A few Parties and a few personalities

The Black Panther Party

The motto of the Black Panther Party was taken from Mao's Little Red Book and his military writings. How easy it was for them to accept the saying that, "We are advocates of war" but only "war can be abolished through war and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun". This quote was repeated by Huey Newton, the Black Panther's Minister of Defence though the tautology of the quote almost defies belief). Moreover the very notion of having a Minister of Defence shows how much the statist and militaristic ideology had altered the heads of the Panthers. Fetishzing the uniform (like all military formations from the IRA to ETA) they could only create a hierarchy, which produced all the social relations of bourgeois society. The dangers of militarism in an armed struggle have to be combated and no social revolution can proceed without the immediate abolition of the standing army.

In the United States the use of the gun is endemic and usually it means a bloodthirsty nothing in terms of revolutionary potential. The Mafia for instance used military formations to reinforce super-exploitation and frighten off the law just as they had done in southern Italy. Eldridge Cleaver (later of Cleaver Jeans Ltd plus the church) and always more 'honest' than the media-oriented Newton said in an essay which he wrote for Rolling Stone mag' in 1970 under the title 'Meeting the Panthers' (an interview which was later published in a heavily edited version in Post Prison Writings) described how he first met the Panthers and immediately turned onto them and their style, saying that "when they [the Panthers] walked into the room, armed with guns... this was the way to organize, not like the long-hairs, more like the Mafia." And it didn't stop with verbal flourish. Panthers who seriously criticised the organisation were offed in the best Stalinist tradition, including the black revolutionary James Carr whose biography BAD (published by Californian ex pro-situs) was silenced by that American liberal consensus which subconsciously suppresses the truth particularly when it's literally staring it in the face. The book a fine account of Carr's life didn't really get much distribution.

That the Panthers in their heyday had any credibility at all clearly shows how far America at the time was from social revolution. European Maoism eagerly accepted the Panthers, and Anarcho-Maoism in France grabbed everything it considered 'subversive'. Thus in issue number 5 of the spontaneist journal Vive la Révolution which carried the title, "To change life is the destruction of the old order" there were articles on the Panthers. It was a common but horrible mix at one and the same time. The Panthers ended up like other Maoist groups – on the frontline of reform, some teaching backward kids, others setting up pressure groups against right wing businessmen.

But before we return to the American Maoist experience we must now take a detour through France......

La Gauche prolétarienne and Jean Pierre Le Dantec

Jean Pierre Le Dantec was born 1943 in Brittany, the son of Communist party primary school teachers strongly affected by the Resistance. In 1966 Le Dantec was influenced by Louis Althusser and Mao and helped produce Red Guard committing himself "body and soul" to the recently formed UJC M/L (Union de Jeunenesses Communistes Marxistes Leninistes) a breakaway from the UEC (Union des Etudiantes Communistes) becoming by 1968 one of its principal leaders. Well before 1968, Le Dantec proved his mettle shouting insults at the bourgeoisie in college get-togethers. A confirmed Maoist he nonetheless read the situationist Vaneigem's Traite de Savoire Vivre and was more than impressed. He also read Althusser's Pour Marx and Lire le Capital ...."This thought whose brilliant rigour is only surface slowly instilled in me its poison"..... "I became like many others a virtuoso of the 'epistemological break' in Marx's thought" believing Althusser would shortly give his undivided thought to the UJC. Not only was Trotskyism "metaphysical" reducing everything to a "simplistic proletarian opposition" [could have fooled us!] failing to grasp the necessity of stages but what is worse had not made any impact over 40 years. So the Alan Krivine faction in the UEC out of which later came the Trotskyite JCR was under considerable suspicion.

From the point of view of developments occurring in the early 1970s it is important to realize that Le Dantec though accepting the Rue D'Ulm circles (the student brothels of Althusser) view that Stalin was after all a major theorist, could never fully reconcile himself to the purges. Not only had Mao finally ignored the Comintern but had seized power also without resorting to "slander or persecution". The truth concerning Lin Piao's death was in 1972 a contributory cause to the dissolution of La Gauche prolétarienne, the party that became the bed rock of the French Maoist movement and which Le Dantec was instrumental in organizing.

