Between Moratorium and People's War

( This analysis of the May Day actions in Washington, D. C. originally appeared in the CRIMSON of May 14, 1971. )

On May 4, 1886 at Haymarket in Chicago police broke up a peaceful rally by the Knights of Labor to protest the murder by police several days before of Jour union men who had been striking for an eight-hour day. As the police went sweeping through the crowd, a bomb exploded. Chaos developed: police opened fire on the demonstrators. Sixty-seven police were wounded and seven died; casualties among the demonstrators were three times that. Police blamed anarchists for the bombing, and to prove it, they planted dynamite in their homes before they arrested them. The anarchists said that the bomb was thrown by a police provocateur.

No one ever really found out who threw the bomb, but the arrested anarchists became revolutionary heroes, the dead and wounded became martyrs in the heroic class struggle, and May Day became a worldwide revolutionary holiday. Those were violent days-the history of the American labor movement is the bloodiest in the world. And yet, despite all the blood and the strikes and the propaganda of the left, the revolution never came in America. The left remained isolated-much of its membership was made up of left-wing intellectuals who had come to this country and formed revolutionary subcultures-and the organizers never seemed to be able to speak to the needs that the mass of workers believed to be paramount. Books and books have been written about the failure of the American left to involve the mass of the people in "their" struggle.

I recount this bit of the sad history of the old left because it is appropriate to Mayday in 1971, in a way far more appropriate than talking about the Moratoriums, or marching in Selma, or Vietnam Summer. Because Mayday was the first national mass action of the revolutionary new left. Mayday seems to me to have been a success, although its success remains problematical. It raises many questions for me about what defines success or failure for the movement right now. These questions reflect my own doubts and confusion and personal feelings. They certainly have no more legitimacy than anyone else's.

The repression of the Mayday demonstrations was not fascism. The repression came instead from a liberal democracy, caught deep in its own contradictions, trying to maintain order. And, obviously, the traffic blocking action was not revolution. For both sides it was a warm-up, a partial unveiling of tactics with the aim of winning a broad base of support for larger designs. The left deliberately sought to create a crisis for the government, and it seems likely that neither the left nor the government really knew what would happen once the crisis had been set. Thus the thousands of troops on call, and the preventative sweep by police at the campsite in West Potomac Park, and the mass arrests on Monday of anyone who might have become a participant in a developing crisis confrontation.

I say that the repression was not fascism, understanding that the mass arrests without cause and the indiscriminate gassing and beatings speakof it, understanding that there can be a future in which all 7000 arrestees end up in mass graves. This government does roughly equivalent things in Vietnam, but when they happen at home, that will be fascism. But fascist repression at home will remain unlikely, not because the government is incapable, but because the American people will not allow it. The deaths of four students caused a furor.

In my jail, a precinct station house near George Washington University, there was a tall skinny brother from Texas, who had his leg broken by police because he did not move fast enough into a transporting bus. He was in great pain, but the police left him untreated for eight hours. Finally, when a lawyer from the Mayday Collective was allowed into the jail, someone shouted that there was a prisoner with a broken bone who was being refused treatment. And the lawyer asked the jailer what was up, and the jailer said that he hadn't know that anyone was hurt, and the brother was finally taken to the hospital. And fascism, although it will mean in a sense only a quantitative extension of his suffering, will also be qualitatively different. For there- will be no lawyer, and there will be no hospital. There will be no anything for those who cross the line of allowable conduct; no net underneath. There is still a net- a net of bourgeois freedoms. One can go to Washington to shut down the U.S. government, and be out of jail 15 hours later on $10 collateral. I was.

In my jail, two tactical squad members who were standing outside in the parking lot-probably fondling motorcycles-maced a whole cell full of kids though the window for a joke. All down the cellblock word was passed and we began screaming and beating on the metal walls of the cells. And a sergeant came running down the cellblock at that moment, throwing cigarettes-which we had wanted all day-into the cells at us, telling us to calm down and that everything would be all right. And if it were fascism, there would be no cigarettes, and we would all be maced whenever police felt like it. And if it were really revolution, none of us would have taken the lousy cigarettes.

I was not in the "concentration camp" at Kennedy Stadium, but people who were said it was pretty brutal. Yet to call it a concentration camp is to evoke Dachau and Auschwitz, but the government is not yet there, and to evoke images as if it were is to cheapen language, to cry "wolf." And the left should let the destruction of sense in language remain with Nixon; let him call fighting a war "ensuring the peace" and an invasion an "incursion" and let us say what we mean so plainly and truthfully that people will know the difference.

The events of Mayday partake of the clouded contradictory reality of the liberal state. Gross repression seems to elicit embarrassment from some courts, some corporate executives, and some of the media. And gross repression still elicits disbelief from revolutionaries who ought to know better. Repression like that in Washington seems to help the movement of the "children of America" in Jerry Rubin's phrase-the white middle-class left-in a way that neither actions nor ideology seem able to do. Yet gross repression against the Panthers embarrasses no one on top, and certainly does not help build the Panthers, whose support does derive from their own theory and practice, rather than from repressive reaction to it.

To sum up the contradiction I am trying to describe: one brother in my cell, after chanting with the rest of us. "WE WANT LUNCH" for ten minutes, and after having asked for an hour for permission to please be able to go to the bathroom, and being refused and then ignored, finally screamed: "YOU CAN'T TREAT US LIKE THIS. WE'RE MIDDLE CLASS."

