“We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”
The revolution was building momentum as the 1960s reached its end point. Marcuse continued to travel around the world, following the wave of student protests and giving interviews to the press in Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, London, Rome, Turin, Milan, Bari, Oslo, Amsterdam, and Korčula.1 He found himself at the center of the left-wing radical movements on both sides of the Atlantic and developed close connections with the most militant factions of the New Left.
In San Diego, Marcuse rallied with students to establish a Marxist-Leninist college at UCSD and, along with his graduate student Angela Davis, was among the first to break down the door and enter the registrar’s office during a student occupation.2 He was a regular guest at the Red House, a left-wing commune that was under FBI surveillance,3 and gave the eulogy for a campus radical who had died by self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War.4 Davis would become a famed communist revolutionary and, after providing the firearms used in a murder-kidnapping plot, a fugitive from the law. As one San Diego resident told reporters, every time political violence erupted, “Marcuse, somewhere, is in the background.”5
In December 1968, Marcuse presided over the twentieth-anniversary celebration for the Maoist newspaper the Guardian in New York City. His cohost was Bernardine Dohrn, who praised Marcuse as “the ideological leader of the New Left” and would later establish the Weather Underground terrorist organization. The other featured speaker was H. Rap Brown, a black militant who promised to wage a “continental liberation struggle” and was arrested a few years later, after going into hiding and engaging in a shoot-out with police.6 During his speech, Marcuse signaled his support for the New Left’s “political guerrilla force,” which comprised “small groups, concentrated on the level of local activities” and might foreshadow “what may in all likelihood be the basic organization of libertarian socialism, namely councils of manual and intellectual workers, soviets, if one can still use the term.”7
These were not idle metaphors. Although Marcuse and his followers would later claim that the professor’s use of the term “guerrilla force” was figurative,8 the context is inescapable. Brown was already on the record promoting an armed “Negro revolution”9 and agitating for “guerilla warfare in all the cities.”10 Dohrn had already declared herself a “revolutionary communist”11 and, months after her appearance with Marcuse, would sign the Weathermen’s declaration of war against the United States,12 inaugurating a long string of bombings, prison breaks, and terror campaigns. Another one of Marcuse’s former students, Naomi Jaffe, would join Dohrn as a signatory and go into hiding after the FBI placed her on a wanted list.13
The young radicals were restless and soon pushed Marcuse to go further. In Rome, they heckled him onstage. In West Germany, they accused him of working for the CIA. Marcuse had touched the limits of academic inquiry, crafting an erudite philosophical justification for the revolution—but the students were growing impatient with the scholar’s intricate abstractions and wanted liberation now, by whatever means necessary.14
The journalist Michael Horowitz, who had once studied under Marcuse at Brandeis University, captured the prevailing mood in a feature story for Playboy, detailing the professor’s visit to the State University of New York at Old Westbury. Horowitz crafts a picture in contrasts: Marcuse, formally dressed in a vest, suit jacket, and French cuffs; and the student radicals, arriving in a dented Volkswagen, hoping to see “if Marcuse is radiating revolutionary vibrations.”
The attendees represented the constellation of activist groups of the New Left: Students for a Democratic Society activists, the East Village Diggers performance troupe, campus Marxists and ethnic studies proponents, an academic sociologist, a gaggle of teenage libertines, and the radical press, carrying along old tape recorders and newsreels. During Marcuse’s lecture, the young radicals shouted at him and bristled with hostility. They dismissed the value of a university education for black youth, arguing that “the white man’s economic courses” could teach them nothing. “If he’s seen rats, junkies, and the General Motors Building, he knows all he has to know!” they insisted.
Marcuse fired back with scorn: “I detect here what I have found on many campuses I have visited: a growing anti-intellectual attitude among the students. There is no contradiction between intelligence and revolution. Why are you afraid of being intelligent?”15
However, despite Marcuse’s insistence that the young people in the audience represented a betrayal of his ideas, they also represented the natural consequence of his philosophy. They embodied the Great Refusal, the liberation of aesthetic form, the unleashing of the instincts. They followed Marcuse’s call to participate in “the refusal to grow up, to mature, to perform efficiently and ‘normally’ in and for a society which compels the vast majority of the population to ‘earn’ their living in stupid, inhuman, and unnecessary jobs.”16 They were the “counter-culture,” the inevitable carriers of the negative dialectic.
Horowitz, keenly aware of this contradiction, concludes the profile with a note of pity: “Poor Marcuse. Even in his popularity, he is out of step with the youth he seeks to guide. The campus left wants to burn libraries and he continues to defend reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic—albeit Marxist reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. The kids thrill to phrases like ‘undermine the foundations of the system’ and ‘the liberation of instinctual needs,’ while the professor would have them temper such excitement with the reading of Das Kapital in the original German.”17
As the campus movements grew more volatile, there was a sense that things might get out of hand. Even Marcuse’s former colleagues at the Institute for Social Research warned the philosopher that he was becoming too radical, too zealous, too irrational. In a long exchange of letters, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, having returned to Germany after the war and taken a position at Frankfurt University, warned his old friend Marcuse that he had lost sight of their shared commitment to rational inquiry.
