blake 3:17
10th January 2011, 01:13
A really great interview with Mark Rudd, an SDS leader then a leader of the Weather Underground. He's done a lot of growing up and seems to have his heart and mind in about the right places.
Self-Destructive Activism and the Weather Underground
From 1965 to 1968, Mark Rudd was a student activist and organizer in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at Columbia University. He was one of the leaders of the Spring 1968 occupation of five buildings and the subsequent strike against the university’s complicity with the Vietnam war. After being kicked out of Columbia, he became a full-time organizer for SDS, where he helped found the militant Weatherman faction. Mark was elected National Secretary of SDS in June, 1969, then helped found the “revolutionary” Weather Underground, which had as its goal “the violent overthrow of the government of the US in solidarity with the struggles of the people of the world.” Wanted on federal charges of bombing and conspiracy, Mark was a fugitive from 1970 to 1977. He spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty on the dangers of self-indulgent activism and his thoughts on current anti-war organising in the United states.
In 1963 as a student at Columbia University you joined the the student activist organisation Students for a Democratic Society, you later became a member of the Weatherman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(organization)) group. For younger readers could you explain what those two organisations were - what were their goals, how did they function?
Actually, you have the date wrong. In 1963 I was a pretty apolitical high school student. I got to Columbia in September 1965, met the people organizing around the war in Vietnam and the university’s institutional racism, then joined SDS in 1966. SDS had been founded in 1962 with the Port Huron Statement, a great document for its time in that it repudiated both the Cold War and anti-communism and sought a true people’s Democratic Party. It was also a white, northern students’ response to the Civil Rights movement.
I organized with SDS at Columbia for several years, then in April 1968 found myself chairman of the Columbia chapter when the university exploded. With the black students, we seized five buildings for a week, suffered a terrible police riot, then led a university-wide strike, the largest up to that time. Columbia set the pattern for student revolts. I became known as the “leader” by the press, though there were actually many leaders. I was thrown out of the university as a result. I became a national and regional organizer for SDS.
Students for a Democratic Society was the largest radical student organization in the U.S. It was not a branch of any other group, it embodied the independence of the New Left. At its height it had four hundred autonomous chapters on college campuses and in high schools.
In 1969, I became National Secretary of SDS, and, along with my faction, known as the Weathermen, took over the national office in Chicago. Unfortunately, we had developed an ultra-radical line by then, which was that just being anti-war wasn’t enough: we needed to be explicitly both anti-imperialist and revolutionary. We wanted to end the system which gave us Vietnam and other wars. This was an over-reaching, since the result was to divide the anti-war movement, at a time when we should have been uniting as many as possible. We claimed to be acting in solidarity with the oppressed people of the world; in actuality we were pretty much doing what we wanted, ie., posing as revolutionaries.
Another part of our over-reaching was our belief that the movement needed to become more militant and eventually engage in armed struggle to overthrow the US government. So in 1970 we closed SDS and began a revolutionary guerilla army, an underground, known as the Weather Underground. One of the first thing we did was accidentally kill three of our own people in a bomb factory in NYC, March 1970.
This story goes on and on. Check out my book, (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Underground-My-Life-SDS-Weathermen/dp/0061472751) “Underground: My Life in SDS and Weatherman,” or my website (http://www.markrudd.com/). The Weather Underground was a bust; by 1976, after the war in Vietnam had ended, it dissolved in internal factional fights. I was a federal fugitive from March 1970 until September 1977.
You have been very self-critical regarding your impact on SDS - why was the decline of SDS so important and what was your role in its decline?
As I alluded to my faction undemocratically decided to close the SDS national and regional offices at the height of the war because SDS wasn’t “revolutionary” enough. We gave up organizing on campuses and in communities for a fantasy of vanguard guerilla warfare. We were followers of the cult of Che, which was not at all relevant to the U.S. (nor any other places). It was a cult of male heroism and violence.
The effect was we 1) killed three of our own people; 2) killed the largest anti-war anti-racist radical student organization in the U.S.; and 3) divided the anti-war movement over the bogus issue of our right to revolutionary violence. We did the work of the FBI for them.
I was one of the architects of all this, in the leadership collective known as the Weather Bureau. I often spoke on college campuses for this crazy strategy.
What is your view today of the acts of violence you and other members of weatherman engaged in?
