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Adventurism, Opportunism and RADS
Theory
Mao's "On Contradiction" (August 1937) has the banger about the egg, stone and chicken. [1] In it he lays out six fundamental problems to understand materialist dialectics (as opposed to idealist metaphysics). [2] Dialecticians see contradiction everywhere. Each contradiction influences a the resolution of a transition and each contradiction is unique. Internal contradictions exist within and are influenced by external conditions (generalized as periods in historiography). These contradictions resolve through antagonism, repetition, and liquidation--and a new period, pregnant with contradictions, begins.
The dialectical science provides a material framework to understand social movements in China like the Long March (1934-5), Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and Tienanmen Square (1989). The Chinese communists inspired western revolutionaries like Dutschke's "der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen" (c.1967) and the American 60s era New Left alliance of peace, free-speech, black liberation and internationalist anti-imperialism. Tom Bates' monograph RADS describes one event during the decline of this period: the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center on the University of Wisconsin campus by the New Years Gang.
The 60s period grew out of a preceding civil rights alliance of black Protestants, unsatisfied women, suburban youth, urban labor and the pragmatic Democratic party. The counterculture was a permanent revolution (though not explicitly Trotskyist) critique of the Cold War, suburban ticky-tacky liberalism--civil rights reforms of de jure but not de facto segregation. Some see 60s radicals as having a mild and sophomoric gripe with their parents. Others see Civil-Rights as a self interested plea to expand the state to enforced equality and on the road to black capitalism. These are valid. A more optimistic narrative stitches the periods together into a coherent American radical left.
The apex of the 60s was somewhere around the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park (January 1967) and the Democratic National Convention (August 1968). The Army-Math bombing is part of an escalation of weatherman style terror and state sanctioned violence which indicates the end of the period. This violent decline includes assassinations of MLK (April 1968) and RFK (June 1968), the DNC crackdown and trial of Chicago Seven (plus-one), the Chicago Days of Rage (October 1969), Fred Hampton assassination (December 1969) and Kent State massacre (May 1970). The movement was totally altered by Vietnamese victory (1973-5) which ended the anti-imperialist, draft and student deferment pressures within the coalition.
All movement is defined through internal contradictions that are resolved as part of transition. The 60s was a development [3] (evolution) from one world outlook to another. Participants conceived it as a generational ideological shift through the hubristic exuberance of youth and detachment from their history.
Within movement, dogmatic Marxists conceive a contradiction between adventurism and opportunism. A unique instance of this dialectic exists within historical period like the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, the Cold War, Civil Rights and the 60s. New Left's version of adventurism was violence like the New Years Gang. Student deferment was both adventurist (infiltrate the system Dutschke style) and opportunist (middle class privilege ). The movement's reform minded opportunists learned from Civil Rights veterans that there were material benefits to gradualism.
Adventurism is an extreme action which is out of pace with public sentiment. A movement without a mass base is not democratic. Adventurism repels those people who haven't yet developed class consciousness. Opportunism is courtship and alliance between class antagonists. Opportunists are diluted by the rationalizations of outsiders and become co-opted. Opportunism and adventurism are related to the social conflict between reform and revolution. Reformists will tend to be opportunists and revolutionaries will tend to be adventurists. Both tendencies are, to a degree, in every leftist.
Mao's proposition is not some Taoist point balanced between twin poles of adventure and opportunity. Instead, it is a scientific theory clarified through praxis that happens to be flanked on either side by adventurists and opportunists. Instead of a central thesis emerging from the conflict between extremes (seemingly Hegelian synthesis or Buddhist Middle Way), Mao is a pragmatic ally who liquidates theoretical outliers along the path determined by material conditions and dogmatic lineage.
A fifth factor, revisionism, is the mechanism that (mostly) opportunists use to undermine the observations, theory and praxis of dogmatic Marxists. Marxists, on the other hand, don't change their theory to explain contradictions--they wait for contradictions to resolve and revise theories accordingly. Revisionism justifies opportunism and pulls socialists towards liberalism.
