*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Logic Of Petty-Bourgeois Moralism: Weather Underground Splits

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Markin comment on W&R article:

Note: Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (along with then companion, Bill Ayers, yes that Bill Ayers of Obama-consorting-with-terrorists during the 2008 American presidential elections fame, Mark Rudd and others) is much quoted and cited in this article as an exemplar of what went wrong politically (and seemingly psychologically) in the later stages of the New Left in the early 1970s. Any commentary on her personal and political dilemmas (then, or now), however, is beyond the scope of what I am trying to draw attention to here.

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If one were a realistic extra-parliamentary left-wing political operative (radical, revolutionary or just plain, ordinary, vanilla anti-imperialist) one could have reasonable projected that out of the turmoil in American society in the 1960s, especially the late 1960s, that at least a solid long-lasting anti-imperialist movement was in the cards. I, and a number of other left-wing politicos, certainly had that expectation, and worked, worked like crazy, from that premise. Obviously the intense level of struggles of the 1960s, especially when the Vietnam War was at its height, could not be infinitely maintained, as American involvement in that war wound down, the fighting of the war went through a Vietnamization process, and importantly, the military draft was ended. However, by the mid-1970s, if not earlier, the potential for that long term anti-imperialist movement had evaporated almost without a trance. From that point on those who had led, or seriously participated in, the previous movements had packed their bags and gone back to bourgeois politics (mainly Democratic Party politics), retreated to their particular oppressed sectors (blacks, women, gays and lesbians, etc.), or, and this was the greatest part, had been so burned out by the experiences that they dropped comfortably back into their interrupted bourgeois career paths and said the hell with politics. Only a relatively few made the lifetime commitment to radical social change, and fewer still those who looked to the potential of the American working class to lead that change.

I mentioned above that there were some objective reasons for the decline of anti-imperialist struggle in the later stages of the Vietnam War but there was also, as the article below notes as well, a subjective factor that aided and abetted that decline. Let us call it for convenience sake, incorrect politics, and the consequences of those incorrect politics. There were literally tens of thousands of people, mainly young and mainly students at first, in this country who, without embarrassment or bravado, declared themselves revolutionaries in those days. And there were plenty of people, many times the number of actual revolutionaries, who were ready to move heaven and earth to support them, to form an organized infrastructure in aid of the fight against the “monster”.

The predicate for that support, however, was a reasonable expectation, that those who were ready to fight the “beast” right then and there, the vanguard knew what they were doing. And, for a while, for the period of time leaders and others were seeking to pursue serious political strategies, that support held. When the movement turned inward, and toward the strategic process of sectorization of the oppressed ( those blacks, women, Native Americans, and others mentioned above) developed and exclusiveness and personal worthiness took “command” there was no reason, no reason at all, for other militants to go down that path.

Look, let me made it plain, in the late stages of the Vietnam War there were many, including those who were associated with the various configurations of the Weather organizations, who were very committed to the idea establishing a “second front” in America in support of the DRV/NLF struggles. The Weather Underground took it one way, the Black Panthers another. Others of us worked trying to get that same idea in motion by getting to the American soldiers into the struggle, and others took other more symbolic forms of action. All acted, in any case, with the serious idea of taking the incredible and vicious American military pressure off the Vietnamese. As it turns out they, the Vietnamese that is, already had the damn thing in hand.
At a great price, greater than necessary if we had done our part better.

The important point here is that very few of us who believed in the “second front” idea gave any thought that the American working class could, or should, lead that struggle. It might be the Panthers, it might be radical women, and it might be, well, you name it, whoever was your candidate of the day for the most oppressed, for the role of vanguard. Moreover, the common thread, the main theoretical concepts that held the various strategies together, were very much in the tradition of some variant of urban guerrilla warfare. The idea here was to create some kind of elite formation whose actions would act as a catalyst to awaken the masses. In short work  underground, not out in mass struggles. Of course no one at the time, at least that I knew of, had read about the Narodniks in the 19th century Russian revolutionary movement. As that movement pointed out the problem is that the underground is debilitating, especially when fruitful work can be done in the open. The early American Communist Party, if any of us had bothered to read a little American radical history either, was also paralyzed unnecessarily by just that framework. Moreover, the capacity for such an organization (as noted in the article) to turn on itself is greater even than the squabbles that develop when revolutionaries are forced into exile communities (think of those exile Bolshevik/Menshevik squabbles in the Russian revolutionary movement). That point is what the article below is really addressing. The substitution of a vanguard for the action of the masses. And that point is also where the fault line of the subjective factor in the decline of the anti-imperialist movement lies. Who has the greatest degree of revolutionary purity, and who has done the greatest self-purging in order to measure up to some mystical standard. Whee!