Once formed the UJC M/L found it essential to reply to the Trotskyite "Comite Vietnam National" which they thought reformist and drawing inspiration from the 1930s French Popular Front government with their own "Comites Vietnam de Base" pledged to untiringly support the NLF in Vietnam and the invincibility of a "popular war" having as their priority agitation in popular quarters and factories. For close on a year Le Dantec became part of the scenery of his quarter selling the Courier de Vietnam written by Vietnamese themselves. (How many other Maoists less scrupulous than Le Dantec rose from such mean beginnings in this leftist pantomime of newsvendor to say, The White House?)

In the summer of 1967 he was chosen to represent the UJC on a visit to China (who paid?)..."Let me give you an idea of my excitement, our excitement. We were going to get to know the country haunting our dreams..... His first impression is everyone's nightmare epic cliché.... "At the back of a hall [in Canton] draped in red, dwarfed by the white statue of Chairman Mao was a young man, in green dungarees joyously waving his arms. Our first Red Guard!"

Come 1968 and the UJC are concentrated mainly in the factories and workers' quarters. Their idea of a student movement following a reading of Mao's is one of self-effacing support for workers' struggles. Le Dantec admits he would have spat on the Situationists, Ten Days that Shook the University and is frank enough to say as a member of the UJC's political bureau he first found out about the trouble in Nanterre in Paris Match. Without exception all the French Trotskyist and Maoist groups regarded one of the major events in world history - May '68 - with deep suspicion and at best merely tail-ended a leaderless process. The Maoists bought crash helmets not to fight capital so much as to participate in street demonstrations against the- neo-fascists of "Occident" in support of the Vietcong. On the working class 'front' their aim was to create a split in the Communist party CGT union structure, the only union in the opinion of the UJC with clearly working class origins. They hoped to do this by an unswerving support f or CGT principles exposing in this way the "revisionists". "In short we had dreamt of a return to a lost original purity" using the name of Monmousseau, a founding member of the CGT, an indefatigable Stalinist militant faithful to the French Communist party who had launched a campaign in 1948 against the CGT's "useless baggage". The pity is amongst older workers, such figures are often remembered with genuine though deluded affection. Sentimental memories provided fruitful pickings for the Maoists. Hence the paradox which is very much still with us of Maoist inspired terrorist groups recruiting mainly from teenagers and pensioners (c.f. The Red Brigades in Italy).

Heralding the First of May the UJC printed an edition of its paper Servir le People with the headline "long live a fighting CGT" and bringing out at the same time the first edition of La Cause du Peuple linking the student movement to the 'masses'. The name was inherited from George Sand's original incendiary newspaper of the same name from the tumultuous year of 1848. By now the Maoists had a toehold within the factories with the formation of the GTC (Groupe de Travail Communiste) and the UJC intended as a group to wait on the sidelines as the invariably huge CGT demonstration passed by until the arrival of a delegation who had been converted to the UJC's views on the CGT. There they intended to noisily join it giving the appearance of being more numerous than they were. In political cunning the Mao's had learnt many a lesson from the Communist party. They were not above circulating a rumour either that Nanterre was about to be invaded by crew cut paras determined to sweep the faculty clean. Helped by the anarchists they were able to recreate in their imagination Peking university achieving a "political victory" over the Trotskyists of the JCR (Jeune Communiste Revolutionnare) who denounced it as a "circus", True an appeal to the imagination often has greater effect than appealing to shit reality but let's face it Jean Pierre those pits and traps a la Vietnam, those giant slings and catapults were deadly serious, there was nothing light hearted about their construction. On the 3rd of May, Nanterre was closed but the UJC instructed its militants to remain in their quarters and not to go anywhere near the Latin Quarter believing it would close the movement within a university ghetto. Breaking the interdiction himself, Le Dantec visited the Latin Quarter then retired to a cafe complaining of the petite bourgeois egoisms behind the revolt denouncing it as a social democratic plot orchestrated by the Trotskyists. Such views could have come straight from the pages of the Communist party paper, L'Humanite.

