blake 3:17
25th September 2015, 00:30
The Heavy Radicals: An Interview with Aaron Leonard
Aaron Leonard and Doug Enaa Greene September 22, 2015
Formed in 1968, the Revolutionary Union (RU), which transformed into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1975, would become one of the most recognizable communist formations of the 1970s in the United States. In their recent book, Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists, Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher trace the history of the RU, drawing in particular on declassified materials to document how the FBI attempted to repress not just the Revolutionary Union, but all the radical movements of the era. In this detailed interview, Doug Enaa Greene talks with Leonard about the vibrant struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, paying close attention to the RU’s history, organizing efforts, changing strategies, and above all the expansive state repression it elicited.
Doug Enaa Greene: Before we begin discussing the book itself, could you share with our readers some of your political and professional background and how it led you to write this book?
Aaron Leonard: I worked with the Revolutionary Communist Party for a very long time. As it says in the introduction, I became radicalized when I was in high school. I caught the tail-end of the sixties and we started our own radical, proto-communist Maoist group. Then I met the party in 1976. I was first with their unemployed group – Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee (UWOC), then the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) when it was founded as a transition from the Revolutionary Student Brigade. Then I wrote for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) newspaper for many years. Today I’m a historian, primarily a radical historian. I’m no longer a political activist in the conventional sense, although the book has an activist element to it in making people striving to make a better world aware of how secret police operate. I’m not organizationally affiliated nor do I plan to be in this life, as it were.
DEG: In your book, you show how the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party USA (henceforth RU/RCP) was a significant and vibrant mass movement. By the late 1970s, it possessed 1,500 members, boasted a large periphery, and could punch far above its weight class. In fact, as you recount in the book, when the student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), broke up in 1969, most of the radical forces within it gravitated toward the RU and not the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). Yet other groups like the WUO, though much smaller, have received more media coverage and appear much more in the histories of that era. Indeed, even in books by radical historians who deal with that period, such as Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Che and Mao, the RU/RCP still receives an arguably marginal treatment. Could you offer an explanation as to why the RU/RCP has been either marginalized or left out of histories of the 1960s?
AL: It’s a good question and I can speculate to a degree. I wrote a paper that was my senior thesis at NYU investigating the role of the Revolutionary Union in SDS, and I had no idea what its actual role in SDS was and how it emerged out of that. It was a very small group at the end of SDS with probably 20 people or so. But it was very influential, a lot of which I wrote about in the book. When I was researching this thesis, I read this book by David Barber, who wrote a book for University Press of Mississippi, entitled A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed. And you know, Barber is not sympathetic with the RU or the politics they put forward in SDS, but he makes this point that the kind of things the RU was arguing for – about basing themselves in the working class, but wrapped in this more conventional Marxist language – as he wrote, “The Red Papers [the RU’s original manifesto] nevertheless represented the future of where most of RYM II [the non-Weatherman faction at the core of SDS] were headed.”
And SDS did indeed fall apart. It was a wide open movement and the national office was controlled by people like Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd and they went off to be the Weathermen. And they did garner a lot of press. I think from the standpoint of the moral compulsion of these folks, my sense is that they felt a genuine and burning desire to put an end to the Vietnam War and all the various injustices that they came to see associated with the United States. Tactically and strategically, they flamed out very quickly. And they are still being talked about, mainly as a prototypical example of how radicalism is a failed way to go.
But the Revolutionary Union did kind of emerge out of that. As we discovered in researching the book, people would tell us, “not that many people in SDS went to the RU.” And then you would ask somebody “were you in SDS?” and they would say “oh yeah.” We have met quite a few former SDS people who went on to be part of the RU. And there were also people like Mike Klonsky who was in the national leadership of SDS who formed another communist organization (The October League) and others who also formed new communist organizations.
As for Max Elbaum’s book, he did a survey of all these groups and he does mention that the RU was the biggest. But he does tend to equally address all the various groups. I feel that my and Conor’s book is a little bit more proportionate in terms of who had the larger impact. And as we say in the book, it had a lot to do with the RU’s association with China. By the early 1970s, the RU had what was popularly called the “Chinese franchise.” They formed the US-China Peoples Friendship Association which was the group you had to be in if you wanted to tour China. And they couldn’t have done that if the Chinese had agreed that this was something to do. This model of Maoist China in the early and mid-1970s and the RU’s association with that was very important to its ability to move forward and to cohere as a revolutionary force in a time when the upsurge of the 1960s was waning.
