Many people misunderstand action. They think that a more timid action shows a more relative position. It may show an uncertain state of mind. It does not show a firmly committed mind that realizes that the war is, in some absurd simplification, only 60 per cent wrong. If you believe that the war is wrong, it becomes totally wrong when you decide to act. You cannot march with one foot in a YAF parade and the other in an SDS demonstration. Therefore, once the decision to fight is made. it is made absolutely. If that decision is not made, the resulting inaction is equally absolute.

The point is that blowing up buildings is justified by the same kind of evil that justifies peaceful protests in front of those buildings. It is fallacious to think that explosions are justified only by 100 per cent evil while peaceful protest is justified by 51 per cent evil.

Five years ago, there was a chasm between SDS and the Young Democrats. Either you rejected the system totally, or you worked for change inside it. Today, there is an entire gradation of political activity from liberalism to radicalism. Because of the proliferation of political groups, it is no longer possible to organize someone for action, knowing that action will produce commitment and in turn more action.

It is certainly true that opinions are forged more in action than in reflection. But many of those who worked for McCarthy then worked for Lowenstein, and deepened their commitment to moderate politics. It is again time to show new vistas of possible action. When radicals are not describing the new, they are enforcing the old.

I HAVE SAVED one tactical argument on which to conclude because it fits in more closely with the rationale for action. The critics of terrorism claim that governments would become much more repressive if terrorists blew up buildings. The point of that criticism must be that this repression would hurt those who are not responsible. It is up to those who act to judge the consequences to themselves. It is up to others in the movement to try to ascertain the consequences for the rest. I think, though, that I could almost argue the opposite. The Weatherman attack on the CFIA made the subsequent Guided Tour much more palatable. When blacks burnt down stores in ghettoes, they legitimized bus boycotts and sit-ins. Blowing up buildings would make sit-ins and building occupations that much easier.

We are now at a point where we can talk about the Weatherman action at the Center without hysteria. There are three things to say. The first is that no one should have been hurt. All of the arguments above are good only for violence against inanimate property. Violence to people can sometimes be justified. Those arguments, however, are much more complex. The N.L.F. is certainly justified in killing Americans. Their justification, however, comes from some combination of possibilities and a progressive view of history. The Vietnamese could no more have begun their revolution by hurting people than we can ours. As a rule of thumb, buildings should be blown up after 5 p.m.

There is another reason for not hurting people. We should try to reaffirm the difference between people and property. One of the deepest philosophical bases of capitalism is the belief that a person is his property. Since you are what you can buy, your purchases are an extension of yourself. Indeed, as Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "If money is the bond which binds me to human life, and society to me, and which links me with nature and man, is it not the bond of all bonds? Is it not therefore also the universal agent of separation?" (Bottomore edition, p. 192)

Money and property become the mediating forces between life and everything else, including people. By the deification of property, capitalism can continue to make people think that their property is part of themselves. To separate people from an identity with their possessions, it will be necessary to show people the transience of those possessions.

"Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person: if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression. corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.c., if you are not able by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune." (ibid. -. p. 194)

People should learn to think of themselves apart from the needs that capitalism creates in them. We should have a particular vengeance, then, against property, because of the role capitalism forces property to play. We see a difference between people and property. We should not kick a researcher in the CFIA. He is not a file cabinet, but a person.

Second, I don't think the Weatherman tactic was destructive enough. In America in 1969, it will take a lot more than a few obscenities to startle most people. The CFIA, again with the exception of most of the Semitic Museum, should have been destroyed.

Finally, people on the Left should take advantage of attacks against imperialist institutions to explain the function of those institutions. A self-indulgent criticism of all tactics but one's own is usually a retreat rather than an advance.

It is difficult to decide exactly how to fight capitalism. People on the Left have been quick to turn their repressed violence toward themselves rather than bourgeois society. One's allies are often far weaker than one's enemies. The very virtue of terrorism, in fact, is that it allows a spontaneous release of the frustrations caused by capitalism. Capitalism should receive the blows from the bent up hostility that it causes.

At this point in the argument, I will make a concession to a friend of mine who is an "organizer." Up until now I have said that terrorism against capitalism is always justified. I believe that. My friend, however, argues that I should wait to blow things up until people have at least some awareness of how bad they are.

I decided to compromise. We agreed that everyone understood that draft boards and induction centers helped fight the war. I could blow those up, he said. The second part of the agreement was that I would help organize against the CFIA, and wait until people understood what it does before I blow it up.

With all of the words and images we have around us, it may be that action is the only way to open fresh areas of consciousness. In any case, it will take a very concrete destruction of the material foundations of the wrongs we are fighting before we are rid of them.

Only then will we be able to plant trees and flowers all over our woes, and begin again.