Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi folks. Dick Flacks here with another episode of Talking Strategy, Making History.
And I'm joined, as I always am, by my partner in so many ways, Daraka Larimer Hall. And today we're going to talk about a book that I've been talking about a lot with friends because it refers to a lot of my political history in the years back. And that's the book by Zaid Dorn called and I never can quite be sure I'll say the title correctly, but Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young. That's the title of the book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young.
And it's a story that many of you may already know that it is the story of his growing up in the Weather Underground as a child because his parents, Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers, were form important leaders of the Weather Underground back in those days.
So we're doing this because you, Daraka, are using it in class. And so let's start with that. How come you're using this book in class? With what intent?
How and why are you using it?
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Well, I'm using it in a class I'm teaching called Activism, where we tried to talk about, you know, movement activity at the level of the individual and like, what it means to be an activist, what kinds of strategies and tactics activists use, et cetera. And so I'm using the book one first. You know, I'm always looking for things that are thick with knowledge, thick with facts, but not written for an academic audience as a entry point for undergraduates. And then, and, and so this memoir, which is, and I mean, I think you agree, Dick, just phenomenally well written, just so good.
And of course is a story that is, I mean, one of my students right away twigged to how cinematic it is. Like, it's, it's like reading the, the plot of a movie. And so, you know, that's interesting and compelling and so forth. So that's part of it. And then, you know, I wanted to, we, we're talking a lot about the, the 60s and 70s and the upsurge in activism for, to look at, at lessons for the kinds of decisions that activists made, kinds of conditions they found themselves in, resistance and repression, all of these things. And so, you know, here's a story that includes all of those things in an, in a narrative that's compelling and interesting. And then, you know, the other, I think the last thing is that I try in all of my classes to give students tools for navigating the current political environment as political actors, as voters, as activists, as Engaged people as neighbors, as students, all of those things.
And, you know, one of the concerns that I have is a kind of break in continuity and conversation between generations of activists. And I see out in the world, people, young, young activists, repeating some mistakes that were made in the past, continuing some traditions, unfortunate traditions that we could leave behind. And this is in. Among many things, among many things, this book is a generational accounting of that and one generation saying to another, like, hey, maybe there's some things we shouldn't take along. And early on in the book, and again, another one of my students really grabbed onto this. Early on in the book, Ayres Doran says that reckoning with his childhood and his. What, you know, his parents were up to and so forth has made it hard for him to find his own activist voice, like his own entry point into being an active person and a, you know, a leftist and engaged in politics in some level which he thinks is a good thing to be right. So he didn't. He came out of all of this experience thinking that his parents were right in being active, in being radical, in being, you know, brave.
And he wants to do the same thing. And he feels like it's harder for him to do unless he reckons with the mistakes, the bad things that his parents were up to and thought and that I think that's exactly what I want for my students and for everyone who's going to be continuing the struggle after.
After I'm gone.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: So how have you highlighted the cautionary tale that this book is? What are the things you're most communicating, trying to communicate with your students and with. And with yourself, really? About what. What to be what. What is the lesson, cautionary lesson to be learned. I have, you know, I lived through that time and I know these people and I. So I've got a lot to maybe say about that. But I'm more interested in what you and the students drew from this in terms of, you know, the. The story is a. Is a tragic story because they brave and. And committed and all the rest of it, committed crimes that are morally wrong, did things that were blind to reality in many different ways, and caused a lot of damage to the movement.
So that's. The outcome of this brave action was extremely the opposite of what one might have hoped for.
But what. So what was. What do we learn from that?
Where did they go wrong in how you've read it?
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, well, actually, I haven't gone over that with my students yet, and I'm waiting to do that because I want them to Excavate that. I want them to find that for themselves. And so, so I'm sort of holding off on drawing conclusions other than like the obvious thing like building bombs is bad and like, like fighting cops for the sake of fighting cops is not a particularly good strategy. All like there's some obvious things but going. Anything that goes deeper than that, there's a, you know, I mean there's a whole bunch more they need to read.
