding principle that everything is related to everything else. Yet the reality of the matter is that the organization really took off in numbers and activity with the escalation of the U.S. attack on Vietnam, from the spring of 1965 to 1968. I was attracted to the older SDS organizers at Columbia because they were the smartest and most politically active people around: they explained the true nature of the war—a counter-guerilla insurgency—in a way that no one else did and they put it into a larger context, national liberation and the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Using the lens that they handed me I began to understand black liberation, Cuba, China, the class society, anti-communism, the Cold War, and a lot more. But for me and for thousands of others like me, it started with Vietnam.

Here we are again, another imperialist war. To any thinking person it is a daily atrocity and a contradiction to every mythological tale of American goodness, generosity, and morality. Public opinion has viscerally turned against the war—mostly because we’re losing—yet there is still no wide-spread anti-war movement to touch people, to give them a deep understanding of what it’s all about and ways to act meaningfully against it. And we are still not using the war to explain imperialism, always our larger goal.

SDS chapters are now looking in all directions for ways to organize, including free speech, student syndicalism, healthy food, living wages on campus. All good. Fortunately, some have finally settled on trying to mobilize other students against the war. University complicity in the form of recruitment, investment, and research is a good strategic way to approach other students. It’s worked in the past, for example at Columbia in 1968, and it will work again. But if you look at the whole history of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the sole tangible way in which it was successful at stopping the war—since we never elected an anti-war president or Congress—was the resistance within the military. In Vietnam the army was mutinous and unreliable. The war planners were forced to start withdrawing the Marines as early as 1969 precisely because they were scared that the mutiny would spread to their elite force. In time the U.S. had no choice but to withdraw all ground troops.

The anti-war resistance is growing within the military. Soldiers hate and resent the horrible position they’ve been put in in Iraq. We need to support them in whatever way we can. Fortunately we have an educational tool which tells the story of the successful military resistance to Vietnam, the recent documentary “Sir, No Sir!” I suggest all SDS and MDS chapters view it for both internal and external chapter education programs. Support demonstrations for Lt. Watada will probably be needed again in March. Maybe chapters could adopt a resister, of whom there are many others besides Lt. Watada. Counter-recruitment efforts will help deny the military manpower. Outreach to active duty GI’s and National Guard and reserve should also become a priority.

On the last point, there’s an awful lot of confusion about the so-called volunteer army. The basic fact of the U.S. military is that it’s made up of citizen soldiers. People sign up for all sorts of reasons—from the need for a job or education all the way to misguided patriotism. The contractual relationship involved in volunteering does not obviate their status as pawns of the system. These soldiers are no different from us and need to be approached as such.

We are fortunate to have in the anti-war ranks organizations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vets for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Courage to Resist. SDS and MDS should join them, follow their leadership. I would also like to suggest a project for the future MDS Radical Education Project, to uncover the hidden history of the hundreds of SDS members who worked in GI coffee houses, newspapers, and other military organizing and legal-defense projects. Perhaps this history will show the current SDS and MDS new ways to support the resistance in the military and push forward the larger anti-war movement.

As we develop a diversity of issues, let’s not forget that the war is by far the best school for learning about imperialism. The goal of this government is global domination through the use of violence. (That’s straight Chomsky). Exxon stations and Walmart stores may constitute the booty of empire, but the bomb and bullet are still the means.

Part III: A few thoughts on MDS

The dreary e-mail battles leading up to this meeting were actually quite useful. SDS now knows not to get too intimately involved with us grayhairs, or at least to keep some distance. Young people should organize themselves; old people need to get our shit together. Please don’t yoke yourselves to us too closely because we’ll probably bring you down. There is absolutely no doubt now that the generations need to keep organizationally separate for awhile.

But SDS needs help in the form of money and other physical resources, skilled lawyers and other professionals, and an intergenerational dialogue. That’s the first key function of MDS. SDS has asked us for help, especially money and skills in pulling together organizer trainings called Action Camps for this summer. I’ll work on this and I hope other people join me.

Thanks to Bruce Rubenstein, Paul Buhle, Tom Good, and the other MDS Inc. officers, the organizational form to collect and channel money to SDS is off the ground. One element of this organizational form is the MDS Inc. board, though it’s not clear how we will function in relation to a future MDS structured into chapters and regions.

It would have been ideal to have built MDS from the ground up, but that’s not what happened. So we’ll have to work outside of a logical sequence. We can develop functioning MDS chapters to work in parallel with SDS chapters and regions and to absorb students who graduate and want to continue organizing along comparable political grounds. When this future decentralized, autonomous MDS gets going, it will have to create a regional and national structure and possibly even merge with SDS in a joint functioning entity. As a consequence there’ll certainly need to be a revision of the MDS Inc. structure to reflect the evolving organizational reality. Maybe we could even drop the INC, which so many young people find objectionable, though personally I think it’s kind of funny.

