that seemed straight out of a Hollywood B-release, the black superintendent of Oakland's public schools was cut down in a hail of cyanide bullets and shotgun blasts. As the killers fled, Marcus Foster lay dead on the pavement, near the writhing body of his seriously wounded white aide.

The following day, "Communique # 1" from a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army Western Regional Youth Unit was received by the media. The communique contained a "Warrant Order" for the execution of Foster and his aide, and a three point "indictment" of the Oakland School Board. It concluded with a phrase made popular by Eldridge Cleaver: "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People."

Up to that time, few, if any, had heard of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Moreover, while the rhetoric of the

"Warrant" and "Indictment" bore resemblances to some Left rhetoric, the act itself was so brutal, so morally unjustifiable and so politically incomprehensible, that most Bay Area radicals assumed the "SLA" to be a cover for some right-wing or police group, or perhaps even a criminal gang seeking to settle an obscure debt, and throw suspicion onto the Left in the process.

For two months, there were no leads in the Foster case. And then a chance encounter between two SLA members and police during a routine traffic check led to a gun battle and the subsequent arrest of Russell Little and Joseph Remiro (who turned out to have been one of the founders of a local VVAW chapter). In their possession, the police found the weapon alleged to have murdered Foster.

A week later, the press received an open letter from Nancy Ling Perry, who was being sought in connection with an arson attempt on the house where Remiro and Little had been staying. Her letter began with a set phrase

that was to open all subsequent SLA communications: "To those who would bear the hopes and future of the people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom." Perry said that she was a "freedom fighter" in an SLA intelligence/information unit, that she had adopted the name "Fahizah," and that the killing of Foster was not indiscriminate, but stemmed from his support for "political police state programs," similar to the one in South Africa, in Oakland's schools. Killing him, she said, was "the only means left open to us to demand that the people's wishes be met, and that all such dangerous, genocidal programs be stopped."

Within three weeks of Nancy Ling Perry's letter, and a month of the Remiro-Little arrest, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from the house in Berkeley's "South Campus" area where she had been living as a student. The Symbionese Liberation Army had become front page news across the nation.

A week later, the media received tapes of several messages from the SLA. These included a "Declaration of Revolutionary War" against the "Fascist Capitalist Class, and all their agents of murder, oppression and exploitation." It also included tapes of the voices of Patricia Hearst, and SLA General Field Marshall "Cinque" (identified by the media as Donald DeFreeze, an escaped prisoner), and a set of demands. As an earnest of "good faith," ensuring the continued safety of the "prisoner of war," Patricia Hearst, her father (Randolph A~ Hearst) was told to provide $70 worth of food for all people with welfare cards, social security pension cards, food stamp cards, disabled veteran cards, medical cards, parole or probation papers, and jail or release slips. The time for distribution Of the food (a point of importance subsequently) was one month, and was to begin the following week. Several radical organizations were named by the SLA as distributors of the food.

At least one group, the United Farm workers' Union, refused to have anything to do with the SLA program. And although others did cooperate in the food distribution, they did so reluctantly, and justified their actions in negative terms. They did not want to deny food to the poor; they did not want to endanger the life of Patricia Hearst. For the SLA itself, there was no support forthcoming from Left organizations in the area. Several radical leaders, including Cesar Chavez, Huey Newton, and Angela Davis, roundly condemned the SLA actions. Only a sprinkling of letters in the Berkeley Barb, including a message from the Black Liberation Army and an equivocal communique from Bernardine Dohrn and the "Weather Underground," offered the Symbionese army and its revolutionary war a semblance of moral support.

In part this was because the Left has learned well the lessons of its failures in the Sixties-that, without a political base among significant sections of America's ethnic communities and working classes, no action, however audacious, can succeed against the cooptive and coercive forces of the world's most powerful state. In part, however, the Left's coolness to the SLA was not pragmatic at all, but moral, and in that way profoundly political. It was the conviction that in killing Marcus Foster and in kidnapping Patricia Hearst the SLA had not pitted revolutionary violence against the violence of the oppressor-the power of the people against the power of the rich.

Marcus Foster was the first black superintendent of schools in Oakland's history. His appointment had come as the result of a major struggle waged by community groups, who wanted an administrator responsive to the needs of Oakland's black, chicano and poor communities, constituting more than 70 percent of the Oakland school population. For three years, Marcus Foster had shown himself to be a liberal ally of the community forces in their efforts to wrench concessions from the Republican majority on the Oakland School Board. Among his achievements, for example, was the introduction of bi-lingual instruction at an East Oakland grammar school near the Del Monte cannery, long a demand of the local chicano community, and another bilingual program in Oakland's Chinatown area.