DEG: You touched on this, but many 1960s radicals, whether in the WUO or the RU, considered themselves communist revolutionaries. Why were they willing to become communist revolutionaries. And more specifically, what was the nature of the appeal of Maoism, which the RU adopted?
AL: It’s a tough question. It’s funny because I was in high school when I became radicalized and I met all the people around me, these older kids who were slowly gravitating towards Marxism-Leninism. And it had a lot to do with what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution – a perception of rebellion, standing up against authority, standing up against tradition, standing up against the rule of a generation that seemed to be ossified. In Cuba there was a revolution where a small group of people seemed to humiliate the United States. Communism was the proclaimed ideology behind these forces. And it had an impact on the student movement here. One needs a model. If you say you are a revolutionary, you need a model or an alternative to make revolution for. And in the late sixties, it appeared as if there were such models.
Today we can talk about what we know and what we understand and what we should have understood then to figure out if those were in fact appealing models. I think we have to put that aside for the sake of what we are talking about here, back in the late 1960s and 70s, the people who were radical were looking at these things and they seemed viable, that was what they proceeded from. People were disgusted with the Democratic Party, which had systematically drawn people into this murderous and awful war in Vietnam. People were rejecting the half-measures of reform politics and movements, and, by contrast, Marxism-Leninism in places like China and Cuba, and revolutionary thought in general, was appealing.
DEG: Now in the formative period, the RU saw itself as a “pre-party formation.” What does this exactly mean? And why did the RU later decide to turn itself into a party despite this earlier formation?
AL: What I wrote in the book drew a lot from Steve Hamilton, who was a Revolutionary Union founder. He’s a very interesting character – he was from the working class and he initially wanted to study to go into a theological field. He was given a scholarship to attend Wheaton College, but he made a turn and decided to study history at Berkeley. And he landed at Berkeley with the start of the Free Speech Movement and he became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PL), which was the Maoist formation before the Revolutionary Union. Progressive Labor Party ended up taking another road, which is another story to tell. But Hamilton was in PL and instrumental in Stop the Draft Week in 1967. He was arrested and kicked out of Berkeley. He and Bob Avakian went to Richmond, California to try and immerse themselves in the working class and organize for revolutionary change. Hamilton thought that just moral calls were not enough, the whole system needed to be brought down. I mention all this about Steve Hamilton because he left the RU around 1973-4 and he wrote a two-part history which was revelatory for me. He makes the point that the RU was already a national organization and essentially acting as a party. He argued against mystifying what a party was. In looking back, it seems that the evidence corresponded with what Hamilton, and Leibel Bergman too, said. Inadvertently, two FBI informants said in 1970 that the RU is probably going to merge with a bunch of organizations and become this new communist party, which is interesting in and of itself.
One of the most startling things we discovered was that the RU was attempting to merge some organizations to form a multinational party. They were trying to merge the Black Workers’ Congress, the Young Lords’ Party which had changed its name to the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and a radical Asian organization called I Wor Kuen. They tried to merge these groups, they’d actually signed a unity statement and then two weeks later it all fell apart. These groups were supposed to join together and form a party. The Revolutionary Union printed a whole pamphlet about the polemical battles that led to the destruction of that.
But as we document in the book, the central committee member Donald Wright, who was the RU’s point person on this National Liaison Committee, played a prominent and destructive role. He basically put forward a different position from the official RU position. And as we looked into Don Wright’s background, we discovered more and more questionable things. He was someone who came out of the Ad Hoc Committee (AHC), which was supposed to be a super-secret section of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) that was more radical than the CPUSA. We discovered that the AHC was actually an FBI concoction, a fully-created entity from the mind of special agent Herbert K. Stallings. All of which adds another dimension to why the National Liaison Committee fell apart.
All of this goes to your question about the forming of the party. In hindsight it looks like the RU was in fact a party. As we point out in the book, the group evolved in a certain way and followed a certain continuum. The RU turning into the RCP was basically the adoption and codification of positions they had developed in their formative period.
