Word: mayday
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...recount this bit of the sad history of the old left because it is appropriate to Mayday in 1971, in a way far more appropriate than talking about the Moratoriums, or marching in Selma, or Vietnam Summer. Because Mayday was the first national mass action of the revolutionary new left. Mayday seems to me to have been a success, although its success remains problematical. It raises many questions for me about what defines success or failure for the movement right now. These questions reflect my own doubts and confusion and personal feelings. They certainly have no more legitimacy than anyone...
...repression of the Mayday demonstrations was not fascism. The repression came instead from a liberal democracy, caught deep in its own contradictions, trying to maintain order. And, obviously, the traffic blocking action was not revolution. For both sides it was a warm-up, a partial unveiling of tactics with the aim of winning a broad base of support for larger designs. The left deliberately sought to create a crisis for the government, and it seems likely that neither the left nor the government really knew what would happen once the crisis had been set. Thus the thousands of troops...
...George Washington University, there was a tall skinny brother from Texas, who had his leg broken by police because he did not move fast enough into a transporting bus. He was in great pain, but the police left him untreated for eight hours. Finally, when a lawyer from the Mayday Collective was allowed into the jail, someone shouted that there was a prisoner with a broken bone who was being refused treatment. And the lawyer asked the jailer what was up, and the jailer said that he hadn't know that anyone was hurt, and the brother was finally taken...
...events of Mayday partake of the clouded contradictory reality of the liberal state. Gross repression seems to elicit embarrassment from some courts, some corporate executives, and some of the media. And gross repression still elicits disbelief from revolutionaries who ought to know better. Repression like that in Washington seems to help the movement of the "children of America" in Jerry Rubin's phrase-the white middle-class left-in a way that neither actions nor ideology seem able to do. Yet gross repression against the Panthers embarrasses no one on top, and certainly does not help build the Panthers, whose...
...next time I go to Washington," said a friend explaining why she was not going to go to the Mayday Demonstrations, "it's going to be marching in a column of the Red Army, and we're going to be there, and we're going to do it, and that will be it." How long away is People's War, and is that the only way to make American Society better, and the only way to end the war in Vietnam and the one after that and after that? And is Mayday building for People's War, or simply pretending...