Michel Le Bris

Born in Brittany in 1945 the bastard son of a maid, he is at 14 placed in a chic lycee at Versailles while his mother works as a maid in the landlord's winter residence. 1958-68 were for him

"Ten somnambulistic years, studying mechanically with no other aim than that of responding to my mother who had placed on me her own revenge on life - she had had to leave school at the age of nine working in order to survive and looking after my invalid grandmother all alone."

For ten years he felt himself "somewhere else" lost between Brittany that continued, "to exist only in my memory and a more and more insupportable modernity". And then there was "the horror, blood, torture" in Algeria contradicting that things will turn out all right. The student milieu was to him particularly hateful finding them, whether because of the benefit of hindsight we can't be sure

"all so proud of their learning, their modernity, their human, linguistic and structural sciences - and me who was half dead and my country with it, from their science. I knew intuitively at least one thing that the learning had constituted itself by excluding mine, crushing it through their culture, by my exclusion."

Throughout this time jazz had helped him survive believing the riots in Watts and Detroit had given birth to a magnificent, radical, new music that we called the "new thing" ("la nouvelle chose"). In order to defend this "new music" Le Bris took over the editorship of a small revue Jazz Hot helping translate into French interviews with black jazz musicians biased towards a simplistic black versus white conflict. (The 1970 Champ Libre /10:18 book Free Jazz / Black Power makes fairly extensive references to these interviews. A revived Third International model of revolution no longer required the Bolshoi Ballet so much as jazz improvisation to renew itself thus resorting to a far more recent cultural archaism). At the same time Le Bris was writing articles to familiarize himself with science fiction: "In short I was exploring in my own way the lines of "possible rupture" making for a revolution in our culture - but as one clutches at a buoy so as not to sink".

May 1968 arrived. Considering that he took over the editorship of La Cause du Peuple after Le Dantec's imprisonment only vacating his chair to Jean Paul Sartre when he likewise was sent to jail, Le Bris does seem to flatter himself that May '68 was "simply first a smile". (It goes without saying that subsequently there wasn't much to smile about in La Cause de Peuple). He did not he admits fight on the barricades in the Rue Gay Lussac not having "a soldiers soul".... "I don't think May '68 was a war... but primarily real life"...... It was "an insurrection of the sons against the father" ... "There had been for the first time a transgression."

But only it seems to fall into the clutches of Maoism. Like others associated with La Gauche prolétarienne, Le Bris was to quite rapidly grow disillusioned with it. Speaking of this and other explicitly vanguard groupuscules he said... "They did not have any time for tenderness – it was a question of seizing power not of laughing." On paper an admirable sentiment yet in practise its real "appel" (Le Bris' word) is to an undefined spirit beyond the political dimension but which still leaves political structures intact. After quitting La Gauche prolétarienne, La Bris became a Nouveaux Philosophe publishing in 1978, L'homme aux Semelles de Vent (Man with Winged Feet?) and a Breton nationalist. From loud-mouthed Maoist mania to the sad complaint of regional nationalism is not really such a giant step: neither ever had nor ever will envisage a world free of politics, money and the state.

La Gauce prolétarienne, and its newspaper La Cause Du Peuple... some of the difficulties encountered

How explain the success of a paper like La Cause du Peuple? No other 'new left' political magazine appearing in the UK can lay claim to a similar success. On the sub-cultural side there was in the UK, The International Times which escaped the confines of an 'educated' readership while France possessed no equivalent to that paper. A miner interviewed in the book Les Maos en France said the attraction of La Cause du Peuple lay in it calling a spade a spade and hints that this was proletarian journalism. At any rate it had some influence on him to take up the journalistic cudgel and write outraged articles on pit accidents etc.

