“Amateurs study tactics, professional study logistics” — Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC

What does revolution mean in America, 2018? Among Merriam-Webster’s definitions of “revolution” are:

b : a fundamental change in political organization; especially : the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed

and

c : activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation

With respect to revolution, we cannot understand the political environment of the US in 2018 without going back to the last upsurge in left-wing revolutionary activity, from approximately 1968 to 1980. This is because much of the current security environment was shaped by the uprisings of the late 1960s and the armed struggle groups borne of that era.

The late 1960s, as most people know, were a time of great social upheaval. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War opposition, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

In 1969, the war in Vietnam was still ongoing and ethnic minorities still faced tremendous discrimination. Groups like the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords and the Red Guard Party experienced rapid growth, as people of color sought increasingly openly militant and armed responses to white supremacy. Robert F. Williams and Deacons of Defense had in the early 1960s advocated open armed-self defense, but it had not caught on as a national movement. While the civil rights organizers of SNCC in the South had utilized armed self defense, they were extremely low key and it would not become public knowledge until decades later.

At the same time as people of color were openly arming themselves for self-defense, there was a faction of the anti-war movement that had become increasingly frustrated by the inability of the non-violent protest movement to put an end to US military involvement in Vietnam. The debate over how to stop the war in Vietnam boiled over in one of the largest student activist groups in the US, the Students for a Democratic Society. Known by the acronym SDS, it had as many as 100,000 members at its peak.

In June of 1969, a group who eventually became known as the Weather Underground called for a socialist revolution in the United States driven by a clandestine revolutionary party. Effectively, the Weathermen dissolved SDS, as they began their policy of secret armed struggle against the United States. The Weatherman were heavily influenced by revolutions in the Third World, and like the Black Panthers, they were strongly influenced by the Chinese Revolution and the Maoist tradition. The Maoist analysis of pre-revolutionary China held that China was exploited by Europe, the US, and Japan, via foreign companies, military occupation and compliant local elites. The Weather Underground considered Black people to make up an internal colony of the United States, with the US government as an occupying imperial power. Under this analysis, Black people made up the revolutionary vanguard in the United States, as the most oppressed class. Weather was a mostly white, young organization, and so committed itself to supporting the Black vanguard. The idea was that young white people were less attached to the system and were also under the threat of military service in Vietnam, and thus would be receptive to the message of socialist revolution. They believed that they could “bring the war home” and make the US into a battleground in support of an international socialist revolution.

The Weather Underground went on to stage numerous bombings and bank robberies during the 1970s. A number of other explicitly revolutionary clandestine armed struggle groups emerged in the 1970s like Venceremos, the Black Liberation Army, and the Chicano Liberation Front . Venceremos, a Maoist organization led by Stanford Professor H. Bruce Franklin that engaged in street skirmishes with police and eventually staged a prison break before dissolving. The Black Liberation Army, was an offshoot of the Panthers. The BLA robbed banks, bombed buildings, assassinated police officers and drug dealers. One of its most famous members was Assata Shakur, I kid you not ,the godmother of Tupac Shakur. The Chicano Liberation Front set off bombs at “banks, chain stores, government buildings, police cars” in the Los Angeles area during the early 1970s. It was not only in the US that groups engaged in armed struggle against capitalism. Groups like the Japanese Red Army, the German Baader-Meinhoff Faction, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army emerged in the 1970s. Many, if not most, of these groups drew their inspiration from the Marxist-Leninist tradition. They robbed banks to finance their operations and to support life in the underground. It was hard to hold a day job and be a clandestine insurgent at the same time.

The Vietnam War was tremendously unpopular by the end of the 1960s, especially with young people in the USA, and combined with the despair created by assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, meant that the tacit support for radical action was strong. Indeed, the military itself was coming apart under the stresses of the war and white supremacy.

In 1968, combined Vietnam AWOLs and desertions reached over 150 per thousand soldiers. About 100 Black deserters established “Soul Alley” in a Saigon neighborhood near Ton San Nhut Airport. Fully armed Black and white troops faced off at China Beach, Danang. Link

Hundreds of US Army officers were killed by their own troops, as morale collapsed and soldiers rebelled against the system, including members of Army intelligence like Captain Christopher Pyle.

One can see that in such an environment, some might think that armed struggle against the US government might have a chance of success. But the American empire was not ready to get pushed offstage yet.

The US government had already started an organized clandestine campaign against the left in 1967 with COINTELPRO. Led by the FBI, the campaign attempted to sow division among the left by turning groups against each other through the use of informants, agents, and anonymous letters to organizers to stir up drama. This was done to make sure that multi-racial coalitions could not gain traction. The FBI wasn’t alone in targeting the left clandestinely. The Army, Navy, and CIA all had domestic programs aimed at the left, as did state and local law enforcement. Most notable of the state programs was the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission which was essentially a state secret police dedicated to enforcing the rule of white supremacy in Mississippi. Almost all of these programs justified themselves on the basis of fighting ‘’communist infiltration” and “outside agitators,” as if to say that there were no real problems of injustice in the US, just “foreigners” causing problems where before there was peace. Apparently the security services believed that no one born in the US could actually believe that segregation, white supremacy, and the war in Vietnam were wrong unless they were mislead by “outside agitators.”

Things really turned up in the early 1970s as the various socialist armed struggle groups launched their campaigns. Previously, police had received reinforcements from National Guard or regular Army formations to contain rioting/uprisings in major cities. In some cases this meant deploying tanks on the streets. After 1970 this became increasingly untenable, when National Guard soldiers on riot control duty fired on a crowd of unarmed students at Kent State, killing 4. Using soldiers against rioters was an old American practice. Federal troops and state militias put down [draft riots in the Civil War era, and state governors routinely used the National Guard as strikebreakers against labor uprisings. But the evolving tactics of uprisings in the 1960s took inspiration from the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, and adopted hit-and-fade guerrilla tactics. It simply took too long to call out a military unit to deal with such attacks. Thus in the late 1960s, the Los Angeles police department had already started its first Special Weapons and Tactics units, to cope with sniper attacks during uprisings. When the various armed struggle groups began operating in the US, LAPD SWAT expanded to a full time operation, and other cities across the nation follow. As the 1970s drew on, innovations in combat shooting techniques, team tactics, and equipment proliferated, much of which was informed by the practical competition shooting community. Practical pistol shooting had undergone tremendous development in Southern California, as a result of the community around Jeff Cooper. Cooper was the father of modern combat handgun technique, and he did his initial research and development in Big Bear, California, not that far from LA. SWAT units built out sniper, dynamic entry, and surveillance skills, with a lot of cross pollination between SWAT and elite military units.

The late 1960s also marked a new veneration of police by the white majority. No more of the old labor battles where cops and strikers fought it out, now, student protesters would be hit with felony charges for assaulting a police officer. While police worship might seem to be something that has always been present in American life, that is untrue. For example, assault on a police officer was not a felony in California until around 1966.

ABSOLUTELY THE BIGGEST DAY in Assemblyman Don Mulford’s life was on the seventh day of the Watts riots when the telephone rang in his Oakland office. The call was long distance; Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker was on the line, Parker invited Mulford to fly down and ride with the police through the riot-torn area the next day, an invitation Mulford accepted with alacrity. It is not every week that the police chief of one of the nation’s biggest cities asks you, in person, to ride around with him and watch his town burn down. This was just Chief Parker’s way or expressing his appreciation for Mulford’s efforts in the California State Legislature on behalf of policemen. For instance, Mulford is the author of a new law which makes it a felony to assault a policeman in California. He has always been strong on law and order.

In California, a Western state with historically lax gun laws, the state legislature had already banned open carry of loaded firearms in 1967, after the Black Panthers had marched on Sacramento open carrying long guns. The author of the bill? None other than Don Mulford. Now, the big city regimes in California began to decisively turn in favor of gun control as uprisings became routine. It became a firm Democratic Party litmus test to weed out radicals from the party, who might be sympathetic to the armed militants. In 1968 the Democrats, under President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the Gun Control Act into law, which created the structure of licensed federal firearms dealers we know today. It also made an attempt to make inexpensive handguns imported from overseas illegal — the so-called “Saturday Night Specials.” In effect, the Democrats decided that inexpensive firearms for self protection should not exist.

Alongside the intensification of police tactics came a new legal enforcement regime designed to target the left on all levels. After ascending the presidency, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, which one of his advisors later admittedwas designed to target Black people and the left. Said the advisor:

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Drugs were also a potential source of income for insurgent groups, then as now. Given that they had already committed to clandestine, illegal operations, they had the infrastructure to move drugs for cash. If you talk to older folks from the anti-war/left movements, you’ll eventually hear stories of how folks sometimes raised money by selling cannabis. Nixon’s law and order efforts were bolstered by liberals, who went all in for mandatory minimum sentences and the “rule of law,” the technocratic and politer version of Nixon’s “law and order.” Naomi Murakawa has written about this:

the fundamental thesis of Murakawa’s book: legal civil rights and the American carceral state are built on the same conceptions of race, the state and their relationship. As liberals believe that racism is first and foremost a question of individual bias, they imagine racism can be overcome by removing the discretion of (potentially racist) individuals within government through a set of well-crafted laws and rules.

In 1973 came a real death blow to the clandestine revolutionaries — in fact, to American leftists of all sorts, when Nixon ended compulsory military service. In one sense, this was a great victory for the youth movement because it meant young men no longer had to go to war in Vietnam.

But at the same time, in one swoop Nixon cut the legs out from under the left mass movements. The young white people that the Weather Underground had been counting on suddenly had a lot of options. After all, the economy was still pretty strong; a white man didn’t need to even have a college degree to land a decent paying job. The sexual revolution was going all out — just talk to anyone who was a teenager in the early 1970s and they’ll tell you how much sex they had. Right then and there, the Weather Underground’s recruiting pipeline dried up, because young white kids were no longer worried about being drafted to fight a war in Southeast Asia.

