Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, leaders of the Weather Underground, has published to much acclaim a new book about his parents, their organization which came out of Students for a Democratic Society, and what he endured as a child growing up on the run from the FBI.
Leon Trotsky observed about reformist Norman Thomas that “he was a socialist as a result of a misunderstanding“. The same could be said about the Weather Underground , that they were “revolutionists” as a result of a misunderstanding. Hatred of imperialism and especially its racism doesn’t make an organization revolutionary. Planting bombs in police stations, corporate headquarters and on army bases does not make an organization “revolutionary“. It makes it a terrorist group to call something by its right name.
A revolution is the displacement of the American ruling capitalist class by workers and their allies. If we can achieve that in America, it’ll be the result of mass mobilizations, self-organization, and conscious socialist leadership.
Historically, socialists like Lenin and Trotsky, who led the Russian Revolution, assessed the inadequacy of terrorist acts on a practical not moral basis. They said it was counter-productive. That it put the onus of violence on us rather than the ruling class where it belongs. That it invited massive repression.
And even if the terrorist act met with popular approval — this is its greatest fault — it sidelines the masses of people who need to participate in their own struggles for freedom, not substituting an individual act for the mass action that is required.
When Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, he became a popular hero. But we still do not have free healthcare for all.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn did not write about this perspective in his book. He is against violence as we all are except of course, in self-defense. He believes that the long arc of history will eventually lead to justice. This is not necessarily true. Think of the unfolding climate catastrophe and threat of nuclear war.
He interviewed Weather Underground leader Mark Rudd who told him that the biggest mistake he ever made was supporting the destruction of SDS in 1969. It had been a large vibrant organization. It broke up when the Weather Underground faction left.
The Weather Underground people were driven by their hatred of the moral rot of this society, particularly its oppression of Black people and the prosecution of its mass murderous war in Vietnam. In March 1970, they planned to dynamite the corporal and sergeant’s enlisted man’s dance at the large army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey. While building a bomb, it prematurely detonated, killing three comrades and demolishing the townhouse in Greenwich Village, where they were building it.
The Weather Underground saw itself as an American extension of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and considered American soldiers the enemy. But it was American soldiers who refused to fight, along with the massive sacrifice of Vietnamese, who lost three million people in the conflict, that finally stopped the war by 1975 when the United States withdrew, defeated.
The organization of masses of millions of people against the war in Vietnam spread to American soldiers over there. Towards the end they refused to fight.
A leader of the American anti-war movement, socialist Fred Halstead, wrote in his seminal book “Out Now” that the Russian revolution was “the greatest anti-war movement of them all”. It was the Russian soldiers’ refusal to fight that caused the end of the slaughter of World War I.
The “bring the troops home now” movement in the far east after World War II prevented the American ruling class from using these soldiers against the unfolding Chinese revolution which finally came to power in 1949.
The socialists in the American anti-war movement here in the USA understood this from the very beginning. It built the first demonstration that SDS called in Washington DC in 1965 and the demonstrations in 1967 in 1969 in Washington DC that had over a half million people.
After 1965, SDS on a national level never built or supported these mass demonstrations. They said they were “tired of marching”, that it didn’t do any good.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s book is a beautifully written page turner. It is about his parents and grandparents. It’s about what happened to him as a child on the run for years from the FBI, never sure that he was a priority for his parents, afraid they would put “the revolution“ first.
The book is a tribute to the courage and self-sacrifice of comrades who went down the wrong road. Get it and read it. It’s a valuable contribution.
Michael Steven Smith is a retired lawyer who was active throughout the 1960’s and 70’s in the peace movement, where he defended anti-war G.I. activists. Tune in to his radio show, “Law and Disorder” Mondays at 11 am on WBAI-99.5fm or via lawanddisorder.org.
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
By Zayd Ayers Dohrn.
W. W. Norton, 376 pages
2026
