Comic Books The Radical Treadmill

THE REVOLUTION is finally legitimate. The FBI's Ten-Most-Wanted List now includes eight student radicals: Bernadine Dohrn of the Weathermen; Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, and Brandeis women charged in the Boston bank robbery-cop killing; Cameron Bishop, a student wanted for blowing up a defense power plant in Colorado; and the four men alleged to have blown up the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Dwight and Carl Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt. All "should be considered armed and dangerous."

The message for the ragged remnants of the New Left masses is the same now as when the Panthers and Kunstler declared it last spring: The Revolution is now; it's happening whether or not people are ready for it. Student radicals are in declared opposition to the State.

Of course there are distinctions to be made between the radical bombers and those whose only revolution is in rhetoric, but these differences are not so important now. This is all the revolution there is going to be-scattered bombings and attacks on government-military institutions followed by arrests and convictions. Nixon is not going to create another Cambodia. The United States involvement in Vietnam continues to destroy that people and country but now the news doesn't appear before page six in the papers and isn't even mentioned three or four days a week on the TV news. Mass indignation is rising against students rather than the government and about the only voices rising above the din are being articulated in bombs.

Hell, that's the reason for a lot of the "so-whatedness" about the CFIA bombing. The student community generally agrees that the government's military and economic exploitation must end; each person just chooses to fight in his own way. Those concerned with civility try a trip to Washington or an election campaign. Those not worried about being nice set bombs. That's their commitment. Carl Oglesby once wrote:

One is not born with a political commitment. One receives certain values, tries to apply them with honesty and as much skill as one can muster, and tries to have the courage to accept whatever political commandments the results may imply.

The University can best exist as a place for an individual to shape his commitment in whatever field, including radical politics and activity.

For this, however, the University must remain open. Agnew claims that the universities are "staging grounds" for violent revolutionaries. Sure they are, just as they're staging grounds for corporate executives. The universities must exist to focus and encourage radical thought, but they must not be turned from the staging area into a practice ground. Radical bombings and attacks on the University from within have just this effect. Attacks on the University will only prevent undergraduate instruction from continuing; the institutional structure itself won't be terribly bothered. Reaction and legislative restrictions will shut down the functioning of the University as a source of criticism, and preserve it only as an academic factory. Sure, the universities support and serve the government in much of its counter-revolutionary machinations. Getting rid of ROTC and the CFIA are fine self-cleansing rituals but, though symbolically important, will undermine the radical student power base if pressed to the point of shutting down the University.

IT'S PAST TIME to take the Revolution out of the University. We must preserve the University and use it to help create revolutionary alternatives. The possibilities exist to structure alternate institutions, such as free universities and student-community-street people centers. And the desperate need for a cogent alternative ideology may well crystallize this fall out of the Panther's Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention. In any event, the bomber's actions must not deter or force into uninvolved withdrawal those who share their radical opposition to the government. Efforts to build community-based student alliances are the only way widespread opposition will reveal itself in this country. These movements are a more "civil" form of revolution, to be sure, but they're also both extremely idealistic and moderate in goals. They can succeed only when a strait-jacketed electoral process will allow change.

Nothing more can be expected or hoped for. The bombings are running on the same treadmill the radical movements have been spinning since last fall: small incidents of opposition-whether bombs or student demonstrations-will do little more than cause their target minor inconvenience. The wounds are quickly repaired and the instigators reviled, jailed, or martyred.

The bombs will continue: if directed at the government-military directly, they may draw sympathy and manpower from the campuses; if universities become the target, student movements will crumble. An alternative creation of community alliances and radical action with the universities as the power base might work, but cannot be built as desperately and quickly as they are needed. At the moment, of course, opposition to the present wave of repression is our greatest challenge, for students are likely to form the majority of the Ten-Most-Wanted List for a long time.