When Marcuse requested to speak to Adorno’s students in Frankfurt, Adorno refused, telling Marcuse that he would inflame the campus radicals, who were on the verge of succumbing to a kind of “left fascism” that resembled “something of that thoughtless violence” from the prewar era.18 “To put it bluntly,” Adorno wrote, “I think that you are deluding yourself in being unable to go on without participating in the student stunts.”19
Throughout 1969, student protestors interrupted Adorno’s lectures, topless women heckled him at the lectern, and a small group of radicals occupied the offices of the Institute for Social Research, prompting the professor to call the police. Believing that Adorno had betrayed them by summoning the authorities, the students passed out leaflets declaring that “Adorno as an institution is dead” and scrawled a message on his blackboard: “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.”20
Marcuse, breaking painfully with Adorno in a return letter, sided with the radicals. “To put it brutally,” he wrote, “if the alternative is the police or left-wing students, then I am with the students.”21 Adorno, beleaguered by the mob and suffering an “extreme depression,”22 retreated to a chalet at the foot of the Matterhorn in Switzerland, where he died of a sudden heart attack.
Adorno did not live to see the New Left’s full descent in violence, but his warnings were prescient. As the year turned from 1969 to 1970, the New Left embraced armed revolution as its new political strategy. During that critical juncture, Marxist-Leninist radicals formally established the Weather Underground Organization, the Black Liberation Army, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, known formally as the Red Army Faction, all of which were committed to overthrowing the governments of the West. Marcuse was connected with them all. He had taught, mentored, and appeared publicly with leaders of the Weather Underground;23 he had engaged in a high-profile struggle against the University of California Board of Regents alongside the spiritual leader of the Black Liberation Army;24 and he had directly influenced the student radicals in West Germany who founded the Red Army Faction terror organization.25
The FBI was so concerned by these connections that Director J. Edgar Hoover personally elevated Marcuse to “Security Matter –C” status, classifying the professor as a “revolutionary,” “anarchist,” “grandfather of the New Left,” and “threat to national security.”26 Agents recruited informants and monitored Marcuse closely, detailing his financial support for the Black Panther Party, meetings with Communist Party officials, and connections with the Marxist intellectual Angela Davis, black revolutionary H. Rap Brown, and German student leader Rudi Dutschke.27
Soon the young radicals would put Marcuse’s theory of revolutionary violence into action. They had studied the books, written the manifestos, and prepared their weapons; they were simply waiting for the moment to strike.
* * *
On the evening of June 9, 1970, a bomb composed of fifteen sticks of dynamite ripped through the walls of the New York City Police Department headquarters in Manhattan.28 The bomb blew out the second-floor windows and injured seven people inside the building with glass, construction material, and blast debris.
The next morning, the Associated Press received a handwritten letter from the Weathermen taking responsibility for the bombing. “The pigs in this country are our enemies,” the letter said. “They build the Bank of America, kids burn it down. They outlaw grass, we build a culture of life and music. The time is now. Political power grows out of a gun, a molotov, a riot, a commune . . . and from the soul of the people.”29
The Weathermen were members of the Weather Underground Organization, a group of white, college-educated radicals who were fed up with the institutional Left and saw armed revolution as the only viable path forward. The Weathermen were deeply influenced by Marcuse. The spiritual leader of the organization, Bernardine Dohrn, thought of Marcuse as a guiding light for the movement, and her close collaborator, Naomi Jaffe, “started to develop an identification as a radical” while studying under Marcuse as an undergraduate.30 The literature that they produced, which justified their revolution and attracted recruits, was suffused with Marcuse’s concepts and themes.
The nucleus of the group had formed in Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing student movement that had mobilized on the issues of civil rights, free speech, and the Vietnam War. But as the 1960s drew to a close, the most radical elements of the SDS wanted to push further. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others wanted to align with the black militants in America and the liberation armies in the Third World in order to achieve revolution on a global scale. “The goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism,” they wrote in their 1969 manifesto, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, referencing the famous lyric from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “We want to smash cops, and build a new life.”31
That fall, the Weathermen had established revolutionary collectives in more than a dozen cities and set up a centralized headquarters, which they called the Weather Bureau.32 “A revolution is a war,” they wrote. “This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres, and an integrated relationship with the active mass-based Movement. . . . Because war is political, political tasks—the international communist revolution—must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ party.”33
Self-consciously modeling themselves on Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and Mao’s Red Guards, the Weathermen directed street protests, occupations, vandalism, and sabotage campaigns across the country, culminating in the “Days of Rage” protest in Chicago, in which several hundred Weathermen smashed windows and fought against a full contingent of police officers. The Chicago police put down the mob with fists, clubs, guns, and tear gas. They shot three demonstrators and arrested nearly three hundred more.34
The Weathermen were defeated, suppressed, and humiliated, but they had their first taste of blood—and they wanted more.
