But if the government-because of a "split in the ruling class" over the war and its incumbent phenomena-seems to evade the rhetorical definitions we would ascribe, so does the movement. Which continues to find itself caught schizophrenically between outrage at what cannot continue in a world of rational men and sustained militance, born of a desire to overthrow that which is in the very nature of a world demarcated by class rather than good and evil. A world in which imperialist wars at not mistakes to be undone but rational, self-interested investment protection, and will thus be inevitable until the system which makes them necessary is banished.
These questions cannot be resolved alone, in the abstract. They are political questions, and can be resolved only through participation in the process of change-by going outside of one's self, by acting collectively. Despite confusion and private doubts. Mayday was a collective action, is a social fact, and will "mean" some thing when history decides post facto what everything was.
Thus the "nature" of what we do is contingent. We do what we believe we must, and the remaining questions must seek to discover how we get to where we want to be.
All possible tactics, even Weatherman tactics, are only propaganda and organizing tools. None of them in itself impedes the war machine. They make the war too costly, and thus the war may end. but the war machine will remain intact. The criterion for judging an action should be, therefore, in terms of building a movement that will be able to destroy the machine itself. The criterion must be dependent upon how many of who never you want to see, to hear and to agree become catalyzed to move to the level of consciousness that the particular tactic embodies.
The Mayday action was to speakto different constituencies: first it was to consolidate revolutionary consciousness among youth and other alienated groups. Thus the gathering of tribes, a gathering of those already committed to social change. Second, it was to speak to the mass of Americans who oppose the war and also oppose radical change. To them it was a statement that the movement, although in fact radical, is not a bunch of violent crazies, and that in fact it is the state which has a monopoly on violence. It did not try to tell the mass of Americans that the movement was made up of people just like them. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
The youth culture acts like a revolutionary vanguard, and it has won an extraordinary number of followers in a short time. In part this must be because it is not like most people's lives, and therefore can offer alternative vision. It has made its values - the values for which one is willing to forsake, or at least question, corporate America-apparent.
And there were in my lock-up, perhaps ten "fellow travellers" who were over forty years old. They were all wonderful, particularly a gray-haired woman who stood across form me smiling as we were being released, and shook her head. "I'm sorry, in a way, that this is over," she said. "You are all so right ... Right On," And then she clenched her fist and said that she would see us all in jail the next day.
Yet up to this point, those whose ages take them beyond the youth culture but have been radicalized by the vision of the new society have been almost exclusively middle class-those with the leisure time, and money, and psychic security that allows them to be free-free to act, free to care, free to love. The vision of Mayday, however, says very little to those - and most of America is among "those"-who do not have those freedoms.
Marcuse says that the goal of the revolution must be liberation. The movement must be utopian; it must seek to make new men and women, who no longer look at the world the way that men and women have looked at the world before. Why was Mayday the first national revolutionary mass action? Why was it, despite all of these questions, an overwhelming triumph?
Because it was about liberation, it was about the new society. It was a success because it was, because it overcame apathy and fear and boredom, and was able to happen at all, in a time when so few things that are about a better world happen in daylight. It was not a success because it was repressed. That would be double think. It was a success because it was beyond the law, because it represented a higher more self-sufficient consciousness; because it was thousands of people who really were brothers and sisters for the days of the demonstrations. And who were brave and strong ... those things are so important ... and who took care of their comrades, freeing them from police if they could, helping them if they were wounded, keeping up spirits through the long hours in jail, singing songs even after you were tired and had a headache and would rather lie down and feel bad.
Those things, that sense of community and interdependence, are what a new society will be all about. And Mayday is just one point along the way to that new society; between the logic of the old and the new; somewhere between the end and the beginning.