DEG: You touched on the FBI which had infiltrated, surveilled, and disrupted the RU/RCP. And of course the FBI had done this to other far left organizations for several decades. What were your sources for FBI disruption of the RU/RCP?
AL: Firstly there was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents. We hit the mother lode with Steve Hamilton’s files. He died in 2009 and because he was an early leader of the group, every time his name got mentioned, which was at most of the leadership meetings, a copy went to his FBI file. So the biggest thing we found was these informant files from someone who had joined the Revolutionary Union by its third meeting in April 1968. We actually didn’t know the group was created in early 1968, we always heard it was created in late 1968. Apparently it was created in January or February 1968 and the FBI had an informant in place and got him on the regional executive committee. And this person meticulously typed single-spaced 6-10 pages of the inaugural struggles and debates that were going on in the RU. In it, he names all the principle figures – Larry Harris, Leibel Bergman, Bob Avakian, Bruce Franklin. And you see their struggle in the RU about attacking Progressive Labor Party. Bruce Franklin, Bob Avakian, and Steve Hamilton initially didn’t want to start a big polemical war with PL, but they were brought around. You see the struggle around Stalin and its striking. Bob Avakian didn’t initially support Stalin and that all got resolved because there’s an informant in there reporting on the evolution, if you will, of people’s views. And the informants records went into Steve Hamilton’s files and were tucked away in the National Archives. We asked for them and they sent them to us and there it was. That was a big source.
But then a lot of this stuff is just sitting out there because no one really looks at the Revolutionary Union. We discovered that the FBI had instructed its informants in SDS to vote with the national office because that record was sitting in the FBI’s “vault” of released documents. One of the documents was on SDS and there it was. A professor, Art Eckstein, who we shared that document with, caught that particular instruction. But if you’re not looking at the RU, you don’t find it. And as you said earlier, nobody talks about the Revolutionary Union.
As we document in the book, major people have written about SDS, such as Todd Gitlin and Kirkpatrick Sale. Unfortunately, they relegate the Revolutionary Union to footnotes and in doing so, they inadvertently misconstrue history. The RU was never that big when they were part of SDS, or in relation to the CPUSA in its heyday of the 1940s, but in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were very influential among a good percentage of the most radical youth. They appeared to have answered some fundamental questions about how to effect revolutionary change without going pell-mell into launching revolution right away. That was just rushing into a disastrous thing and you’d get destroyed very quickly.
DEG: What kind of repression did the RU/RCP face from the FBI? You’ve mentioned some examples, but do you want to go a little more into it?
AL: Regarding the strategy, and this is important because it comes up with the Weathermen and Bruce Franklin who broke away from the RU, there was a paper that argued it was possible to start a kind of protracted urban guerrilla war. And the FBI had a very clear assessment of this – these people want to go off and do violence, they’ll become isolated from the general population really quickly and be killed or put in jail. That’s one way – from the Bureau’s outlook – to deal with a certain kind of radical.
Now the way of dealing with these more strategic-minded organizations is more strategic. The FBI made sure that all the leaders were monitored and put on their Security Index, which was later changed to their Administrative Index. This meant every six months, the FBI needed to double-check to see where people lived, where they were working, because the point was they would be arrested when the time came, and the leadership of the RU, the most important people, would be put in jail. That’s consistent with what happened to the CPUSA as World War II ended and gave way to the Cold War. They invoked the Smith Act, they arrested the top CP leadership and effectively paralyzed the group. That’s one thing – making sure they had a bead on the leaders.
The other thing was they had informants at every level, including in the leadership. And this is actually astonishing to me, as a matter of doctrine, the FBI attempted to infiltrate groups as they were starting out. They did this in a period in the 1950s when the Communist Party was reforming and they did this with the RU in the early 1970s. We have now documented not one, but two FBI informants on the central committee of the Revolutionary Union of 1971. So they’re actually in there on a leading body. They’re not just giving information, but they’re in there, one would imagine, arguing for policy and pushing things one way or the other. I think back to the example of the National Liaison Committee that I gave earlier, of how that entity was destroyed, there is a big question of what role the FBI played in that dissolution. This is not to say that the FBI was able to do whatever it wanted. The RU grew, despite all this stuff.
So there’s all these kind of things – monitoring the leadership, dividing people at every turn. And this is insidious like the one FBI memo that proposes writing a fake novel under Leibel Bergman’s name that puts forward a pro-Soviet line. It’s a long memo, but it says “we should write this fake novel, say it’s by Liebel Bergman, say it’s arguing the Soviet line to make him look bad and look like a cop.” They ended up saying we’re not going to do that since it would have been a little too ambitious. That’s the kind of interesting stuff. Or the poison pen letters claiming that so-and-so is an informant. There was an idea of a comic book. There is a comic that attempted to show Leibel Bergman was an FBI informant, and which was sent to Liberation News Service surreptitiously, allegedly from Marv Treiger, who had been in the RU and left. We actually called Liberation News Service people who are still around and they said “we got this cartoon, but we don’t enter into these polemical battles and take sides. So we didn’t print it.” Which was a good policy to have, because in this instance that cartoon seemed a provocation.
What the FBI was doing at every turn was to stir people up. They took Red Papers and they said, “let’s send this to Progressive Labor because Red Papers 1 had a polemic against PL.” So in that way, they wanted to fuel the fires, so they tried to create divisions at every turn, divisions between organizations, divisions within organizations, and divisions among leaders. There’s a number of memos talking about how to set Bruce Franklin against Leibel Bergman. Now, the repression was different from what the Black Panthers faced, where people were in shoot-outs or ended up with serious jail time. The approach to the RU was different, this was a strategic organization and the FBI was dealing with that strategically. And of course they did have these informants at the top level which raises the whole question of the interpenetration between the secret police and this revolutionary organization. When you have FBI agents on the central committee, the FBI is part of your group, maybe not the main part or necessarily the determining part, but it’s unhelpfully dismissive to not think they’re playing a significant role.
This was startling to me. I thought I understood some of this stuff, but I was rather shocked to learn the degree to which this was going on. I can also say this: it didn’t stop people from joining or the group from growing. Larger forces ultimately determined what was possible and what was not possible. That said, I think it is being blind to some realities to not understand how intertwined, how dialectically intertwined, the operation of the secret police is with a group that is attempting radical change – the political police are in there and a major player. They are intimately in your shit.
Full article: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/09/22/the-heavy-radicals-an-interview-with-aaron-leonard/
Aaron Leonard and Doug Enaa Greene September 22, 2015
Formed in 1968, the Revolutionary Union (RU), which transformed into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in 1975, would become one of the most recognizable communist formations of the 1970s in the United States. In their recent book, Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists, Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher trace the history of the RU, drawing in particular on declassified materials to document how the FBI attempted to repress not just the Revolutionary Union, but all the radical movements of the era. In this detailed interview, Doug Enaa Greene talks with Leonard about the vibrant struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, paying close attention to the RU’s history, organizing efforts, changing strategies, and above all the expansive state repression it elicited.
Doug Enaa Greene: Before we begin discussing the book itself, could you share with our readers some of your political and professional background and how it led you to write this book?
Aaron Leonard: I worked with the Revolutionary Communist Party for a very long time. As it says in the introduction, I became radicalized when I was in high school. I caught the tail-end of the sixties and we started our own radical, proto-communist Maoist group. Then I met the party in 1976. I was first with their unemployed group – Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee (UWOC), then the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) when it was founded as a transition from the Revolutionary Student Brigade. Then I wrote for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) newspaper for many years. Today I’m a historian, primarily a radical historian. I’m no longer a political activist in the conventional sense, although the book has an activist element to it in making people striving to make a better world aware of how secret police operate. I’m not organizationally affiliated nor do I plan to be in this life, as it were.
DEG: In your book, you show how the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party USA (henceforth RU/RCP) was a significant and vibrant mass movement. By the late 1970s, it possessed 1,500 members, boasted a large periphery, and could punch far above its weight class. In fact, as you recount in the book, when the student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), broke up in 1969, most of the radical forces within it gravitated toward the RU and not the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). Yet other groups like the WUO, though much smaller, have received more media coverage and appear much more in the histories of that era. Indeed, even in books by radical historians who deal with that period, such as Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Che and Mao, the RU/RCP still receives an arguably marginal treatment. Could you offer an explanation as to why the RU/RCP has been either marginalized or left out of histories of the 1960s?