One final lesson of the last few months: MDS has to figure out some way to tame the depressing tyranny of the verbose armchair listservers. These discussions go on and on endlessly, completely disconnected from actual organizing and real people’s struggles. There must be a lot of angry frustrated old guys out there with lots of time on their hands. This situation is totally weird. It’s as if the ego-driven ideological quibbling of SDS in 1969 has lain dormant all these years, only to reemerge like some long-sleeping deadly virus two generations later. For myself, I don’t care who leads, who makes decisions: let’s just do some work that needs doing.

MDS begs the question posed long ago by the poet R. Zimmerman: “What do you do to get out of/ Going through all these things twice?”

Organizing vs. Activism in 1968

admin — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 01:18:28 +0000

Speech given at Drew University conference, Nov. 4, 2006

There is also a report of this talk plus pix of yours truly and Bertha at Next Left Note.

I want to thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me to speak, especially my friend Jeremy Varon. Jeremy, as I’m sure you know, wrote the brilliant study of the Weather Underground and the German Red Army Faction, Bringing the War Home. When I read Jeremy’s analysis of how we went up to the brink of terrorist violence, in the Townhouse, looked over, and then pulled back, I said to myself, “Well, at least we weren’t as whacko as the Germans.” This reassuring thought was a step in a process of rehabilitating my own history which had begun in 2003 with the release of the documentary, The Weather Underground. I might even go so far as to say that through his work, Jeremy has helped me find some compassion for myself and my friends in looking back at what I consider to be a thoroughly failed and destructive strategy.

I’ll return to the topic of Weatherman in a few minutes.

The fact that so many thoughtful students and teachers have come together for this conference suggests that the events of almost forty years ago may have something useful to teach us for today. The panels and papers presented yesterday and today have certainly corroborated this view. I’d like to begin my contribution with a few observations about Columbia, 1968.

I’ll assume that the events comprising the Columbia strike which began on April 23, 1968, are widely known to this audience, so I’ll dispense with a summary. I may be mistaken in this, since we’re dealing with a topic almost forty years old, but I do explain many of these events and details in the body of this talk and you may be able to piece together a chronology. If you have any questions about what happened, feel free to ask me at the end.

First point, and most important, the student occupation and strike of April and May, 1968, against Columbia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and its institutional racism, were the product of more than three years of concerted, focused, unrelenting organizing. This fact is generally not known or discussed, having been overshadowed by Columbia SDS’ aggressive militancy, demonstrated in the building takeovers begun on April 23, and by the subsequent role of Columbia in generating numerous other campus uprisings and Weatherman itself. From the outside, and from this distance in time, it may appear that the uprising was spontaneous, but the reality is otherwise.

I arrived at Columbia in the fall of 1965, just months after the U.S. invaded Vietnam with main force troops. The Independent Committee on Vietnam, the predecessor of Columbia SDS, had already been educating, agitating, and organizing. In May, 1964, while I was still in high school, David Gilbert and other ICV members were arrested at a demonstration at Columbia’s Naval ROTC commencement. The Columbia chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, had already taken up the issue of supporting black and Latino cafeteria workers in their long, bitter struggle with Columbia over forming a union.

David Gilbert recruited me, a green freshman from Maplewood, N.J., to a fully functioning Independent Committee which the next year morphed into the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Our organizational meetings consisted solely, as I recall, of discussions and debates on how to best build our base at Columbia. The first meeting I attended was a discussion of which demand we should support in the upcoming spring, 1966, march being organized by the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, “Negotiations Now!” or “Immediate Withdrawal!” We opted for the more radical position, immediate withdrawal, of course, but the debate sharpened our understanding of the nature of the war and how to fight it. We were preoccupied with questions of strategy and tactics: Should we build a campaign against the university’s sending student class rank to draft boards? Should we take up the presence of ROTC on campus? Should we raise the issue of CIA and military and Dow Chemical recruitment? Should we petition or demonstrate or hold a referendum or commit civil disobedience or conduct educational campaigns? Over the course of years, we did it all.

As the war grew and as our efforts intensified, the campus community became more and more politicized, debating both the war and the university’s involvement in it. These became central questions in people’s lives. That’s one way to define the goal of organizing: politicizing people, helping to move them from the default state in this society, which is thoroughly apolitical.

Confrontations with enemies such as Marine recruiters and their jock supporters, or with the university administration itself, were only one aspect of our tactics; teach-ins and dorm meetings on Vietnam were another. So was, especially, one-on-one discussions at our daily literature table out on College Walk with students who were waiting on the sidelines, discussions that convinced people that they had a role in opposing the war and, ultimately, fighting for radical change. All this was organizing.

Funny thing: the only time I ever heard the word “activists” was when Columbia’s administration or an occasional angry professor would call us “mindless activists.” We always called ourselves “organizers.”