However the appeal of La Cause du Peuple was its declamatory style – a call to arms rather than a careful analysis of tendencies. The pointed refusal of La Gauche prolétarienne to produce a theoretical equivalent of Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the "theoretical practise" if you like without which the proletariat was lost according to Lenin (!!) - struck a chord somewhere in the hearts of the French working class. Is it by chance that the miner mentioned above quotes Marx via Mao (unknowingly?) on the educated educator? "There were the texts where Mao said that before being an educator it was necessary to educate oneself. Really it was that we clutched at then."

The setting of the special status of intellectuals at zero – which La Cause du Peuple seemed to practise and up to a point insinuated in the staccato delivery where heroic catchphrases counted most in an otherwise crude political consensus of students, workers, petite commerciants met the vengeance of the proletariat against 'clever' intellectuals halfway. In theory at least all were as one in their ignorance.

The editorial board of La Cause du Peuple contained a "former worker" who apparently possessed the ability "to discover in our phrases the words which carried: and the expressions lacking force" (Les Dangers du Soleil). Necessarily the language of the factory and workshop was not that of the Academie Francaise and La Cause du Peuple was right in regarding that tongue as also the language of negotiations between worker and capitalist - the latter finally as master of the situation. But the language of the factory and workshop was for La Cause du Peuple finally insufficient - it was utilizable; even "our treasure" – "those scraps of phrases coming without any modification from the mouths of workers" but ultimately it had to be given a political inflection. The heroic commands were to trap the proletariat. Eventually the effigy of the proletarian hulk - all boiler suit and muscle - strangling diminutive capitalists turned into a fanatical Goliath of morality and this consequence was present from the first fanciful cartoons.

Though the threats that La Cause du Peuple made against the murderer of B.G. who was raped and brutally murdered in the mining regions of the north at Bruay was bloody enough - they really concealed a saint like conception of the proletariat even though several businessmen were suspected. The working class is "without stain" (La Cause du Peuple), it would not - it could never do anything similar!! You must be joking. But in defending the proletariat like this, La Cause du Peuple / J'Accuse helped make the working class ashamed in front of itself driving 'negative' thoughts underground and ultimately of worth to the bourgeoisie who have to control the proles on many levels and 'shame' is an invaluable weapon in its defensive arsenal.

The real problem is explaining why 'the people' fall for this image of themselves and up to a point reinforce it. The threats in La Cause du Peuple / J'Accuse was also the occasion of an inter-party crises - a test of party loyalty from which would follow the purges (as one of the editors of La Cause du Peuple said at the time) "The article is not perhaps perfect but to my mind it possesses a special quality by bringing the vipers who are poisoning the editorial committee out of their den." (Les Dangers du Soleil).

La Cause du Peuple was on the way to becoming the "spiritualism of the corporation" (Marx) and this fiction of an angelic proletariat was only a symptom of a nascent state rationality, which must turn things on their head. And it was also more than cynical manipulation or opportunist behaviour with the best of intentions. Rather it reflected the fundamentally false picture, parties must build up of reality to fox those they rule over and this incident helped mark in at least one, instance (the case of Andre Glucksman) the drawn out birth of the Nouvelle Philosophie which paradoxically still reflects the hold of this genre of politicking because the only way it can see beyond it, is by going back to the forlorn liberalism of human rights campaigners demanding - ever demanding - cast iron guarantees from the state. It would also be interesting to know if the Nouvelle Philosophie hadn't also been nurtured when La Cause du Peuple went canvassing for all the help it could get when the paper was eventually brought before the French courts. After all, the mere mention of good names with international reputations (the buffoon Sartre etc) would surely be sufficient to dampen the wrath of the most ardent state Prosecutor. Inevitably La Cause du Peuple folded giving way to the daily Liberation a more watered down successor, even if more superficially open and less party oriented.

Some thoughts on Maoist populism, Bringing stars down to an everyday dimension. The interviewer interviewed.

La Gauche prolétarienne and La Cause du Peuple used celebrities to defend themselves when they found themselves in deep trouble and as VIP propaganda publicising militant causes in lieu of the failure of their own propagandist tactics based on the 'name' of ex-jailbird Maoists who courted police arrest for publicity purposes. Le Dantec says, "After my trial and release I had in a way become a personality therefore the eventual dealings with the police could not risk passing unnoticed."

