After October, 1968, PL became more sectarian and critical of other radicals in the movement and around the world. Since 1966 they had withheld their support from the NLF and Ho Chi Minh because they had "sold out the people's struggle" by negotiating with the United States. Cuba was a petty-Bourgeois country. The line on Black struggles had also changed-all nationalism was reactionary and separate Black organizations were "Racist." Open admissions demands were reactionary since universities would only brainwash the poor (Had PL appointed itself the student part of the student-worker alliance?).

Last year the National Office, under Mike Klonsky, began to develop the idea of a Revolutionary Youth Movement. This led to the celebrated "Weatherman Proposal." The Weatherman contingent regards the roles of third world liberation movements and Black struggles in this country as crucial to any real change. The revolution is not around the corner, and if it comes, it will be part of an international movement against U. S. imperialism. Because of the nature of this imperialism workers in this country are better off than anywhere else in the world, too well-off, in fact, to ever be the vanguard of a revolution as long as relative prosperity continues. But if the United States can no longer sustain the kind of control over world resources and labor that it has in the past and if internal tensions simultaneously disrupt the system, then it might be possible to radicalize the workers. Aside from being a longshot (but no longer than PL's strategy), the Weatherman proposal is the best argument yet for white radicals not to do anything.

Since it is very difficult to engage a Weatherman in a theoretical discussion, the only thing clear so far about them is that they have balls. Unfortunately it seems to be of the Guerrilla Theater variety-are they interested in hurting the system, or showing that they want to? Why don't they engage in sabotage? Given their analysis it makes more sense to blow up war factories and labs at night than to get in fights every other day.

AT ANY RATE, as everyone knows, RYM walked out of the convention last June and took half of SDS with it. A few weeks later Klonsky resigned from the NIC (National Interim Committee) because of political differences with the NO, now led by Mark Rudd. Together with Avakian he has formed RYM-2 on the West Coast, which is concentrating on building a mass-based anti-war movement.

The New Left started as a middle class phenomenon. For the most part its original adherents had never been close to politics. Black people are close to politics because where they live the coercive instruments of the state are an oppressive fact of their day-to-day lives. Some workers are close to politics because they have four hungry kids and are working more hours than they did twenty years ago. Only the children of the middle class could come up with the idea that politics might be something other than the exercise of power for survival.

And when the fleeting thought has passed through your mind that politics might be the liberation of everyone and everything and you discover it is still the raw and frightening war that Hobbes said it was three hundred years ago, that can be a frustrating experience. That can make you want to pick up the gun. Or become apolitical.