"The next time I go to Washington," said a friend explaining why she was not going to go to the Mayday Demonstrations, "it's going to be marching in a column of the Red Army, and we're going to be there, and we're going to do it, and that will be it." How long away is People's War, and is that the only way to make American Society better, and the only way to end the war in Vietnam and the one after that and after that? And is Mayday building for People's War, or simply pretending in a perverse way that it's already here? And is People's War something that any of us can or ever will be prepared to participate in? What is the present level of struggle and what is its base ?

The contradictions are apparent: we would not go to Washington to disrupt non-violently this fascist imperialist government if we did not ourselves still believe that it is a liberal state, not fascist-still believe that the war is a horrible mistake which does not in itself mean that American society is really what it seems when we think about the war. We go to Washington believing that the government will respond to our acts of outrage and defiance in a non-fascist way.

We go to Washington, at least in part, to show our strength, and we must recognize that at best it is potential rather than actual strength. The case with which the police were able to sweep the camp Sunday and secure the city Tuesday, and the inability or unwillingness-however sensible that might be-of the demonstrators to devise tactics that would shut down the city, amounts to a restatement on a higher level of struggle the powerlessness to end the war or effect social change that characterized the previous level.

And the tactics of non-violence, predicated at least in part on the restraint of the government, were sensible. The government is, in spite of what we imagine it may become, or what we announce to be its underlying ideology, somewhat restrained at home. While no judges yet rule for the Vietnamese, they sometimes rule for demonstrators over the machinery of repression. Judge Green demanded that the government "show cause" as to why the mass arrests were necessary. And another judge ruled that those arrested without cause could not have their fingerprints and mug shots placed in FBI files.

But if the government-because of a "split in the ruling class" over the war and its incumbent phenomena-seems to evade the rhetorical definitions we would ascribe, so does the movement. Which continues to find itself caught schizophrenically between outrage at what cannot continue in a world of rational men and sustained militance, born of a desire to overthrow that which is in the very nature of a world demarcated by class rather than good and evil. A world in which imperialist wars at not mistakes to be undone but rational, self-interested investment protection, and will thus be inevitable until the system which makes them necessary is banished.

These questions cannot be resolved alone, in the abstract. They are political questions, and can be resolved only through participation in the process of change-by going outside of one's self, by acting collectively. Despite confusion and private doubts. Mayday was a collective action, is a social fact, and will "mean" some thing when history decides post facto what everything was.

Thus the "nature" of what we do is contingent. We do what we believe we must, and the remaining questions must seek to discover how we get to where we want to be.

All possible tactics, even Weatherman tactics, are only propaganda and organizing tools. None of them in itself impedes the war machine. They make the war too costly, and thus the war may end. but the war machine will remain intact. The criterion for judging an action should be, therefore, in terms of building a movement that will be able to destroy the machine itself. The criterion must be dependent upon how many of who never you want to see, to hear and to agree become catalyzed to move to the level of consciousness that the particular tactic embodies.

The Mayday action was to speakto different constituencies: first it was to consolidate revolutionary consciousness among youth and other alienated groups. Thus the gathering of tribes, a gathering of those already committed to social change. Second, it was to speak to the mass of Americans who oppose the war and also oppose radical change. To them it was a statement that the movement, although in fact radical, is not a bunch of violent crazies, and that in fact it is the state which has a monopoly on violence. It did not try to tell the mass of Americans that the movement was made up of people just like them. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.

The youth culture acts like a revolutionary vanguard, and it has won an extraordinary number of followers in a short time. In part this must be because it is not like most people's lives, and therefore can offer alternative vision. It has made its values - the values for which one is willing to forsake, or at least question, corporate America-apparent.

And there were in my lock-up, perhaps ten "fellow travellers" who were over forty years old. They were all wonderful, particularly a gray-haired woman who stood across form me smiling as we were being released, and shook her head. "I'm sorry, in a way, that this is over," she said. "You are all so right ... Right On," And then she clenched her fist and said that she would see us all in jail the next day.

Yet up to this point, those whose ages take them beyond the youth culture but have been radicalized by the vision of the new society have been almost exclusively middle class-those with the leisure time, and money, and psychic security that allows them to be free-free to act, free to care, free to love. The vision of Mayday, however, says very little to those - and most of America is among "those"-who do not have those freedoms.

Marcuse says that the goal of the revolution must be liberation. The movement must be utopian; it must seek to make new men and women, who no longer look at the world the way that men and women have looked at the world before. Why was Mayday the first national revolutionary mass action? Why was it, despite all of these questions, an overwhelming triumph?

Because it was about liberation, it was about the new society. It was a success because it was, because it overcame apathy and fear and boredom, and was able to happen at all, in a time when so few things that are about a better world happen in daylight. It was not a success because it was repressed. That would be double think. It was a success because it was beyond the law, because it represented a higher more self-sufficient consciousness; because it was thousands of people who really were brothers and sisters for the days of the demonstrations. And who were brave and strong ... those things are so important ... and who took care of their comrades, freeing them from police if they could, helping them if they were wounded, keeping up spirits through the long hours in jail, singing songs even after you were tired and had a headache and would rather lie down and feel bad.

Those things, that sense of community and interdependence, are what a new society will be all about. And Mayday is just one point along the way to that new society; between the logic of the old and the new; somewhere between the end and the beginning.