Including in fact they're reading for, you know, just after finishing the book is that very widely circulated negative review that was in the LA Review of Books that was sort of took this kind of wild conclusion from it that it's an anti action or anti struggle book and that, you know, the basically like the Weather Underground was, was right or at least not wrong. And this book just puts, you know, water on a fire and you know, it's I think terrible review. Very un. Yeah, I just, it was a terrible reading of the book and just silly but, but it, it, it made the rounds. In fact, I had it sent to me from some friends whose, whose kid or child, you know, adult child had sent it to them and they're an activist in the kind of Northern California anarchist ish milieu and found it very compelling and interesting and so forth so. Which was like a red flag, so to speak, if you will, for me, of like, oh shit, yeah. See, people are taking the wrong conclusion. So anyway, I'm gonna have my students read that, engage with it, read, you know, Joe Freeman and read more about the African American freedom struggle, read about Black Lives Matter and Occupy and read about the right and their strategies. And then we'll go back sort of in conclusion to talk about good and bad strategies and what they take away from it, including from the story of the Weather Underground. So I don't like to make conclusions for them, but you know, like lead them to a well of, you know, good possible readings.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: So I guess one of my starting points when the Weather movement began within sds, I mean I would. By that time I was not in SDS leadership anymore and didn't think that a faculty member, which I was, should be part of a student organization. But of course I was very actively involved in Chicago where a lot of the SDS leadership was also in the anti war movement and so forth and watching closely and what one thing, the two things I guess I would say about that that may be helpful for now is first the weather people, the people who are most attracted to it from the beginning were the people from the most advantaged class backgrounds in sds.
And I think that's an important part of the story.
And Zaid does talk about white privilege.
Bill Ayers father was the head of a major utility corporation in Illinois. Bernadine didn't come from quite that upper class background, but certainly very comfortable.
And just from his account, you can see how deeply there's a dimension of guilt, of course, in their politics from the beginning.
Now in the early 1600s,
[00:09:53] Speaker B: absolutely.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: People like that were attracted to the civil rights moon in the South.
And you know, there's something very creative if advantaged people in the fact that advantaged people come to realize the true horrors of the world and their own ways in which they inevitably had benefited from the exploitation of others and the poverty of others and the oppression of others deciding to vote their devote their lives to overcoming that. And that was really one of the exciting things about white radicalism in the early 60s was that realization by advantaged young people that they had a role to play that was both morally almost required of them, but also could be a benefit to social change. And that's not unique to the US story. It goes back to Zara. I started to think about this then and realize that back in the 19th century in czarist Russia, it was the children of the aristocracy who wanted to, you know, start a revolution if they could. Who, who were. And that was, you know, who was Fidel Castro, he was a privileged guy. And Che Guevara, for example, in Cuba and probably, and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party similarly. So that's a pattern. But what we learn, I think, from this story is the danger involved, which is that being guilty about your privilege can lead to suicidal resolution. And I mean that very seriously. In other words, if you are guilty because of who you are as a privileged person, you might think, well, the extreme the final sacrifice is, is to get rid of yourself on the planet. And I think in a way that's what some of the ways of thinking that we're in the Weather Underground and that is depicted in this book have that, that element to it a
[00:12:06] Speaker B: hundred percent.
Can I just
[00:12:09] Speaker A: want to interject
[00:12:10] Speaker B: just a couple things because that's really great. The, you know, one thing that I want to highlight and I have, you know, with my students, is what you're describing in white folks, white, young, white people in the middle of the 20th century kind of being radicalized by, you know, being confronted by the civil rights movement, by the news coverage and you know, the inescapability of the question of like white supremacy and white Terror, particularly, you know, in the south, and then discrimination and inequality in the whole country, like everywhere. Right. Because it was an awakening, not just about the particular kind of horrors in the south and race structures, but how those were like replicated in Chicago and Boston and, you know.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Some of the, some of the founders of Weatherman were actually in Quaker camps in Latin America. They, they experienced even more fully the third world poverty and so forth. And, and
[00:13:10] Speaker B: the global scale. Yeah.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: And. And that's not, that's not a criticism. That's what helped them see reality. So. But
[00:13:17] Speaker B: no, no, yeah, it's not only not a criticism. I, I want to pull it out and say that it's. It was a really important thing in American history, like a good thing. And that the Weather Underground or like the radicals that had this relationship, you know, that we've talked about in class a bit with the Black Panthers and idealized relationship with like the, the most radical elements of the black struggle. These things.
Like, that's one piece of a much larger story where we white people educated themselves, took jobs, made careers in ways aiming to change, you know, alleviate change, restructure this inequality. And it reminded me of, you know, reading this book has been a really personal journey too. God, I was. I hate when I use the term journey. Anyway, it was a personal, very emotional experience for me too, because it's in many ways reminds me of a story of my own parents and my own mentors, you being, you know, such an important part of my life and being directly related to it. So it was a very personal experience for me, even though I'm not, I don't have any direct ties.
And I just thought a lot about my mother in reading the story of Bernadine, you know, as a pioneering woman in a male dominated field in law school, being one of the few women there being that kind of from that sort of like striving middle class, first person in her family to go to law school, in my mother's case, first person to get a bachelor's degree.
And you know, and then being.
Yeah. Radicalized by what was happening in America, both of them at the same time, around the same issues. But where Bernadine decided after finishing law school not to go into law and use her law degree like within the legal structure, and got involved in SDS and as the book put so starkly like, gets elected to the national leadership of SDS and within 18 months is a fugitive. It's mind blowing, but. Which I hope we'll get to. But anyway, the point is there were Millions of people really who went into teaching, legal work, social work, all kinds of things to try to make a change. Because of that inspiration and the example set by black leaders, activists, regular people standing up to Jim Crow in the south. It really was. So it wasn't only like this kind of dish, toxic or dysfunctional thing of white guilt leading to making bombs. There are also like all these other things
[00:16:13] Speaker A: that were. And that, that's really an important point because from the, from the, what you get from the book and what I already had observed in, in, in my time with, in the same, in living through that time was certain some people, and they were the kind of folks that joined, that helped form and join the Weather Underground formation, but also other factions within SDS who also claimed to be revolutionary. So this was the one possible outcome was that what we were doing in the early part of the 60s and the whole civil rights movement and all of these nonviolent movements, they were not enough because the war was escalating.
Nothing was really changing once you come to this idea that the struggle that you're in is not enough or had failed. So we need a new stage of struggle.
And that I began to really get worried about as the 60s went on as a way of thinking not that we didn't need advance the struggle, but in what direction?
And, and, and so one, one influence was the perception of, well, how did the Vietnamese, the nlf, the Viet Cong in Vietnam get so strong? They took up the gun, they, they took up armed struggle. How did Fidel and, and his followers win in Cuba? They picked up the gun. That must be the answer. That is a kind of short circuiting.
And along with that, oh, you know, there's one great handbook of revolution that we have that these people used and that's Marxism or Marxism and Leninism. In other words, those are more advanced ways of thinking according to this particular perspective as the 60s went on, that we will be growing politically the more we become like the Vietnamese and like the Cubans and following Marx and Lenin and that. So that was to me a very disturbing direction because I thought, and still to this day am convinced that the path of radical democracy, which SDS had enunciated at the beginning and that SNCC had been trying to practice, was really the promising path for the future. Not. And that included a deliberate revolutionary nonviolence, revolutionary nonviolence, which is what SNCC was trying to practice in its early days.
And what, and, and, but that was considered what petty bourgeois or not advanced by some of the people who were thinking they had to become Marxists.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Well, and also there was a process that happened in. Within sncc. Right. And like a.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
And I mean one other thing relating to within.
At the same time, SDS was invaded by a Maoist faction called Progressive Labor Party. They invaded SDS not with the intention of fulfilling SDS stated goals, but of taking it over and changing it into something very different. Their version of Maoism.
