Meaghan Linick (right) of Newschool SDS, Iraq Moratorium, 2007. Photo Thomas Good/Next Left Notes

Mark Rudd delivered this speech, excerpted below, at the Feb. 17, 2007 meeting of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the organization for alumni of SDS.

(Counter)-Revolutionary Suicide

I come before you this morning as one of the principle authors, almost forty years ago, of a totally failed strategy. In the course of things, my little faction seized control of the SDS national office and several of the regional offices. We then made the tragic decision -- in 1969, at the height of the war -- to kill off SDS because it wasn't revolutionary enough for us. I am not proud of this history.

So there is no reason in the world why you should want to listen to me, except for the fact that over the last thirty-seven years I've reflected continually about the complex of errors that led to the death of SDS and also on my part in this historical crime. As a result I've come up with some hard-won conclusions.

I often read references in historical literature and commentary to SDS "self-destructing." This seems to refer to a constellation of generalized forces including Maoist sectarian infiltration, the development of various brands of Marxist dogmatism among the "regulars," the drive toward hyper-militancy, violent confrontation, and ultimately "armed struggle," all within a bitter context of government repression. In some renditions of the death of SDS story there is the consoling air of historical inevitability -- no matter what we in the national leadership would have done, SDS was destined (by the God of History, I suppose) to implode.

But I don't agree. I remember a certain meeting with no more than ten people present -- out of a national membership of 12,000 and perhaps ten times that many chapter members -- at which we in the Weatherman clique running the National Office decided to scuttle SDS.

I remember driving a VW van to the Sanitation Department. pier and dumping the addressograph mailing stencils and other records from the NY Regional Office onto a barge. These were insane decisions that my comrades and I made unilaterally, to the exclusion of other, much better, choices.

We could have, for example, fought to keep SDS in existence so as to unite as many people as possible against the war (which is what the Vietnamese had asked us to do) while at the same time educating around imperialism. I often wonder, had we done so, where we would have been a few months later, in May, 1970, when the biggest student protests in American history jumped off? Or today, when imperialist war rages yet again, would we have had to reinvent the anti-imperialist movement almost from scratch?

Alas, with all the best intentions of promoting revolutionary solidarity with the people of the world, the Weatherman faction, by killing off SDS, did the work of the FBI for them. Assuming we weren't in the pay of the FBI, we should have been.

Obviously this is a harsh critique. But it gets even worse: our hyper-militancy and armed struggle line created a deep division that weakened the larger anti-war movement and demoralized many good people. This was totally unnecessary.

Also we provided a gold-plated gift to the media and the government enabling them to characterize the entire movement as violent and therefore deranged. As a tragic coda, bombs they were making in the townhouse on West 11th St. in New York accidentally killed three of our own beloved comrades.

The subsequent Weather Underground did not, of course, lead to the growth of a revolutionary movement in this country. It led to isolation and defeat. One thing I'm absolutely certain of, having learned the hard way, is that political violence in any form can never be understood in this society.

No amount of rhetoric around revolutionary heroism and solidarity with the Third World can mask the Weather strategy as anything other than sure revolutionary suicide. Revolutionary suicide may serve some psychological or existential function, but politically it produces nothing.

Violence is Self-Destructive

So the greatest lesson I draw from my disastrous history is that the left must absolutely stay away from violence or any talk of violence. The government is violent. We oppose their violence.

Two broken windows at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, one at a Nike store, the other at a Starbucks, constituted the entire justification for fifteen million dollars of anti-terrorist police funding and for a complete city-wide lockdown during the Free Trade Area of the Americas demonstrations in Miami in 2003. The New York Times for years repeated the lie of violence and mayhem in the streets of Seattle, even when shown evidence to the contrary.

To this day anarchist groups defend their right to commit property destruction, as if the morality of this form of self-expression (which, by the way, I don't dispute) trumps the political damage. The practical reality is that any sort of violence stemming from the left -- or talk of violence -- is guaranteed to get us isolated and smashed.

Our goal is always to build a mass movement. SDS and MDS have to repeat tirelessly, again and again and again and again, that our movement is completely, 100% committed to nonviolence, that we will never use violence. The reason: we have no desire to commit suicide. This is a long struggle and the repression will only get more intense. So let's not play into the hands of the enemy.

Note please that I am advocating here for total nonviolence solely on practical grounds, not even touching on other quite valid moral, ethical, and spiritual arguments.

Focus on OrganizingAgainst the War

In its infinitely long and involved seven year odyssey from Port Huron, 1962 to Chicago, 1969, SDS sought first of all to be a multi-issue radical organization, under the guiding principle that everything is related to everything else. Yet the reality of the matter is that the organization really took off in numbers and activity with the escalation of the US attack on Vietnam, from the spring of 1965 to 1968. I was attracted to the older SDS organizers at Columbia because they were the smartest and most politically active people around: they explained the true nature of the war -- a counter-guerilla insurgency -- in a way that no one else did and they put it into a larger context, national liberation and the struggle against US imperialism.

Here we are again; another imperialist war. To any thinking person it is a daily atrocity and a contradiction to every mythological tale of American goodness, generosity, and morality. Public opinion has viscerally turned against the war -- mostly because the US is losing -- yet there is still no wide-spread anti-war movement to touch people, to give them a deep understanding of what it's all about and ways to act meaningfully against it. And we are still not using the war to explain imperialism, always our larger goal.

SDS chapters are now looking in all directions for ways to organize, including free speech, student syndicalism, healthy food, living wages on campus. All good. Fortunately, some have finally settled on trying to mobilize other students against the war. University complicity in the form of recruitment, investment, and research is a good strategic way to approach other students. It's worked in the past, for example at Columbia in 1968, and it will work again.

But if you look at the whole history of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the sole tangible way in which it was successful at stopping the war -- since we never elected an anti-war president or Congress -- was the resistance within the military. In Vietnam the army was mutinous and unreliable. The war planners were forced to start withdrawing the Marines as early as 1969 precisely because they were scared that the mutiny would spread to their elite force. In time the US had no choice but to withdraw all ground troops.

The anti-war resistance is growing within the military. Soldiers hate and resent the horrible position they're in in Iraq. We need to support them in whatever way we can. Fortunately we have an educational tool that tells the story of the successful military resistance to Vietnam, the recent documentary "Sir, No Sir!" Maybe chapters could adopt a military resister, of whom there are many others besides Lt. Watada. Counter-recruitment efforts will help deny the military personnel. Outreach to active duty GI's and National Guard and reserve should also become a priority.

I would also like to suggest a project for the future MDS Radical Education Project, to uncover the hidden history of the hundreds of SDS members who worked in GI coffee houses, newspapers, and other military organizing and legal-defense projects. Perhaps this history will show the current SDS and MDS new ways to support the resistance in the military and push forward the larger anti-war movement.

As we develop a diversity of issues, let's not forget that the war is by far the best school for learning about imperialism. The goal of this government is global domination through the use of violence. (That's straight Chomsky.) Exxon stations and WalMart stores may constitute the booty of empire, but the bomb and bullet are still the means.

To Get Involved

National Days of Student Actions to Protest the Iraq War, March 17-21, 2008. Rallies, walk-outs, & civil disobedience on campus, www.newsds.org/march20 [5], march20sds@gmail.com [6].