A caravan was ostentatiously rented in Le Dantec's name wherein some hunger strikers could at least comfortably grow hungrier before the gates of the Renault factory at Sequin. Alas the caravan was impounded.

"The situation became then, if not desperate, at least critical." Que faire? The answer was as slow in coming as a push button quiz programme.

"With others I set myself to breaking the isolation of Christian, Saddock and Tose [the hunger strikers] by asking some celebrities to support them so that the alerted press would condescend to interest itself in the protestors---hence in the layoffs and the repression at Sequin."

So it was that famous French actress, Simone Signoret was dragged into the affaire as the glamourous leading lady of the wageless society. One could be forgiven for thinking the following was from Cosmopolitan, Honey, Harpers Bazaar, Elle, Brigitte, etc.

"Here I was seated opposite one of the idols of my communist youth......I stammered certainly but Simone is a woman who knows how to put everyone at ease while being extremely exacting in her obligations. She did not want in any way to play the obscene role of actress, lady, patroness in a mink coat coming to visit unfortunates........

When she is not acting, Simone is fantastically available, ready to acquaint herself with anything and so generous! Soon our conversation drifted. Here am I telling her about my life! We parted very late like old friends."

(Les Dangers du Soleil)

In recent years there has been a change in the style of reporting in fashion mags and reflects the crisis of the star system resolving itself finally in favour of the non-superstar. It is a way of challenging the role of actor giving it an ordinary dimension, something not particularly favoured, a job with ordinary human asides like chatting to one's peers. So the interviewer goes away interviewed, the humdrum given a new prestige. The meanest sparrow has been seen to fall witnessed by the pop stars half rising from their regal orange boxes in an ambiguous gesture of abdication.

This response to crises lacks any historical parallels. During the 1930s, Hollywood for instance gave pre-imminence to the safe harbour of family life. The child superstar Shirley Temple focused the passions dispersed by the depression of uprooted families. However that development came about in response to economic crises – it did not occur as the result of a failed total social revolution as is the case today. Hence its trajectory was more apparently conservative. It did not have to look for ways of doctoring the disease through an idolatry of defiance. Thus the star is humanised, the glacial haughtiness becomes a thing of the past.

Yet in spite of the fireside chat of Le Dantec, what it gains in approachability it loses in realism. It does not come as a revelation to find someone is approachable because it is as much a myth as the glamour of cosmic unavailability. An open door to close scrutiny, an appointment, can co-exist alongside the blazing pages of soft cosmetic products because it neglects to show the havoc which more advanced bourgeois reporters revel in revealing –e.g. the Elvis Presley horror stories.

The demand of commitment from an artist also helped destroy the dumb fuck left who haven't much of a theory at all on everything never mind art and this when the pan has boiled dry is Le Dantec's position. Soon there is not much to revolt against. Between street theatre and Hollywood there is only a difference of degree – e.g. Car Wash the film for the blue-collar worker. Le Dantec's uncritical regard for actors – only wanting of them commitment could easily be that of the contemporary swimming pool 'reds' like Burt Lancaster.

The countryside, guns and "Le Weekend"

To find roots was easier in countries, which still had a peasantry like in Italy, Spain or Portugal. Even in France where the Maoists tail-ended the regionalist movement and the policies of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC (CAP) trying to radicalise it, it is interesting to note their development. Certainly there were many peasants who looked with horror on the changing landscape and looked back into the past where their existence was more secure. Le Dantec in his book Les Dangers du Soleil speaks of the large agriculturalists eating up the Bretagne countryside in such a nostalgic fashion that one feels that he is prepared to take out a home-owners grant in order to save a single thatched cottage. For Le Dantec nostalgia develops into a conservative opposition to tourism which emphasizes not its boredom, misery, rip-off etc but tourism as destroying the 'natural' beauty of 'authentic' peasant culture in Britanny / Langudoc etc.

By 1977, when he wrote Les Dangers du Soleil Maoist party vanguardism had reached such a point of confusion that Le Dantec couldn't distinguish natural occurrences from bogus revolutionary parties or the working class – it was that much of a jumble. He can now speak, in Wordsworthian terms of the "spirit of the wind which each must fear" and this is not just transference of Chinese poetry into French. It is that the natural world has taken precedence over the revolutionary crowd in which he no longer has any faith. The failure of vanguard party politics has given way to the personified natural world and he writes,

"It was necessary to return to the origins, to establish the genealogy of our despair, to transform the idea of revolution, into which we had all put so much hope, into a new quest."

"To establish the genealogy of our despair" for Le Dantec became a withdrawal into the Bretagne past, even as he cynically or crazily (?) admits, "of those who no longer exist." The final chapter of his book An Dro Enezenn is a fool's effort at revival having many features in common with the English Romantic intellectuals effort to resist the development of the productive forces by poetry, small farming and Kubla Khan type fantasy. An Dro Essezann is also a political settling of accounts with empty negative conclusions. His erstwhile belief in proletarian violence is projected on the elements. The night of the barricades in Paris 1968 ten years on has become the storms that lash the Brittany coasts, "the sea, where calm has not yet returned calls me." The incessant rain having submerged a building lot returning the land to swamp, summon to mind by default the revolutionary seizure of power of the material environment and its transformation. Unable to accept revolution or reject it completely, the revolution returns on the condition that it is denied, externalized by the delinquent storms of nature. The only permitted human intrusion on this desolate scene is the ghostly presence of ancient Breton Opposition to the present conceived more in terms of, (yes you've guessed it), an immeasurably rich past. Thus protest begins to take on an inevitably doomed, eccentric guise.

Pure nature, an idealised peasantry, has a long history in Maoist archives. It overlaps with a military strategy too; one only has to remember the lamentations of Regis Debray in Revolution within the Revolution regretting that the urban workers were bought off by too much consumerism to be revolutionary and his repetition of that old cliché about the countryside surrounding the city. Mao's village - encircling - city strategy repeated and intensified in Lin Piao's, Long Live the People's War (1965) a text which put this same strategy and all the social relations which came with it, on a world-wide basis. In terms of world politics the military strategy used and formulated by Mao in 1938 was recreated in the mid-1960s in such a way that Europe and the US could be seen as cities and the rest of the world as rural. The war against Imperialism was seen in such terms; terms which groups like the R.A.F. in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy were later to use as a defence of terrorism.

Viewed as heroes Che Guevara and Nguyen Van Troi and the writings of Regis Debray (largely pilfered from the ideas of Che) were made pertinent to militaristic First World strategy. Debray, like Che has insisted that the army should direct the party and that military strategies determined political ideas. This form of organization became more and more vital to Maoist eschatology. Often seeing themselves as an embryonic war council (like the Weathermen at Flint, Michigan 1970) they were to take up positions, which gave them confidence over and above all others. Who cares about the sacrifice? As Che put it in 1962 in one of his most cynical statements: "The blood of the people is our most sacred treasure it must be shed in order to spare more blood in the future." Essentially the Maoist militarists lived in a make-believe world of media headlines and press conferences on the front lines; these conferences substituting the 'poor' consciousness of the mass of the workers. It was expected that the heroism and militarism of a class (which was never heroic or militaristic) would gel into some kind of spontaneous mass action - in which insurrectionary politics would explode into Maoist war. Their belief in war - like the sound and fury of the Futurist movement – was a part of the war of believing. It is not just necessary to point out the reactionary nature of the Futurist appeal to war as it is to attack all its modern day varieties, including the Maoist one. The difference between the Futurist and Maoist appeal to war lay in the fact that the Italian (especially Marinetti) 'superman' would find their dimension in such a war while for the Maoists it was the "working class" who were to find their 'lost' heroism.

A posture of French liberalism (which is not so alone in the world) with its frothy amour propre congratulates itself for having spent some idle moments in defence of the regional autonomy, the underdog and the cultural heritage, which is being destroyed, while all the time working for the Paris Leviathan. The rationalized agriculture of CAP advances and the basis and support for such eco-regionalist movements vanish, despite the partisans of Le Dantec and Le Bris. Like Le Dantec, "a soul a little mad and one which prefers to return to the things of yesteryear" the hollyhocks will lean over the rose-hedges and country crafts will serve elite pursuits and a snooty remonstrance against the ills of mass production.

Even if we wanted to save the villages from utter devastation in the face of CAP it is not through such regionalism and eco-political considerations that it could happen. This type of ideology especially its present-day ecological defenders, can only change the large tracts of land now demarcated for intensive capitalist farming or industrial development into a place where the professional city-dweller can turn peasant partisan for the duration of "Le Weekend", maintaining the thatched roof and the "purity of the past". To judge by letters in Le Monde, this process is in its infancy – the Celtic towers are falling into ruin, the harbour walls are breaking up - but it could be reversed and then what length could the often uneasy alliance between a form of archeology and its senior partner big capital go to? Certain crafts are kept in existence solely for tourist purposes (c.f. posters on Crete), indeed these living workshops are often open to the public satisfying the need these days for the past to function in its totality as it becomes ever more popular to question the lifelessness of the glass showcase. What better than to bathe in the ambience of the past, see those costumes taken off the museum mannequins and put on the unemployed become living antique weavers. And no capitalist in sight only the benign presence of myriad National Tourist Boards!!!

"We are the people of our generation" ... (P.L.) Progressive Labor / Weathermen in the USA... Plus the beginning of the collapse of classical Maoism in Europe and America...

Reading much of the folksy material of the Maoists in the early 1970s makes one think that the revolt is more about aesthetic life style than anything else. If they have echoes in Galway or Brittany or Languedoc it merely shows that their literary apologists have gone overboard with fine phrases. Yet it also belied something else: the need for a fundamental ecological transformation though well messed up with Leninist leftovers.

Unfortunately it wasn't seen as clearly as this and the American Weathermen, even as late as 1974, clinging to the desperation and isolation of the underground, could condemn the most technologically developed country through the romanticised haze of underdevelopment. The following quote is both full of Maoist crap as well as having a visionary edge at one and the same time...

"This is a deathly culture. It beats its children and discards its old people, imprisons its rebels and drinks itself to death. It breeds and educates us to be socially irresponsible, arrogant, ignorant and anti-political. We see the most technologically advanced people in the world and the most politically and socially backward. The quality of life of a Chinese peasant is better than ours. The Chinese have free and adequate health care, a meaningful education, productive work, a place to live, something to eat and each has a sense of her or himself as part of a whole people's shared historical purpose. We may eat more and have more access to gadgets but we are constantly driven by competition, insecurity, uncertainty and fear. Work is wasteful and meaningless and other people are frightening and hateful. This is no way to live."

(From A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire: a political statement of the Weather Underground, May 9th 1974).

Maoism in the USA in the form of Progressive Labour criticized the introverted almost solipsist subjectivity of the counter culture (the acid trip etc.) and its stars like Ken Kesey, only to reproach the U.S. workers with the baneful horror that everything which they possessed as workers had been plundered from the Third World. P.L. asked them to make a revolution in North America so that the Third World could take back everything they had taken. They could attack ordinary white workers for the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton or the imprisonment of Bobby Seale, then Black Panther Minister of Information. Such responses had their counterpart in Europe too. In France, La Gauche prolétarienne could organize a demo in which Renault workers were harassed and insulted because somehow they were partly responsible for the death of Che Guevara. Less spectacularly in the UK, Maoists could declaim to tired workers on the way home on balmy summer evenings about Che's heroic example neglecting to point out that he had also been president of Cuba's national bank when the majority of those harangued had never been in the position to even get an appointment to see a bank manager. Inevitably most workers ignored such garbage. Progressive Labour did this in spite of the fact that their ideological base was the blue-collar worker and the industrial proletariat though they also realized such a base was insufficient to create a mass movement. They wanted the mass movement but with the industrial workers in the saddle led only by themselves who exclusively were able to comprehend their real but hidden desires! Indulging in all kinds of populism as in means of tapping into this 'hidden' populism was also designed as a means to create the larger party. They were that arrogant!

