Book: Underground - My Life with SDS and the Weathermen

Mark Rudd, from the perspective of now being a respected member of society at 70, looks back on his previous life as a student radical, a fugitive from justice, one of America's Ten Most Wanted and his seven years underground.

He's an excellent writer. He captures the era very well, and creates a compelling case for the choices he made, even as he now disavows any kind of violence or destructiveness.

I'm going full revolutionary this week.

In addition to Mark Rudd's book I have purchased:

1. Bill Ayers - Fugitive (book) 2001
   
2. Weather Underground (movie) 2003
   
3. Tom Hayden - The Port Huron Statement (book) 1962
   

I expect a knock at my door any day now for MindCrime.

Rudd's book was remarkably balanced.  Some people in the hard left despise him, because he argued against some of the more violent actions and once he went underground in 1970 (and separated himself from the macho posturing) he pretty much renounced violence.  But his book discusses his evolution of thinking, the slow realization that a ragtag band of hippies trying to overthrow the US government was madness.  To this day he is conflicted about his role, and sympathetic to those who claim that by splitting off the Weathermen as the militant wing of the SDS, he pretty much ensured the fate of the SDS, that they would be unable to gain widespread nationwide support among disaffected campuses everywhere, among the tens of millions of angry-but-not-particularly-militant students.

But at the same time, Kent State and the end of the Vietnam war both also took the wind out of the student movement.  It was probably inevitable that the whole movement would settle down, become splintered and no major change would come out of it.

In the movie, which makes a great companion piece, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who never renounced violence, now reflect more philosophically about whether what they did was crazy.  Naomi Jaffe talks about how the context of the times is critical to understanding how a handful of privileged white college kids thought they could fight for black liberation and Southeast Asian self-determination.  Looking back today, yeah, it sounds crazy.

I remember the sixties (somewhat, born 1954) as a period of real tension and uncertainty.  At times it really seemed like a revolution might be in the works -- primarily because the Nixon Administration was as evil as any tin-pot dictator, and "the system" didn't seem to be correcting itself.  

When choosing between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I still side with King.  But as I grow older I can see Malcolm X's point of view too.  And the conclusion that non-violence leads to a continuation of the status quo is pretty hard to dispute.

Tom Hayden’s pellucid “Statement” confronts the paradox that those who would design a more equitable distribution of wealth and power have, historically, ended up concentrating such wealth and power in their own hands, creating dystopias. Possibly the best way to avoid such stratification is to have no organizing principle at all.

Rudd’s book too talked a lot about the endless (and to my eye meaningless) committees, statements, pronouncements and alignments with dead and dishonored movements of the past. SDS descended into a sort of circular firing squad, with everyone out to out-revolution everyone else, and as soon as anything resembling leadership began to emerge it was quickly stamped out as “elitism.”

As I get older, my pride in the sixties gets more and more pitted by cynicism.

Rudd’s book, arising out of the 1969 Columbia University takeover, reminded me of James Simon Kunen’s “The Strawberry Statement” (about the same events) which I bought shortly after it was published in 1969. It meant enough to me that it has survived a dozen book purges since.

I may have to pull it out & re-read it again.

“Prescient” is what Tom Hayden’s book was in 1962, or perhaps it simply illustrates the fact that nothing has advanced in the intervening 55 years. He talks about the military budget, he talks about Democrats needing to represent the people rather than corporations, he says there is more difference inside the two major political parties than between them, he talks about how students are graduating college with skills that the workplace does not need.

It could’ve been written in 2017.

Hayden’s “Statement” is pellucid and prescient, accurately describing the 1962 problems with modern American society which largely have remained unchanged in 2017.

Where it falls down, or perhaps fails to achieve greatness, is in coming up with any workable solutions. There’s a lot of wobbly talk of equity and power-sharing but it’s all socialist gobbly-gook.

I suppose that’s the problem with most revolutionary movements, eh?

Is it the "equity and power-sharing" that you consider gobbly-gook? Or is it just anything that hints at socialism that you reject?

No, it’s the idea that those in power would share power because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s the old “belling the cat” problem.

NoCoPilot wrote:

No, it’s the idea that those in power would share power because it’s the right thing to do.

That is most certainly NOT a socialist belief.

The problem with socialism is that most people would rather not be involved in governing. They just want to live their lives without interference.

The problem with communism is that the larger a group the slower they will reach consensus on anything.

Representative democracy really seems to be the best option, but maybe with some strictures. Term limits except if voted on by a supermajority. Public financing. No immunity. Strict lobbying limitations, strict separation between regulators and the regulated.

Socialism is not a model of government. It is an economic system. Nothing you said in that post is applicable.