In the final days of 1969, the Weathermen gathered their most loyal soldiers in a crumbling dance hall in a Flint, Michigan, ghetto to convene a “war council.” The event turned into a multiday bacchanalia. The young attendees endured long drug binges, participated in orgies, and entertained political hallucinations. The speeches, which slurred together in long sequences, captured the revolutionary ethos: “It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building”; “we will burn and loot and destroy”; “we are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.” Bernardine Dohrn, the most charismatic Weather Underground leader, celebrated the serial killer Charles Manson, the cult leader who had recently butchered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four of her friends. “Dig it!” Dohrn exclaimed to the menagerie in Flint. “First, they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”35
The Weathermen followed Marcuse’s theory, outlined in his book Eros and Civilization, that sexual and political liberation were intertwined. They deliberately broke up monogamous relationships and asked members to submit their sexuality to the collective in order to surpass bourgeois norms and “commit suicide as a class.”36 In Flint, the Weathermen confronted one another in all-night, Mao-inspired criticism/self-criticism sessions, confronting their racial privilege, their sexual inhibitions, and their commitment to the revolution.37 They engaged in macabre thought experiments and contemplated the question of whether it was “the duty of every good revolutionary to kill all newborn white babies,” who would otherwise “grow up to be part of an oppressive racial establishment.”38
Violence was the highest theme of the war council discussions. Dohrn suggested that terrorism and political assassination were legitimate means of revolution and the organizers hung up a massive twenty-foot banner with the names of their enemies, such as Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, illustrated onto pictures of bullets.39
According to an FBI informant who infiltrated the group, the Weather Bureau leadership was already making plans for what they would do after violently overthrowing and seizing control of the state. They would establish reeducation centers in the Southwest to rehabilitate the capitalists and guard against the counter-revolution. “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate, that are die-hard capitalists?” the informant asked. “And the reply was that they would have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say ‘eliminate,’ I mean ‘kill’ 25 million people.”40 The young radicals were utterly disillusioned with Western society and ready to enact Marcuse’s dictum that “counter-violence” was necessary in “the struggle for changes beyond the system.”41
The war council concluded on New Year’s Day 1970 with a declaration of war. The Weathermen had made the decision to go underground and to commit themselves to revolution in their time. “Armed struggle,” they said, “starts when someone starts it.”42
That spring, Dohrn released a tape recording of the Weathermen’s Communiqué #1, announcing the revolutionary intentions of the New Left. “Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution,” Dohrn said. “Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.” The strategy of peace had failed. The new strategy of war would succeed. “Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the [Uruguayan leftist] Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world,” said Dohrn, echoing Marcuse’s language on the technological society. “Protests and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.”43
Two weeks later, they set off the bomb at the NYPD headquarters, inaugurating a five-year campaign of bombings, robberies, escapes, and communiqués. Operating in small revolutionary cells, the Weathermen would claim responsibility for a string of symbolic bombings, including detonations at the US Capitol, the Pentagon, military bases, courthouses, police stations, government buildings, financial institutions, and a state attorney general’s office.44 The Weathermen, who considered themselves “white revolutionaries inside the oppressor nation,” believed that their work against the United States represented “the unique contribution [they could] make to the world revolution.”45
The scale of left-wing political violence during this period was enormous. The Weathermen, black nationalist organizations, and other left-wing groups perpetrated a stunning number of property bombings, police assassinations, bank robberies, prison breaks, and violent assaults. During a fifteen-month stretch between 1969 and 1970 alone, police recorded 4,330 bombings that resulted in forty-three deaths.46 The militants, drawing on Che Guevara’s foco theory of revolution, which held that focused action could inspire a broader movement, believed they were on the cusp of sparking a national revolt.
Marcuse, too, had succumbed to the romance of the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas and the armed revolution against the state. In An Essay on Liberation, he had expressed admiration for the revolutionaries in Vietnam, Cuba, and China, who he thought represented “the possibility of constructing socialism on a truly popular base.”47 Like his young disciples in the Weathermen, he praised Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the living embodiment of “‘freedom,’ ‘socialism,’ and ‘liberation’”48 and told a French newspaper that “every Marxist who is not a communist of strict obedience is a Maoist.”49 When another reporter asked him if he agreed with the student slogan “Marx as the prophet, Marcuse as his interpreter, and Mao as the sword,” Marcuse replied modestly: “I think they do me much too much honor.”50
The New Left’s wave of violence, however, did not advance the revolution. It alienated the public and precipitated a forceful response from the government.