Ridiculous. A total waste of time and energy. We should have been organizing on college campuses, which we were moderately good at, building the larger anti-war movement and pushing anti-imperialism. Instead we became incompetent terrorists.
Had we actually organized an anti-imperialist movement with a widespread consciousness of the nature of US imperialism, perhaps we would have been successful at stopping the Central American war of the 80’s and even the current wars. We blew it.
Is violence in the service of a political cause ever justifiable?
In theory, a small amount of violence might be moral to stop a larger violence. I have no problem with this. In practice in the U.S., violence only isolates the revolutionaries and gives a great big fat gift to the government: they can call us terrorists. I’ve become an advocate of nonviolent strategy because it’s been proven so effective in the 20th century—it is a zen answer to the militarism of the US.
In addition to the pragmatic advantages of nonviolence, it also has certain moral and even spiritual advantages. I once heard the Dalai Lama answer the question of why he doesn’t hate the Chinese, despite what they’ve done to his country. He said, “They’re our neighbors, and when this is all over, we’ll have to live with them.
One problem with violence is that it always breeds more violence, which means that revolutions need repression. That inherently makes them coercive and unstable.
SDS has been relaunched - what is the situtation of the present day SDS and anti-war activism in the United States more generally?
Anti-war activism is low because so much energy has gone into the Democratic Party and the elections of 2004 and 2008. We seem to have lost our capacity to do mass-movement organizing. I think the model has been lost, actually. The Vietnam War peace movement inherited the organizing model from the labor and civil rights movements, with which it was contiguous in time.
Young people are often depressed thinking that “nothing anyone does can make a difference.” This is a self-fulfilling idea, unfortunately. The irony is that 45 years ago, no one would ever have thought such a thing, because it was obviously untrue. The civil rights movement showed clearly that people were making a difference. The 20th century was a time of many mass social and political movements, all more or less successful—labor, civil rights, peace, anti-nuclear, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental, and on and on.
In an article for Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/rudd12252009.html) you made the distinction between activists and organisers - what is the difference between the two?
I’ve noticed that many anti-war people think that if only they demonstrate their opposition and commitment, people will join the movement. It doesn’t work that way. Movements are organized through relationship-building, leadership development, education, sometimes confrontation. It takes a long-term strategy.
Full interview: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/self-destructive_organising_and_the_weather_underground/
Self-Destructive Activism and the Weather Underground
From 1965 to 1968, Mark Rudd was a student activist and organizer in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter at Columbia University. He was one of the leaders of the Spring 1968 occupation of five buildings and the subsequent strike against the university’s complicity with the Vietnam war. After being kicked out of Columbia, he became a full-time organizer for SDS, where he helped found the militant Weatherman faction. Mark was elected National Secretary of SDS in June, 1969, then helped found the “revolutionary” Weather Underground, which had as its goal “the violent overthrow of the government of the US in solidarity with the struggles of the people of the world.” Wanted on federal charges of bombing and conspiracy, Mark was a fugitive from 1970 to 1977. He spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty on the dangers of self-indulgent activism and his thoughts on current anti-war organising in the United states.
In 1963 as a student at Columbia University you joined the the student activist organisation Students for a Democratic Society, you later became a member of the Weatherman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(organization)) group. For younger readers could you explain what those two organisations were - what were their goals, how did they function?
Actually, you have the date wrong. In 1963 I was a pretty apolitical high school student. I got to Columbia in September 1965, met the people organizing around the war in Vietnam and the university’s institutional racism, then joined SDS in 1966. SDS had been founded in 1962 with the Port Huron Statement, a great document for its time in that it repudiated both the Cold War and anti-communism and sought a true people’s Democratic Party. It was also a white, northern students’ response to the Civil Rights movement.
I organized with SDS at Columbia for several years, then in April 1968 found myself chairman of the Columbia chapter when the university exploded. With the black students, we seized five buildings for a week, suffered a terrible police riot, then led a university-wide strike, the largest up to that time. Columbia set the pattern for student revolts. I became known as the “leader” by the press, though there were actually many leaders. I was thrown out of the university as a result. I became a national and regional organizer for SDS.
Students for a Democratic Society was the largest radical student organization in the U.S. It was not a branch of any other group, it embodied the independence of the New Left. At its height it had four hundred autonomous chapters on college campuses and in high schools.