Ultimately, however, Foster was a product of the forces brought to bear on him. Sometimes he bowed too precipitously to the white conservative majority on the School Board. (Legally the Board sets policy guidelines and the superintendent, as the Board's employee, administers them. In practice, his influence is somewhat greater.) Nonetheless, the perception of Foster as an important ally of the third world and poor communities in the Oakland school struggle was so strong and so generally accepted, that seasoned radicals familiar with the situation are convinced that his assassination was the work of police agents who regarded him as too liberal. In support of this hypothesis, they point to the fact that in last spring's mayoral election, Bobby Scale polled nearly 40 percent of the vote, an unprecedented showing for a radical in so large a city.

The issue which cost Foster his life was a controversial report issued by the Alameda County Grand Jury in mid-July. The report dealt with truancy, violence and vandalism in the Oakland schools and resulted in a proposal to revive student identification systems in seven high and junior high schools, and to appoint a handful of "safety coordinators" with law enforcement backgrounds to deal with problems in the pilot institutions. A first draft of this proposal had been signed by Foster, but the plan itself was still in negotiation between the School Board and a funding agency (the California Council on Criminal Justice), and the tide of community opposition was mounting. Foster, in fact, had prematurely leaked the proposal to a local journalist, whom he knew would be hostile to its recommendations and would alert community forces, grouped in the Coalition to Save Our Schools, against it.

On October 9, when the School Board met, the community pressure had grown so great that Foster announced he had withdrawn the proposal from the agenda, saying "the program might never get funded because the schools and the funding body might never get together." Knowing that over Foster stood the conservative Oakland School Board, a series of speakers, including leaders of the Coalition to Save Our Schools and Black Panthers Bobby Scale and Elaine Brown, rose to attack the withdrawn proposal and serve notice that, if the Board did not confirm Foster's withdrawal action, the community was ready for a major fight.

Then, on November 6, less than a month after this meeting, when the issue seemed almost dead, the SLA "executed" Foster, and the following day, issued the "Warrant" for the execution. It was a grisly extension of the Queen of Hearts' justice in Alice in Wonderland: first the sentence, then the verdict. The warrant itself showed the executioners to be far removed from the realities of the Oakland school situation (indeed, from reality itself):

The receipt of this communiqué was made public as one leader of the black Oakland community after another, including Congressman Ron Dellums, Assemblyman John J. Miller, and Black Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Scale expressed their outrage and grief at the murder of Foster.

Not a single community group had called for the ouster of Foster, let alone his death. In whose name and on whose behalf did the SLA execute Foster? In what sense is their Court of the People, of the people at all? In what sense is it a court? Foster was given no chance to answer the charges, or plead his case. Indeed, the three-point indictment of Foster and the School Board (the SLA makes no distinction between the two) is mainly a weak effort to link the withdrawn proposals with police practices in outposts of the American empire:

The indictment is completely vague. There is no effort to determine specific guilt. Even assuming the bizarre interpretation of the significance of the Alameda County Grand Jury report and plan, the question of Foster's responsibility is surely not unimportant. Was he an employee or a policy-maker? Was he a reluctant or active supporter of the program in question? Under the SLA's doctrine of guilt, every employee of every government agency, local or federal, civilian or military, could be held responsible for the crimes already committed in Vietnam, Chile, etc., and, under the SLA's standard for matching punishments with crimes, put to death. But perhaps the vagueness has a purpose: perhaps it is just a license to kill.

In "executing" Marcus Foster and in making no effort to justify that execution by any doctrine of specific guilt, the SLA assumes the power of life and death over everyone. It has made no serious attempt to establish any legitimacy for its actions; it has a "court," but the court has no apparent function other than to sanction executions and authorize kidnaps. It recognizes no authority except its own will, which it identifies with the will of the people in much the same manner that many psychopathic killers claim to be instructed by God. It has killed a defenseless individual whose guilt is not only not proved, but is mainly a fantasy of his executioners. It has committed a crime not only against the individual in question, but against the entire black, brown and Asian communities of Oakland.

And yet there have been a few radicals who have tried to look beyond what they call this "immense political mistake," to offer support to the SLA in its other actions. Such radicals confuse the defense of revolutionary violence

-that is, a legitimate violence on behalf of a community defending itself against the violence of the oppressor, when there are no other means available to it-with the criminal violence of the SLA, which is accountable to no community and recognizes no moral code of responsibility.

"Do we really believe every Vietnamese village chief cut down by the NLF deserved to die?" asks one former New Left activist. "Have we such supreme faith in the Cuban government that we can state categorically its revolutionary firing squads were never aimed in the wrong direction?" But the Cuban Government and the NLF are legitimized by mass movements numbering millions of supporters, by political organs, by legal codes which are enforced and respected (not mere camouflage and window dressing), by courts of justice and judicial review procedures to which military functionaries are responsible and to whom they can be held accountable. They have a concept of the criminal abuse of revolutionary authority, and of illegal procedure, as distinct from mistakes due to human error.

