----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Pyle" <andypie at earthlink.net> To: "marxist list" <marxist at yahoogroups.com> Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2001 8:34 AM Subject: [marxist] Notes on Bill Ayer's Book FUGITIVE DAYS
Notes on reading Bill Ayers' FUGITIVE DAYS
andy pyle
I had an opportunity over Thanksgiving to read Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days and to talk about it with old and new friends from Chicago, or who went through it all in the 60's along with Bill and had read the book. I confess I skipped most of the stuff about the teen years.
If ever a book suffered from perfect bad timing, it was this one. An article on the book was in the New York Times THE DAY OF THE BOMBING and a Book Review the following Sunday. In the paper Bill was flippant that he had gotten away with bombing the Pentagon in the '70's. "This is America" is how I remember the remark. (no one was hurt or killed. They blew up an Imperialist Bath Room.) Bill was on his book tour in East Lansing the night before the bombing, his stop in Ann Arbor on 9-11 was canceled. The tour was canceled, word is "the book is no longer being published". What that means for existing stocks I do not know. Folks from Chicago say he "backpedalled furiously" after the WTC bombings and they are pissed off about it but details I do not have.
The New York Times article and review has engendered howls of protest from conservatives for Bill being an "unrepentant terrorist." I first heard about the book from a letter to the editor in The Canton Repository here in Ohio from someone using that article for left-bashing.
My first memory of Bill is from the Fall of 68 when he showed up at our SDS meeting in East Lansing. I got along with him OK until the next Spring when what became the Weatherman group was pulling together in SDS and the gap grew wider and wider. I was just a chapter person, don't know if he even remembers me. I had a bad time with Weatherman being around, and so you can't say this is objective.
FUGITIVE DAYS is written in a stream-of-consciousness style. You learn what was running through Bill's head, only incidentally what the movement was going through. You still get a sense of colossal ego and self-righteousness "I am the center of the universe" which is so Bill and in that sense the book is an accurate portrayal.
The section up thru the Chicago '68 Democratic Convention is a fairly straight forward and common account of how Bill and a lot of us came to consciousness about The War and what else was wrong with American society and capitalism. The thing that JUMPED RIGHT OUT AT ME is the book completely skipped from the Democratic Convention of '68 to the SDS Convention of '69.
This was a mass-market book it may have had a size limit and publishers may have thought that the period-in-between detracted from the streamofconsciousness narrative of life in the radical '60s. But its' really hard for me to swallow because the missing year was so critical in how everything developed. I'm not saying he should have recapitulated Kirkpatrick Sales' SDS but this is not even the Bill Ayers story with that vital year left out.
After Mayor Daley's '68 Police Riot "The police aren't here to create disorder. They are here to preserve disorder" Bill, energized, got the SDS leadership (Mike Klonsky) to appoint him Regional Traveler for Michigan-Ohio. We sure needed one. Chapters weren't working together at all. We were very wrapped up in "ideological struggle" with long position papers about "what direction for the New Left" and "everyone else vs PL". Our activities about Vietnam were (mostly) about Draft Resistance "what the war is doing to me" rather than what it was doing to the Vietnamese. We were very introspective. Michigan State SDS had hosted the national SDS convention that right before Chicago, which gave us a big boost and also exposed a lot of chapter people to Progressive Labor Party for the first time.
The first Michigan State SDS meeting that Fall (after Chicago) "we wuz surprised and amazed" when hundreds of showed up and packed the first SDS meeting. the wanted to DO STUFF. Hippie looking, mostly younger than us, women and men, from out of the dorms, there they were, ready to move. Our planned presentation based on the old intellectual SDS style of the previous year was off the mark. Bill was there and he spoke in tune with the crowd. He was good. Many old SDS members didn't like it, saying it was superficial. It was the start of something.
The dialectics of that school year are like something out of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The masses were activated. The women's movement raised its head in SDS. A lot of us understood some the oppression of women in society, but didn't see much of it in our SDS chapter because we had strong women in leadership, such as the now Notorious Flag Burner Cheryl Lessin now with the RCP in Cleveland, who I remember as a most empathic organizer yet determinedly theoretical in the chapter. This was also the year of the Tet Offensive, and The Year of the Panther. The presence of the Black Panther Party went from zero to infinity. They were heavily promoted by the SDS national office, and despite lots of questions about their program and style, their boldness and flair were........irresistable.
The dialectics developed. Bill Ayers and the other 5 regional travellers, Steve Fitch and Linda Evans (the one who just got out of prison) of our chapter, Terry Robbins (who blew himself up in the Manhattan Townhouse), Corky Benedict who later became a Spart, and Lisa Meisel of Cleveland (maybe I've got one wrong) went campus to campus building Taking Action as the model. The very active Kent State chapter was the regional model. At MSU, most of the older chapter people formed one grouping, some and a lot of the new people were growing out of this in becoming as a second grouping around Ayers, Fitch, and Evans, and The Worker-Student Alliance caucus was growing and attracting some very serious undergrad and grad students who saw it as serious and Marxist and were having revulsion to Ayers' hippie-revolutionary pep-talks. PL had just given up Maoism and declared that "All nationalism is reactionary" which made them hypercritical of both the Vietnamese and the Panthers. MSU was the only Michigan-Ohio chapter to have PL.