In 1969, I became National Secretary of SDS, and, along with my faction, known as the Weathermen, took over the national office in Chicago. Unfortunately, we had developed an ultra-radical line by then, which was that just being anti-war wasn’t enough: we needed to be explicitly both anti-imperialist and revolutionary. We wanted to end the system which gave us Vietnam and other wars. This was an over-reaching, since the result was to divide the anti-war movement, at a time when we should have been uniting as many as possible. We claimed to be acting in solidarity with the oppressed people of the world; in actuality we were pretty much doing what we wanted, ie., posing as revolutionaries.
Another part of our over-reaching was our belief that the movement needed to become more militant and eventually engage in armed struggle to overthrow the US government. So in 1970 we closed SDS and began a revolutionary guerilla army, an underground, known as the Weather Underground. One of the first thing we did was accidentally kill three of our own people in a bomb factory in NYC, March 1970.
This story goes on and on. Check out my book, (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Underground-My-Life-SDS-Weathermen/dp/0061472751) “Underground: My Life in SDS and Weatherman,” or my website (http://www.markrudd.com/). The Weather Underground was a bust; by 1976, after the war in Vietnam had ended, it dissolved in internal factional fights. I was a federal fugitive from March 1970 until September 1977.
You have been very self-critical regarding your impact on SDS - why was the decline of SDS so important and what was your role in its decline?
As I alluded to my faction undemocratically decided to close the SDS national and regional offices at the height of the war because SDS wasn’t “revolutionary” enough. We gave up organizing on campuses and in communities for a fantasy of vanguard guerilla warfare. We were followers of the cult of Che, which was not at all relevant to the U.S. (nor any other places). It was a cult of male heroism and violence.
The effect was we 1) killed three of our own people; 2) killed the largest anti-war anti-racist radical student organization in the U.S.; and 3) divided the anti-war movement over the bogus issue of our right to revolutionary violence. We did the work of the FBI for them.
I was one of the architects of all this, in the leadership collective known as the Weather Bureau. I often spoke on college campuses for this crazy strategy.
What is your view today of the acts of violence you and other members of weatherman engaged in?
Ridiculous. A total waste of time and energy. We should have been organizing on college campuses, which we were moderately good at, building the larger anti-war movement and pushing anti-imperialism. Instead we became incompetent terrorists.
Had we actually organized an anti-imperialist movement with a widespread consciousness of the nature of US imperialism, perhaps we would have been successful at stopping the Central American war of the 80’s and even the current wars. We blew it.
Is violence in the service of a political cause ever justifiable?
In theory, a small amount of violence might be moral to stop a larger violence. I have no problem with this. In practice in the U.S., violence only isolates the revolutionaries and gives a great big fat gift to the government: they can call us terrorists. I’ve become an advocate of nonviolent strategy because it’s been proven so effective in the 20th century—it is a zen answer to the militarism of the US.
In addition to the pragmatic advantages of nonviolence, it also has certain moral and even spiritual advantages. I once heard the Dalai Lama answer the question of why he doesn’t hate the Chinese, despite what they’ve done to his country. He said, “They’re our neighbors, and when this is all over, we’ll have to live with them.
One problem with violence is that it always breeds more violence, which means that revolutions need repression. That inherently makes them coercive and unstable.
SDS has been relaunched - what is the situtation of the present day SDS and anti-war activism in the United States more generally?
Anti-war activism is low because so much energy has gone into the Democratic Party and the elections of 2004 and 2008. We seem to have lost our capacity to do mass-movement organizing. I think the model has been lost, actually. The Vietnam War peace movement inherited the organizing model from the labor and civil rights movements, with which it was contiguous in time.
Young people are often depressed thinking that “nothing anyone does can make a difference.” This is a self-fulfilling idea, unfortunately. The irony is that 45 years ago, no one would ever have thought such a thing, because it was obviously untrue. The civil rights movement showed clearly that people were making a difference. The 20th century was a time of many mass social and political movements, all more or less successful—labor, civil rights, peace, anti-nuclear, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental, and on and on.
In an article for Counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/rudd12252009.html) you made the distinction between activists and organisers - what is the difference between the two?
I’ve noticed that many anti-war people think that if only they demonstrate their opposition and commitment, people will join the movement. It doesn’t work that way. Movements are organized through relationship-building, leadership development, education, sometimes confrontation. It takes a long-term strategy.
Full interview: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/self-destructive_organising_and_the_weather_underground/