The people leading all this work were just a couple of years older than I, sometimes graduate students, mostly undergraduate upperclassmen. Some of them had grown up in communist or labor families; a few were veterans of the southern civil rights movement; still others had learned from veteran left-wing organizers. We were definitely working with an organizing model which had been developed and tested over many generations. Though we called ourselves New Left, and rejected the political caution and dogmatism of both the CP and of the anti-communist socialists, we were squarely in the lineage of the Left, experiencing a kind of Buddhist-like transmission of organizing know-how.

Related, but I think I’ll make it a separate point, is the fact that the Action Faction was wrong. Or rather, we were right for a moment, the spring of 1968, that taking bold action would push our movement forward, but we were wrong to raise that notion to the level of strategy. Let me explain.

The political context of this country shifted dramatically from January to April, 1968. The only comparable sudden turning points in my experience were the summer of 1974, the time of Watergate right before and after Nixon’s resignation, the months immediately after September 11, 2001, and possibly right now, as the Republican clique in power implodes around the failing war in Iraq and its own corruption. From the end of January, 1968, to the end of March, the Vietnamese struck against the American and puppet troops in more than 160 cities of South Vietnam, exposing the lie coming out of Washington that we were winning the war. When the U.S. embassy in Saigon was occupied by NLF fighters, in full view of TV cameras, the war was over, as far as the American people were concerned. The Tet Offensive reversed public opinion, though it would take another seven full years before we stopped murdering people in Indochina. As a direct consequence, LBJ went into negotiations with the NLF and the government of North Vietnam; he also announced, on that same amazing night of Sunday, March 31, 1968, that he would not run for re-election. We danced in the streets, I’m not kidding.

Then, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Harlem, along with dozens of other black ghettos, went up in flames. I was there, I saw it with my own eyes.

I had just returned from three weeks in socialist Cuba, fired up with the flame of socialist revolution. I was fond of quoting Jose Marti, “Now is the time of the furnaces and only light should be seen,” and from Che,“The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.” The latter means don’t just talk about revolution, do it! With this mindset, I sensed that moment as an opportunity in which bold, strong action would gain broad support. But the old leadership of the SDS chapter, wonderful people like Ted Gold and Teddie Kaptchuk, were stuck in the old cautious mode—don’t get too far ahead, we might alienate our base; we’ve got to organize before we can act.

So we had this standard-issue faction fight on What Is to Be Done? with both sides quoting Lenin, Fidel, Che and Mao Tse-tung. “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” was among my favorite slogans. My group was called the Action Faction. It consisted of myself, John Jacobs, an anti-imperialist wild-man with a brief PL background, a few more enflamed juniors like JJ and me, and a bunch of action-freak sophomore and freshman kids. The SDS regulars, circled around the two Teddies and Dave Gilbert, now a graduate student downtown at the New School, were labeled the Praxis Axis, due to both their tendency toward talking theory rather than taking action and also because of what I’ve described years ago as the never-ending need for symmetry. During the argument I developed the rhetorical position, “Organizing is another word for going slow,” a line which I repeated endlessly in the year that followed as I spread the story of the Action Faction to other SDS chapters throughout the country.

In the end, when we held elections for new chapter officers at the end of March, a coalition slate with myself as chairman and Nick Freudenberg, a Praxis Axis guy, as vice-chairman, easily beat out a weak PL opposition slate.

Three big events emerging from Action Faction leadership energized the political scene on campus in the weeks leading up to April 23. The first was the famous pie incident, in which the draft committee of the chapter voted not to confront the head of the New York City Selective Service system, a colonel, with anything more than provocative questions. I was incensed at that decision, so I organized the throwing of a coconut cream pie by a fictional group called the New York Knickerboppers. Many people told me this was the best thing Columbia SDS had ever done, and SDS hadn’t even done it! The second was an SDS-organized walk-out from an official memorial service for Dr. King that Columbia was running. Seizing the microphone from Vice President David Truman, I denounced Columbia’s hypocrisy in supporting the war and in opposing unionization for non-white campus workers. A lot of people on campus, especially the black students, took note. The third was an SDS-led demonstration against Columbia’s involvement with a defense research consortium, the Institute for Defense Analyses; we intentionally violated an arbitrary ban on indoor demonstrations, the result of which six of us were threatened by the university with suspension. This set the trigger for April 23.

The unplanned building occupations beginning on April 23 appeared to be a victory for the Action Faction. By the time the dust cleared after the police riot on April 30, in which many hundreds of students were beaten and arrested, the entire campus was on strike, polarized against the stupid and inept administration. We had been proved right beyond our wildest dreams that bold action would build our movement; the Praxis Axis line was smashed and some of their leaders, including, tragically, Ted Gold and David Gilbert, were won over. Ted died in the townhouse explosion of March, 1970, and David has been in prison since 1981 for participating in the Brinks robbery in which three people died.