An anarchist might observe opportunism pushing the movement rightward and expect adventurism to push it toward the left. More dogmatic and authoritarian leaders--like Lenin and Mao--don't worry as much about the party fringes as much as the true believers in their vanguard. To the pragmatic authoritarians--opportunists, reformists, adventurists and revolutionaries are temporary allies to be later liquidated from the movement. Liquidation is the fate of a self aware anarchist.
Wisconsin
When the standard narrative of Wisconsin leftist history is parsed using the dogmatic Marxist rubric on a longitudinal basis there are familiar and predictable occurrences. These include the Utopian Fourier socialists at Ceresco (Ripon), the scientific Socialists in Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Idea Progressive Republicans in Madison, 60s student radicals (like the New Years Gang), their Panther allies and contemporary movements of indigenous and anti-war activists. Wisconsin's radical environmentalist movement--the local heir of conservationists like John Muir and Aldo Leopold--of sportsmen and Luddites--fostered within the Wisconsin Idea--manifests today as a revisionist critique of liberalism's failure to regulate leaking sulfide mines, stinking Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, never ending commodification and development, invasive species, Lyme ridden ticks, or prion diseases in the precious deer herd.
Progressive left history is a critique of the state's liberal lodestars like speculative Democratic founder Henry Dodge, Civil War era abolitionist Republicans, Women's suffrage leaders like Carrie Chapman Catt, the conservationists like Muir and civil rights activists like Vel Phillips. Progressivism in Wisconsin are a reformist critique of liberal capital and not revolutionary. It indulges the metaphysical belief that reformed financial markets, universal suffrage and benign American nationalism are possible superstructures atop basic capitalist structure that trades on increasing inequality.
Liberals understand the exceptional ideal past, current material status quo, and future Platonic Utopia as the same state. To them, American exceptionalism was miraculously conceived, has never changed and is always bending towards justice. Grammatically present, past and continuous. Metaphysically immortal, material reality but also an aspiration. The distance between romantic idealism and material reality is explained by revisionist concepts like gradualism, deliberation and the moral arc of the universe. The unified worldview lacks the space between two world outlooks for the motion studied by dialectics. [4]
Generally, Wisconsin liberals from Dodge to Phillips were reformists and opportunists and not revolutionaries. They were without an allegiance or even proximity to Marx needing revision. LaFollette was also Marx-less, a Progressive Republican reformer and liberal opportunist. But his third party politics and anti-interventionist politics during WWI tempered his liberalism with a stubborn progressive righteousness. [5] Appearing like to Debs' interpretation of American Marxism via Berger; allied with Non-Partisans, Populists and Farmer-Laborites; but actually a follower of the Wisconsin Idea--intermingling of state apparatus and university extensions--of early University of Wisconsin legends John Bascom, Muir and the "frontier" historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
The defining lines between leftists and liberals are apparent through the lenses adventurism, opportunism, reform, revolution and revisionism. Opportunists are more prevalent than adventurists in the standard narrative. These include the reformist Senator LaFollette, and revolutionary Representative Berger, the revisionist Sewer Socialist Milwaukee Mayors and the modern reformist and revisionist Democratic Socialist caucus. Their earnest participation in liberal politics (the rigged superstructure of capitalist economics) is historically illiterate. With this history modern entryism is either opportunism or (more cynically) vanity.
Here's why: Berger was a participant in republican politics until he was re-elected and denied entry into the US House of Representatives. The republic changed during the pressure of WWI and Socialist (German) non-interventionists were suspect and politically limited. The conditions also affected the non-interventionist LaFollette, who was American by birth and worked within the two-parties so he kept his senate seat. LaFollette's realization came later at the hands of Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt, who co-opted the Progressive Party and liquidated Fighting Bob from his right during a presidential election.
The infamous national case which defines the WWI period is Debs' sedition imprisonment for upsetting the draft in Canton. This is the Old Left rediscovered and turned New by Vietnam era conscientious objectors, draft dodgers and refuseniks. Wisconsin's DSA (and Greens like Pete Karas or Cheri Honkala of the Poor People's Army) inherit this scape-goated (Nader-ed? McKinney-ed? Stein-ed?) history of modern era third party agitation. The most successful attacks against the progressives are not from the radical revolutionaries on their adventurist left but rather (on LaFollette, Eugene McCarthy or Bernie Sanders) from nominal allies on the party right (from T. Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Hillary Clinton). Liberal politics are stacked against the anti-intervention imperative of both the historical left and it's inheritor movements.
