Weather Underground

The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground

By Ron Jacobs

Verso, 1997. 216 pp., $27.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/18307

The '60s produced some inspirational politics and music of protest in the USA. But one of the less glorious products of this decade of defiance was the Weather Underground, which borrowed its name ("Weatherman", initially) from the Dylan classic, "Subterranean Homesick Blues".

Amongst some of the New Left, the bombs that Weather exploded in the buildings of corporate, governmental and military USA gave the group a certain romantic aura for physically striking back at a system which was murdering a Vietnamese nation overseas and a black population at home. Ron Jacobs was an early admirer of Weather, and in his history of the group he recalls how its bombing campaign "lifted many a revolutionary heart" and how "many anti-imperialists privately applauded" the dynamiting but how, in the end, Weather was a political failure.

As the level of US imperialist aggression and domestic repression spiralled up in the late '60s, some elements of the left believed a new fascism was brewing, if not already in full flood. Impatient with the slow pace of mass protests and political organising, they declared that the time for petitioning their rulers to repent and remedy their ways was over. The hour was late, one had a moral duty to confront evil, and armed revolution was called for.

At the 1969 national convention of Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman emerged to take control of what was left of that mass youth body after a fiasco of factionalism caused the SDS virtually to self-destruct.

Weatherman declared that the capitalist state had to be smashed here and now, that anything which delayed this imperative, like organising around reforms or working-class struggles, was counter-revolutionary. The white working class was racist and an enemy of anti-imperialism, said Weatherman, because the workers' "television set, car and wardrobe" were the fruits of oppression of the Third World. Youth alone were to be the new revolutionary agent.

Youth were summoned to their duty by the 350-strong Weatherman at the Days of Rage, a week of protests in Chicago in October 1969. Rejecting the demand for US withdrawal from Vietnam as not revolutionary enough, Weatherman wanted to "Bring the war home".

But this ultraleft maximalism and Weatherman's proposed tactics of confrontation with the cops ensured that the vast majority of the mass anti-war movement and black organisations stayed away. The tens of thousands of revolutionary youth also failed to show and the few hundred who did spent a few days fighting cops, smashing windows of banks and corporate offices, along with much random and pointless destruction.

The national Weatherman leadership (called the Weatherbureau, in one of the rare examples of humour from the group) took stock. With their rage and impatience for instant revolution still undimmed, however, they demonstrated no better appreciation of political analysis, strategy or tactics by renouncing futile street battles with cops to head, with equal futility, underground in 1970 and pick up the bomb.

The house of a judge presiding over a frame-up of Black Panther Party members was bombed, as was the New York City police headquarters. Whilst three members of Weatherman were killed by a wiring mistake in their own bomb, Weatherman were able to pull off the stunt of busting Timothy Leary, Harvard psychologist turned counter-culture and LSD guru, from a California prison to a Black Panther compound in Algeria.

The bombings continued into 1971: courthouses, an academic centre at Harvard involved in war work (the target of an all-woman group of the renamed Weather Underground), and offices of the Californian prison system in retaliation for the prison murder of Black Panther George Jackson and the vicious repression of an uprising in Attica State Penitentiary.

The US Capitol, home of Congress, was also bombed in the wake of public disclosure of the bombing of Laos, and, in 1972, in response to an intensive air assault on North Vietnam, the Air Force wing of the Pentagon was bombed, knocking out its communications facilities.

A more bizarre target was the San Francisco office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, bombed by Weather women in 1974 — a sad commentary on Weather's simplistic counterposing of reform and revolution, which led its women to bomb public sector bureaucracies rather than participate in struggles for child-care or welfare rights, reforms which would, it argued, prolong capitalism.

Nevertheless, Weather was eventually forced to concede that immediate revolution in the USA was not on the agenda. But whilst the apocalyptic rage and rhetoric died down somewhat, the fascination with violence didn't. Further bombings took place in the mid to late 1970s before Weather began to fragment internally over the issue of reform and revolution, and the role of the working class (the hard line being maintained by veteran Weather leader Bernardine Dohrn that organising amongst workers was an error of "opportunist white supremacist analysis").

Recognising that their attempt to blast the USA into socialism had been a failure, many Weather members began to surrender during the '80s. The final act of Weather was to unite with other remnants of similar armed groups to form the Armed Resistance Unit, which bombed the US Capitol in retaliation for the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. This bang was their last whimper.

If Jacobs' book about the Weather makes for slightly dull history, that is due to the limited political imagination of the group. Although Weather did want to establish a socialist society in the USA, and although it was committed to anti-imperialism, anti-racism and, belatedly, anti-sexism, its history shrinks to a repetitive list of buildings bombed.

Far more exciting, and with more political substance, was the mass organising against the war, for women's liberation, for black civil rights. Making history, not bombs, has always been more politically rewarding and more challenging.

None of this critique of Weather, to follow Trotsky's polemics against individual terrorism, is to join the professional hypocrites of the capitalist ruling class whose hysterical baying against "terrorism" hides their support for the mass terror of the capitalist state. Weather didn't kill anyone; their enemies were mass murderers.

Nor is it to deny the right of oppressed peoples in countries where bourgeois democratic freedoms are absent, such as apartheid South Africa or Latin American military dictatorships, to take up arms against tyrants. Nor is it to foster reformist illusions about the prospects for peaceful revolution in capitalist democracies. It is about taking revolution seriously, and that means critically examining the weaknesses of bomb politics and turning those misdirected energies into constructive organising.

Weather, and similar groups, can only eliminate individuals (or buildings) of the ruling class, not the class itself. Their emphasis on clandestine activity and strict secrecy prevents them linking up with mass movements. Above all, they substitute the feats of a small group for mass action, thus reducing people to passive, and powerless, spectators of their own liberation.

As the smoke cleared away after the Weather bombs, all that was left was a profound pessimism about the ability of ordinary people to make their own history. Weather, for all its fearsomeness, was but liberals with a bomb. As the parliamentary reformist says "Leave it to me", so does the bomber.

Marxism, despite its sometimes weird mutations in this period of its rebirth, had much more to offer the rebels of the '60s. The Weather Underground, on the other hand, became hoist on its own lyric: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows".