adherents and others rallying around the “Weatherman” statement successfully portrayed PL as anathema to SDS. With shrewd determination and great drama, they expelled PL by means of plebiscite. (Duplicity may have been involved as well. The Weatherman Johnny Lerner recently alleged that he and two other SDSers threw out pro-PL ballots; if true, the group, with “democratic” in its name, rigged perhaps its most pivotal election.)94 From the rubble of the convention, in which SDS crumbled into several warring parts, Weatherman was born.
The meeting concluded with the election of a number of “Weatherman” advocates as SDS’s national officers. Among these were Bernardine Dohrn; Mark Rudd, the former head of Columbia SDS, who became a 50
“Agents of Necessity”
nationally known figure during the 1968 protests; and the veteran organizers Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. This group and their supporters, known collectively as the Weathermen, now controlled SDS’s national office in Chicago and the SDS newspaper New Left Notes. Though PL, based in Boston, insisted that it was the true SDS, most New Leftists recognized the Weathermen as the organization’s leadership. But many rank-and-file SDSers did not identify with either Weatherman, PL, or any of the smaller factions. As they withheld their support, SDS functionally dissolved as a national organization.
Weatherman represented much more than an answer to PL. The statement offered what the Weathermen felt was a bold new direction for SDS
(or what was left of it) and a way for the New Left to make itself into a genuinely revolutionary movement. Though not all Weatherman followers were necessarily versed in the detail of the cumbersome statement, it nonetheless articulated the key components of the group’s politics to which all Weathermen at least implicitly adhered.
The essence of Weatherman’s ideology was contained in the statement’s opening declaration that “the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.” Weatherman gave this conflict the status of the world’s “principal contradiction” and announced that the task of the revolutionary was “to solve this principal contradiction” on the side of “the oppressed.”
The goal was “a classless world.”95
Targeting imperialism, the Weathermen took aim at their society’s apparent crowning achievement: its vast wealth. “We are within the heart-land of a world-wide monster,” they proclaimed. “The US empire . . .
channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. . . . [A]ll of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz’s automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree, to the people of the rest of the world.”96 Weatherman also rejected the approach to socialism of much of the American left. To Weatherman, the comparative privilege of the American working class made any effort to organize domestic workers without addressing the exploitation of foreign labor an expression of “national chauvinism.”
Furthermore, the “white skin privilege” of white workers virtually precluded the possibility of their alliance with blacks, who had a lesser stake in supporting a system in which they would always be subordinate to whites, irrespective of their economic status.97
Weatherman concluded that the impulse to revolution in the United States—at least initially— could not possibly come from the adult white
“Agents of Necessity”
51
working class. Instead, it would come from three main sources: liberation movements in the Third World, the struggle of American blacks, and the activism of white working-class youths supporting the first two. To the Weathermen, Third World movements were chiefly responsible for the current “crisis of American imperialism,” manifest not only in America’s futile intervention in Vietnam but also in
The meeting concluded with the election of a number of “Weatherman” advocates as SDS’s national officers. Among these were Bernardine Dohrn; Mark Rudd, the former head of Columbia SDS, who became a 50
“Agents of Necessity”
nationally known figure during the 1968 protests; and the veteran organizers Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. This group and their supporters, known collectively as the Weathermen, now controlled SDS’s national office in Chicago and the SDS newspaper New Left Notes. Though PL, based in Boston, insisted that it was the true SDS, most New Leftists recognized the Weathermen as the organization’s leadership. But many rank-and-file SDSers did not identify with either Weatherman, PL, or any of the smaller factions. As they withheld their support, SDS functionally dissolved as a national organization.
Weatherman represented much more than an answer to PL. The statement offered what the Weathermen felt was a bold new direction for SDS
(or what was left of it) and a way for the New Left to make itself into a genuinely revolutionary movement. Though not all Weatherman followers were necessarily versed in the detail of the cumbersome statement, it nonetheless articulated the key components of the group’s politics to which all Weathermen at least implicitly adhered.
The essence of Weatherman’s ideology was contained in the statement’s opening declaration that “the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.” Weatherman gave this conflict the status of the world’s “principal contradiction” and announced that the task of the revolutionary was “to solve this principal contradiction” on the side of “the oppressed.”
The goal was “a classless world.”95
Targeting imperialism, the Weathermen took aim at their society’s apparent crowning achievement: its vast wealth. “We are within the heart-land of a world-wide monster,” they proclaimed. “The US empire . . .
channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. . . . [A]ll of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz’s automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree, to the people of the rest of the world.”96 Weatherman also rejected the approach to socialism of much of the American left. To Weatherman, the comparative privilege of the American working class made any effort to organize domestic workers without addressing the exploitation of foreign labor an expression of “national chauvinism.”
Furthermore, the “white skin privilege” of white workers virtually precluded the possibility of their alliance with blacks, who had a lesser stake in supporting a system in which they would always be subordinate to whites, irrespective of their economic status.97
Weatherman concluded that the impulse to revolution in the United States—at least initially— could not possibly come from the adult white
“Agents of Necessity”
51
working class. Instead, it would come from three main sources: liberation movements in the Third World, the struggle of American blacks, and the activism of white working-class youths supporting the first two. To the Weathermen, Third World movements were chiefly responsible for the current “crisis of American imperialism,” manifest not only in America’s futile intervention in Vietnam but also in
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