The notion that breaking windows, burning limousines, knocking over trash cans or throwing rocks at the cops has anything to do with the epochal struggle against American capitalism must be interrogated. Keep in mind that this is a recent “tactic”, for the lack of a better word, that emerged in the 1970s as a largely student movement grew frustrated over its ability to change society. If it was impossible to get steelworkers, truck drivers and oil refinery workers to join a revolutionary movement, maybe the next best thing would be to carry out “exemplary” actions that might encourage them to resist the ruling class. This was what the Weathermen believed and it must be noted that the black bloc was following their example as they would willingly admit.
I have vivid memories of the “Days of Rage”, which can best be described as a collective nervous breakdown by Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and others who have led productive political lives in recent decades. Even Van Deusen, who wrote in defense of the black bloc, has a more grounded existence today as a union representative of the Vermont State Employees Association.
The Weathermen were fond of making épater la bourgeoisie type statements such as Bernadine Dohrn announcing that the Weathermen “dig Charles Manson” and Bill Ayers advising young people to kill their parents. In an attempt to build up their strike force for the “Days of Rage” between October 8–11, 1969, they used to invade high schools or community colleges, barge into classes and harangue the students about the need to “fight the system”. If teachers got in their way, they’d get a karate chop for their efforts. Most students felt like they were being addressed by maniacs, a function no doubt of the mixture of ultraleft fantasies reaching epic proportions and marathon LSD sessions at Weathermen crash pads. One of the people involved in these “jailbreaks” was Diana Oughton, the daughter of a banker who died in an accidental explosion making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970.
Why anybody would want to emulate such “tactics” is an enduring mystery.
But things were not that different in Europe where the student left was going through the same kinds of paroxysms. On the continent, you had the same sort of adventurism but it was cloaked in a neo-Marxist ideology called “Autonomism”, which was a reference to being “autonomous” of the traditional trade unions and left parties.
One of the more exotic of the Italian autonomist groups was the Metropolitan Indians, a group that dressed up and put on war-paint as if they were Sitting Bull, a sign of their “autonomy” from bourgeois society. Among their demands were free pot and LSD for anybody who wanted to use them and occupying empty buildings as sites for alternatives to the nuclear family.
In 1973 they stormed a jazz festival in Umbria and harangued the audience with the message that the “weapon of music cannot replace the music of weapons”. Apparently, they had a big fetish over the P38, a pistol made by Walther. (James Bond used the Walther PPK.) Obviously, we are dealing with some very humorless people despite their feeble attempts to the contrary.
On February 17 of that year a two thousand strong detachment of CP trade unionists accompanied party leader Luciano Lama to the campus of the University of Rome where he intended to deliver a speech against a student sit-in protesting tuition hikes. Not long after Lama’s talk began, the Metropolitan Indians donned masks and led an assault on Lama and his supporters. At least fifty people were seriously injured in the fracas. This violent attack gave the government the pretext it needed to launch an assault on the university. Two thousand cops raided the campus and used tear gas and clubbed everybody in sight. Between the naked opportunism of the CP and the agent provocateur-like behavior of the Metropolitan Indians, it is not surprising that the Italian left crashed and burned in this period.