Compare the legacy of reformers and opportunists with the revolutionaries, adventurists and dogmatists--the people to whom political gradualism and reform is only a side effect. Their focus is an overthrow or dissociate the bourgeoisie liberal order. They range from the Peace Church Luddites in every rural town to red diaper grand-babies raised on stories of Mifflin Street; there are the weatherman anarchists (like RADS main character Karl Anderson) who opened up juice bars. There are adults who grew up hearing about the black freedom struggle from their grandparents. There are reservations full of kinds who know about the occupied the Milwaukee Coast Guard Station in '71 and Alexian Brothers' Novitiate in '75. There are videos of water protectors chaining themselves to machines and getting hauled out of public hearings. The ubiquitous Flock cameras are being vandalized. These righteous, adventurist radicals are not worried about being attacked by partisan allies on their right because they don't caucus or court opportunists or liberals to begin with.
The adventurists are fewer in number, have shorter active periods and are less featured in polite public civics. There is probably because a full spectrum education might yield a new generation of homegrown John Browns, Lucy Parsonses, Emma Goldmans, Abbie Hoffmans or Jerry Rubins. A metaphysical trick of American historiography is the incongruity of the state's revolutionary and adventurist Enlightenment republican ideology; the domestic materialist reality of reform, opportunism and oligarchy; it's international (and manifest destiny) imperial belligerence; and self-identification as a rational, legal, peace-keeping and democratic entity. In short, American ideology and material reality are at odds which makes the whole thing seem hypocritical and ridiculous.
Without radical demands, opportunism is less censored than revolutionary adventurism by the memory holed standard narrative censors in media, politics and academia who define liberal historiography. Mao liquidated the opportunists before the adventurists but the order is probably less meaningful than pragmatic. Acceleration minded adventurists might use radical leftward pressure to counterbalance the rightward trend of opportunism. Marxist dogma, on the other hand, believes adventurism is counterproductive because it pushes the movement beyond democratic consent and detaches its legitimating base. Preserving the relationship to the democratic base through authoritarian management--Anarchist expulsion from the First International, Maoist liquidations, Stalinist purges, Leninist vanguardism and the expulsion of Anarchists from the First International--is an ironic and undemocratic method used successfully by the Communists.
In this process both opportunists like Mensheviks and adventurists like Trotskyites are discarded. Sometimes the former survive as liberals. Sometimes, like Rosa Luxembourg, they get thrown off of a bridge by fascists. Some revisions survive, like the Juche Kims, the Hoxhaist Albanians, Titoist Yugos or Bolivarian Chavismos. Other adventurists are hunted and murdered by Stalinist agents. Each situation is in motion, embedded with a unique primary contradiction and influenced by evolving historical conditions. What doesn't change is the existence of tension dialectical between concepts like reform/revolution, dogma/revision, and adventurism/opportunism.
Lenin had two places for reformers. The first was as welcome side effect, not primary goal, of revolutionary action. The second was as the moderate object of ridicule. He understood the "struggle for reforms..." was important even if it didn't "destroy the ruling class." But he also believed Marxists must "wage a most resolute struggle against the reformists, who, directly or indirectly, restrict the aims and activities of the working class to the winning of reforms. Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital." If reformism can be both welcome and ridiculed so to can adventurism. Reform is good when it benefits material conditions of people but inadequate on the whole. Adventurism can also be both welcome and inadequate. [6]
The contradiction within adventurism is made of the opposites: violence (Orwellian hate) and non-violence (MLK's agape). The success of the civil rights and student movements were determined by control, modulation and manipulation of these two impulses, in full public view, by authorities and activists who embodied nightly news propaganda of democratic aspiration and authoritarian control.