Unlike the NLF, which was called into being by a political mass movement as a strategy of self-defense under conditions in which there really was no political alternative, the SLA is a self-appointed vigilante group. Its authority derives from no source outside its own will. Its sense of threat from the system is personal, not collective. That its first action should be the assassination of an unarmed black educator (and its second the kidnap of an unarmed innocent woman) is surely not unconnected to these operating assumptions, nor irrelevant to the assessment of the SLA's basic character. To argue otherwise is to maintain that in the name of the revolution any crime is permissable, and by extension that any criminal gang can commit a crime and justify it in advance by presenting it in political terms.

The difficulty of converting criminal acts into revolutionary gestures is real, however, and is dramatized by the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. Those isolated voices that praise the "profoundly revolutionary character" of the Hearst kidnapping can do so only by abandoning even their own narrowly pragmatic criteria for evaluating revolutionary acts. "The important thing about revolutionary action" explains Bernardine Dohrn in the Weather communique, "is its political effect, its direction, what it teaches and strengthens."

What have been the political effects of the Hearst kidnapping? It has created more public sympathy across all class lines for the Hearst family than it has been able to muster for more than half a century. It has taken Catherine Campbell Hearst, a symbol of reaction and white racism on the Board of Regents of the University of California, a leader in the fight against the Free Speech Movement and in behalf of the move to fire Angela Davis, and it has placed her before millions as a terror-stricken and heartbroken mother. It has made the recipients of the ransom, those poor and oppressed people whose interest the SLA claims to serve, the objects of humiliation and abuse as the beneficiaries of extortion and the recipients of blood offerings. It has created a pretext for repressive police actions against revolutionary, prison and welfare groups, including the Coalition to Save Our Schools, and a climate of fear in which police agents always do their best work. Federal and local police agencies have already gone to work preparing indictments against known radicals in the Oakland area, and at least one uninvolved activist whom police are seeking to link with the SLA has been arraigned on felony charges.

The blanket of fear that has spread in the wake of the SLA actions is all the more problematical, because it has no focus either in its source or aim (a consequence of the fact that the SLA has shown itself to be grounded in no constituency or framework of moral right). Thus the Reverend Cecil Williams, a revered figure in the Bay Area black community, a man well-liked by all factions of the Left, and who for this reason was chosen by the SLA to receive its communiques and help distribute the food, within weeks after assuming this responsibility, felt it necessary to protect his family with bodyguards. In these ways, the SLA has made the work of the Left, aheady difficult in a period of pessimism and demoralization, far more difficult. In sum, the effect on consciousness of the SLA's actions, beyond reminding people that there are rich and poor (which surely could have been accomplished in other ways), has been decidedly negative, creating sympathy for the ruling class, credibility for the police and paranoia for the radical movement.

These effects were a predictable consequence of the action itself. The very structure of the Hearst-type kidnap embodies negative results for revolutionaries: in order that~ the action be successful, the kidnappers (i.e., the revolutionaries) must demonstrate their ruthlessness, their willingness to take the life of an innocent hostage; on the other

hand, the target of the kidnap (the ruling class oppressor), must demonstrate his humanity, his willlingness to sacrifice material possession and power to save a human life. In short, a kidnap dramatizes the very reverse of the revolutionary program. The revolutionaries who claim to speak for the human interest against the property interest, appear instead on the other side of the equation, as traders of money for life. If the kidnap is successful, the ruling class demonstrates that it has a heart. If the kidnap fails, the revolutionaries show that they can hold life lightly, that they too can kill. And all this is done in the public spotlight!

From the point of view of mass consciousness, it can almost be said that only if the kidnap were to fail from every point of view would it succeed as a revolutionary gesture-that is, if Hearst had refused to make any effort to save his daughter, and if the SLA then released her unharmed.

Of course, there may be political contexts in which specific types of kidnapping do not have the moral implications of the SLA action. In the film State of Siege, an agent of a foreign controlling power, specifically charged with the training of political police and police torturers (and shown to be guilty of the charge), is kidnapped in a country whose servile political and judicial structures are totally complicit with the system of police torture and repression. He is held as a hostage not to his family, but to his employer, the U.S. government, which is responsible for creating the police system and the servile condition of this satellite state. He is held for the release of the political prisoners of precisely that police system which he helped to create.

But none of these conditions remotely apply to the Hearst kidnapping or to the present political situation in America.

[A DOOMED STRATEGY]

Several radicals have noted the lack of parallels and have criticized in particular the choice of victims. "No doubt the popularity of the movie State of Siege helped motivate and teach the SLA," commented Jerry Rubin, "but the Tupamaros would never kidnap the innocent daughter of a capitalist criminal." Yet one must ask whether this is merely another "political error," or whether it does not stem from a deeper dualism in the SLA strategy?