One final point directly related to the “sector” that the Weather Underground was trying to organize. Those who are not familiar with the 1969 “Days Of Rage” can look it up on Wikipedia or some other source. At that time, being a virtually all white organization by choice and by the terms of the “political correctness” of the day (one did not presume to speak for, or for that matter even intermingle much with, other oppressed sectors) the leadership decided to go to the white working class. No, not the guys and gals on the factory floor, not the people on the auto assembly line, not even the white collar service workers. No, the short cut to revolution was through alienated lumpen white gangs. Street kids, jack-rollers, bikers, corner boys, and so on. As things turned out this lot, as Marx, any Paris Communard, Trotsky, or hell, even Jean Genet, could have told them these elements are more likely to form the advanced guard for fascist movements, or just plain apolitical criminal sprees, than left-wing political action. This is why during that period, the period of building the “second front” the Weather People’s strategy never appealed to me. Hey, I knew, knew to my very bones, those kinds of kids for my own poor working class neighborhood.  Only a mass working class party, if that, could galvanize such elements, and that would be a close thing.  I looked elsewhere then, rightly and gladly.

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The Logic of Petty-Bourgeois Moralism

Weather Underground Splits

Since at least last November rumors of bitter internal argument among the leadership collective of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) have been in circulation, and on February 3 the bitterness exploded into public print in the Madison New4.eft paper Take Over:

"This is Bernardine Dohrn. I am making this tape to acknowledge, repudiate and denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather Underground Organization We led the entire organization to abandon the principles of anti-imperialism, liquidated the Black nation and the leading role of national liberation struggles, and heightened our attacks on the women's movement. I repudiate and denounce the Central Committee of the WUO, myself included, who bear particular responsibility for the criminal consequences of having led the WUO into full-blown opportunism.

"...this organization refused to seek out or recruit revolutionary women fugitives. We characterized these women as anti-men, anti-communist, anti-Marxist-Leninist. Actually, the central committee feared their effect on women in the organization and was threatened by their criticisms of central committee leadership for male supremacy. We attacked and defeated a tentative proposal for a woman's underground, to carry out anti-imperialist and revolutionary feminist armed struggle. This is another example of using the solidarity relationships to keep control of the weapons—keeping them out of the hands of revolutionary women as well as national liberation movements.

"While denying support to Third World Liberation, to revolutionary armed struggle forces and to revolutionary women fugitives, we used resources and cadre's efforts to support opportunist and bourgeois men fugitives. The most glaring example of this is our support in the form of time, money, cadres, of Abbie Hoffman, a relationship which produced media attention for us, through the articles in New Times and his TV program.

"...For seven years, I have upheld a politics which is male supremacist and opposed the struggle of women for liberation."...Why did we do this? I don't really know. We followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sell out the revolution."

Dohrn and other former Weather Undergrounders, now organized as the "Revolutionary Committee," analyze the WUO's "betrayals" as due to "white and male supremacist- policies," demonstrated through two main issues: their economist and opportunist turn to the "white working class" and their tentative plans for resurfacing.


The importance of the split lies not in the size and strength of the WUO, which has always been vastly exaggerated and mythologized in the bourgeois press, but in the fact that it reveals, in a remarkably pure form, the fatal dilemma of American petty-bourgeois radicalism.

Guerrillas" Without a Following

The Weathermen uniquely attempted to carry to logical conclusion the ideology of petty-bourgeois radicalism. They did not become orthodox Maoists, Stalinists or Trotskyists, or, in fact, Marxists of any variety, as did many other New Leftists, but rejected all the "bearded prophets" of the old left, refusing as a matter of principle to study the classics of socialist thought. Nor did they sink back into simple liberalism, as did Tom Hayden and many of the older SDSers, or become religious mystics, organic gardeners or "save the whales" fanatics, as did so many demoralized New Leftists (who undoubtedly feel more at home with their various gods, fruits and animals, which at least have the virtue of not being prone to turn on their supporters with ungrateful accusations of being white, middle-class or male chauvinist).

