The Weather Underground
Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel
2003

This documentary about the radical group that split from Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969 to take up armed struggle against the U.$. 
government includes interviews with former Weather Underground (WU) members 
and clips from the 1960s and 1970s. The footage and interviews provide 
useful information but the perspective of the film is useless at best and 
reactionary at times.

For MIM the WU is an example of the failure of the strategy of focoism. In 
a nutshell, the idea behind focoism is that violent revolutionary acts, 
carried out by a few people, will inspire the masses to join the 
struggle.(1) In adopting this strategy, the WU discarded their own 
scientific class analysis which explained why armed struggle was out of the 
question then (and now). Instead, they justified their actions with a 
version of Judeo-Christian morality.

That said, there are aspects of the WU that we like. They were part of a 
general movement that correctly broke with the old-style Communist Party, 
which they saw as reformist and irrelevant. The Weatherman's 1969 line on 
the Euro-Amerikan working class was similar to MIM's, namely that 
"virtually all of the white working class has short-ranged privileges from 
imperialism, which are not false privileges but very real ones which give 
them an edge of vested interest and tie them to a certain extent to the 
imperialists, especially when the latter are in a relatively prosperous 
phase."(2)

This film concludes the WU was a failure but fails to analyze the reasons 
for its failure or discuss the implications for revolutionary organizing 
today. Instead it relies on former SDS president Todd Gitlin for analytic 
commentary. Gitlin criticizes the WU for being charismatic and then 
compares their "evil" to that of, in his words, other great "evil" people 
in the world, specifically Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Gitlin is heavily 
featured in the film to provide perspective and analysis, but in reality he 
doesn't say much of any use.(1)

In interviews the audience is introduced to members of the WU who look back 
on their activism with a range of reactions. Several of the people featured 
in the film turned themselves in to the police in the mid-1970s. They 
escaped prosecution when it came out that the FBI had used illegal methods 
to collect evidence against them. MIM is pleased with this outcome, but we 
note that this is a clear example of white privilege. Black Panther Party 
leaders were being killed or put in prison by the same FBI COINTELPRO 
program without so much as a peep from the Amerikan public, while many 
members of the white members of the WU got off free. One former member 
commented on this, noting that while the FBI did harass WU people at 
home--hanging one outside a window by his feet, for example--this was 
nothing compared to the murders of Black people going on at the same time.

Mark Rudd, one of the WU founders and a former SDS president, now teaching 
math at a community college, says he has mixed emotions about what he did. 
He does a good job representing the atrocities of the Amerikan war in 
Vietnam and the compelling need to take some action to stop the massacre. 
He puts the SDS and the WU in the context of the revolutionary activism of 
the Black Panther Party and other groups in the U.$. and around the world.

Rudd says that during those years there was not a time when he wasn't 
thinking about Vietnam. It may be hard for people in Amerika to understand 
this, especially those who didn't live through the 1960s, but it was a very 
radicalizing thing for people to see Amerika blatantly murdering hundreds 
of thousands--eventually millions--of people in Vietnam. And it inspired 
many people to commit their lives to stopping it however they thought 
possible. SDS grew to a group with more than 100,000 members. The film 
contains some graphic footage of Amerikan massacres in Vietnam as well as 
the murder of Fred Hampton, doing the service of presenting this history of 
Amerika.

The WU members believed that white people needed to step up to fight 
Amerika and put themselves at risk the same way Black people were. They saw 
the SDS stance as too pacifist and wanted to "bring the war home". And they 
believed that a revolution was possible in Amerika, so they determined to 
contribute to it by attacking Amerikan institutions with bombs. They were 
careful to never kill any people, but they bombed two dozen buildings 
during the few years they were active, including the Pentagon.

The WU demonstrated very clearly that focoist violence does not succeed. As 
time went on the WU became more and more isolated rather than gaining more 
mass support. Even Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party publicly 
condemned the actions of the WU saying that they may be well intentioned 
but their strategy was all wrong. In the end they succeeded in bring down 
greater FBI surveillance and repression and removing their ability to do 
effective educational work amongst the people.

