Marvin Gandall wrote: > > > If you're both saying that Marxists of all stripes played an outsized and > often catalytic role in relation to their numbers and were frequently in and > around the leadership of major struggles, I agree.
Even in an actual revolution, most of those who make the revolution are not revolutionaries. And most of the revolutionaries are not marxists (or self-conscious socialists of any variety). So yes that is what I'm saying. And I'm claiming that the reason for it is (a) what marxists, even beginning and sort of cockeyed marxists, pick up quickly from the marxist tradition in way of tactical skills and (b) that marxism gives one a certain way of looking at the present that 'mere' reformers don't (usually) have. When I speak of reformers 'goofing' up the works I think, for example, of the refusal of the Moratorium in Bloomington/Normal, two weeks before the murder of Fred Hampton, to even pass a resolution condemning repression of the black movement. A couple of them did have the courtesy to apologize to me in December. But most of them never had a clue, even after the fact, that one of the major elements that led to the success of that repression was failure of anti-war groups to exhibit solidarity with the black movement. Jan & I weren't really marxist then, we just had intentions to be marxist, but already we were beginning to look at the present from the perspective of the future, though in a stumbling and untheorized way. And we _knew_, damn it, that white solidarity with the Panthers against repression was essential. Incidentally, the anti-war movement in Bloomington pretty much died after Hampton's murder. SDS came apart. Liberals stopped being activists. Nothing was really left locally to give a backbone to the events following Kent State. So it was another case of opportunism failing to be very opportune. Carrol
