The Mail THE RIOT

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The revolutionary's calling is a glorious commitment and one of deep love but it is a damned hard business, and there are certain requirements of the task that are difficult but imperative.

His own tortured soul notwithstanding, he has to learn that by no means is revolution an act of individual will. In this country it will require a movement of people from all walks of lfe, acting together on the understanding that their individual problems will be approached most feasibly through a socialist democracy, and encountering little resistance from the State's coercive apparatus. For nurturing the development of this movement and bringing it to fruition, it will require the assistance of men and women who have brought themselves to an intelligent understanding of the workings of America, of the potentialities and possibilities for action and of the limits that both the Ruling Class and the population-at-large will tolerate: we have learned that these men and women will have forced themselves through the sometimes painful processes of gaining some patience for others and of acquiring a long-term, uphill perspective.

These are all characterizes that, unfortunately, the handful of almost distraught guys who created last Saturday's "riotchka" have not learned. That night it was simple to grasp how a fellow like Lenin could get so vehement over political mistakes that he would go home to write his Collected Works. In contrast to the Old Mole. Juche and other radicals who went out of their way to ease the situation, a collective or two persisted in stirring something up from a near-vacuum. Should a similar situation recur, such groups might best be sternly isolated and restrained and confronted with the strong moral censure that comes with having numbers of their peers arrayed against them.

Why is this unequivocal criticism in order? Whetrer the small group of guys lay behind the leaflet that called the riot and colored it with their own reck-lessness, elitism and male chauvinism is a question that can be left aside. What the band of surely no more than ten did that night was wrong and, to use a good descriptive word, was plainly adventurist for among others, the following reason:

First, because full-scale repression is in the offing with camps and the abrogation of all freedom of speech and assembly, radicals cannot afford to further narrow their own base. This will surely happen if a fringe aimlessly vents its hostility. Any group action that is undertaken has to be clearly readable-we're not. after all, talking about cheap thrills-and has to center around definite and explicit issues that more liberal groups can at least sympathize with. To insure the liberal sympathy that makes repression more costly and difficult, actions have to be infused with an unmistakable political content.

Secondly, if many young people were actually mad enough to do something dangerous, whatever the motivation, they should have been guided into something safer. The image in the Battle of Algiers of organization members checking a riot is apt. The crowd should be restrained and given a vicarious outlet, perhaps something that could have been seen and heard around the Square. But they should not have been encouraged to go to the Square-as these guys attempted-for a physical confrontation with the police.

In any event, what did happen was that the group pushing for a fray met the unexpected resistance of many people on the Common. The light blue leaflet that circulated on Saturday attacking the idea of a riot was a convincing statement for many that the people intent upon a street battle worked against revolutionary purposes.

The handful then overlooked the divisions of the Commons people, discounted those who stood against a riot as pigs, and proceeded to their macho trashing. This was a wrong move. What these guys and others have to take into account is, first, that solid riots happen not according to the dreams of the extreme but when masses of people feel a common hostility; second, and this is the main point, trashing, looting and bombing are not to be done indiscriminately and should for the short-term be suspended: although terrorism can serve on occasion as a thermometer in reading just how radical certain groups of people are, terrorism as a steady tactic is an appropriate instrument in building a movement only when masses of people engage in it or approve of it, and we have not arrived at that point.

This is not to say that we should be quiet and let our oppressors calmly sit on us and the rest of the world. Socialism means people taking rightful control: in their workplaces and schools, of their resources and their environment, of their own lives. Our job is to build that movement, to convince others that socialism is necessary, urgent and possible. We can do this by patiently working with people as they go about organizing themselves around the issues that they are most sensitive to and by showing, while we further educate ourselves, why the radical analysis is the adequate one.

We want, I think, to change the way others think about and respond to the political system, and to bring them in with us. We should try to avoid turning others away by rapping and acting just too far ahead of where they are. But, and this is obvious: we have to be militant enough to show them that we are not frightened and to provide a position to which they can move.

The tensions of the task are trying, but they should not be allowed to overwhelm us, as they did to the handful of guys answerable for Saturday night's mistake. We should try to bear in mind that narrow-based groups can stage narrow-based actions and in their isolation incur unnecessary penalties that cut at their long-range effectiveness in bringing down this system, and they can do this without having ever added to their support or heightened others' awareness.