[lbo-talk] the beating heart of oakland commune: the kitchen

[Mike Ballard]

Weatherman said, "We are everywhere." And they were. But, there weren't very many of them. Max, I'd say about 700, if you include active sympathizers. Still, that was a lot of people, mostly kids, who took up the challenge of making a political revolution in order to help stop the Vietnam War and to participate in what the Weather Underground ideologically understood as a world revolution in the late '60s-mid '70s. That was one of the BIG problems with Weatherman. They didn't think too deeply about history or theory. They were the self-described "action faction" of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They weren't going to wait around while a bunch of armchair revolutionaries were intellectually masturbating while black, brown, red and yellow people were being oppressed by white honkeys. No sir-ree, Bob. They were going to stop the Vietnam War by, "bringing the war home" and align themselves with the oppressed peoples of the Third World and people of

 colour at home in order to meaningfully participate in the anti-imperialist peoples' war. "We chose to become guerillas", they announced as they watched television and saw what they called imperialist soldiers wreaking a "destruction of peoples' culture."
...from my review of the movie about THEM! full: http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2011/01/wobbly-times-number-99.html

Hi-ho,
Mike B)

On 12/7/2011 11:01 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:


> I very seriously want to warn people that even as a metaphor 
> references to Weatherman will lead to degradation of political 
> discourse and political thought. I am still sad that Ron Jacobs wrote 
> a book on them. However you approach them, to do so is to distort 
> history and to distort current thought.

This is one of my favorite lbo-talk posts of all time.

SA