On the one hand, we honor the martyrs of the Weather Underground, people who died in bomb accidents such as Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton and Ted Gold and prisoners still in prison today. They were fighting hard to put internationalism in practice in their individual lives--as we might expect Amerikkkans to do with any idea, work on it at the individual level not the group level. On the other hand, we can stand here and berate the Weather Underground, because it left nothing behind organizationally. A number of organizations continued to exist into the 1980s, but the Weather Underground never designed itself for a long-haul fight or to connect its analysis to strategy. In this, the Weather Underground was too Amerikkkan, too much rooted in the individual and not a calculation of the overall balance of forces. Even if MIM died today, MIM has been putting out a line for twenty years. The Weather Underground had the bourgeois media's attention, but it cannot claim that much.
MIM has always said that the Weather Underground was a failure. However, let's be clear that it did carry out a bombing campaign that hit the Pentagon itself and which in dozens of bombings hurt no one.
When we read shrewd war criminal Richard Nixon's memoirs now, we see that in fact the Weather Underground played a much bigger role in Nixon's day-to-day life than other larger organizations or anti-war demonstrations. The Weather Underground was hitting close to the White House and Nixon knew it. Was he the mouse or the cat? Beyond that, Nixon did sum up the mood of the movement based on what the Weather Underground did. The Weather Underground could reason this way: "The dialectic of prolonged imperialist war, if further pushed out, could change the power balance now existing between the anti-imperialist and left-liberal camps of the peace movement; that is to say, the candle-holders may end up being the diminishing minority, and the street-fighters might emerge as the expanding majority."(p. 240) So it was that while Nixon promised peace, the Weatherman thought that it's action made sure he delivered.
The reason that the Weather Underground was a failure is that it adopted much Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, but in the final analysis, the Weather Underground was a moral force, an internationalist force inside the united $tates, not a scientific vanguard. While Marx and Mao were about class analysis and linking huge groups of people to successful social revolution, the Weather Underground was much more concerned about being a moral force. The proof is that Mao said that armed struggle was inappropriate in imperialist countries until imperialism was really "helpless" and about to fall. Even Che said armed struggle was futile until material conditions were right, though in many places he thought the armed struggle itself would provide the final condition. There was no blanket endorsement of armed struggle from any major theorist of revolution. The Weatherman asked Amerikkka if it would stand by with murder committed in front of it or would it just talk about it. Most of Amerikkka or at least large portions had concluded that indeed the war in Vietnam was a crime. The Weatherman asked if people were going to stand there and talk about it just because it was 9000 miles away or whether Amerikkkans were going to take action to stop the murderer.
The Weather Underground was not going to break the back of u.$. imperialism. At most it could make Nixon feel harried, harassed in his own backyard. It also showed the world in no uncertain terms, that even here in the united $tates there were people who thought as they did--that u.$. imperialism deserved class war.
At the time that the Weather Underground carried out its bombings and street fighting, only an ostrich would not know that it was somehow connected to Vietnam. The Vietnam War was in the political air everywhere inside the united $tates, thanks to all the dead bodies Uncle $am had to bring home from Vietnam. It was in this sense that the Weather Underground's armed struggle had the most impact. The Weather Underground did little to advance public consciousness, except for by-standers at street-fighting, but it sought to take advantage of what public consciousness already existed.
The Weather Underground strategy made most sense thinking of it as a detachment of the Vietnamese being bombed in Vietnam operating behind enemy lines. If the Vietnamese could send a detachment behind enemy lines of the war, what would the few soldiers do? The Weather Underground did not calculate anything long-term. "Nothing we could do in the mother country could be adventurist. . . . We couldn't be adventurist while there is genocide going on in Vietnam and in the black community," said Bill Ayers.(p. 184)
From the Weatherman's point of view, "twenty white people ... getting killed while fighting hard against imperialist targets would not be a defeat, but a political victory, for the same reasons that would make a massacre a politically unacceptable option for the ruling class; that it will hurt the ruling class ten times more than the damage inflicted in an operation with twenty Viet Cong dead."(p. 251) One thing no one doubts is that the Weatherman succeeded in making the Democratic Convention of 1968 a horror for the whole public.