And that I think propelled some of the people like Bernadine, Bill Ayers and other people and Mike Klonsky who formed a different faction, but also a revolutionary Marxist defined faction. They wanted to compete with Progressive labor and defeat it by becoming more communist than they were by proving that the PL faction was really not where it's at. We are the really true revolutionaries.
And this.
So that was.
That's what I. One thing that I consider and I'd like to hear what you would say about what I'm about to say because the current situation is very fraught in similar ways. We have very repressive potentials in the society. Things are. Have been going wrong. The possibilities for change seem quite difficult to jump to. This kind of belief that revolution not well defined in terms of what it really would be, but revolution which includes breaking with the political process completely and moving toward maybe violence, moving toward actions. And one of the premises of the weather people was that the youth in general were ready for this and that black people were going to rise up in the cities of America in a revolutionary fashion. That was part of their imagination. So part of the consequence of them thinking this way was they were deluding themselves about the political realities and the actual conditions around them. And I want to get back to that point because I think that's another. Well, let me just finish this and then I'll. Then you'll take over. The third factor that, that I think is really cautionary.
In order to reinforce their new consciousness, they form tighter and tighter small group ways of organizing that were deliberately designed to make people give up their past ways of thinking and thinking in these new ways. And they were like little bubbles that made it harder and harder to see outside of those bubbles what the reality was. And that's one of the dangers I think in political organizing is do you form such a cohesive communal relationship among people, which can be a strengthening thing, but which is dangerous because it blinds you to reality. And there's one example from the book that I, that I want, that I've been thinking about. And one thing, one criticism I had of the book he quotes Bernadine as saying she went to Cuba with a bunch of other SDS type people, and there they met not only Cuban Communists, but Vietnamese revolutionaries. And they. She comes back and tells people in the SDS world that she was in. That the Vietnamese now want us to engage in armed struggle.
That's her conclusion. And Zay doesn't seem to question that that was what she had heard from the Vietnamese. Well, I've had experiences of meeting with Vietnamese and NLF people in Czechoslovakia with a whole bunch of other American activists just about the same time, just a little few months earlier, they were saying the opposite.
They were saying, it's important for you to connect with the American people.
And we, in the Vietnamese development, we learned that it is important to connect to the national feelings of Vietnamese people, not just to the ideology of one. One of the Vietnamese told me, I'm a nationalist first and a Communist second.
And
[00:23:58] Speaker B: that tracks.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Yeah, and. And,
[00:24:01] Speaker B: yeah.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: And they were welcoming us in. To quote them, welcome to the sons and daughters of Jefferson and Lincoln.
That's what they said to us. So I am absolutely convinced that Bernadine misheard what she was hearing, what they were saying.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: She heard what she wanted to hear.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Heard what she wanted to hear. And that's part of the blindness that developed out of the kind of formation that I'm trying to talk about. I hope it's fairly clear what I'm getting at, anyway.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: No, it is. It. It's great. I mean, that's really wonderful to have firsthand account of that. That storyline. And one of the things that, if you read. I think this is in Kirkpatrick's sales book about SDS I.
But, you know, there's a kind of implication that the leadership group, you know, that would later split, that included Klonsky's and Bill and Bernadine and like folks that had come out of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as well as the Columbia would be involved, I guess you could say, you'd say in the Columbia strike, like that network was responding in a way to the infiltration of the organization by the Progressive Labor Party, by plp, that the PLP came in with this very dogmatic, really insane, cultish version of Maoism, kind of similar to some things that were going on in. In France, in the. In the student movement and in. In. Yeah. In response to that dogma, they felt like they had to have a dogma. They had to have a rap. They had to have a line. They had to. And be more revolutionary. More
[00:25:56] Speaker A: communist. Yes,
[00:25:57] Speaker B: More communist. Or.
Or at Least just as. Or something. Right. And so I'm.