The Weathermen, like the rest of the petty-bourgeois New Left, accepted unquestioningly the rhetoric of militant nationalism, whether of the "third world" or the American black variety, including the dangerously complacent viewpoint that it is "racist" or at best "sectarian" to attempt to directly intervene in or criticize nationalist movements. But rather than becoming simply sideline cheerleaders for "other peoples' struggles," the Weathermen viewed themselves as a legitimate, independent force for revolution in their own right. Rejecting Marxism and deeply committed to the legitimacy of separatism, they turned to the white youth of America—to white' "lumpen rage"—as their base.

At the same time they turned inward, moving into communes in poor, run-down neighborhoods "smashing monogamy" through enforced sexual promiscuity and exhaustive "criticism/self-criticism" sessions seeking to root out "bourgeois individuality" and produce the ideal Weatherperson: a tough street fighter ready to "kick ass." Confident that the American empire was on its last legs and needed only a slight push to topple, they boasted of their "overwhelming strength" and really believed that a few bombings, slogans painted on campus walls and militant "trashings" would spark a mass upheaval of the oppressed.

But these self-styled "urban guerrillas" lacked the mass base in the peasantry which the "third world" guerrillas they idolized had. Their attempts to impress white street gangs got them only bloody noses. A mere handful of middle-class white ex-students, they tried to substitute sheer emotional energy and the rhetoric of "pure rage" for social weight. The Spartacist League alone on the left defended them against the bourgeois state, as we recognized their subjective commitment to overthrow the American imperialist state despite their mistaken political program and pathetically incompetent tactics.

Since 1970, student radicalism has dissipated as the Vietnam War ended, the draft was abolished and the Black Panthers split and disintegrated. Today a sullen torpor hangs over American society, despite the continuing intense privation and exploitation of the masses. In this context, it is not surprising that the Weather Underground has finally shattered. The various attempts by the WUO to break out of its self-imposed isolation, culminating in the debacle of the Chicago Hard Times Conference in the winter of 1975, illustrate the fatal limitations of its petty-bourgeois worldview. The shopworn rhetoric of Dohrn's accusations of "white and male supremacy" are part and parcel of the guilt-tripping and self-contempt of white petty-bourgeois radicalism, driven to a frenzy by a reality that it cannot comprehend or seemingly affect. While Dohrn sees her new-found feminist consciousness as a fundamental break from the Weather Underground, in fact she is simply perpetuating the same ideology which led to the formation of the Weather Underground in the first place. The pervasive belief that "only the oppressed can understand and act upon their own oppression" led to the splintering and diffusion of the New Left into separatist groups. The Weatherpeople chose white lumpen youth to identify with, and it didn't work. So now Dohrn has decided to take the splintering process a logical step further and identify with white radical women and thus rehabilitate herself by locating herself within her "proper place" in the schismatic, individualistic panoply of "the oppressed."

Smashing Monogamy

Although Dohrn today insists that the Weathermen were always "male supremacist," the truth is much more complex. The Weathermen felt a real compulsion to struggle against women's oppression in a purely personalist and subjective way and many of them ripped apart their psyches and personal lives trying to carry it out". The intense "criticism/self-criticism" sessions mandatory for all Weatherpeople focused on wiping out all traces of the members' former "bourgeois life styles. They focused, in particular, on "smashing monogamy," which was believed to be inherently sexually repressive, mainly for women, but for men as well, encouraging selfishness, protective-ness and the placing of another individual's needs above those of the collective.

Much of the expressed motivation for "smashing monogamy" was that women in couples were being held back by their male partners. And, in fact, in the early days of the collectives, many women separated from their partners did experience a sense of "liberation" and became much more vocal and aggressive. Coming out of, the New-Left SDS, where male chauvinism was rampant and many women did, indeed, do all the "shit work," the Weatherman life style had a temporarily exhilarating effect. But the price paid for this "liberation" was heavy. Many women and men became quivering nervous wrecks, forced into feeling themselves worthless for being unable to beat out of themselves their personal needs and desires and become pure "tools of the revolution."

In retrospect, it is pathetically easy to condemn the dangerous naiveté and idealism of the "smash monogamy" campaign. Sad tales of bitter disillusionment and personal tragedy have become all too common these days, as aging ex-Weatherpeople and other ex-radicals recount the errors of their youthful ways while settling into comfortable middle-class academic and liberal milieus. Pointing out that the Weathermen's "New Nation" of revolutionary human beings was doomed to evaporate like the idealistic daydream it was seems almost to be beating a dead horse. But, as Dohrn's statements and the 1975 Hard Times Conference so graphically demonstrate, yesteryear's radicals have been unable, on their own, to draw the lessons of their failures.

