Interview with Mark Rudd, former Weather Man

[blake 3:17]

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 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, “Underground: My Life in SDS and Weatherman,” or my website. 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 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....r_underground/

[Imposter Marxist]

Seems like a counter-revolutionary mindset to me. SDS didn't fail because they "Used violence!" :O

They failed because they didn't base their support in the working class.

[The Grey Blur]

explain to me how students for a democratic society should have based their support in the working class.

decent interview.

[RED DAVE]

I met Rudd once, and I've traded emails with him since he wrote the article in Counterpunch. An important point he makes is the stupidity of the "terrorism" they engaged in and the necessity of organizing.

RED DAVE

[KurtFF8]

explain to me how students for a democratic society should have based their support in the working class.

decent interview.

Because the majority of students (in some places at least) are of the working class. "Student" isn't a class category, it's about the kinds of jobs those students have during and after school that defines their class, not that they are taking courses.

Now if a student movement is based in the middle class (which some try to argue SDS was, although I'm not too sure I would agree with this) then the political conclusions may be quite faulty from the perspective of a workers' revolutionary group.

There are some interesting articles on SDS including many debates between PLP and Weathermen here: The New Communist Movement: The Early Groups, 1969-197

[The Grey Blur]

Because the majority of students (in some places at least) are of the working class. "Student" isn't a class category, it's about the kinds of jobs those students have during and after school that defines their class, not that they are taking courses.

Now if a student movement is based in the middle class (which some try to argue SDS was, although I'm not too sure I would agree with this) then the political conclusions may be quite faulty from the perspective of a workers' revolutionary group.

There are some interesting articles on SDS including many debates between PLP and Weathermen here: The New Communist Movement: The Early Groups, 1969-197

blah blah i never said students were a class (i don't get why on revleft people feel the need to patronise other marxists?) rather that a student organisation organised on a campus basis isn't going to be able to 'base itself in the working class' ie the organised labour movement. in fact students in the 60s and today are giving the lead to the labour movement politically. my point was that Noth and yourself are repeating, mantra-like, a phrase removed of political context which offers us zero political insight.

i'm trying to raise the level of the debate bro, try it. there is a marxism beyond slogans, i'm sure of it. (sorry, now i'm the patronising one).

[Imposter Marxist]

The bombings were isolated, non-ideological attacks with no real organization. I'm not arguing in FAVOR of their bombings, or AGAINST them, im simply saying that had they have an ideological movement, then perhaps they would have been more sucessful. Thats not what this article is about though, its about Mr. Rudd idealist statements and refusal to accept the means for revolution. Then he talks about how "Effective" the non-violent strategies have been, and then qoutes the fucking DALAI LAMA.

[KurtFF8]

blah blah i never said students were a class (i don't get why on revleft people feel the need to patronise other marxists?) rather that a student organisation organised on a campus basis isn't going to be able to 'base itself in the working class' ie the organised labour movement. in fact students in the 60s and today are giving the lead to the labour movement politically. my point was that Noth and yourself are repeating, mantra-like, a phrase removed of political context which offers us zero political insight.

i'm trying to raise the level of the debate bro, try it. there is a marxism beyond slogans, i'm sure of it. (sorry, now i'm the patronising one).

I didn't mean to be patronizing or condescending, comrade.

It's just that a lot of folks on the Left in the United States see any sort of involvement with students and automatically equate that with organizing them instead of the working class, where as I simply wanted to point out that it's not quite that dichotomous (I say this coming from someone who is actually critical of that kind of student-centered organizing also mind you).

I know a lot of the language I used in my post is just "cliche Marxist" sloganeering to some extent, but it does have a real affect on the debate on how to organize. If an organization sees any sort of campus organizing as "liberal" or "petty-bourgeois" then they will adopt a wholly different kind of approach than an organization that doesn't share that same analysis.

[Rakhmetov]

Oh, that's a lot of cant! Rudd is full of feces. Dr. Kissinger even admitted that the Weather bombing of the U.S. capitol scared the beejesus out out of the Nixon administration. Who can deny this???? I'm not for bombing innocent people but symbolic targets are a good scare tactic to put pressure on the establishment.

[blake 3:17]

I can't believe some of the above. Rudd has come to some kind of sanity about building effective movements and folks are dissing him for non-militancy.

One of the striking features of the Weather Undergound is that a good number of them have gone on to do decent political and social service work.

As Red Dave says above, the bombings were STUPID. After the tree WU members blew themselves up, there was a special point in bombing so that nobody would get hurt, but unless there's a real target it just plays into the kkkops hands.

Michael Albert, in his memoirs, talks about being at MIT when the big schisms in SDS were happening (I believe his affinity group was named after Rosa Luxemburg) and, while rejecting these types of tactics, acknowledges if he had known what was happening down the hall from him (R&D on low level military helicopters to kill the Vietnamese and I'm sure a precursor for the ones used in the Middle East), he might have gone the same route.

[Martin Blank]

Our Top Story: Former SDSer and Weatherman Mark Rudd says individual terrorism only aides government persecution of radicals, and is "a total waste of time and energy".

In other news: bears shit in the woods,... the Pope is Catholic,... and Francisco Franco is still dead....

Turning to weather: the sky is blue....

Join us at 11 o'clock for our broadcast or visit our website: www.likethisshitwasn'talreadyfuckingobvious.com