Unfortunately, in our arrogance, we forgot that the years of tireless organizing, base-building through education, agitation, and personal connection, had laid the groundwork. Just as we took too much credit for the victory, we also raised the tactic of militancy to the level of strategy, a very common self-defeating error. This mistake led directly, a year and a half later, to the disaster known as Weatherman.

A third point I want to make about the Columbia rebellion is that it could not have occurred without the coalition with the black students. Before April, 1968, the few black students at Columbia had kept to themselves, grouped in the Student Afro-American Society, SAS, a mostly cultural organization. (There were so few Latino students at Columbia that Juan Gonzalez joined SDS at the time of the strike because no Latino organization existed). But a new, more radical political leadership was elected in SAS, and they recognized that SDS was actively working against the gym in Morningside Park, which had become the symbol of Columbia’s racism. In the days before April 23, the leaderships of both organizations formed a working coalition, SAS and SDS co-sponsoring the planned demonstration against the gym, IDA, and the disciplining of the IDA Six.

It was the speeches of Bill Sales and Cicero Wilson of SAS that energized the crowd that morning. And it was the joint SAS/SDS occupation of Hamilton Hall that drew hundreds of students and community members all that first day. Then, after the blacks ejected the white students from Hamilton in the early morning hours of April 24, out of their need to act on their own as representatives of the larger black community, and also freaked out by SDS’ hyper-democratic style, we took the second building, Low Library, in order “to not let the blacks down.”

The same thought was repeated continually for the next six days in all the occupied buildings, that we could not give in because of the blacks. In turn, the students in Hamilton Hall sent word to our central strike coordinating committee that they would not surrender separately; that they would continue for the six demands worked out the first night in Hamilton. Huge support demonstrations involving thousands of Harlem residents and others boosted our resolve. This fight was so much bigger than students vs. administration: we saw ourselves as fighting for the colonized people of this country and of Vietnam! And there they were, occupying Hamilton Hall and rallying outside on Amsterdam Avenue!

Almost all accounts of the Columbia strike have omitted the importance of the black students of SAS, but I can tell you absolutely that there would have been no Columbia strike without them leading the way. The fact that they have been erased from history, with the emphasis put on the white SDS, can only be ascribed to racism. I expect there are some serious historians here at this conference who will take on the task of righting the balance by researching the role of SAS and the other black students. Many of them are accessible right here in northern New Jersey, I think. There’s a big lesson to be learned here about the necessity of coalition in creating a winning strategy.

The last point I want to make before moving on to Weatherman and beyond, is that the building takeover and subsequent strike at Columbia was almost entirely non-violent. Building occupations were in the great tradition of the auto workers’ sit-down strikes of the thirties. We had no weapons. With one exception we were careful to not harm the occupied offices, despite New York Times articles to the contrary. For our part, this was non-violent direct action at its best.

It is true that much of our rhetoric was over the top, like the appropriation of the slogan, “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” from a poem by then LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) which had been adopted as its name by an SDS anarchist street collective on the Lower East Side. We must have needed that sort of thing to fire us up, being mostly pacifistic white middle-class college kids, and to a large extent Jewish, to boot. Thank God the Panther slogan “Off the Pigs,” hadn’t yet reached the east coast, or the police riot that ended the occupation and launched the shut down of the entire university might have been even bloodier than it was.

In retrospect, that slogan was one of my few regrets about Columbia, since it muddied the waters concerning the non-violent nature of our protest. Verbal violence is still violence, I’ve come to understand. We weren’t too clear about our non-violence at the time. But we were essentially nonviolent in our actions, and that created our moral and political strength: it was Columbia that resorted to violence, in its racism, its support for the war, and its using the cops against us.

A second big regret also has to do with a violation of strictly nonviolent strategy. This has never before been acknowledged, since only JJ and I knew that it was he who set the fire in an upper floor of Hamilton Hall just as the police were breaking into the building to arrest the student occupiers, myself included, during the second Hamilton Bust, on May 21. JJ chose the office of history professor Orest Ranum at random, I think, and the small fire wound up destroying the notes for the book the professor was working on at the time. Professor Ranum was a liberal who had tried to mediate between the students and the administration. Maybe I’m wrong about JJ choosing Professor Ranum’s office randomly: JJ was a radical who hated the hypocrisy of liberals, so it is possible he knew precisely whose office he was torching. I think it was his idea to set a fire, but I certainly approved it: we were angry at the university and wanted to hit back.

SDS—and JJ and I—always denied that students were responsible for the fire. We even blamed it on the cops. What we were doing was hedging our bets, playing a primary strategy—nonviolent mass disobedience—while at the same time increasing the chaos with a single act of property destruction. I told you we were unclear on the strategy of nonviolence.

As I make this disclosure to you I find it quite shocking, as I’m sure you do. Setting a fire in an occupied building is a very ugly deed. My intention here is to tell the whole truth, not a varnished version, in order to give an accurate idea of who we were and what we were thinking. Continuing to hide this crime, for it is that, serves no end other than obscuring the complicated fact that the roots of Weatherman ran all the way back to Columbia. At Columbia we felt ourselves at war, and once war is declared, the limits on tactics and weapons get blurred very quickly. So does the definition of participatory democracy, on which SDS prided itself, since it was JJ and I who made this decision alone, without democratic consultation of any sort. My conclusion, after all these years, is to absolutely proscribe the political use of any sorts of violence, even violence against property.

I should add that my old comrade, John Jacobs, or JJ, died of cancer in Vancouver. In 1977. At his death he was still living as a fugitive, the last Weatherman. JJ was also the principle author of the original Weatherman document, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” so in a real sense he was the first Weatherman, too.

Let me turn now to a broad view of the consequences of the Columbia strike. Seizing the opportunity offered by all the media attention, national SDS adopted the slogan, “Create two, three, many Columbias!,” a take-off on Che’s “Create two, three, many Vietnams!” That’s exactly what happened in the following two years, as campus after campus exploded, culminating in the largest student strike in U.S., perhaps world, history in May, 1970, following the invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. Kent State SDS, incidentally, was a hyper-aggressive Weather chapter in the model of Columbia, a fact which is not well known.

Weatherman grew directly out of Columbia. Columbia was our proof that the “foco theory,” which we had learned from Che Guevara, was correct.

In the summer of 1967, a translation of a book by a young French leftist intellectual, Regis Debray, “Revolution in the Revolution?” was printed by Monthly Review Press. Based on conversations with Fidel and Che, Debray put forward the theory that a small mobile group of committed guerrillas could start a revolution by actually beginning armed actions; that a revolutionary army to seize power could be built around this nucleus (or “foco” in Spanish); and that it was the fact of successfully challenging the reactionary army that attracted support for the revolution. This theory was juxtaposed to several other more standard Latin American revolutionary theories, such as the Trotskyist “liberated peasant zones,” and the CP’s gradualism based on organizing urban industrial workers. Foco theory vs. organizing, get it? The theory was developed as an analysis of what allegedly happened in Cuba’s revolutionary war from 1956 to 1959: that the revolution only got going when Fidel’s survivors from the Granma built their guerrilla army which eventually toppled Batista. I have my doubts, now, about whether this is an accurate description of the Cuban revolution, but won’t go into the question here, other than to say that there had been decades of difficult revolutionary organizing against the dictatorship in Cuba, especially in the cities, before Fidel and Che hit the Sierra Maestra.

Che Guevara himself died behind the foco theory in Bolivia in October, 1967. Obviously it didn’t work in Bolivia. It also didn’t work in any of the countries of Latin America in which it was tried, except perhaps Nicaragua; thousands of leftist militants were either killed or imprisoned as brutal military regimes repressed revolutionary movements throughout the continent in the sixties and seventies. It’s only now, thirty years later, that the left in Latin America has finally come back from the defeats inflicted in that era.

In our context, within the United States, adherence to the foco theory was even more stupid: there was no basis whatsoever for Americans to understand revolutionary violence other than as crazy or criminal, a point I’ve made elsewhere. Moreover, the Weatherman experience, from the summer of 1969 on through to the end of that year, actually deorganized our base, attracting fewer and fewer to join our violent confrontations with the police, our kabuki expressing our determination to build a “white fighting force” to aid the people of the world. I kick myself for not having seen the obvious, that the Weather Underground, no matter how brave, was doomed to defeat and isolation. This was the strategy for which we destroyed SDS. Funny how, unintentionally, you can wind up doing the work of your enemies for them. The FBI should have put us on the payroll.

Weatherman, and the Weather Underground, was the strategy of the Action Faction writ large. In the years since, I’ve learned that bold action only works in a few rare contexts, such as at Columbia in April, 1968. Without that context, supplied by both history and base-building organizing, bold action is merely self-expression. Weatherman and the Weather Underground were purely existential politics—look at us, this is what we believe—which doesn’t even buy you a cup of coffee.

We thought that people would see our seriousness, our militancy, and because of that, join us. We had no need anymore for careful base-building, education, engagement. Fighting greasers on a beach in Detroit or a street corner in Milwaukee, or running through a high school in Pittsburgh or Chicago was by some strange sort of alchemy supposed to induce the hypothetical revolutionary youth to join our revolution. Handing some kid a leaflet with the words, “There’s a war going on in the world. Which side are you on? Come to Chicago Oct. 8!” was somehow going to build a white fighting force. Where were our heads?

Similarly, our armed propaganda against symbolic targets, that is, bombs in bathrooms of the Capitol and the Pentagon and corporate headquarters, were no more effective at moving people to action. In our despair and zeal, we threw out the essentials of building a movement, replacing them with one single tactic, militancy, which had become our strategy.

