Stories
The Black Panthers
in New Haven
The American
Independent Movement
Union-Organizing at Yale
* * *
In 1968 revolution was in the air. In Italy where I had been working, the university had been occupied by the students who had turned the usual power relationship on its head. Instead of competing against each other for grades, the students worked together for group grades. And instead of having the professor grade the students, it was the students who graded the professors. In fact, they were going back to the nature of the original universities in 16th century Italy.
In France the students had tried to seize political power and were suppressed brutally by the police, although there was not the same blood bath of hundreds dead that the police had previously inflicted on Parisian sympathizers with the Algerian Revolution.
Nina and I returned to a United States embroiled in the same struggle, thanks to the War in Vietnam, the military draft and the arrogant authoritarian methods of the government and media that I had previously experienced. The most militant were the Black Panther Party which we all watched and admired at the time for their courage to confront the system.
I was ready to listen and learn. Already, back in 1962 I had been fascinated by stories told me by Nina, long before we were married. The daughter of a former communist school-teacher, she had gone to Cuba on a Venceremos brigade and experienced first-hand a communist country. Her college roommate, Lee Dlugin, was now working with the Communist Party USA (and I would work with her 25 years later at the Party office in New York). When she had first come to Connecticut the CPUSA tried unsuccessfully to recruit her. The meeting took place in a car because there were two members at the time, both named Sid. Twenty years later I would join the Party in the house "of the two Sids."
The American New Left listened sometimes to the veterans of the CPUSA and other progressives from earlier times, but it was fiercely independent and did not learn much from previous experience. Its social class was different. Few of us came from the working class, and most of us were from the families of professionals, what the communists call the "petit bourgeoisie." In our local organization in New Haven, the American Independent Movement we did a bit of union organizing, but it was of the white collar workers at Yale. But mostly we talked, ran a few political campaigns, conscious-raising groups and tried to establish alternative enterprises, such as "Modern Times on which I worked.
I was greatly influenced by the consciousness-raising groups, principally those of the new Women's Liberation Movement, in which Nina and the other women I knew took part. I even participated for a while in a men's liberation group that complemented them. Although I was studying psycholoy and becoming a professor of psychology, I found that traditional psychology was completely devoid of any real consideration of consciousness. Later, in writing Psychology for Peace Activists, I would draw on the experience of the Women's Liberation Movement and refer to my book as an attempt to develop a theory of consciousness.
And, of course, being intellectuals for the most part, we read and discussed revolutionary literature, Mao's little red book, the Communist Manifesto, What Is To Be Done, etc., and followed Che Guevara's ill-fated mission for a revolution in Bolivia, then later the ill-fated attempt to establish socialism by the electoral process in Chile. It was a precedent that I would follow through on years later with the website SFR-21.org.
Modeled after Che or, to be more historical, Lenin, there was always an attractive young male in the movement who assumed (and was accorded) leadership. From the early 60's I recall Yale students Ed Greer and Karl Klare (whose younger brother Michael became a major figure of the peace movement in later years, and who once came as my guest to speak at Wesleyan). These were the days when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were the leading force against the War in Vietnam. The apocryphal story at that time concerned an SDS convention where it was said that someone stood up in the back row and shouted, "I have here a newspaper clipping from Drew Pearson who says that SDS has received a million dollars in gold from Peking, and I want to know what you have done with it!". Later Nina and I would buy a house together at one point in Fair Haven with Rick Wolff, who considered himself the new Lenin, and his wife Harriet. Later I would come to consider this type of leadership to be symptomatic of the culture of war in the form of a "cult of revolutionaries" (see, for example Rick's role in the breakup of Modern Times).
Our anger and resolve was fueled by the viciousness of the internal culture of war under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The assassinations of King and Malcolm X and Kennedy, we assumed were carried out by government agents, just as we came to assume that John F. Kennedy's assassination was an "inside job." After all, we came face to face with such agents provateurs in our work on the New Left. We became used to strangers arriving in our groups promising guns and dynamite, and for the most part, we refused to let them in. But there were exceptions, such as the newspaper The Rat where a government agent supplied dynamite for bombings of corporate headquarters on the eve of the largest of our peace demonstrations in order to dissuade people from taking part. And there was Ronnie Johnson of the Hill Parents Association in New Haven who was entrapped by a federal agent promising guns and dynamite.
Looking back on that period, I see it as a window through which we got a glimpse of the future, a future in which the contradictions of capitalist society become evident and unsolvable, and a new society must be born out of its collapse. At the same time, however, I hope that we can learn from that experience that revolution does not take place at the point of a gun, but through what Martin Luther King, assassinated in 1968, called "the supreme task": "to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force."
 |
Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme