*Films To While the Class Struggle By- What Is The Left?- “Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst”

Click on the title to link to the first part of a "YouTube" film clip of "Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst, Patty Hearst, Cinque, Bill and Emily Harris and other members of the SLA, directed by Robert Stone, 2004

Some films reviewed in this space are offered with the idea that viewing them will given the reader, especially the younger reader or those who are not familiar with the tumultuous events of the period, a fairly positive sense of what it was like to live through the turbulent 1960s and the early 1970s, the high water mark for the last time that we had the “monster” of American imperialism on the run or so we thought. A prime example of that type of review was one that I did a while back on the Black Panthers. Another more recent one was the animated/ documentary film footage provided in “Chicago 10”. Other film reviews are offered to be more thought-provoking or just plain provocative. The film under review, "Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst", is of the latter type.

This film does a good job of presenting the actual events around the kidnapping of the Hearst newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst, by the upstart and then unknown Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the waning days of the militant leftist movement after the practical (in American terms) withdrawal from Vietnam War, through archival film footage, interviews and commenting by surviving members of the organization, reporters who covered the event, officials who were involved in the investigation and others with something to say about the matter. The startling, and perhaps sometimes bizarre train of events is well documented: the inexplicable murder of the Oakland Superintendent Marcus Foster; the kidnapping of UC/Berkeley college student Hearst; the ransom demand of food for the hungry of Oakland in exchange for her release that in turn ran amok; the abrupt change in the case with the apparent adaptive conversion by Hearst to the SLA cause; a serious of robberies including one in which a teller was killed; the massive, seemingly never-ending, on-going hunt for the SLA in the aftermath of that action: the widely viewed 'real time' police assault on an SLA “safe-house” that netted the leader, Cinque: the subsequent off-handed capture of new leaders Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst; and, the subsequent trials, including Patty’s commutation of sentence. All in all, if you want a refresher course on the case it is all there for you.

However, above I characterized this as a thought-provoking film, and for my purposes that means what are the lessons to be learned from the experience, if any. I have tried to telegraph that concern by the phrase in the title “What is the Left?” and by the way I presented the story line in the last paragraph. So what is my problem some thirty odd years after the dust has settled on the case, which also preoccupied me at the time as well. Just this. Was the defense of the SLA then a matter of a leftist's duty, an important question to those of us on the left who take such matters seriously.

Among the things that this reviewer stands for, in addition to adherent to the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and their progeny can be summed up in the slogan of the old Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies)- “an injury to one, is any injury to all”. I, thus, stand in that tradition, that of the old Communist Party-led International Labor Defense, and of later groups like the one I support today, the Partisan Defense Committee. The premise underlying that slogan is that it is very much in the interest of the international working class and of the left that we defend, and defend vigorously and with all the resources we are able to muster, every individual militant and group that falls under that umbrella. Going back to that period I defended, for example, such groups as the Weatherman (Weatherpeople?) and other guerilla-oriented organizations on the American left, whole-heartedly fought under the banner of the United Front Against Fascism to defend the Black Panthers against the governmental onslaught that they faced, and the brothers and sisters of what became known as the Ohio Seven. I did not defend, nor call for the defense, of the SLA.

Why? None of the leftist groups listed above were exactly popular in the broader population, including the left itself, so that is not the question. The serious question that I faced at that time was this- "Who are these people?" Weathermen I knew their politics and their left lineage, and some sympathizers personally. I knew their political history, where they came from and their foibles. Panthers, after the thaw of their 'go-it-alone' heavily black nationalist period, when whites could again talk to young blacks without having to watch their backs, stayed at the commune that I lived in back in those California days. And were gladly welcome. Believe me I knew who they were and where they came from. I could go on and on about the local collectives, communes, etc. that sprouted up like wheat in those days and that I helped defend.

But as the late Hunter S. Thompson noted toward the end of his drug-crazed saga of weirdness and blow back, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, there was a point in the very late 1960s where one could sense that the victory that seemed so near, and so righteously fought for, was slipping away. I might have held onto the dream a little longer that others, and than I should have but there you have it. And that is the point. Others, who faced that same sense that we had “lost” or that ill-thought out exemplary actions or whatever would turn things around started to get a little crazy. To speak nothing of isolating themselves and staying isolated from the harsh realities of Nixon’s America. Some went to the country or the commune, others dropped away. Still others went back to the ancient tradition of nilihism.

That is the way that I looked at the actions of the SLA. The group had no known history, as a group. When it surfaced it had all the verbiage of anti-imperialism that many students and leftists spouted at the times. Hell, I had a girlfriend then who, in the end, was nothing but a garden-variety pacifist who had the whole lingo down better than I did at the time, a time when I was just turning to Marxism. Hell, in some towns in this country you couldn’t get anywhere on campus, even campaigning for some useless bourgeois candidate on the make without the obligatory “right on” or other gesture signifying the language of “youth nation”.

