Micah Uetricht
In the ’60s, many radicals thought the American working class was bought off, and that you needed a Che Guevara–style strategy. You needed people like you to be extreme militants who were willing to do what needed to be done to spark social change, because the old agent of change, the proletariat, wouldn’t.
Mark Rudd
Within this larger anti-colonial national liberation story that we were telling, which did not involve the working class, we idolized Che Guevara, the revolutionary hero with the machine gun. In 1967, a theory had appeared: we were intellectuals of the sword.
We read books like Revolution in the Revolution? by Régis Debray. After extensive discussions with Che and Fidel in Cuba, he put forward the theory that revolutions were made by small groups of people starting armed struggle: the guerillas. That was known as the foco theory.
We became adherents of the foco theory — which didn’t work. It didn’t work anywhere in the world. We were so in love with Che Guevara that we didn’t notice he had been killed in October 1967 by a combination of the CIA and the Bolivian Army. He had failed. Foquismo never worked anywhere, and it certainly didn’t work in the United States.
MU:
You went to Cuba at one point, where you met members of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
MR:
I went before the Columbia uprising and met people from both North and South Vietnam. I was twenty. One of the Vietnamese gave me a ring made from a downed American plane.
Cuba was the United States flipped on its head. They followed the Tet Offensive daily, like we would follow the World Series. Our tour bus would go into a small town, and people would start celebrating a new victory in Vietnam. I fell in love with the idea of socialist revolution. I was a product of that moment.
MU:
What’s funny about what happened after that, when you and other former SDSers founded Weather, was that at one point in Cuba, the Vietnamese comrades told you, basically, what would be best for them would be for you to go back to the United States and build a broad antiwar movement. You didn’t listen to them.
MR:
We didn’t want to build a broad antiwar movement. We wanted to get to the root of the problem. Radicals always go to the root, and the root is imperialism and capitalism.
We wanted to jump many, many steps. Instead of building the base, we just wanted to go forward. I picked up a slogan in Cuba from José Martí, the poet who was the soul of the Cuban Revolution: “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”
MU:
What was wrong with the approach that you all were taking?
MR:
It didn’t work! We thought we’d start a revolution and everybody would join us. It was a fantasy; it was a delusion.
The freedom struggle had morphed from the nonviolent, integrationist Civil Rights Movement to Black Power by 1968. I came of age during that transition, and one of the slogans of black power, which had originated with Malcolm X, was “by any means necessary.” Fifty years ago, this phrase was code for violence: we have to pick up the gun. We joined what historian Vijay Prashad called the “cult of the gun.”
MU:
Then, in 1969, SDS became Weather.
MR:
Then we moved to militancy. Again, we misidentified the source of our power, which was organizing and coalition-building at Columbia. We moved to militancy, and we made militancy the issue. We substituted bad organizing for good organizing.