And I don't know to what extent that's true or whatever. And they're all different people and had different backgrounds and different political perspectives coming into it. Because there's also like, Mike Klonsky's line that, you know, he came in from the old left, never thought there should. Needed to be a new left, and was just like it was all continuity from his politics as a baby or something. Sometimes.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's why I really. I really was angry at. At him in particular at that time.
But. And I'll get back to this point, but I'll just, I'll just preview it.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Both he and the Bill and Bernadine, their, their post 60s when they reemerged from the underground. And from this period, all of them have led very honorable lives. And I think that's
[00:26:50] Speaker B: doing very good work.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: Yes. And why I love. Part why I love Zayd's book is because he both reveals their crimes and failures and moral mistakes while acknowledging their underlying decency and commitment, which I think is very true. And I say that partly because some of my peers in the SDS still hate these people, and I don't at all. I think that they really done excellent work. And they're all in Chicago, though Three of those people that I named are in Chicago now. And I want to get back to whether later, whether they. How honest or not they've been about their past. We can talk about that a little bit because I've.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Let's give that some space in a bit. But yeah, anyway, in terms of a parallel and like, why this is fresh in the mind. Right. Is between what happened in SDS and what's going on in DSA today. And, and you know, to the extent that there is this dynamic of if somebody comes into the space, a political space, and they're like revolution, scientific Marxist, Leninism, this. And, and, and if you don't agree with me, you're not really for the most oppressed people.
And, you know, whether that's Palestine or the poorest Americans or people incarcerated or whoever it is, there's some group of people that's not us. It's not the people in this room or like, you know, maybe someone is able to sort of embody one of these constituencies as well. But usually it's not. Right. Usually it's white folks with college educations arguing about what group of people are the vanguard. And what's this, what dead European authoritarian or third world dictator came up with the best theory for how to liberate those people. And then it's sort of a bar that gets set and everything gets sucked to that bar because in order to refute it, you can't concede that those are more radical or, or, or honorable or brave concepts. You have to accept the concepts and have a strategic reason why they're wrong or whatever. Right. And so, so that's how you, everybody's competing in the late 60s in SDS for the, the hardest communist line, totally losing sight of what a where the most of the members were. Let's be
[00:29:31] Speaker A: like your
[00:29:32] Speaker B: average college campus member was not there, was not interested in how many Che Guevara's fit on the head of a pin and, or in picking up guns or any of that thing. Right? And you know, it's why like with the Weather Underground's coming out party, right, it's like let's all show up in Chicago and fight the cops. We're going to have 5,000 people and like 250 people showed up.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Right?
[00:29:54] Speaker B: So, okay, so fast forward to today and DSA and I I think that your average member of dsa, both paper member and the average member of the big most active or most impactful chapters are democratic. Socialists are like believe in a multi party democracy and in building a majority support for socialism in order to achieve our goals.
And yet the factions, the organized factional groups that control the national organization, the ones that are in control, all of them declare that some kind of connection to Lenin and Lenin's thought and you know, everything that DSA was founded to avoid or be beyond or against. And so you have that. And I don't, you know, I think that the exact, there's some better articles that have been coming out but the exact story of sort of 2015 to today in DSA and like how exactly this happened is not totally clear but man does it look from my vantage point a lot like sds.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: In that you had an influx of people that already had Marxist Leninist damage. Like we're already there that the, the, a couple of sects had imploded and their members were sort of free agents.
And then in response to that, if you look at the, the rhetoric or the discussions of even of like the good folks in dsa, the, the like Socialist Majority Caucus I would put as the sort of real emblematic group grouping. Right. And, and that includes like a lot of the people that we, we've interviewed on this podcast, the people that we read and look to within the debate in and around DSA for the most grounded and inspiring and interesting and insightful takes. Like those folks, you can tell how much they calibrate what they say and how they frame things so that to deflect from ultra leftist attacks or to appeal to their categories or their vocabulary or their style.
And that to me is really dangerous, this sort of race to the bottom.