The movie also touches on another lesson we can learn from the WU: in 1969 
shortly after they formed they spent a summer going out in the cities 
amongst the working youth with the theory that these people would be more 
revolutionary than the student youth. This theory clearly comes from the 
revisionist idea that the workers in Amerika are proletarian and so have 
great revolutionary potential. They gave up this work quickly but the movie 
doesn't bother to explore why. MIM hopes people who see this will draw the 
correct conclusion that the white workers in Amerika are petty bourgeois 
and as a class have little interest in revolution--a conclusion the WU also 
adopted for a time.

One former WU member, Brian Flanagan, who now owns a bar, provides the most 
reactionary perspective on their history. He seems unclear why he joined 
the WU, but he is very clear that he thinks what they did was wrong. He 
compares the WU actions to the 911 attack on the World Trade Center and the 
Okalahoma City bombing (ignoring the fact that the WU never even killed 
anyone).

Naomi Jaffe, on the other hand, provides some good perspective on the 
actions of the WU saying "We felt that doing nothing in a period of 
repressive violence was itself a form of violence. That's really the part I 
think is hardest for people to understand." This is correct, and she goes 
on to say that if she had the chance again she would do it again but try to 
correct mistakes. (Unfortunately the film does not go into what she 
considers those mistakes to be.) She later qualifies her commitment by 
saying she would do it again if she didn't have kids and a family, 
inadvertently pointing out one reason why white youth are the most 
revolutionary among white people -- they have less tying them to capitalist 
society.

Overall the wimmin in the film end up saying the believe in what they did 
and would do it again while the men are either fully regretful of their 
actions or, at best, have mixed emotions, with the exception of David 
Gilbert who is serving a life sentence in prison after joining another 
focoist group and being caught carrying out a bank robbery.

Another aspect of the WU that is featured in the film was their decision to 
"Smash Monogamy" by banning it among their members and instead having group 
orgies and attempting to justify this as politically progressive. The film 
doesn't offer any analysis of this but MIM would point to it as one of the 
failed practices of the WU. While we don't think monogamy is great as a 
long term practice for humanity, we do see that under the patriarchy 
non-monogamy reinforces patriarchal relations and generally harms wimmin.

Notes:
1. For a much more in-depth discussion of focoism, see MIM Theory #5, pp. 
61-77.
2. MIM Theory #5, p. 66, quoting from the collection of WU documents, "You 
don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing," Harold 
Jacobs, ed.
3. Gitlin, it turns out, is part of the vicious "pragmatic" 
Democratic-party backlash against Communists, radicals, anarchists and 
Greens--basically anybody who the Democrats feel splits their vote. In his 
book ITAL Letters to a young activist END (Basic Books 2003) Gitlin argues 
that the anti-Vietnam war movement "must...shoulder the blame for nudging 
some voters [away from Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey] towards Nixon, 
who proceeded to extend the Vietnam War for five years and expanded it to 
Laos and Cambodia, killing more than a million people." Gitlin does not 
mention that as President Johnson's Vice President Humphrey shared 
responsibility for the Vietnam war--and in any case, MIM's response to 
these "pragmatists" is that if the Democrats truly opposed Amerikan 
military aggression they would not simply sit by when the Republicans 
invaded several countries in the course of eighteen months (of course not 
just the Republicans, but let's leave Democratic sins of commission from 
Clinton to Kerrey aside for now and focus on sins of omission). If it were 
possible to stop Amerikan imperialism and militarism within the rules of 
Amerikan "democracy," fine. But that last 130 years (at least) have shown 
that it is not. Gitlin and his ilk put the formalisms of bourgeois 
democracy ahead of basic humyn rights to life and self-determination. They 
lost the public opinion battle on this question to the radicals a 
generation ago, and now they are opportunistically using 911 and younger 
activists unfamiliarity with history to "overturn correct verdicts."