The Mail 'MARSHMALLOW REVOLUTION ARIES'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

On my way to speak at a "pro-Vietnam" program at Harvard I bought a P. L. P. leaflet entitled "Free Speech at Harvard." As usual it makes a most compelling case. It tells us: "It is nice perhaps to imagine 'freedom for all.' But it cannot exist. You can side with one side or the other... We should get past abstractions and judge: whose freedom should be attacked, whose should be upheld." It insists that we are all part of a class war where the correct class is always correct because it is the working class and the incorrect class is always incorrect because it is the capitalist class. Students should join with workers to destroy every expression of "U. S. imperialism."

Needless to say our presentations were mere expressions of U. S. imperialism and, therefore, devoid of any right to free speech. This makes sense. But let us look at what this logic drives us to. All classes PLP tells us, seek to protect their power-their freedom if you will. Therefore, if we are to be branded as a separate class, the capitalist class, all those of us who support freedom (our version) must defend ourselves when our freedoms are attacked. Since our class is the class in power in America, it doesn't make sense for these "revolutionaries" to bombard us with paper balls and marshmallows-they should have used REAL instruments of revolutionary violence. After all, since we would have responded repressively to defend our class status, it seems stupid to incite our violent power with harmless paper balls, marshmallows and shouts.

So why the weak assault? The answer is all too clear. The "revolutionaries" who confronted us, the spokesmen of imperialism and repression, were marshmallow revolutionaries. They each wanted to be two people at once: one a real revolutionary throwing things, the other a petit bourgeois doing nothing. When the repression comes in the form of our "pig police," these "revolutionaries" would not have to face "capitalist justice." After all, who can charge assault and battery when hit by a marshmallow?

This is what infuriated me. This is what drove me to say, as quoted in the CRIMSON, that these revolutionaries had "no balls at all." To some of you this may be a small point. You may indeed consider me a baiter, but in fact I am only saying that such big words as used by PLP in its dissertation on free speech normally constitute a courageous commitment. I suggest that the little bourgeois revolutionaries of Harvard who regard such tracts as only verbal exercises should get off their campus and see what the real world is like. Despite the niceties of intellectual bestiality, out there where men live, verbal violence and physical violence blend together into an unbroken continuum. Brave words are considered brave because of the physical commitment that lies behind them. But those who depend on the restraints of etiquette in order to escape the wrath of those they assault are only playing revolution. Such fakes are despised by all.

It is not just out of rage but out of utter contempt that I berated your marshmallow revolutionaries in the foulest terms I could. I was ready for any consequences but obviously, despite their numbers, they were only putting on a show in the hope that we on the podium would melt in fear. They were wrong because unlike some campus revolutionaries who hide out at Harvard we come from the real world. Another alternative would have been to engage us in meaningful dialogue, but of course, that's too bourgeois for these brave vanguard marshmallow revolutionaries.