Their Maoist compatriots, the Weathermen who were to emerge as an anti P.L. faction in S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) congress of 1969, nevertheless also accepted Lin Piao's thesis on imperialism and, along with Progressive Labor were to put themselves up as some kind of 'Levellers' - world tax collectors to even out inequality. The notion that all the workers of the First World (if one can still use that term with any accuracy) were guilty was to reach extraordinary heights not only in the USA but also throughout the world. It had a social base alright drawn mainly from specific social strata, just a little above the broad mass of workers plus those in search of an anti-consumer life style and assisted by the chanting voices of the dissenting bourgeoisie, the sub- poets, long after the great days of poetry had gone forever.

"Who's got the guilt?
We have America.....
So happens we missed the boat to the New World."

(Allen Ginsberg, October 1960)

If La Gauche prolétarienne in France tried to organize among school kids and foreign non-unionized workers (e.g. in 1970 there were 3.5 million foreign workers in France) the Weathermen also tried to organize among hippies and youth culture after a blue-collar beginning. While Progressive Labour and the Weathermen tended to criticize the New Left for its anti-communism and the yippies for their self-indulgence they were forced to recognise that "youth culture was temporarily (but only temporarily) the place to be. By July 1969 the Weathermen had moved away from the old P.L. line on union organizing and the proletarian purity of industrial workers to an amalgam of "youth culture" LSD and a heroic bravado, which quickly became terrorism. In Sept 1970 in their fourth communiqué they could write.... "LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future where it will be possible to live in peace."

Or in the Fall Offensive communiqué (October 8th 1970):

"We are building a culture and a society that can resist genocide. It is a culture of total resistance to mind controlling maniacs; a culture of high-energy sisters getting it on, of hippy acid smiles and communes and freedom to be the farthest out people we can be."

And how very recuperated Motherfucker influenced minus the essential situationist / anarchist perspective! It was the last euphoric / apocalyptic fling before their sails were trimmed and many drifted into the "small is beautiful" robotic smiles of the new ecology movement though there was a mini-revival in 1974 in a political statement from the Weather Underground re the aforementioned Prairie Fire. Pathetically it was still extolling the virtues of Chinese peasant life and the ensuing years had only deepened a little their critique of highly developed capitalisms. Desperate ravings still amounted to a thirst for bureaucratic power. Nonetheless this change was also reverberating throughout Maoist circles in Europe.

Bit by bit, Le Dantec became a partisan of the Nouvelle Philosophie, which for "humane reasons" rejects the necessity of revolution as leading inevitably to the Gulag. The Nouveaux (or Nouvelle) Philosophes paradoxically still clearly reflect the hold of Maoist politicking because the only way they can see beyond totalitarianism, is by going back to a forlorn liberal existentialism of human rights campaigners demanding - ever demanding - cast iron guarantees from the state which finally can be no other than mendacious. The despair of the Nouveaux Philosophes against the state while hypocritically so often quite lucratively funded by a position ensconced within the para-state reflects a culturally necrophiliac social position where they can afford to contemplate an eternity of misery. Other French Maoists (like those chameleons in Italy making their names a little later) changed their masks as part of the pot pourri of Les Autonomes setting about abusing the very essence and relevance of autonomy. Many who were on the fringes of The Weathermen in the USA less subtle but no less saboteurs became part of the mushrooming milieu for the reform of everyday life separated into fragments - Bernadette Dorn and feminism and particularly the 'rational' consumerism of the ecology movement. And while there are antediluvian Maoists who may reject these people as not having anything to do with 'correct' Marxist Leninist thought (why is Stalinist fundamentalism constantly reoccurring in America?) there can be no doubt that a cunning and altered Maoism in the early 1970s was crucial in the development of the present day ecology movement.