In the summer of 1970, President Richard Nixon mobilized the intelligence services against the Weathermen and other radical organizations, which, he believed, were “determined to destroy” the country.51 The United States Congress launched an investigation into the organization52 and the FBI placed Bernardine Dohrn on its list of the Ten Most Wanted fugitives.53 By 1972, law enforcement agencies had captured or killed dozens of left-wing militants and sent the remaining holdouts into deep hiding. Finally, Nixon—the architect of the counter-revolution—sealed his victory against the revolutionaries with a forty-nine-state landslide against liberal candidate George McGovern, promising a return to law and order.
For the remaining members of the Weathermen, the initial euphoria of revolution was overtaken by despair. Life underground turned painful, lonely, and monotonous. The all-night orgies resulted in hangovers, jealousies, gonorrhea, and lice.54 The bombings lost their sheen and slipped to the back pages of the New York Times.
Eventually the movement shriveled down to a dozen hard-core followers, who managed to secure a bourgeois, if clandestine, existence with the help of left-wing lawyers and financial supporters—a pink houseboat in Sausalito, California, a cozy bungalow on Hermosa Beach, an apartment in San Francisco.55
By 1974, as Marcuse was openly conceding the defeat of the New Left, the Weathermen, too, realized that they were at the end of the line. The revolutionary coalition had fallen apart. The relationship between the white radicals and the black militants—Marcuse’s new proletariat—had ended in recriminations. The black liberation organizations turned against their white counterparts, arguing that “the White Left” was a “bankrupt” political movement that “subsumes its hunger for White bourgeois legitimacy behind marxist rhetoric and intellectual lip masturbation.”56
At the same time, the Weathermen’s plan to radicalize the white working class had failed. When the Weatherman Mark Rudd tried to recruit a group of down-class white teenagers loitering outside a restaurant, they sent him to the hospital with a vicious beat-down.57 As Marcuse had feared, the laboring classes, which Marx had considered the ultimate engine of revolution, had become “antirevolutionary,” absorbed into bourgeois mythology and decisively opposed to large-scale social change.58 The blue-collar worker, despite the best efforts of the young radicals, was still a one-dimensional man, sated with a paycheck, a television, and a wife and children at home.
Marcuse was shell-shocked. The forces of Thermidor, which had once devoured Robespierre, had smothered the spirit of revolution yet again. The reactionaries had won.
* * *
Marcuse’s twilight years were a long, contemplative gloom. His revolution, which he had chased since the bracing days of his youth, was over.
From 1972 until his death in 1979, Marcuse retreated to his single-level suburban home in La Jolla to publish his final political manuscript, Counterrevolution and Revolt, and to contemplate the failures of the New Left. He still maintained a small office at UCSD, but following the conflict with Governor Reagan and the Board of Regents, the university had let his contract expire, putting Marcuse into early retirement and ending his career as a teacher.
Marcuse was unsparing in his diagnosis of what went wrong. In 1975, he told students in Irvine, California, that the counterculture was a spent force. It had become anti-intellectual, decadent, and authoritarian. “The countercultures created by the New Left destroyed themselves when they forfeited their political impetus in favor of withdrawal into a kind of private liberation—drug culture, the turn to guru-cults, and other pseudo-religious sects,” he said.59 “The strong libertarian, anti-authoritarian movements that originally defined the New Left have vanished in the meantime or yielded to a new ‘group-authoritarianism.’”60
The student radicals of 1968, in other words, had taken one of two roads: they had either dropped out of society, rendering them politically inert, or joined the militant groups, rendering them vulnerable to infiltration, disruption, and despair. The young rebels had convinced themselves that the revolution was imminent, but, as Marcuse had tried to warn them, the United States had never met the Marxist preconditions for revolution. The students, playing the role of the avant-garde, failed to recruit the working classes. The ghettos, despite the objective conditions of poverty and oppression, failed to develop a political consciousness.61
Still, despite these setbacks, Marcuse refused to accept defeat. “I do believe that a democratic Communism is a real historical possibility. Worse still, I believe that only in a fully developed Communist society is a general democracy possible,” he argued in a 1972 debate, insisting that the only path to liberation was a “socialist regime, with collective ownership of the means of production and collective control of central planning.”62 For Marcuse, the end was the same—traditional Marxism—but, he conceded, the means must change.
The revolution, he told his young followers, would not be achieved through LSD or guerrilla warfare. They had failed at the ballot box and failed in the streets, but there was still one thin glimmer of hope: returning to the origins of the critical theories—the universities—and rebuilding the revolution from the ground up.