Moreover, on the senseless killing of the Oakland school superintendent, the Patty Hearst action and subsequent bank robberies seemed well beyond the pale. Especially the logic of kidnapping Patty on the basis of her biological relationship to her family. Left politics cannot work that way. If bourgeois, or their children, get in our way that is one thing, the Hearst kidnapping is another. Nothing was right here. I will not belabor the point but this organization seemed like nothing so much as one of those nihilistic groups that Dostoevsky castigated in the mid-19th century or like the remnants that turned bandit and lumpen after the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905. To finish up. Would I help the authorities in their manhunt for the group? Hell, no. Did I defend them, like some others did by hiding them out or raising monies for their defense? No. But let me tell you this. At that time I was not sure that I was right, I was queasy about placing them outside the left. Reviewing this film still makes me feel I made the right decision. But I am still queasy about it. You probably will be too.

From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- "The Confession Of A Ex-Left Fink"- A Cautionary Tale

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?

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter (of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS)-April 1970

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (of SDS) Newsletter archival website for an online copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.

*********
Revolutionary Marxist Caucus
Newsletter

Note on Issue Numbering for

Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter
Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter
Young Spartacus


The youth group of the Spartacist League began as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus within SDS in 1970, around the time the Maoist Progressive Labor Party took over SDS after the walkout of the New Left at the Chicago Convention.

They published (stapled mimeographed legal 8 1/2 X 14 size sheets, 8 to 12 printed pages per issue, red ink for the banner) issues 1 thru 8 of Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) Newsletter. 8 issues total.

Then the RMC became the SL's national youth group, the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY). This published RCY Newsletter.

BUT, because it was a group in continuity with the RMC, they started numbering their newsletter with issue 9, the first 8 issues being RMC newsletter 1 thru 8. RCY Newsletter was in professional printed tabloid form.

Later, after publication of issue number 18 (nine issues total), the Revolutionary Communist Youth changed their name to Young Spartacus, and changed the name of its publication to Young Spartacus, too. But again, because this was in continuity with the previous organizations, the first issue of Young Spartacus was numbered 19, reflecting its previous "incarnations" as RMC Newsletter and RCY Newsletter.

Young Spartacus was published as a stand alone tabloid for issues 19 through 134 (March 1984). At that point, it was folded into Workers Vanguard, where it became an occasionally appearing section of the paper.

—Riazanov Library

******
Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Reposted from an earlier post commenting on this series.

Reflections On Old Time (Old Times 1960s) Revolutionary Methods Of Work- A Short Note

Markin comment on this article:

I have in the recent past been posting archival material from the Vietnam era anti-war GI movement and have, as an initial offering, highlighted the efforts of the Spartacist League/U.S. (now the U.S. section of the International Communist League to intersect the then burgeoning GI discontent with the war. (See From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs, dated May 11-18, 2011). One of those posts involved commentary on a reproduction of a mimeographed issue of a GI-published anti-war newspaper, The Fort Polk GI Voice (see archives, May 12, 2011).

That commentary centered on a comparison of the old time way that we had to produce our propaganda via mimeograph machine and today’s Internet-driven efforts. Now there is no question that the modern technology that allows easy publication, and easy communication, of all manner of material, including our precious communist propaganda is a plus but just for a moment I wish to return to the so-called good old days when we worked in small, rented cubby-hole backrooms to get out our material for distribution on the streets, many times on the fly. And that was not merely for anti-war GI work that was the impetus for this commentary but I would estimate that from about 1960 on until the mid-1970s when things died down, died down too quickly and without resolution (or rather resolution no in our favor) was the mode of operation for all political efforts, all extra-parliamentary efforts (and maybe, remembering what friends told me at the time the early parliamentary efforts of the Minnesota Senator, Eugene McCarthy, to unseat President Lyndon Johnson).

One of the most poignant moments for me in Leon Trotsky’s 1930 memoir My Life was when he was describing his first, tentative efforts to put out revolutionary propaganda in Czarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century under very trying, much more trying than we faced in relatively democratic 1960s America, circumstances. That described crude hectograph method of production, painstaking (and meticulously as well, as least from what I know of Trotsky’s work habits), was closer, too much closer to our methods of work than today’s speed publication, but more recognizable because of the collective nature of the work, if the not dangerousness of the efforts. He noted that he had to do all the stenciling work by hand and then place the master on the block. Ouch. That is an additional image that came to mind in seeing that GI publication.


