MIM Notes 35                    Jan 23 1989 

Book Review:

The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

Todd Gitlin

By MC2

This book is very disappointing. It is very long and contains many 
stories about various liberal and social democratic activists, but 
is seriously flawed because Gitlin refuses to take Maoism seriously. 
Here is how Gitlin describes what happened in the 1970s. "Only a 
small fraction of longtime activists stayed with the Marxist-
Leninist sects. Purified of counterculture and expressive politics, 
some of these hoarders of the Correct Idea calcified into out-and-
out cultists; some, more solid, on the Trotskyist side, worked to 
bring actual workers into radical union caucuses." (p. 422)  Like 
most social democrats, Gitlin favors economism and thinks Trotskyism 
is better than Maoism.  Gitlin attacks the Chinese Cultural 
Revolution, "for what excuse can there be, in the closing years of 
the twentieth century, for overlooking the injuries done to human 
dignity not only by the Soviet Union but by Castro's Cuba and the 
Chinese Cultural Revolution?" (p. 437) Gitlin's treatment of the 
conflict between the Progressive Labor Party and RYMI 
(weatherpeople) is extremely disappointing.  PL believed that white 
workers in the United States could be won over to revolution. Gitlin 
explains PL as follows: "The faction organized by Progressive Labor 
was growing--less a consequence of its 'Maoism,' whatever exactly 
that was (it was certainly different from the barricade romanticism 
of the French 'Maoists'), than of its availability as a counterforce 
to the 'resistance' mood of 1967-69. With its talk of 'base-
building' and 'worker-student alliance,' its short hair and 
suspicion of rock 'n' roll (to avoid offending 'the workers'), PL 
positioned itself as a straitlaced alternative to the raucous go-it-
alone sentiment surging through the rest of SDS." (p. 382) Gitlin 
dismisses out of hand Maoist political theory. Gitlin's attitude is 
that Maoism is evil so no one could have possibly believed in it 
despite the fact that most members of SDS in 1969 claimed to be 
Maoists. The Weathermen or Weatherpeople (RYMI) argued that white 
workers in the United States and Europe (including the Soviet Union) 
were labor aristocrats and hence counterrevolutionary.  RYMI took 
the line that revolution was going to come from the Third World and 
the Black and Hispanic internal colonies in the United States. 
Weatherpeople argued that white revolutionaries in the United States 
should undertake focoism to sabotage the imperialist war machine.  
Naturally, Gitlin does not discuss the politics of RYMI, but instead 
concentrates on the use of LSD and bomb building in that movement.  
Gitlin discusses the RYMI's position paper, "You Don't Need a 
Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," as follows: "Who knows 
how many of SDS's hundred thousand or more members actually read 
this clotted and interminable manifesto, which raised obscurity and 
thickheadedness to new heights?" (p. 385)  Gitlin covers RYMII, 
which included Bob Avakian, as follows: "Their RYM II allies soon 
abandoned the alliance and went off to find their own working-class 
base--the first of a series of factional splintering that culminated 
years later, in the founding of a miniscule Revolutionary Communist 
Party." (pp. 391-92)

Gitlin hates Maoism and tries to claim that it did not matter in 1969. 
Don't read this book. Read Adelson's SDS or other books about the 1960s 
on the MIM reading list.