Meetings became like rugby matches over which set of policies and actions would get to use the SDS name. It went back and forth. A radical psychology professor was fired and there was a huge demonstration. We took over the spanking-new Administration building with 800 people but voted not to stay. PL was cautious, Bill wanted us to get arrested. The big ideological struggle was whether to make a second demand over Open Admissions, and whether this should be for all working class people or for Black and Third World students. PL with their stand against nationalism wanted it to be for all working class people. They carried the vote.
The demonstrations went on and on, but were becoming smaller. Bill's bad side began to show. He wanted more and more action, and militancy, but was unconcerned about mobilizing the masses. Demonstrations got called with no publicity, and flopped. The last action was at a Board of Trustees meeting where only a dozen or two, a good part not even MSU students, confronted the Trustees. PL stayed away from that one. Ayers argued that it didn't matter that the students weren't there, that by our militance and determination we could "be a cadre" and carry the movement forward. That was how the line that became Weatherman was starting to show. "Gut checking" was another. At Kent State the Action Faction people brought in ice cream, and everyone thought it was a peace gesture, but those who chose vanilla over chocolate were then branded as racists.
At the end of the school year, the big change crystallized. Everyone was urged to join a Summer Project, firmly under the leadership of Ayer's group, and "You Don't Need A Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" was published. It was a Marxist SOUNDING combination of Youth Culture (youth as a new, separate class), Lin Piao, Che, White Skin Privilege Theory and following after the Vietnamese and the Panthers. The (white) working class of the imperialist countries was totally written off, forever.
The old SDS, the "Praxis Axis" led by the National Secretary Mike Klonsky was becoming the (maoist) Revolutionary Youth Movement II, was splitting from Weathermen, and Worker Student Alliance was, at the '69 National Convention although not in the chapters, bigger than them combined. At the Convention the split between PL and everybody else became final, both sides used the SDS name, and PL became irrelevant to the rest of history. Justly so. Bill was a big leader at the Convention. He was full of his own importance. He and the other Weatherman authors were the Vanguard of White Youth.
That summer of '69 was weird. The Summer Project people were openly killing SDS, just pimping off its resources, and having total contempt for the chapters and those SDS who didn't follow Weatherman. The Klonsky group got the motley lot of old chapter people, because no one else would take them. A lot of unaffiliated dorm-dwelling radicals were disgusted and either dropped out or boycotted all factions. SDS conferences became War Councils. A second-rank Weatherman leader confronted me at someone's house and told me he had a gun in his back pocket and was going to shoot me then and there, "because underneath, you are just a liberal". He dropped out of the Summer Projects a week later.
Lots of people were dropping out, or being driven out. This part of the story has been written about many times so I'm going to skirt it. I will remark that at the Summer War Council Bill Ayers confronted a young working class nurse, at her first movement event, an activist in a hospital Strike, who happened to have bleached blond hair and stuck his finger out at her and shouted "Look at your hair! How could you be a revolutionary with hair like that! You don't belong here!" Another recruit lost to the movement.
The second thing that JUMPED OUT AT ME about the book FUGITIVE DAYS was the lack of self-criticism about the "Days of Rage" demonstrations in Chicago on October 11, 1969. These were intended to be the spectacular (in the full sense of the word) coming out of the new, hypermilitant, Weatherman line. "Bring the War Home!" was the slogan. Weatherman was going to turn out thousands of long-haired white youth street-fighting in solidarity with the Vietnamese and the Panthers. What a vision! What a flop!
Ten thousand predicted, 300 showed up. Bill passes right over his surprise at the turnout on the streets of Chicago with a single-sentence transition in his flow of exhilaration. If even there was a place in a book for introspective analysis, this was it. I still don't think he gets it. That's also the feeling of my friends who have read the book. Its' not all about the depth of your feelings and your level of commitment. Its not all about the tremendous rush you get from being in and leading a crowd. There's More To It Than That. There's the masses of the people, and there's the strength of your analysis of the situation we found ourselves in.
I was hoping to find some apology for killing SDS. Didn't see that. I heard Bill's wife, Bernardine Dohrn, make such a self-criticism at a Kent chapter reunion a few years ago. Said it was the biggest mistake they ever made. She was right. Took away the leadership of a mass student movement when it was just peaking and left it leaderless in the decisive year of 1970. The movement managed to find its head that year and storm the heavens, but that it due to the self-activity of the masses and not any leadership. It could have so much more with a national organization.
Weatherman reduced itself to being a little group of 300 in cells. Ayers calls their subsequent bombing campaign "Propaganda by the Deed." The old anarchist slogan. Fewer and fewer people, more and more militancy. "Weatharchists" I think of them.
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