AL: It’s a good question and I can speculate to a degree. I wrote a paper that was my senior thesis at NYU investigating the role of the Revolutionary Union in SDS, and I had no idea what its actual role in SDS was and how it emerged out of that. It was a very small group at the end of SDS with probably 20 people or so. But it was very influential, a lot of which I wrote about in the book. When I was researching this thesis, I read this book by David Barber, who wrote a book for University Press of Mississippi, entitled A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed. And you know, Barber is not sympathetic with the RU or the politics they put forward in SDS, but he makes this point that the kind of things the RU was arguing for – about basing themselves in the working class, but wrapped in this more conventional Marxist language – as he wrote, “The Red Papers [the RU’s original manifesto] nevertheless represented the future of where most of RYM II [the non-Weatherman faction at the core of SDS] were headed.”
And SDS did indeed fall apart. It was a wide open movement and the national office was controlled by people like Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd and they went off to be the Weathermen. And they did garner a lot of press. I think from the standpoint of the moral compulsion of these folks, my sense is that they felt a genuine and burning desire to put an end to the Vietnam War and all the various injustices that they came to see associated with the United States. Tactically and strategically, they flamed out very quickly. And they are still being talked about, mainly as a prototypical example of how radicalism is a failed way to go.
But the Revolutionary Union did kind of emerge out of that. As we discovered in researching the book, people would tell us, “not that many people in SDS went to the RU.” And then you would ask somebody “were you in SDS?” and they would say “oh yeah.” We have met quite a few former SDS people who went on to be part of the RU. And there were also people like Mike Klonsky who was in the national leadership of SDS who formed another communist organization (The October League) and others who also formed new communist organizations.
As for Max Elbaum’s book, he did a survey of all these groups and he does mention that the RU was the biggest. But he does tend to equally address all the various groups. I feel that my and Conor’s book is a little bit more proportionate in terms of who had the larger impact. And as we say in the book, it had a lot to do with the RU’s association with China. By the early 1970s, the RU had what was popularly called the “Chinese franchise.” They formed the US-China Peoples Friendship Association which was the group you had to be in if you wanted to tour China. And they couldn’t have done that if the Chinese had agreed that this was something to do. This model of Maoist China in the early and mid-1970s and the RU’s association with that was very important to its ability to move forward and to cohere as a revolutionary force in a time when the upsurge of the 1960s was waning.
DEG: You touched on this, but many 1960s radicals, whether in the WUO or the RU, considered themselves communist revolutionaries. Why were they willing to become communist revolutionaries. And more specifically, what was the nature of the appeal of Maoism, which the RU adopted?
AL: It’s a tough question. It’s funny because I was in high school when I became radicalized and I met all the people around me, these older kids who were slowly gravitating towards Marxism-Leninism. And it had a lot to do with what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution – a perception of rebellion, standing up against authority, standing up against tradition, standing up against the rule of a generation that seemed to be ossified. In Cuba there was a revolution where a small group of people seemed to humiliate the United States. Communism was the proclaimed ideology behind these forces. And it had an impact on the student movement here. One needs a model. If you say you are a revolutionary, you need a model or an alternative to make revolution for. And in the late sixties, it appeared as if there were such models.
Today we can talk about what we know and what we understand and what we should have understood then to figure out if those were in fact appealing models. I think we have to put that aside for the sake of what we are talking about here, back in the late 1960s and 70s, the people who were radical were looking at these things and they seemed viable, that was what they proceeded from. People were disgusted with the Democratic Party, which had systematically drawn people into this murderous and awful war in Vietnam. People were rejecting the half-measures of reform politics and movements, and, by contrast, Marxism-Leninism in places like China and Cuba, and revolutionary thought in general, was appealing.
DEG: Now in the formative period, the RU saw itself as a “pre-party formation.” What does this exactly mean? And why did the RU later decide to turn itself into a party despite this earlier formation?