The concept of love [7] is metaphysical but also material and especially clarified as a class expression conflicting with state repression. The selfless Agape was an effective tool of the Civil Rights movement employed because it, unlike the Orwellian hate, MLK-style love can be escalated ad infinitum (or ad absurdum to the hippies) to meet the immense hatred of The Bomb, Silent Spring and a live streamed genocide without risking extinction, environmental or social collapse. There is no conceivable limit to human violence against ourselves and home. But there is a limit to the planet's patience with us. To combat this, the inheritors of Civil Rights and New Left ideologies must utilize the love, Agape, which exists in an insurmountable quantity and is one of two possible resolutions to the Anthropocene Era dialectic between love and hate.
Periodization
It is impossible to understand the 60s student movement without first understanding the conditions created by the preceding Civil Rights. Part of the 60s alliance between white suburban students and black urban militants grew out of the McCarthy Era Communist Popular Front and media blacklist figures like Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger. The organizers--Ella Baker, Beyard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy--were disciplinarians who structured the moral and reformist demands of black liberation preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. Civil rights tactics like mass public boycotts intended to be theater as much as reform or rebellion--the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-6), Greensboro lunch counter sit ins (1960), Freedom Rides (1961) and Bloody Sunday (1965)--were studied and adopted by the New Left student movement of the 60s.
One difference between the Old Left of Debs and the New Left of Tom Hayden is the unabashed adoption of these Civil Rights era tactics and allies. This set up a new contradiction between the opportunist reform minded members of the Civil Rights coalition: liberation theology (charismatic preachers, radical pacifists like AJ Muste, contentious objectors activated by Vietnam) and black capitalists and the dogmatic Marxists of the Old Left (Red Diaper Babies turned students, their Panther allies and radical academics). More than the opiate of the masses, this was a two world outlook problem. The metaphysical religionists and the dogmatic materialists were due resolve or schism.
The alliance was possible because Old Left memories had deteriorated for fifty years after the Bolsheviks took over. The New Left experienced a generational disconnect with their materialist Marxist lineage because these leaders were deported, imprisoned or driven underground by the feds. The Marxist-Leninism that dominated the 60s seems to come from Panthers like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael (or the Nation of Islam) inheritors of the decolonial perspective of W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon. The students and hippies were probably less inspired by America's adventurist historical lineage of Brown, Goldman and Debs as they were decolonial contemporaries (like Che, Castro and Ho), the founding fathers, indigenous Americans or the Sino-Soviets.
An example of the split which occurred between the metaphysical and material wings of the 60s movement is the evolution of student "Freeks" to Jesus Freaks. There is something individualistic personal salvation that seems to mirror other hippies (and yippies) who transitioned into me-first yuppies.
The materialists alliance with metaphysics also opened them up to federal infiltration by counter intelligence. One example of this were leaders like A. Ginsberg - T. Leary who encouraged drugs dealt by federal chemists like Sidney Gottlieb (UW magna cum laude, 1940) through MK-ULTRA. Other drugs in this haze were brought in by CIA aligned cartels and the mafia.
This splintering of materialists and metaphysicians would be less dramatic if the baby-boom student peace movement had allied with the Soviet Union and emphasized Debs' Bolsheviki period instead of allying with non-violent reform-opportunists like John Lewis (Good Trouble is the opportunist distinction from the presumably bad trouble of adventurism) that were duped into the moral majority a few years later. Of their alliances, the students defended their independence from foreign governments and anyone over 30. They also waved North Vietnamese, Cuban and Soviet flags at their mass events.
Non-violence, be-ins and democratic education were the basis of the Years of Hope which culminated in violence, narcissism and misinformation known as Days of Rage. [8] This is the standard narrative periodization of the 60s which pits the status quo against the leftist mob. A more useful narrative focuses on the dialectical impulses within the mob as it moved from non-violent (love) to violent (hate). The bombing of the AMRC was part of 60s decline and transition into a neoliberalism--de-industrialization, deregulation, military voluntarism, financilization. The me-first Nixonian-Thatcherite-Regan, Gordon Gekko, period. In Wisconsin defined by austerity hawks Melvin Laird, Tommy Thompson and Paul Ryan.