When young people first learn about Weatherman, mostly through the Weather Underground documentary, they are astonished that such a phenomenon existed. They assume, inevitably, that militantly expressing rage is the beginning and end of what radicals do. I often find myself arguing with audiences, because they think I’m some sort of hero for “standing up” or for “speaking out.” But they don’t realize that millions stood up, and that most of the anti-war movement was following a far better strategy, patiently base-building, educating, and uniting more and more people against the war, rather than dividing them along a crazy macho fault-line, the courage to “pick up the gun.”

The courage to stand up and speak out is not our biggest lack today, just as it was not the basis of the old anti-war movement. What I’ve found everywhere in my travels since 2003, when the Weather Underground movie was released and the war began, is a lot of concerned people without much idea of what to do. Consistently they express to me their deeply-held paralyzing belief that “nothing anyone does can make a difference.”

Anti-war activists hold demonstrations like clockwork on the anniversary of the start of the war in March, and in some towns they gather to vigil every Friday night or Saturday morning. Always the same people—or a dwindling number—show up, with the same signs against Bush and Cheney. Well-meaning observers on the sidelines note these futile repeated demonstrations as proof that nothing can make a difference.

If they’ve thought about the problem at all, the activists seem to believe that their repeated expressions of opposition to the war will eventually draw people in. Grimly soldiering on, they have run out of ideas, tactics, strategy. Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used to be only one part of building a movement. It’s a tactic which has been elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy.

What’s happened is that we’ve lost the models of organizing that we once had. Those of us who were young in the anti-Vietnam War movement had the benefit of both the labor and civil rights movements contiguous in time with us. From veterans of these movements who were fighting the war we learned that we needed to build a base through education, agitation, and, most of all, direct connection with people. But there’s been at least a thirty year gap between the last successful mass social movements and young people now. A generation, maybe two, has come of age without knowing what organizing is, or even knowing what questions to ask. Most young activists think organizing means making the physical arrangements for a rally or benefit concert. And the words base-building and coalition are not even in the lexicon.

No wonder we don’t have an anti-war movement, even as public opinion has turned against the war and as the Republicans self-destruct. But public opinion is not a movement: it’s not organized for political action. Seeking some outlet, like water running downhill, public opinion seems to have settled on the Democrats, who are no more deserving of the mantle of opposition party than they were during the Vietnam War.

I hold my generation responsible for the lack of a movement now. After Vietnam and Watergate, too many of us retreated into our small personal and family concerns, perhaps tired of the demands of organizing. By and large we ceased working in our communities; few organized within the Democratic Party, where it would have helped. Perhaps we felt that all was revealed about the nature of the American system, and that political solutions would automatically fall into place. Meanwhile, the Republicans didn’t give up on mass organizing—far from it. Under the tutelage of aggressive Young Republican organizers like Karl Rove, they learned from their early defeats and went on to master the arts of engagement, communication and coalition building. They were the ones who eventually seized state power, in case you hadn’t noticed, not the old SDS’ers.

Our efforts didn’t stop completely. We were able, from time to time, to organize small and influential movements, such as the one against nuclear power in the late seventies, which stopped the industry cold, but these efforts were sporadic and circumscribed, and they didn’t last as models. The same can be said of the Central America solidarity movement of the eighties, which was less successful. I was active in both. The Rainbow Coalition, which came together around Jesse Jackson’s candidacies in 1984 and 1988, was based on a strategy of uniting the grassroots-organized left wing of the Democratic Party—minorities, women, progressive labor, peace activists, environmentalists. When I tell young people that Jesse got 6.5 million votes in the 1988 primary, their eyes get wide. But Jesse dissolved the Rainbow Coalition at the behest of the right-wing of the party, the DLC, which then took power, and the progressive insurgency was over.

Since then the left has lost the ability to speak with people unlike ourselves or even to contemplate the problem of strategy. It’s a caretaker operation at best. The millions of my generation who used to be active against the war stay home and listen to the latest Bush atrocities on NPR, Air America and Democracy Now. In Albuquerque, thousands, literally, turn out for Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman when they come to town, but try to get them to walk precincts for a progressive Chicano candidate for mayor, forget it.

But there are hopeful signs. A new generation of young organizers asking the right questions has begun to emerge. The media hasn’t yet discovered them, and when they do, it’ll be a giant surprise, just like we were forty years ago. One of the best sources I can recommend to you, if you haven’t already seen it, is Letters from Young Activists, by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow. I learned the distinction between “activism” and “organizing” from Andy Cornell’s “Letter to Punk Activism.” He gave a name to a problem I’d been sensing, but was unable to describe until I read his critique of punk activism. Buy the book, read it. We can all learn something from these young people.

Right now, on more than two hundred college campuses, activist students have formed chapters of a newly resurrected SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. Some of my old comrades find this development irritating, believing that you can’t go backward to an organization of a different time. But I interpret the choice of names and organizational model much more positively: intuitively, these young people are looking to the past for successful models of organizing.

The new SDS organizers are very savvy. They’re not falling for the self-defeating sectarian ideological debates we ran aground on, nor for the dead end of hyper-militancy and violence which was Weatherman. They will have nothing at all to do with totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or the bizarre organizations that continue to push them. They’ve gone back to participatory democracy, a lovely concept still to be defined in practice. Also, quite generously, they are actively seeking help and support from old SDS’ers, who are now organized into a new parallel organization, the Movement for a Democratic Society, or MDS.

I predict that one of the biggest problems the new SDS will have in working with us old grayhairs is our insufferable tendency to lecture. We have so many years of thoughts and inadequacy and frustration bottled up inside us, and now, finally, somebody appears to be listening. And boy, will we tell them. I have personal experience with this: I myself was banned from the Albuquerque office of the League of Pissed-Off Voters for a horrific one-and-a-half hour lecture I delivered in response to a simple question from a staffer on what I think needed to be done. (And I wasn’t even stoned). “You don’t understand organizing, you’re all activists, into self-expression, but you don’t even know what questions to ask about how to organize. We never called ourselves activists, we were organizers,” blah, blah, blah. No wonder they never call me anymore, except when they need money.

On that note I think I’ll stop lecturing. In sum, Columbia, 1968, good, because of organizing, which meant education, base-building, and coalition; Weatherman, 1969, very bad, for substituting violent self-expression for a real organizing strategy.

Long Live the Victory of People’s War and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! [Raises fist!] Just joking.

Comments on Ten Questions on Movement Building

admin — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:43:41 +0000

Comments on Ten Questions on Movement Building, by Dan Berger, Andy Cornell.

The ten questions you raise are all right on the money, especially starting with the question of what is organizing? and ending with the question of how to develop strategy. I loved most of your discussions, especially the one about the three types of stances that the old people take and also the brilliant discussion of the difficult and tense dance between militancy and movement-building. There’s so much else: the recognition of the difficult state of international struggle, the question of how to do anti-racism and solidarity, all of it.

Thanks so much for raising all these issues.

I have just a few questions:

1. Why is there no discussion of electoral strategies? These seem to me most popular among young people, though not those on the left necessarily. The League of Young (Independent, Pissed-Off) Voters bases its whole strategy in elections, and at least in Albuquerque, these people are not that different from the Student Socialist Coalition (we have no SDS) and other activists. I consider them all of the Left, such as it is.

Is it the case that as anarchists you don’t participate in elections, or even discuss them?

Public opinion is manifesting itself right now in an electoral turn toward the Democrats, though they, of course, don’t deserve anything at all. That indicates something, though, about elections as natual responses to discontent, sort of like water flowing downhill. But people think in terms of elections, and I’d hate to see the left lose out on this tendency for some purely ideological reason.

I keep raising with people the example of the Rainbow Coalition of the eighties, that was grass-roots based, led by people of color, and was a true coalition. It got Jessie Jackson an amazing 6.5 million votes in the Demo primary of 1988. Of course it was dissolved by Jessie in one moment, at the behest of the DLC, which showed its weakness, but that’s not the point.

2. Environment and race, as I’m sure you know, are intimately connected. Did you find much organizing going on around environmental justice? Here in New Mexico, some of the most vibrant work is such community based EJ organizing. (Not incidentally, that’s what Marla and I are up to).

When we talk about anti-racism, solidarity, etc., the formulations are not theoretical, they’re concrete, like EJ and immigrants’ rights.

3. Related, are Katrina and the loss of New Orleans central to young peoples’ thinking? It strikes me that Katrina was so monstrous that almost any smart 19 year-old would be thinking about how the government can’t be trusted. This is a perfect example, also, of environmental degradation (including global warming) coming together with institutional racism.

4. I’m not sure I understand the Build Dual Power/Confront State Power formulation, except in a few concrete examples you refer to. Are you saying that one without the other is useless? Is this a guide to the development of strategy? At another point you refer to goals of ending the war and making fundamental changes in society. Is that the same as Dual Power/Confront State Power? Or is it something else, more liberal?

Perhaps there’s a better way of phrasing the Dual Power/State Power dichotomy.

Speaking of which, you use the phrase “revolutionary movements” in your introduction. Do you mean this literally? It’s the only time the word revolution creeps in, but somehow I think it’s there all along. Is that why elections got no mention, because they’re not revolutionary? If the goal is still revolution, is it wise to be out trumpeting it, since most young people would draw a complete blank and refuse to even consider it. Is revolution a strategy? Is it a goal? Is it even on the table for consideration?

Thanks, Dan and Andy, for taking the time to report on your trip, and thank you, Doug, for sending it to me. I learned a lot.

Still angry after 38 years: a pissed-off SDS member gets in his licks

admin — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 04:51:44 +0000

The following is an unsolicited e-mail received Sept. 30, 2006, from Tom Cleaver in L.A. He graciously allowed me to post it here. Check out Tom’s blog at http://www.thatsanotherfinemess.com.