And as I said there, and will repeat here. Be still my heart. A picture comes to mind very similar to what Trotsky described, all due technological advances considered. A scene: Cambridge 1969, 1970, 1971, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1971, Camp Pendleton, California, 1971 Washington, D.C. 1971, 1972, Fort Lewis, Washington, 1971, New York City, 1971, early 1972, name your year, name your place, take your pick. A small, dusty, always dusty, almost storage room-sized back room on about the 14th floor of an old time building like something out of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. An old building, a building findable in any medium or large city, if you look hard enough, long past its prime filled with small businesses like divorce work private detectives, penny ante loans companies, failed dentists, chiropractors, and the like the landlord grateful, grateful as hell for the rent (discounted usually depending on how unsuitable the building for other uses). Or some clean, always clean, back room, down stairs back room, of a church, usually one of the function-oriented protestant churches that were washed over by the Reformation’s distain for pageantry, just plain gospel and plainsong, thank you. Available, always available if you put your case just right (and didn’t look too scruffy, too scruffy even by liberal church brethren standards) for the good of the cause, after all we are all brothers (and later, sisters too) in the struggle to made judgment day in good order, whatever the cost. Or, and this was surprisingly more frequent that the reader might think, the book-lined, newspaper-strewn, cluttered desk den, study, extra room, hell, in suburban New Jersey or California, the family room, of some long in the tooth old time 1930s radical, or wannabe radical who couldn’t him or her self get immersed in the struggle because of kids, college tuitions, hefty mortgages, health, soul, take your pick. Not exactly “angels” but on the right side of the angels.

And in that cobwebby dusty storage room, in that saintly austere backroom, in that photo-filled family memory den someone hard at work pecking at the old typewriter, the old creaky needs oiling (and a new ribbon) Underwood typewriter, working against time, always working against time or against the latest egregious transgression by the imperial state that we needed to arouse the masses against, to produce the latest newsletter. Or better, several people talking, talking up the “party line” for the issue at hand as the woman, and let’s be candid here, it was usually a woman at the typewriter just then, and mainly guys talking up that party line storm and letting the collective wisdom, including many times that madly typewriting woman, rain down on the paper. And hope and pray, if that was your “thing”, that the fiendishly sensitive stencil in the typewriter would hold up to the beating of the fingers tapping. Or that there were no errors, no typos, in those ancient pre-spell check days. And worry, worry not only about time, not only about typos but about being only one page, or at the most two sides of one piece of paper. The “masses,” after all in that short-focused media-icon-obsessed Marshall McLuhan message age couldn’t take more than one sheet. Folk wisdom, folk wisdom and political “wisdom.”

Jesus, the smell of the mimeograph fluid permeates the air even now, as does the noise made by the cranking out by hand of those few hundred copies (hopefully, if the master holds out). And always some ink, or some other fluid, on the hands. But success and the latest announcement for the latest rally, march, conference, something-in, newsletter, what-have-you was ready for distribution. “Eddy, Phil, Doris take twenty each, take some paste and put them up on XYZ poles, walls wherever,” cried the communications director (not his or her title in that somewhat title-averse day but in effect that what it was). And the next morning, or maybe it was morning New York, Washington, D.C., christ, Hoboken, was awash in the latest real news, ready to do battle against that many-headed monster. And… but enough of this because the point then, and the point that I am making here is that something beyond high or low technology was going on in those days, something I sense is missing now, as important as this technology I am using right now is.

Let me finish by reiterating something I said one of the GI Voice commentaries because, unfortunately, we face today that same imperial hubris, and that same struggle to get the ear of the GIs today. “We can cut up old touches some other time though. The important idea then, and today as well, is that this little four-page beauty {referring to the size of the GI Voice newspaper] got written by, and distributed by, GIs on base. The brass will forgive “grunts” many things (not as many as in civilian life though) but to put out anti-war propaganda cuts them where they live and they go crazy. See, they “know”, know deep down, that it doesn’t take much, a little spark like during Vietnam days, and you have horror of horrors, something like the Bolshevik Revolution on you hands, and you are on the wrong side. All over a little four-page spread. Ya, nice.” And that my friend, whatever the method of conveyance, is why we put out our anti-war, anti-imperialist propaganda today. Even if we can’s hear the clickity-clack of the typewriter, the smell of the mimeo fluid, or remember the recipe proportions for the poster paste.

*Free David Gilbert! - Ex- SDS Member and Black Liberation Fighter

Click on the headline to link to a David Gilbert site for information about his case, his writings, and other materials. Also Google his name for a Wikipedia entry.


Markin comment:

The bourgeoisie does not forgive or forget its serious left-wing opponents, and we of the left should not forget our liberation struggle brothers and sisters behind bars. On a day when the name of SDSer Ted Gold, a fallen fellow radical associate of David Gilbert's, is posted in this space via a song from Bob Feldman's music blog the struggle for Gilbert's freedom comes to mind. Free David Gibert!

*From The Archives Of The 1960s Student Left- Harlem vs. Columbia University- A Book Review

Click on title to link to Bob Feldman's blog for a book review of an important student/black/leftist struggle in the late 1960s. Some of the conditions and Columbia University administration attitudes (and plans)seem from back then very, very familiar today.