It was an act of terror (attentat [9]) at the height of the contradictions of the dot-com crash is what shocked the empire into a new period--the ongoing War on Terror. Here, attentat was again proven effective, unpredictable and likely to result in liquidation.
Osama bin Laden tried different methods of interacting with the American empire that occupied the Middle East. He bombed military targets like USS The Sullivans attempt and the USS Cole success (2000). He bombed civilian targets in New York and military targets in Washington DC (2001). He wrote letters and recorded videos intended for public consumption. Some of which were delayed and censored by the military. These include a 2016 letter urging Americans toward climate action and the infamous 2002 "Letter to the American People," published by The Guardian which was taken down twenty years later (presumably under pressure from the Israel Lobby). The 2002 letter denounces American foreign policy in the occupied Middle East and it's support for the genocidal theocratic state.
Bin Laden's experience with Western violence, imperialism and extractive foreign policy influenced his world view and the conditions of 9/11. An inversion of the imperial boomerang--instead of colonial repression manifesting state violence in the metropole it was de-colonial resistance that manifested as rebel violence. Bin Laden's justification wasn't a claim of responsibility and was dismissed at the time as anti-Semitic. He did take claim the attentat in a video two years later.
In retrospect, through the lens of the ongoing Palestinian genocide and with clearer distinctions between Zionists, Jews, Arabs and Semites: Bin Laden was prescient even if his violent actions were adventurist. His heritage was not the American Civil Rights movement and the Old Left; it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and CIA funded Mujahideen resistance. He understood violence to be the language of empire and turned it into a common vernacular to bridge the two world views.
But that doesn't mean that every terrorist act is capable of historical impact. Lucy and Albert Parsons, August Spies, Berkman and Goldman, Sacco and Vanzetti...Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh and Earth Liberation Front are infamous American terrorists that failed in attentat because their adventurism was mistimed, disproportionate, censored or otherwise out of step with the mass democratic base. Karl Anderson is of this class of revolutionary.
Others--like John Brown, Gavrillo Princip and OBL--through theory, praxis, luck and timing actually actually altered social consciousness in real time. The Army Math bombing by the New Years Gang was a tailing act during the decline of the movement. The result was not systemic change but rather an increase in state repression justified by the student's turn to violence. The Vietnam contradiction that animated the movement resolved without Anderson who outpaced the shrinking movement and was liquidated.
Nechaev versus Most
Like everything, Anarchism has an internal contradiction. One simple way to understand it is through theorists Johann Most and Russian Sergei Nechaev. They were materially liquidated from the Old Left when Anarchists were kicked out of the First International. Nechaev's Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) was republished on the centenary by the Black Panthers in (1969) and calls for revolution by any means necessary. This is the same authoritarian license adopted by Lenin, Stalin and Mao which allows true believers to cull party dissents to serve theoretical purity. Mostians, in contrast, are propagandists--inherently democratic--and the maintenance of press organs.
Propagandists manipulate public opinion during heightened contradictions to accelerate social change toward revolution. Nihilists are the self interested prime movers of history, random and wanton--defined as without principle. Most, Nechaev, Goldman, Et al., contained this simplified dialectic. So did Karl Anderson.
Mostians seem to experience adventurist attentat similarly to how communists experience opportunist reform: as unwelcome goals but worthwhile points along the revolutionary path. A part of the process but also extremely ridiculous. Followers of Nechaev are unconcerned by the adventurist break with democracy democratic movements or gradualism. They swing for the fences, aiming for catastrophic change. Dogmatic Communists worry that opportunistic alliances with liberal reformers will become the goal instead of a side effect of praxis. But they pragmatically stomach it so long as material conditions improve. The same pragmatic relationship exists between the Communists and their Mostian allies (on the way to the liquidation at a Maoist reeducation camp).
Where Communists fear creeping liberal opportunism, anarchists see a descent into adventurist bedlam. In the later case the tension is between classless democratic internationalism and unrestrained authoritarian righteousness. To Mostians, attentat is the adventurism that counterbalances a mass of opportunists (Mensheviks, Spartacus Bund, Democratic Socialists of America). To Communists, attentat is the adventurism that detaches the movement from its democratic base.
A self-aware anarchist in this dialectic can expect liquidation or purging; imprisonment or reeducation. The Civil Rights movement gifted the New Left with the rediscovered Greek concept of agape. It has been deemphasized during the me-first neoliberal turn but it is a critical element of any subsequent. The altruistic love of mankind to an Anarchist means acting to awaken the democratic social consciousness by fighting against the internal contradiction with nihilism and authoritarian tenancies. It means internationalism and not "socialism within a state" or "socialism with state characteristics"--apparent revisionism espoused by Stalin and Deng.
The New Years Gang featured in Tom Bates' RADS were not Nihilist. They were of the broad New Left coalition of students, emancipated women, labor, environmentalists, civil-rights and free-speech activists--this is a class of believers, reformists, opportunists and sometimes revolutionaries. Not as many Nihilists. And the infamous--like reviled race warrior Charles Manson or beloved merry prankster Ken Kesey--were probably controlled by the Feds.
Karl Anderson, the New Years Gang ringleader, was not bombing random places during placid historical times. He was targeting military contractors during the height of the Vietnam War. He noticed period contradictions which included democratic imperialism, the draft, sexual-revolution and cold war diplomacy. He was inundated by leftist thought from SDS, Yippies and Black Panther Party. He presumably didn't study Lucy Parsons (or Most), who would have advised he learn how to use the explosives he created and acquired instead of dropping duds (and an unexploded ashtray) on the Baraboo munitions plant, mistakenly bombing the primate lab on campus and inadvertently killing a miliary contractor in the Army Math bombing.
What appears like Russian Nechaevian Nihilism to Bates to others might appear German Mostian attentat without Parsons' (1884) remediation from "A Word to Tramps" published in Chicago to "learn the use of explosives."
Lessons
On the history of American and internationalist anarchism, Bates' book lacked some nuance. The monograph excelled at story telling and the sources were both deep and wide. Bates was a participant in the movement. Campus, city and federal police spies were cataloging the whole thing. They had infiltrated campus and State Street and placed spies to counter the affinity-groups. Bates claims this network was disassembled after the 60s subsided. But it appears Federales continue to infiltrate every heterodox place including mosques, militias, environmental organizations, student groups and libraries in the country and many worldwide. There is no where in American public or private life that is less surveilled by state and corporate spies today than in 1970.
Drugs were another theme in the book. Both for the students who cooked, trafficked, sold and consumed everything from marijuana to mescaline; and for the CIA who cast a Kesey sized shadow over drug culture which at any time could open a conduit to mind control agents working for MK-ULTRA. A scene where Anderson loses a half hour of his day hints at these CIA drugs. Fifteen years previous, the fear (maybe the material reality?) was more psychological Manchurian Candidate than pharmacological Helter Sketer.
Police violence, torture and the involuntary haircut are part of this history. Civil Rights veterans, Old Lefties of the Great Railroad Strikes, Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians--all know state violence is one inevitable step on the way toward revolution. Every movement from emancipation to suffrage to peace to (prison) abolition has been met in America by state violence. Non-violence--manifesting agape--is one possible response to this state violence. The effectiveness is proven by Civil Rights and the subcontinental Indian decolonial movement. There are other proven international methods that have worked to varying degrees in America. The militant reformism of Emmeline Pankhurst, Mostian and Nechaevian Anarchism, dogmatic Marxism and its opportunist revisions (like the DSA). Regardless of the revolutionary theory, praxis or historical conditions--a heterodox or dissenting movement should expect to be met by the violence of the status quo.
The civil rights movement provided a non-violent clarification to Mostian attentat that corrects for adventurism. Non-violence is less likely to offend the democratic base. It is also clarifies the state's violent response to outsiders. Instead of class consciousness being shocked into existence from the assassination of a CEO--the shock comes from seeing neighbors, friends, citizens and humans: sold, drafted to become killers, imprisoned for speech, launched into the air by fire hose jet streams, beaten by policemen and dogs, bound and gagged in the courtroom, dissapeared without charge, stripped naked and stacked in human pyramids, shocked by car batteries, defenestrated, raped by objects, soldiers and dogs. These are the material conditions offered by gradualist liberals who moralize about their worrisome foes to the left--authoritarians like Mao or anarchists like Most--that might upset the moral arc of the universe.
Method
The modern method of attentat is inherited from past movements but shaped by current historical conditions. This reality is a realization that property damage is not violence, property is violence. Proportional non-violence--in line with the Golden Rule--may be more realistic then the "turn the other cheek" non-violence of the lunch counters. How many times can we see kids get blasted in the face by mace, rubber bullets, microwaves and and sonic guns while glued to the sidewalk, blocking some arms manufacturer or rescuing beagles from experimental cages. Funding a live-streamed genocide in Palestine is not a contradiction that floods Americans with shame, horror and cognitive dissonance. The country is not being shocked into class consciousness by the decline of material well-being or observable climate chaos.
What possible media or message, theory or praxis--modern attentat--could possibly shock this body politic into democratic class consciousness of materialist reality and out of the and out of manufactured opioid [10] illusion. There is more to it than posting a cell phone of a limp comrade being tossed by cops into an ICE van. Donald Trump could disinter John Lewis, shoot the corpse on Fifth Ave., dump it into the Alabama River from the Edmund Pettus bridge and it wouldn't crack the first paragraph of the racist two-time President's Fuckeulogy. This is the man chosen to lead the only state that has nuked another state that is founded by hypocrites, built by imported slaves atop indigenous genocide. The Gerald Horne, David Stannard narrative style narrative describes the American development as the repetition of a holocaust. This continues today through the proxy state of Israel.
There is little violence that compares to this. There is no dialectical terror that can counteract it. The only method left that can escalate to match the centuries of material horror which began in 1619 is agape, handed down from the Greeks via the metaphysical liberation church of the Civil Rights movement through Martin Luther King, Jr. himself.
RADS style affinity groups, black block dress codes, Faraday cages, decentralized networks--combating the surveillance state, a panopticon cell inside the imperial core. Remaining uninstitutionalized, becoming deinstitutionalized, what the hippies or Peter Pan might call refusing to grow-up. Using the liberal rights--even if they are ridiculous reforms--like free-speech. Publicize state censorship and repression of assembly and religion to shock democratic consciousness.
The public rite is divisive and can be adventurist but there is no real difference between burning a cross or a flag. Only who is triggered and who finds what adventurist or revolutionary or reactionary or whatever.
Education is not violence even if it contradicts the superstition of American exceptionalism. Organization is not violence, it is democracy. The only universal Western mandate inherited by the majority of Americans is the Golden Rule--"do unto others..." from the Sermon on the Mount--if it's good enough for Kurt Vonnegut and Jesus Christ then its good enough for the next generation of leftists who inherit this tradition.
notes:
[1] "In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis." This is an explanation of external ("the condition of change") and internal ("the basis of change") causes.
[2] The six are: "two world outlooks, universality of contradiction, the particularity of contradiction, the principal contradiction and the principal aspect of a contradiction, the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and the place of antagonism in contradiction."
[3] Mao cites Lenin to define the "conceptions of development [as] decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites..." This third part, the "...division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation," is where dialectical concepts like Opportunism - Adventurism and Reform - Revolution can be observed.
[4] These people are obsessed with Transcendental Unitarian concept of the Moral Arc of the universe from Theodore Parker's Ten Sermons of Religion (1853) that was adopted by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. The morality of justice is an ideological concept and not material that can be observed by scientific socialism. This is a problem with materialist dialectics not with theology. The New Left inherited non-violent tactics from the preceding Civil Rights Movement (which were adopted from the Indian de-colonial movement). Non-violence is something which can be escalated without alienating the democratic mass base and becoming adventurist. Forcing the state to reveal its monopoly on violence against non-violent protesters is a tactic that generates sympathy and class consciousness. Escalating violence has a logical end point--death or The Bomb--but the escalation of love (the inverse of violence) is infinite and builds solidarity. The materialist dialectic can account for violence (police beatings, property damage, imperial war, overflowing prisons, overt repression) but the unified opposite of targeted violence--which is universal selfless love: agape--is ethereal, ephemeral and a (seemingly) metaphysical phenomenology.
The metaphysical agape might become a visible quality through dialectics as the inverse of materialist violence. This contradiction resolved after the New Left 60s social revolution as the New Age 70s culture of self actualization. The culture of self improvement might be an artifact of the Protestant morality and personal relationships to god inherited from the Civil Rights era through the 60s era Jesus Freeks.
[5] "Righteous Reformer" is Nancy Unger's frame for LaFollette's biography.
[6] V.I. Lenin "Marxism and Reformism" Pravda Truda No. 2, September 12, 1913.
"Unlike the anarchists, the Marxists recognize struggle for reforms, i.e., for measures that improve the conditions of the working people without destroying the power of the ruling class. At the same time, however, the Marxists wage a most resolute struggle against the reformists, who, directly or indirectly, restrict the aims and activities of the working class to the winning of reforms. Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers, who, despite individual improvements, will always remain wage-slaves, as long as there is the domination of capital."
[7] Specifically "agape" as used by Martin Luther King Jr.: "unmotivated, spontaneous, overflowing...seeks nothing in return." in "Levels of Love," in the Sermon Delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church (16 September 1962).
[8] Todd Gitlin The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage UK: Bantam Press, 1987.
[9] Attentat is the Anarchist concept of propaganda of the deed attributed to Johann Most. This is different than Sergei Nechaev's revolution by any means necessary which is a different, Nihilist, anarchist tenet. Both men preached violence but they came to it from a different place.
Most was a German newspaper man who started with politics and became disenchanted toward revolutionary violence. He was influential to American Anarchists like Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The later two were inspired by Most to shoot industrialist Henry Clay Frick. When this was unsuccessful they turned on Most--Goldman challenged him in public and whipped him in the face. Most was probably the inspiration to Lucy Parsons famous command to learn the use of explosives. Nechaev was a Russian Nihilist student of Bakunin. He influenced the Russian Communists like Lenin and Stalin. The over-simplified shorthand for the Anarchist dialectic is Mostian (propaganda is democratic) and Nechaevian (Nihilism is authoritarian).
This distinction is not made by Tom Bates book RADS where all anarchism is Nechaevian. This is inadequate because the book has whole chapters about Karl Anderson's intellectual and moral beliefs. These include preserving life, like warning people to evacuate. The campus student movement was advised by college professors like William Appleman Williams, Harvey Goldberg and George Mosse--people with beliefs beyond the abyss who have glossy photos in the book.
The Nihilist turn of the movement was not the bombings--it was the Yuppification of the leadership (Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin) and the abdication of the clown prince Abbie Hoffman for his own safety. After seeing BPP allies assassinated it is pragmatic, albeit opportunist, to tune back in to survive.
[10] The difference between opium, opiate and opioid is poetic license with a footnote (like all good poems). Opium is the natural and semi refined state; opiate are drugs refined from the plant; and opiods are semi-synthetic and synthetic drugs. They all act on the same brain receptors and share chemical traits but (like Mao's egg, rock and chicken)--there are conditions that a poppy seed can become opium or an opiate but there is no condition that it can become the synthetic opiate. There is a meaning here that is completely irrelevant to the masses who consume the stuff.
"Johann Most, German anarchist, aged 33"
via wikimedia; PD-Public Domain by date, 1879.
"Picture of John Bascom, President of the University of Wisconsin from 1874-1887"
via Biographical history of Massachusetts: biographies and autobiographies of the leading men in the state, Volume 1. by Samuel Atkins Elliot; PD-Public Domain by date, 1911.
sources:
Mao Tse-tsung "On Practice" (revised for Selected Works) Yenan: Anti-Japanese Military and Political College, July 1937.
-- "On Contradiction" (revised for Selected Works) Yenan: Anti-Japanese Military and Political College, August 1937.
Tom Bates Rads: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath New York: Harper Collins, 1992.