Mark:

My old friend Jeff Segal sent me the URL for your site and I’ve just been reading it.

You likely don’t remember me, but during the seven years you were underground, I’d have turned you in to the FBI in a heartbeat for your crimes against the movement. I used to be in sds, but left it in 1968 over the bullshit put forward by you and the would-be revolutionary army, and the PL morons. I well remember you and Dohrn coming down to Austin in December 1968 to speak at a conference I had spent the previous four months organizing, getting 180 lawyers in Texas to come together around defending radicals. 30 minutes of baloney from you and Dohrn, and the argument with the drooler who was “Chairman Mao” of the UT sds PLfreaks over the proper use of “communist rhetoric” had all but 5 of those people out of there for good. Having only missed going to Huntsville for 20 years that previous summer for the crime of being “found” with a roach under the driver’s seat of our car up in Killeen the week of the Democratic Convention (we were running The Oleo Strut GI coffeehouse), I was pretty seriously pissed off at you idiots for making life more dangerous for all of us while you went back to playing Che Guevara in Chicago. Top that with 7 years of harassment from the FBI for the crime of having known you, I’d have shot you myself had I run across you.

That, however, was 36 years ago, a long time to hold hatred in one’s heart. I read your op-ed in the local fishwrap here in El Lay last November and was pretty seriously surprised to see you take responsibility for all those failings. Jeff told me you’d been saying that for a good long while by then.

So you’re officially forgiven now.

Tom Cleaver

Letter from Mark on resurrection of SDS and MDS

admin — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:48:19 +0000

Dear Friends:

Perhaps you’ve heard that Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, a defunct sixties rock group, has been resurrected from the grave. It’s true!

Myself, I’ve kept my distance up to now, thinking that they don’t need any stupid old people hanging around to screw things up, like we did forty years ago.

But I have been watching the growth of this new SDS, with more than 130 chapters on college and high school campuses. You can check out what they’ve been up to at http://www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org/.
Last May I had the pleasure of meeting two young organizers from Tacoma SDS. They’ve been doing some great work organizing against the war in the Olympia/Tacoma area, which you can read about on the above website.

Last month I was recruited by a zealous grey-haired organizer, Bruce Rubenstein of Hartford, Conn, (or maybe he has no hair, I’ve never met him in person), to join the SDS old people’s auxiliary, Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS). The original MDS was founded around 1967 to provide an organizational framework for post-campus organizers. This one is intended to help the young SDS organizers with bail, fund-raising, advice (only if asked), logistical support, and who knows what else. The president of MDS is our old founder, Al Haber, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement. Check out MDS at http://www.movementforademocraticsociety.org/

Somehow, I was immediately put on MDS’ board upon joining. When I looked on the website to try to figure out what the duties of board members are, I found my name alongside those of other several old comrades, among others: Tom Hayden, Carl Davidson, Bernardine Dohrn, Charlene Mitchell, Michael Rossman, Michael James, HOWARD ZINN and NOAM CHOMSKY!!!! Now I know what it feels like to be on the same board with both God and Jesus Christ.

A lot of the start-up SDS support work in the last year has been done by Paul Buhle, at Brown, and Tom Good, of New York City. Tom edits a website called Next Left Notes, which you might want to check out at http://www.antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/. He has a bunch of great stuff there, plus links to everything under the sun. Check out especially Paul Buhle’s reports and essays.

My deepest hope is that the new SDS flourishes and helps build the broadest possible anti-war movement and even a new radical movement to challenge the violent fascist clique now in power in Washington.

One requisite is that they and we avoid the stupid ideological infighting, sectarianism, name-calling, and “correct lineism” that killed the old SDS. (For my mea culpas, check out my website at www.markrudd.com). Unfortunately there’s already been an outbreak of this garbage, involving three old comrades, Tom Good, Jesse Lemisch, and Maurice Isserman, all good people; in response young organizers will probably just change the channel, but old people like me will certainly be repulsed and withdraw because we have better things to do with the little time left us on this mortal coil.

Let’s hope this is the last instance of the poison which is guaranteed to kill us off. Or are we incapable of learning from our mistakes?

Anyway, the purpose of this long message, please forgive me, is to ask you to investigate joining SDS (if you’re a student or young person) and MDS (if you’re a veteran or off-campus). We need help getting these organizations going. The intergenerational aspect of the work can be a plus, especially if the old people don’t act as a heavy hand on the young.

Speaking of which, anyone interested in helping me organize a Buddhist style self-immolation brigade? We could create instant martyrs, plus get rid of some of our more annoying old comrades at the same time.

Feel free to write me with your response at mark@markrudd.com

Also, please circulate this message to your lists so that we can get the word out about SDS and MDS.

For peace, justice, and freedom, and a new and better SDS,

Mark