And I'll just end by saying, like, outside of DSA then there's been a proliferation of new Marxist, Leninist or revolutionary Marxist sects. And the other day I saw a video of the first congress of a new anti imperialist organization that's like a front group for some Maoist formation.
And dick, they were. It was, you know, a room full, I don't know, a hundred people maybe.
And they were watching a performance of their comrades that had kafiyehs, like Palestinian scarves wrapped around their waist like belts and little red flags. And they were doing like Chinese, you know, dance performance, you know, sort
[00:33:08] Speaker A: of
[00:33:08] Speaker B: peak Beijing opera or Red Guard style, like performances. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? This is like American college students. And they're like, we're gonna pretend to be like, we're in Tiananmen Square for Mao's birthday. Like, this is. So what I'm saying is those people will. It will never be big. The Progressive Labor Party never got big. These sects never get big. They're not a threat to the United States, they're not a threat to you and me, they're not a threat to democracy.
But what they do is like change the conversation in the more vital, important, mainstream parts of the left and like suck it down to the drain and keep us all marginalized as a result. So that's the thing that I'm afraid of reproducing if we don't have good conversations about what went down in the past and if our elders, our veteran and activists aren't like really honest, self critical about mistakes that were made and so forth. So that. That's
[00:34:14] Speaker A: my agenda here. That's right. I mean, and also, I think another thing we need to do is understand where, where that impulse comes from to do exactly the kind of pageant that you're describing. It goes back, I think, to what I was saying right at the outset, which is people who see their own privileges as a problem in the world, that they are privileged. And that is a problem. It's a problem for the world and it's a problem for me personally to be so privileged. How am I going to deal with that? And all of these performative things that you're alluding to have to do with stripping away that privilege or the claim of that privilege or showing, you know, and some, then it becomes, and, and so that's interesting if it remains poetry, art and music that great. I mean I love, I, I, I've noticed for example over the years that there are many, many singer songwriters who I call Jewish cowboys. They, they're Jewish, but their Persona on stage and in performance and in their art is American and cowboyish, so to speak. And that's created so there's a creativity involved in this struggle that, that the kind of class position that I'm talking about can generate. But the danger is, as I said, it has a suicidal underpinning and a, and once it becomes competitive, like you're saying, like who's going to prove they're even more stripped from their privilege?
And it turns in on itself and it cuts you off completely from being an effective organizing force in the, in the wider society.
Which means then you develop illusions about what's going on in the wider society to make what you're doing seem like it's politically relevant.
So I think that this is part of the discussion that should be somehow had is, you know, let's look at who we are as human beings and what might motivate us to take these turns that we feel are good for our soul. Like we are doing this because we now see the need to be a more morally moral being in the world. But the consequence if it's closed in, if it's cut off from reality, can be the opposite. And it's not just the 60s experience. This is the whole history of the left is colored by this kind of cult like formation that can happen that stems from why did so many people in the Communist party in the 30s obey the party discipline? Well, I think it some of the same dynamic. You're a more middle class person, you join the party, you need to be true to the working class. And who knows better about the working class? It's the people in the New York Communist Party leadership that I have to listen to because my own thoughts are colored by my privilege. So I better I'd be more disciplined. I am as a party member. The more, the more I am being moral. But you're silencing what's what you know from your direct experience about what the real world is like if you do that. And I've said what I'm about to say, but I think I've said before on the podcast, I've written about this a Bit the left wing organizations. I think there are two kinds of participation.
One is you join the party or the organization and your whole life revolves around the party, building the party, fighting for control within the party.
The other kind of member, and who is much more important in history, it turns out, are the members who are in the real world organizing unions, organizing tenants, organizing neighborhoods, acting in the real world with a organizing perspective. And they're in touch with much more the realities of the consciousnesses of people in the real world and of the conditions of life in the real world. But the less influential within the party because they're not spending their time fighting for the party. And I think that's a real problem in part any organization of the left. So DSA is maybe the most bizarre version of this.
And this in a way makes this.
