The Radicals: Time Out to Retrench

By Jesse Birnbaum

There is no way of fixing the precise moment at which the radical left decided to pause in its headlong pursuit of the apocalypse, but the reason for the halt was clear enough: nothing was working right; it was time to retrench, reassess.

For the extremists, the first signal illumination came in the explosion last March that ripped up a Weatherman bomb factory in Manhattan, killing three members of the group. Weatherman activity declined, and then, early in December, Fugitive Bernardine Dohrn, one of the group's leaders, issued a manifesto that was at once a critique of past mistakes and a manual for future strategy.

The document, titled "New Morning--Changing Weather," declared that "the future of our revolution has been changed decisively." The March explosion "forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle. It is time for the movement to go out into the air, to organize, to risk calling rallies and demonstrations, to convince that mass actions against the war and in support of rebellions do make a difference."

For radicals, it was a new political awakening. The bombers had at last learned what millions of angry Americans had known all along--that the Weatherman was little more than an underground collective of grimly moralistic Bonnies and Clydes. Analyzing Weatherman tactics in a forthcoming Ramparts article, Writer David Horowitz observes that the terrorists overlooked the political consequences of their deeds; karma was their trip. Revolution had almost ceased to be a strategy of social change and had become instead its own justification, a cult, "a yoga of perfection." The result was that the Weatherman had lost, not gained ground for the movement. Their self-styled revolutionary vanguard had far outdistanced and alienated virtually all branches of the moderate and radical left.

It is likely that the final nudge toward at least a temporary renunciation of Weatherman violence came from Radical Priest Daniel Berrigan. Last August, three days before he was arrested, Berrigan sent the outlaw band a brotherly and eloquent admonition, warning that "no principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being." Revolution is only "interesting" insofar as it "avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal." Berrigan urged the Weatherman to "do only that which one cannot not do," and reminded them that "the history of the movement in the last years, it seems to me, shows how constantly and easily we are seduced by violence, not only as a method but as to an end in itself. With very little politics, very little ethics, very little direction and only a minimum of moral sense, if any at all, it might lead one to conclude in despair: the movement is debased beyond recognition. I can't be part of it."

It is not only revulsion over mindless bombing that has dampened the passion of the left. A pervasive fog of fatigue, fear and frustration has settled over the barricades. Radicals still insist that "repression" is everywhere, and as evidence they cite drug arrests, expulsions from schools and conspiracy trials. The arrest of the Berrigan brothers, says Harvard Crimson Staffer David Landau, looms as the newest example "of what the Government is prepared to do to kill the antiwar movement."

Confrontation politics, an acceptable tactic for those who shun terrorism, had become as American as Mom (partly because some Moms participated too). But for many, the vibrations are now gone. Radical Law Student Ted Siff of the University of Texas says the feeling is, "Why try at all if all you are going to do is maybe get busted and bring on the far right?" The sweeping and angry protests of the Cambodian spring, the resolute demands and plans for restructuring the universities, and the energies expended on getting out the vote--all such events are viewed, despite some evidence to the contrary, as having been unproductive. "You work your ass off for years," complains Mark Knops, an underground-newspaper editor, "and nothing comes of it."

Similarly, while many Americans may be willing to accept the argument that renewed U.S. military activity in Indochina is a protective and not an offensive strategy, the radicals are only further convinced that the Nixon Administration dissembles while the earth trembles. The President's recent appropriation of phrases like "a new American revolution" and "power to the people" only serves to confirm Herbert Marcuse's thesis of "repressive tolerance": it reminds the radical left of its own impotence at the same time that the Administration co-opts revolutionary themes.

Radical Prophet Marcuse concedes that he did not foresee the extent to which the "preventive counterrevolution" has blunted the movement. Says Marcuse, in February's Psychology Today: "It is becoming increasingly costly to use forms of confrontation which were still possible a year ago. What is required is a wholesale re-examination of the strategy of the movement."

That re-examination is already well under way, and it is producing surprising and in many cases familiar trends. Everywhere along the radical circuit the same refrains are echoed: "We're getting our heads straight"; "We're getting our stuff together"; "We're getting into radical theory." Organizational work is approaching orgiastic proportions: Marxist groups, Maoist groups, Trotskyite groups, socialist groups and plain old American-style Communist groups are all flourishing. Old Left intellectualism has been reborn, mainly in the form of the Young Socialist Alliance, with thanks to a helping hand from J. Edgar Hoover, who labeled the 5,000-member Y.S.A. "the largest and best-organized youth group in left-wing radicalism."

While tactics may differ, the aim of virtually all the groups is the same: having accepted at last the dictum that it cannot win the hearts and minds of people through violence, the movement hopes to radicalize the population through organization and political education. In Berkeley, for example, radicals are putting up a slate for mayor and city councilmen in the spring elections. Members of this "April Coalition" have already succeeded in placing on the ballot a measure that would decentralize police powers and give them over to neighborhoods within the community. Another, even more old-fashioned radical activity is organizing workers. Coming to terms with this necessity has caused a good deal of pain among many young radicals since, as one of them puts it, "workers tend to have the worst pig values."

What is most significant about the new direction of the political movement is that it is pursuing its goals within the mainstream of the more general cultural revolution of the young. At the same time that radicals are rebuilding their political structure, they are breaking into small groups, living in communes, "relating to each other"--in short, trying to live their revolution instead of making it. Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation are increasingly active elements in the movement. In a way, the intermingling of cultural and political drives has provided a strength and energy to the movement that it never had before.

This does not mean that America has seen the last of revolutionary violence. The movement has always been characterized by uppers and downers, and this spring may bring more uppers than anybody cares to see. Radical Rennie Davis, for example, is organizing a mass demonstration aimed at strangling highway traffic near the Pentagon on May 6. There are unquestionably many people, both in and out of the Weatherman faction, who still believe that the way to salvation is a pipe bomb and a fuse. Trashing is still considered a reliable tactic in many radical quarters, as is "selective" violence.

Still, thoughtful radicals now see that the time has come to redefine what they mean by revolution. For too many, the word had come to mean mere game playing on the barricades. Author Paul Jacobs, 52, whose credentials as a professional radical stretch back into the 1930s, recalls that in his bloody early days of head bashing and worse, "we did not delude ourselves by thinking that violence per se was a noble act. We understood the nature of violence. It may have to be used, but we need to understand what it does to those who use the violence as well as to those upon whom it is used."

There is, moreover, a realization that what a Marxist would call the "objective conditions" required to achieve revolution in its classic sense simply do not exist in America. This conviction partly explains the movement's new directions. The radical organizers are persuading themselves and their fragmented followers that their "revolution," regardless of past confusions, requires steady heads, hard work and an end to the anti-intellectual dilettantism. As its best leaders know, the movement's only hope lies not in armed struggle but in concerted political and economic action.

"If there's something called a revolution in the U.S.," says Leftist Historian Howard Zinn, "it will not be a quick palace revolution but a long-term one, a deep-going one, not in one city like Washington but all over the country at once--in revolutionizing the way people live day to day and the way they relate to one another." That, of course, is not revolution at all in the true historic meaning of the term, but a slow drive for radical change by traditional means.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.