As an example of the calculations in armed struggle, in another operation, Shin'ya Ono said, "six hundred of us managed to preoccupy, for a few days, the same amount of imperialist pig power that a VC regiment would attract (2600 Guardsmen + 2000 pigs = 4600 pigs)." (p. 263) Shin'ya Ono was also of the line that it would be a mistake to take up the underground focos line and become Tupamaros. He thought that street-fighting did the most at the Amerikkkan stage of the struggle to steel people for struggle. Shin'ya Ono lost and the Weatherman did go underground like unscientific revolutionaries in Latin America, who also suffered catastrophic defeats.
Another confrontation was typical of how the Weather Underground saw itself fighting crimes going on in Vietnam. "When asked if she thought the Viet Cong should fight, the girl from Iowa replied that she did. She added, however, that she believed that there 'could be an alternative for people living in America in 1969.'
"A Vietnamese in the crowd rose and delivered a bitter attack. 'That is exactly the hiding behind the white-skin privilege that we have been talking about,' he said. 'She can just sit there and say the Vietnamese should fight but she doesn't have to. She is a nationalist chauvinist racist.'"(p. 219) While this made obvious ideological sense, it did not answer why it was more effective to fight physically than do something else. Some of the essays in this book try to address that question.
Too many people oversimplify this question. When MIM says the labor aristocracy is the majority, many then conclude that revolutionary work is futile or that only terrorism is the alternative, as a feel-good solution to a hopeless case. Yet, MIM points out that even 10% of 290 million people is 29 million people--a lot of people to organize.
If comrades were in Vietnam fighting the U.$. troops and there was a region of Vietnam where only 10% supported the fight against the united $tates but that 10% was 29 million people, could the Vietnamese communists afford not to send some comrades there to organize the 29 million? Of course not, which is why from an internationalist standpoint, MIM organizes for revolution despite being surrounded by enemies. By any internationalist calculation, whatever we can do here still contributes. Only if we look at it too narrowly by only looking at the population in the u$A like the "RCP-USA" and Progressive Labor Party do today would we come to the wrong conclusion. When we adopt the Weatherman's approach to seeing ourselves as a detachment behind enemy lines, things look different. We do not have to adopt the enemy's line, just because we are behind enemy lines. In the overall global situation, things will work out for the international proletariat. There is no need to put forward parasitic politics in Amerikkka despite a parasite majority.
One good defense of the Weatherman also linked their fight to defeating the Khruschev line of the "three peacefuls." "The ruling class usually acts with a certain degree of rationality from the standpoint of their class interests. To picture them as irrational mad dogs ready to unleash their worst at any moment is to disarm the people psychologically before they commence their struggle. The argument is usually made in order to justify punking out of the struggle. Historically, the same argument was made by the Soviet counterrevolutionaries to oppose national liberation wars and the Chinese line in the Sino-Soviet polemics."(p. 250) Today we continue to hear the incorrect line spawned originally by Khruschev that if Cuba opposes revisionism, the United $tates will nuke it, which leaves Cubans with the option of restoring capitalism themselves or dying in war. If those are the options, there does not need to be any discussion of "socialism."
In one of the Weather Underground's few criticisms of Cuba, Bill Ayers said, "Cuba is for the living."(p. 141) This was a reference that some were going down to Cuba to help with the sugar harvest and learn some things concretely. Meanwhile, the Weather Underground convened 800 comrades to fight police directly at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Ayers was only pointing out that the Weathermen expected death. Especially given that the Weatherman faction of SDS was the most likely to see the white workers as bought off, it's clear that some Weathermen leaders did not even expect their fight against police to spark an upsurge in the revolution. For MIM, the question is how a minority detachment behind enemy lines surrounded by millions of enemies can make the greatest contribution. People of suicidal impulse can contribute to the revolution, but they cannot become the whole leadership. They can be given tasks that suit their persynalities, but calculating people like Shin'ya Ono need to be the leaders and they only prove their worthiness by keeping the revolutionary movement going forward in all areas-- the party, the united front and the people's army. We at MIM see only conditions for the first two magic weapons at present in the imperialist countries. We prefer to be moving forward with two weapons than none at all, the way the descendants of the Weatherman are now. When conditions ripen, and u.$. imperialism becomes "helpless" as Mao said, there has to be a party and practice with the united front in place for armed struggle to come into play.
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