I don't know how to evaluate what I think is, on the one hand, you have this large scale impact of DSA chapters electorally in the real world, and then you have these factions who don't even agree with the electoral strategy, fighting for control of the party,
[00:39:18] Speaker B: rescinding endorsements,
[00:39:19] Speaker A: wanting to rescind endorsements, expel candidates who may belong to the DSA should be expelled.
And this doesn't seem to be a stable organization. I don't understand how those two wings can go forward because the electoral strategy is working.
And it's part of what you and I have, why we started this podcast. Namely, we want to remake the Democratic Party. We want to create a left wing of the party that really can move the party forward as a people's, however you want to phrase it, the DSA electoral force is doing a lot of positive things in that direction. There are more people elected calling themselves socialists now than even in the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Well, and I think that's the opportunity that people who are serious, like serious people in DSA want to take full advantage of and institutionalize in some ways. And what you've hit at, which is a, you know, attention and I love our dialectic about it for years. Right. Which is to what extent looser, more temporary arrangements and organizations are the way to go or, you know, some things that are more sort of permanent and durable and so forth, like obviously both are important and learning from one another, like making, making our permanent institutions more malleable and participatory and able to change, I think is part of that solution. And then also, yeah, like letting, letting movement structures and networks like ebb and flow and live and die and not being super attached to them. I think both of those things are good lessons. But you know, I think about someone like Eric Blank, who we should have back on the show, who's been, you know, really trying to think seriously about and in good faith about, like, how can DSA be a political home for lots and lots of people and you know, a thing that they're engaged in at a much bigger scale than it is now. Which is like an audacious and interesting thing to think about because for all of it's in the news and in Republican attack ads and, and it's very real impact. You know, a hundred thousand members, a hundred thousand people in the United States is just minuscule. You know, if you compare it to the NRA or the, the Sierra Club or like any of these sort of like large mainstream long term legacy institutions.
Sorry. So anyway, the point is, if it was going to be 500,000, if there were going to be a million people in this organization, what would its internal culture be like? How would it affect politics? And certainly it can't be that and be affecting real politics and have within its membership people that are running for president or are president. It can't be that and then have its national leadership be controlled by people who are like Mao versus Stalin versus like this. This is an absurdity. Or, or who would like rescind the membership of the President of the United States if they signed a deal with the wrong. I mean there's just nothing about that that makes any sense. So. But at the same time, what I've noticed is he lately Eric wrote a piece looking at the American evangelical community and movement and churches as a place to look for lessons for how to organize or, or how. Yeah, how to organize. How to build an internal culture for dsa. And it's interesting and I'm, I, I want to give it space. I don't want to dismiss that out of hand. But what that flags for me is that more I think about the dysfunctions on the left more and more using cult theory and even religion, the history of religion and so forth. It seems very illuminating for some of the dis. The bad habits that we have and toxicity that we have and part. One of the things that you, you highlighted is that we, we just definitely don't want is for people to be, you know, in the world, but not of it to, to be evange. Like an evangelical Christian who's like living in their afterlife and everything now is the preparation for that. Like that is exactly the opposite direction I think we want to go because that's what generates the kind of magical thinking and cult like behavior that you see in sects.
Two other things I want to say real quickly before I think we should get back to your question about sort of post 60s, post underground life and talking about that period.
But one is you're this dynamic of self hatred that we talked about in terms of sort of racial privilege but also in terms of. It comes up a lot in class, to a lesser extent gender and sexuality.
But you know, I think there's really bad thinking that flows from middle class and upper class leftists hatred of their class identity.
