Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for The Weathermen.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. On a day when I am posting an entry on the Symbonise Liberation Army this entry acts as a cautionary tale. Also, in contradistiction to fink Ms. Alpert- Honor and Remember Susan Saxe and Sam Melville. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
*****
Jane Alpert's Growing Up Underground:
Confessions of an FBI Fink
Poor Jane Alpert, just a Trilby to the Svengalis of the New Left. But she sang for the FBI too, which is what most leftists remember. Her autobiography, Crowing Up Underground (William Morrow, 1981), which appeared just in time to reap the publicity around the Nyack Brinks job in which several Weathermen, including Kathy Boudin, were picked up, is a lengthy exercise in blame-shifting and vindictiveness against her former comrades. Yes, it's true, she admits, she did bomb the Federal Building in New York City on 18 September 1969, traveling downtown via bus "wearing a white A-line dress, kid gloves... and a touch of makeup… I felt as I imagined I would on my wedding day." And yes, she did write "I will mourn the death of 42 male supremacists no longer" following Rockefeller's bloody 1971 Attica prison massacre which left her former lover Sam Melville among the dead. And, yes, she did talk to the FBI, Alpert admits, in 1974 when she turned herself in after four years under¬ground on bombing charges, in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
But nothing, you see, is ever really Jane Alpert's fault. She says now Melville bombed buildings only out of sexual frustration and she went along because she was his love-slave. Alpert says now it was feminist Robin Morgan's evil influence that led her into man-hating excess and even—this delicately insinuated—perhaps into finking to the FBI as well. "Robin and I stayed up all night discussing the best way to handle the crisis" (of FBI pressure), Alpert recalls. Morgan thought up the scenario Alpert followed, she says, of talking to the FBI but "making up" some parts to hide certain details. "This was perhaps the most deluded strategy on which Robin and I had ever collaborated," she writes, but—as usual—she did it, "naively confident in her wisdom." And after her first fink session, Alpert in panic realized she had probably given enough details to trap fellow-radical Pat Swinton, also sought on bombing charges. So she called Swinton and told her to disappear again. "She told me she would never leave Brattleboro," Alpert self-righteously recalls—so we're supposed to think it was just Swinton's own fault she got picked up seven weeks later.
Alpert's book is really kind of embarrassing, not because the details of 1960s Lower East Side sex life are particularly painful (at least, no more than anybody else's), or because "underground" life is revealed as the pathetically aimless scrounging it no doubt was for many. It is this nasty, blatant evasion of responsibility which evokes disgust. Hegel's aphorism, "To his valet no man is a world hero, not because he is not a world hero, but because his valet is a valet," is appropriate to Alpert's love-slave outlook.
What is most irritating—and most dangerous—about this book is Alpert's vicious trivializing of the radical wing of the New Left as simply a bunch of psychotic sexually hung-up creeps. A most useful myth for Alpert, no doubt, but that doesn't make it true. It's easy enough today, in the era of Reagan reaction, to shrug it all off as youthful mistakes, "Oh, we must have been crazy then—to think we could stop American imperialism." But the New Left wasn't crazy. The best of the 1960s radicals—and militants like the Black Panther Party, relentlessly gunned down—hated this society and its bitter oppression with a deep and fundamentally just hatred. Their means of fighting back, their strategy and analysis, were flawed—we Marxists argued at the time against the commonly held New Left belief that a few guerrilla fighters "picking up the gun" could alone inspire a revolution. We fought instead to win young radicals to the socialist perspective of working-class revolution leading all the oppressed.
As we predicted, the "Days of Rage" was a disaster. But we defended these young radicals against the ensuing vindictive state repression. Bitter enough was the brutal smashing of the Panthers, the rounding up of the Weather Underground, the punishing court sentences, the fact that the capitalist state is more powerful than the heroic individuals of the black radical movement and New Left thought. Better it were not.
Unfortunately a facile writer, Alpert is now making hay out of a movement she obviously didn't understand at the time and today is interested only in slandering to her own greater glory. It is true that among the thousands of idealistic young people, inspired by the civil rights struggles in the South, disgusted by the brutal resistance of the state to elementary justice, then impelled toward radicalism by the ever-escalating dirty Vietnam War, there were a few adventurers. The impatient spirit of petty-bourgeois radicalism often burned out, particularly given the dead weight upon the antiwar movement of the "respectable" liberal peace crawls, the cringing appeals to the president and Democratic Party. But the best of the New Leftists found their way to Marxism, found a way to deepen and continue their resistance to a hateful system of exploitation and oppression. Many cadres of the Spartacist League came from the New Left, from SDS, from the early women's and civil rights movements. And a lot of New Leftists, whether they found their way to proletarian socialism or not, at least had the decency not to fink on their former comrades-in-arms when things got tough. We salute heroic individuals like Susan Saxe and Wendy Yoshimura.
As for Alpert, today she's busy fighting the demon porn, right in tune with the times—the Moral Majority Reagan reaction times, that is. We wonder though, if this petty-bourgeois feminist fad mercifully dies out, will Alpert say Susan Brownmiller made her do it?
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. On a day when I am posting an entry on the Symbonise Liberation Army this entry acts as a cautionary tale. Also, in contradistiction to fink Ms. Alpert- Honor and Remember Susan Saxe and Sam Melville. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
*****
Jane Alpert's Growing Up Underground:
Confessions of an FBI Fink
Poor Jane Alpert, just a Trilby to the Svengalis of the New Left. But she sang for the FBI too, which is what most leftists remember. Her autobiography, Crowing Up Underground (William Morrow, 1981), which appeared just in time to reap the publicity around the Nyack Brinks job in which several Weathermen, including Kathy Boudin, were picked up, is a lengthy exercise in blame-shifting and vindictiveness against her former comrades. Yes, it's true, she admits, she did bomb the Federal Building in New York City on 18 September 1969, traveling downtown via bus "wearing a white A-line dress, kid gloves... and a touch of makeup… I felt as I imagined I would on my wedding day." And yes, she did write "I will mourn the death of 42 male supremacists no longer" following Rockefeller's bloody 1971 Attica prison massacre which left her former lover Sam Melville among the dead. And, yes, she did talk to the FBI, Alpert admits, in 1974 when she turned herself in after four years under¬ground on bombing charges, in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
But nothing, you see, is ever really Jane Alpert's fault. She says now Melville bombed buildings only out of sexual frustration and she went along because she was his love-slave. Alpert says now it was feminist Robin Morgan's evil influence that led her into man-hating excess and even—this delicately insinuated—perhaps into finking to the FBI as well. "Robin and I stayed up all night discussing the best way to handle the crisis" (of FBI pressure), Alpert recalls. Morgan thought up the scenario Alpert followed, she says, of talking to the FBI but "making up" some parts to hide certain details. "This was perhaps the most deluded strategy on which Robin and I had ever collaborated," she writes, but—as usual—she did it, "naively confident in her wisdom." And after her first fink session, Alpert in panic realized she had probably given enough details to trap fellow-radical Pat Swinton, also sought on bombing charges. So she called Swinton and told her to disappear again. "She told me she would never leave Brattleboro," Alpert self-righteously recalls—so we're supposed to think it was just Swinton's own fault she got picked up seven weeks later.
Alpert's book is really kind of embarrassing, not because the details of 1960s Lower East Side sex life are particularly painful (at least, no more than anybody else's), or because "underground" life is revealed as the pathetically aimless scrounging it no doubt was for many. It is this nasty, blatant evasion of responsibility which evokes disgust. Hegel's aphorism, "To his valet no man is a world hero, not because he is not a world hero, but because his valet is a valet," is appropriate to Alpert's love-slave outlook.
What is most irritating—and most dangerous—about this book is Alpert's vicious trivializing of the radical wing of the New Left as simply a bunch of psychotic sexually hung-up creeps. A most useful myth for Alpert, no doubt, but that doesn't make it true. It's easy enough today, in the era of Reagan reaction, to shrug it all off as youthful mistakes, "Oh, we must have been crazy then—to think we could stop American imperialism." But the New Left wasn't crazy. The best of the 1960s radicals—and militants like the Black Panther Party, relentlessly gunned down—hated this society and its bitter oppression with a deep and fundamentally just hatred. Their means of fighting back, their strategy and analysis, were flawed—we Marxists argued at the time against the commonly held New Left belief that a few guerrilla fighters "picking up the gun" could alone inspire a revolution. We fought instead to win young radicals to the socialist perspective of working-class revolution leading all the oppressed.
As we predicted, the "Days of Rage" was a disaster. But we defended these young radicals against the ensuing vindictive state repression. Bitter enough was the brutal smashing of the Panthers, the rounding up of the Weather Underground, the punishing court sentences, the fact that the capitalist state is more powerful than the heroic individuals of the black radical movement and New Left thought. Better it were not.
Unfortunately a facile writer, Alpert is now making hay out of a movement she obviously didn't understand at the time and today is interested only in slandering to her own greater glory. It is true that among the thousands of idealistic young people, inspired by the civil rights struggles in the South, disgusted by the brutal resistance of the state to elementary justice, then impelled toward radicalism by the ever-escalating dirty Vietnam War, there were a few adventurers. The impatient spirit of petty-bourgeois radicalism often burned out, particularly given the dead weight upon the antiwar movement of the "respectable" liberal peace crawls, the cringing appeals to the president and Democratic Party. But the best of the New Leftists found their way to Marxism, found a way to deepen and continue their resistance to a hateful system of exploitation and oppression. Many cadres of the Spartacist League came from the New Left, from SDS, from the early women's and civil rights movements. And a lot of New Leftists, whether they found their way to proletarian socialism or not, at least had the decency not to fink on their former comrades-in-arms when things got tough. We salute heroic individuals like Susan Saxe and Wendy Yoshimura.
As for Alpert, today she's busy fighting the demon porn, right in tune with the times—the Moral Majority Reagan reaction times, that is. We wonder though, if this petty-bourgeois feminist fad mercifully dies out, will Alpert say Susan Brownmiller made her do it?
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