As to people of color, well, the power structure’s response was more than just the iron first of the security services. In addition to the end of compulsory military service, communities of color suddenly had opportunities in the form of affirmative action jobs and education programs. At first, most of these were concentrated in the public sector. But quickly, private companies joined in on the diversity push as well. Effectively, this meant that young militants had the ability to get a subsidized education since public universities in many places were still free or minimal cost. Those who had completed college had a chance at a stable job in the public sector, or maybe at a government contractor that had to show commitment to equal opportunity in order to get government contracts. At a time when the security services were regularly assassinating leftist militants, a good government job provided an appealing out from an uncertain life of armed struggle. People who might otherwise have become effective leaders in the underground instead chose to work within the system that seemed to offer a pathway for advancement. What’s more, elite American institutions verbally repudiated the history of segregation, and by 1983, Martin Luther King Day became an official holiday, in which the MLK of “I have a dream” was the focus, and “Beyond Vietnam” was studiously ignored.

For those who had not made up their mind in the reform versus revolution debate, the opening of education and jobs to people of color put a strong weight into the reform column. Perhaps the United States’ history of white supremacy could be put to rest through equal opportunity programs and “black faces in high places.”

As the 1970s drew to a close, the combination of the end of the draft, equal opportunity programs, and the counterinsurgency masked as the war on drugs strangled the various armed struggle groups by draining the sea of recruits and hunting militants. There was another factor in the failure of the armed struggle groups. Unlike revolutionaries in China and Cuba, the Americans had no refuge or guerrilla base from which to launch attacks and rest between missions. In some revolutionary circles, the American inner cities were viewed as de facto colonized area that ethnic minorities could wrest from the white power structure and use as sanctuaries. This did happen to some extent during the 1970s and 1980s. However, unlike the Chinese and Cuban revolutionary bases, inner cities did not offer the possibility of subsistence agriculture. Which is to say, people who lived in the inner cities could not raise their own food and thus refuse most interaction with the capitalist system. Instead, inner city residents had to obtain food either from government food programs (which were increasingly attacked under the Reagan administration), steal it, or purchase it with dollars. To get those dollars they either had to enter the capitalist wage system, or engage in illegal activity. Moreover, where the Cuban and Chinese revolutionary bases were remote and required government forces to traverse significant distances to even engage in battles, inner city neighborhoods by definition are in the heart of capital’s control zones. Thus, the ability of inner city residents to exercise significant autonomy from the power structure were limited spatially as well as by available food resources.

The international militants of the Baader-Meinhof and Japanese Red Army factions were also similarly impaired. While they often trained in Lebanon in the camps controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, neither group had a mass base in their home countries, as Japan and Germany both experienced incredibly economic growth in the 1970s.

One group that survived the 1970s and continued to fight on through the 1980s was the Provisional IRA, which had widespread popular support in Northern Ireland among Catholics. Unlike the American armed struggle groups, the PIRA also had a nearby refuge, the Republic of Ireland, right across the porous southern border of Northern Ireland. The PIRA also obtained significant support from Irish-Americans, both money and weapons.

Unlike the PIRA, throughout the 1980s, the remaining American leftist armed struggle groups dropped off the map one by one. Many participants were captured or killed in actions, some fled the US, and some went into hiding, trying to live ‘normal’ lives and gave up on armed struggle against the American government. As the Soviet Union and its economic block collapsed, and China forswore supporting overseas revolutionaries, it seemed like the era of armed insurgency inside the United States was over.

But in wide open spaces of the American West and Midwest, something was brewing. High interest rates set by the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker triggered a farm crisis in the early 1980s. The resulting collapse struck rural America hard.

Rural communities that once bustled with activity began to look more like ghost towns. Thousands of farm families defaulted on their loans and were forced off the land. Those who couldn’t find work in nearby towns pulled up stakes in droves, and the mass exodus resulted in fewer jobs for those who stayed. Businesses and factories shut down-many never to reopen. Stores on Main Street were closed and scores of banks failed. The rapidly declining population resulted in abandoned farmhouses, diminished government services and widespread school consolidations.

In the years after 1968, the Democratic Party moved to eventually embrace neoliberal economic principles. They worked hard to purge any other way of thinking, and began to embrace Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, “there is no alternative.” Thus, they had no significant policy response to the farm crisis.

Just as the material base of many white rural communities was coming under attack, the coastal Democrats in the Northeast and California had successfully put down the leftist insurgencies with a combination of elevating some ethnic minorities into the elite, and a program of strict controls over firearms. Both of these initiatives became core to the national Democratic party platform, and both struck at the heart of rural white identity. In time, as the economic situation in the interior of the United States deteriorated, a new group of insurgents arose in the early 1990s. These men wanted a fundamental change in government to turn the clock back to 1789. Unlike the insurgents of the left, the militia movement that emerged after 1992 had significant support inside the security services.

In Part II, I will analyze the rise of the right wing militia movement in the US, and what it means for revolution today.