And I think that an extreme example is like how the Japanese Red army faction, the sort of weather underground like formation in, in Japan where they all ended up like killing one another and themselves in these like really brutal criticism, self criticism sessions in which people were like exposed to the freezing cold and so forth. That should like purge their bodies of bourgeois thought. I mean that's like one extreme and then the other one is like the center for working class politics where they fetishize working class identity which seems to be reduced really down to being like a white dude worker or even not a worker. You could be like a boss, but if it, if you're a boss of people who do things with their hands, then you're a worker. I mean it's like the worst kind of reductionist stuff that is also animated by this like oh, we hate this middle class is woke and loves democrats and is weak and blah blah blah. And we should be like the tough working class who can, you know, be anti immigrant and anti trans but, but they hate the boss and that's what matters. It's a like foes like bad social science in defense of the same kind of progressive labor party shit of like we're gonna cut our hair and dress like workers and go be like workers and talk like them and that's how we're gonna move the mass line and it's all lunacy. Anyway. Those are some things I wanted to get off my chest before.
[00:46:11] Speaker A: Oh, they're very, that's very. The left point is really important because if you're a serious Marxian thinker about social structure, then the working class includes the educated working class as well as the less college educated working class includes people of, of all races who are, you know, and that the, the only way that class theory of political, of social change can be meaningful is that the majority of people in the country are in the working class and conscious of their shared, their shared destiny and power. And that includes the educated as well, the more and less educated and, And.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: And people who do all kinds of work.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Within the next five years, we're going to have that on the national level as a true battle. That is a very popular battle that unites people across many of these divisions. And that's one example. And there are quite a few other policy areas.
So I think one way that people who want to fight against the cult and revolutionary performative politics that we're criticizing and Leninist politics is to have a good, rich class analysis that feeds into their politics.
That's point one. Point two, there is a revolutionary perspective that can work, and that, I think, is the revolutionary perspective of revolutionary nonviolence. It's what A.J. musty, who's a largely forgotten figure, but a socialist, former Trotskyist minister, Christian minister Guy, remarkable figure. And he articulated, tried to articulate an idea of how you could be strictly and firmly nonviolent, but nonviolent in the sense of civil disobedience, of resistance activity, of creative tactics, of strategies of mass action that can challenge the powers. And that has worked in American history. I mean, we are one of the leading countries in the world where that kind of movement strategy has worked to bring down power structures, particularly segregation.
[00:48:44] Speaker B: Well, look, I mean, we were talking, talking about things that have come up in class, like just in the last week, we've seen social movements morphing into or. Or allying with electoral activity and so forth and overthrowing governments and replacing them and changing directions and setting new records. I think that this book, which I strongly recommend is like an important inflection point in having this, these conversations, this, that, that reckoning, in a sense. How do you think Bill and Bernadine, where do you think this story ends with this book in terms of their thinking about their actions?
What does this book add to that story?
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Well, they don't claim that they were. They were on any right track when they were in the. In the Weather Underground. I think that they, and I've heard Bernadine in particular, say we were crazy.
That's. She said we were crazy, but the times were crazy and the times made us crazy. So she's not taking, you know, and I don't blame her. She's not saying we. We were off on the wrong track and there's no way to justify it. She thinks there's. There was.
It's in a way understandable, but she's not saying, let's go back and think how admirable we were at any point in, in this story. And that's, in a way, the beauty of this book because he's able to show, I mean, more of an inventory of their crimes and their dubious behaviors than I think anyone else has ever done. He does to his own parents. But they come off in the end as having lived through that and come out as better people having learned from their, from all of those things. So that's quite a good story. That in itself is a story. So that's a good way to end, I guess, today.
[00:50:45] Speaker B: I think so.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: This has been very nice for me and I hope for listeners, as I said, a good way of provoking further thought, discussion. And as always, we'd love to get your comments at our website, which is patreon.com TSMH talking strategy, making History. That's the name of the podcast.
Thank you, Daraka. And happy birthday to Ada, your child.
[00:51:16] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:51:32] Speaker C: And just because he's human A man would like a little bite to eat he wants no bull and a lot of talk that gives no bread and meat
[00:51:48] Speaker D: and just because he's human he doesn't like a pistol to his head he wants no servant under him and no boss overhead so left 2, 3 so left 2, 3 to the work that we must do March on in the workers united front for you are a worker too Build thieves of the.