AL: What I wrote in the book drew a lot from Steve Hamilton, who was a Revolutionary Union founder. He’s a very interesting character – he was from the working class and he initially wanted to study to go into a theological field. He was given a scholarship to attend Wheaton College, but he made a turn and decided to study history at Berkeley. And he landed at Berkeley with the start of the Free Speech Movement and he became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PL), which was the Maoist formation before the Revolutionary Union. Progressive Labor Party ended up taking another road, which is another story to tell. But Hamilton was in PL and instrumental in Stop the Draft Week in 1967. He was arrested and kicked out of Berkeley. He and Bob Avakian went to Richmond, California to try and immerse themselves in the working class and organize for revolutionary change. Hamilton thought that just moral calls were not enough, the whole system needed to be brought down. I mention all this about Steve Hamilton because he left the RU around 1973-4 and he wrote a two-part history which was revelatory for me. He makes the point that the RU was already a national organization and essentially acting as a party. He argued against mystifying what a party was. In looking back, it seems that the evidence corresponded with what Hamilton, and Leibel Bergman too, said. Inadvertently, two FBI informants said in 1970 that the RU is probably going to merge with a bunch of organizations and become this new communist party, which is interesting in and of itself.
One of the most startling things we discovered was that the RU was attempting to merge some organizations to form a multinational party. They were trying to merge the Black Workers’ Congress, the Young Lords’ Party which had changed its name to the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and a radical Asian organization called I Wor Kuen. They tried to merge these groups, they’d actually signed a unity statement and then two weeks later it all fell apart. These groups were supposed to join together and form a party. The Revolutionary Union printed a whole pamphlet about the polemical battles that led to the destruction of that.
But as we document in the book, the central committee member Donald Wright, who was the RU’s point person on this National Liaison Committee, played a prominent and destructive role. He basically put forward a different position from the official RU position. And as we looked into Don Wright’s background, we discovered more and more questionable things. He was someone who came out of the Ad Hoc Committee (AHC), which was supposed to be a super-secret section of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) that was more radical than the CPUSA. We discovered that the AHC was actually an FBI concoction, a fully-created entity from the mind of special agent Herbert K. Stallings. All of which adds another dimension to why the National Liaison Committee fell apart.
All of this goes to your question about the forming of the party. In hindsight it looks like the RU was in fact a party. As we point out in the book, the group evolved in a certain way and followed a certain continuum. The RU turning into the RCP was basically the adoption and codification of positions they had developed in their formative period.
DEG: You touched on the FBI which had infiltrated, surveilled, and disrupted the RU/RCP. And of course the FBI had done this to other far left organizations for several decades. What were your sources for FBI disruption of the RU/RCP?
AL: Firstly there was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents. We hit the mother lode with Steve Hamilton’s files. He died in 2009 and because he was an early leader of the group, every time his name got mentioned, which was at most of the leadership meetings, a copy went to his FBI file. So the biggest thing we found was these informant files from someone who had joined the Revolutionary Union by its third meeting in April 1968. We actually didn’t know the group was created in early 1968, we always heard it was created in late 1968. Apparently it was created in January or February 1968 and the FBI had an informant in place and got him on the regional executive committee. And this person meticulously typed single-spaced 6-10 pages of the inaugural struggles and debates that were going on in the RU. In it, he names all the principle figures – Larry Harris, Leibel Bergman, Bob Avakian, Bruce Franklin. And you see their struggle in the RU about attacking Progressive Labor Party. Bruce Franklin, Bob Avakian, and Steve Hamilton initially didn’t want to start a big polemical war with PL, but they were brought around. You see the struggle around Stalin and its striking. Bob Avakian didn’t initially support Stalin and that all got resolved because there’s an informant in there reporting on the evolution, if you will, of people’s views. And the informants records went into Steve Hamilton’s files and were tucked away in the National Archives. We asked for them and they sent them to us and there it was. That was a big source.
But then a lot of this stuff is just sitting out there because no one really looks at the Revolutionary Union. We discovered that the FBI had instructed its informants in SDS to vote with the national office because that record was sitting in the FBI’s “vault” of released documents. One of the documents was on SDS and there it was. A professor, Art Eckstein, who we shared that document with, caught that particular instruction. But if you’re not looking at the RU, you don’t find it. And as you said earlier, nobody talks about the Revolutionary Union.
As we document in the book, major people have written about SDS, such as Todd Gitlin and Kirkpatrick Sale. Unfortunately, they relegate the Revolutionary Union to footnotes and in doing so, they inadvertently misconstrue history. The RU was never that big when they were part of SDS, or in relation to the CPUSA in its heyday of the 1940s, but in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were very influential among a good percentage of the most radical youth. They appeared to have answered some fundamental questions about how to effect revolutionary change without going pell-mell into launching revolution right away. That was just rushing into a disastrous thing and you’d get destroyed very quickly.
DEG: What kind of repression did the RU/RCP face from the FBI? You’ve mentioned some examples, but do you want to go a little more into it?
AL: Regarding the strategy, and this is important because it comes up with the Weathermen and Bruce Franklin who broke away from the RU, there was a paper that argued it was possible to start a kind of protracted urban guerrilla war. And the FBI had a very clear assessment of this – these people want to go off and do violence, they’ll become isolated from the general population really quickly and be killed or put in jail. That’s one way – from the Bureau’s outlook – to deal with a certain kind of radical.
Now the way of dealing with these more strategic-minded organizations is more strategic. The FBI made sure that all the leaders were monitored and put on their Security Index, which was later changed to their Administrative Index. This meant every six months, the FBI needed to double-check to see where people lived, where they were working, because the point was they would be arrested when the time came, and the leadership of the RU, the most important people, would be put in jail. That’s consistent with what happened to the CPUSA as World War II ended and gave way to the Cold War. They invoked the Smith Act, they arrested the top CP leadership and effectively paralyzed the group. That’s one thing – making sure they had a bead on the leaders.
The other thing was they had informants at every level, including in the leadership. And this is actually astonishing to me, as a matter of doctrine, the FBI attempted to infiltrate groups as they were starting out. They did this in a period in the 1950s when the Communist Party was reforming and they did this with the RU in the early 1970s. We have now documented not one, but two FBI informants on the central committee of the Revolutionary Union of 1971. So they’re actually in there on a leading body. They’re not just giving information, but they’re in there, one would imagine, arguing for policy and pushing things one way or the other. I think back to the example of the National Liaison Committee that I gave earlier, of how that entity was destroyed, there is a big question of what role the FBI played in that dissolution. This is not to say that the FBI was able to do whatever it wanted. The RU grew, despite all this stuff.
So there’s all these kind of things – monitoring the leadership, dividing people at every turn. And this is insidious like the one FBI memo that proposes writing a fake novel under Leibel Bergman’s name that puts forward a pro-Soviet line. It’s a long memo, but it says “we should write this fake novel, say it’s by Liebel Bergman, say it’s arguing the Soviet line to make him look bad and look like a cop.” They ended up saying we’re not going to do that since it would have been a little too ambitious. That’s the kind of interesting stuff. Or the poison pen letters claiming that so-and-so is an informant. There was an idea of a comic book. There is a comic that attempted to show Leibel Bergman was an FBI informant, and which was sent to Liberation News Service surreptitiously, allegedly from Marv Treiger, who had been in the RU and left. We actually called Liberation News Service people who are still around and they said “we got this cartoon, but we don’t enter into these polemical battles and take sides. So we didn’t print it.” Which was a good policy to have, because in this instance that cartoon seemed a provocation.
What the FBI was doing at every turn was to stir people up. They took Red Papers and they said, “let’s send this to Progressive Labor because Red Papers 1 had a polemic against PL.” So in that way, they wanted to fuel the fires, so they tried to create divisions at every turn, divisions between organizations, divisions within organizations, and divisions among leaders. There’s a number of memos talking about how to set Bruce Franklin against Leibel Bergman. Now, the repression was different from what the Black Panthers faced, where people were in shoot-outs or ended up with serious jail time. The approach to the RU was different, this was a strategic organization and the FBI was dealing with that strategically. And of course they did have these informants at the top level which raises the whole question of the interpenetration between the secret police and this revolutionary organization. When you have FBI agents on the central committee, the FBI is part of your group, maybe not the main part or necessarily the determining part, but it’s unhelpfully dismissive to not think they’re playing a significant role.
This was startling to me. I thought I understood some of this stuff, but I was rather shocked to learn the degree to which this was going on. I can also say this: it didn’t stop people from joining or the group from growing. Larger forces ultimately determined what was possible and what was not possible. That said, I think it is being blind to some realities to not understand how intertwined, how dialectically intertwined, the operation of the secret police is with a group that is attempting radical change – the political police are in there and a major player. They are intimately in your shit.
Full article: https://viewpointmag.com/2015/09/22/the-heavy-radicals-an-interview-with-aaron-leonard/