One of the most embarrassing New-Left spectacles occurred at the Hard Times Conference, perfectly illustrating the self-hatred and guilt that finally drove many white radicals out of politics entirely. After several hours of vicious race-baiting of the entire assembly by the subreformist Republic of New Africa (whose demand was that Cush County, Mississippi be immediately handed over to blacks), "Queen Mother" Moore, a black demagogue swathed in purple acetate took the floor for a rambling, religious, race-baiting monologue (including an off-key rendition of "America the Beautiful" with new words)—following which a young white male clad only in a pair of overalls leaped the stage to fervently embrace her, screaming "I love you Queen Mother Moore!"

Such self-abasement was a strong tendency in the Weatherman ideology, as well. Weathermen could accept themselves—as opposed to the rest of "racist honky dog" white America—only by literally trying to jump out of their own skins. The sick self-hatred encouraged at the Hard Times Conference was only the logical culmination of those attempts. Dohrn's latest "self-criticism" is a continuation of the same individualistic policies which assert that sheer will power is sufficient to overthrow the state. If it didn't work, it must have been because that will power wasn't strong enough. But why not? Obviously, because the individuals-were flawed—"racist," "sexist" or whatever.

But will power alone cannot make a revolution. This ideology of petty-bourgeois terrorism has been proved futile over and over again. The Weathermen failed because of their individualistic petty-bourgeois approach to revolution, not because of lack of revolutionary will.


Radical feminist groupings are likely to be a haven for aging Weatherwomen, since they, too, cling to radical life-stylism, cloistered and rigid separatism and Utopian daydreaming about the "power and beauty" of "pure (women's) rage" which characterized the Weather Underground, as well as assuaging any guilty pangs about "leeching" off other peoples' oppression, since for feminists their own oppression is the only legitimate area of concern.

White Guilt and Separatism

Unfortunately, the problems wracking American society are far deeper than the simple solutions which the New Leftists preached. The poisonous hatreds generated by oppression cannot be dissolved by moralistic exhortations to "love one another," by self-abasement or by feeding the (already hotly burning) fires of separatism. This oppression and the divisions which it creates within the working class are part and parcel of capitalist society and must be overcome not merely in the mind but in the real world. While racism and sexism, which retard the working class's ability to wage a struggle against the bourgeoisie, must be opposed now, they will be rooted out only with the destruction of capitalism through proletarian revolution.


But the working class, the only force in society with the social power to smash capitalism, is by itself unable to transcend trade-union economism. Revolutionary consciousness must be brought to the workers by a party of professional revolutionists embodying a program of relentless class struggle. Infused with revolutionary class consciousness, the working class becomes the decisive force in history.

There are no short cuts. No amount of subjective revolutionary will or personal heroism can substitute for the class-conscious proletariat. Until and unless the radicals of the 1%0's can assimilate this fundamental premise of Leninism, they are doomed to wander futilely from one dead-end to another, ending like the Weather Underground, in either a pathetic display of impotence and cringing before the bourgeois state or locked into self-isolated and shrinking separatist circles, helpless before the increasing barbarism of decaying imperialist society."

*The 40th Anniversary Of The "Days Of Rage"-October 1969- The Days Of Political Futility

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the "Days Of Rage".

Markin comment:

I was originally going to make some extended remarks about this 'event' but after thinking about it, given how far we are removed in political time, space and consciousness from even that futile gesture against that version of the American imperial war machine I decided there were other topics that are more pressing and worthy of commentary. Like today where have all the anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist protesters gone? Liberal, radical or revolutionary. We are at square one (or maybe one and one-half) and best realize that.

A couple of little, little comments to finish up. The rationale for this entry can be summed up this way- Today I am 'wishing' that the energy of those "days of rage", if not the political confusion behind the events, was stirring the political air. And the disastrous outcome of this event, for a lot of people I knew back in those days and who were sympathetic to its aims, got us thinking not only about the futility of isolated, virtually leaderless actions, but to seriously "hit the books" and go back to look seriously at the work of Karl Marx and fighting for a perspective of a mass movement based on the leadership role of the working class as the way to bring social change. That, my friends, is still a good lesson to remember on these cool, lonely nights.