Officially the SLA announced its aims in disinterested and generous revolutionary terms: "We have heard it said that Mr. Hearst wants to save his daughter, we want to save all the children and people. In an effort to answer some of the basic needs of the people, we are asking for a symbolic gesture of good faith from this representative of the corporate state." This symbolic gesture was the provision of $70 worth of food to any poor person that came to claim it, the food to be delivered within one month. The SLA's Field Marshal Cinque was at pains to stress that "our interest is to serve and defend the people and not ourselves. Since the people shall always come first in our hearts and souls."

Yet at the same time there was a clear signal from the SLA that self-interest might be at least an equally powerful motive behind this kidnap. Accompanying the SLA

demands was a tape of Patricia Hearst's voice, which carefully outlined this other interest: "I am a prisoner of war and so are the two men in San Quentin," she explained, referring to Little and Remiro who had been captured less than three weeks earlier. "I am here because I am a member of a ruling class family and I think you can begin to see the analogy. The people, the two men in San Quentin, are being held and are going to be tried simply because they are members of the SLA and not because they've done anything. Witnesses to the shooting of Foster saw black men. And two white men have been arrested for this." She explained that Little and Remiro were apparently part of an intelligence unit and had never executed anyone themselves. "You have to understand that I am held to be innocent the same way the two men in San Quentin are innocent," i.e., as members of opposing armies. "You're being told this so that you'll understand why I was kidnapped and so that you'll understand that whatever happens to the two prisoners is going to happen to me."

From the moment that the two unrelated objectives of freeing the SLA prisoners and providing food for California's poor were joined, the tortured consequences of the action were foredoomed. From that moment, Patricia Hearst and California's poor would be linked as pawns in a desperate struggle to compel the state to release Remiro and Little, while convincing the public that the SLA was acting in the people's interest and that any harm to the hostage could only come from the agents of the fascist .corporate military empire, and in particular Randolph Hearst and the FBI. Patricia Hearst and fiancé, Stephen Weed

Although at this writing barely a month has elapsed since the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, the identities of the dozen or so people who make up the SLA are already known to the police; at least one Bay Area journalist from the major media has already written a detailed account of the SLA's origins and development, identifying the individuals by name (the story has been suppressed at the request of Randolph Hearst). On the other hand, the FBI is taking around a list of suspects which is more than twice as long as the SLA roster and contains the names of many dedicated radicals in the Bay Area whose threat is not as kidnappers and killers but organizers of the working class and poor. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, meanwhile, is gearing up for a new witch-hunt.

Under the circumstances, we do not feel it politically wise or proper to discuss in detail the specific political roots of the SLA. Several facts, however, are already public. It is clear that many of the individuals came together in the Black Culture Association at the Vacaville correctional facility, and that the SLA is a fusion of black prisoners (perhaps no more than two) with non-prison radicals holding beliefs in the necessity of immediate armed struggle, the fascist character of the present American state, and the revolutionary mission of the "human". elements of the population.

The society encompassed by America's prisons corresponds fairly precisely to that nightmare vision of a fascist military corporate state engaged in internal warfare against its own people which underlies the SLA's general strategy. It is the cadre forming the other side of the alliance, whose base is outside the prison walls, that have to be seen as crucial to the emergence of the SLA. For if the radicals, operating in a non-prison context, were not ready to confirm what is essentially a prison view of American society, and act upon it, then the SLA could not have embarked on its tragic course.

Until more information is made public about the SLA, only partial insights into the genesis of the SLA's views are possible. But one source already publicly available is the "Letter to the People" written by Nancy Ling Perry, shortly after the arrest of Remiro and Little. In it, she strives to tell "something about my background and the evolution of my consciousness."

It is the consciousness of someone up against the wall, who sees herself as having no alternatives but to fight or die: "All members of the SLA recognize that we, right here in Amerikka are in a state of war, and that in a state of war, all must be armed, and understand the true meaning of self-defense," she explains. The "true meaning of self-defense" is that "when any member of the people's army strikes out at the murderer of our people and children [i.e. Marcus Foster-Eds.], we are doing so because we are left no alternative and force of arms is now our only legal means to affect revolutionary justice."

Nancy Ling Perry is one of those deracinated children of the Sixties youth culture, increasingly a bottomless reservoir of believers for the prophets of instantaneous apocalypse, from Timothy Leary and Eldridge Cleaver to Jesus and the Guru Maharaj Ji. A refugee from a middle-class Goldwater background, steeped in the racism of small-town America and plunged into the deep acid culture of Berkeley

It is not necessary to go over the details of the subsequent negotiations (which at the time of writing are still in process) to see that from the outset Hearst could hardly be expected to believe that a goodwill gesture on his part, whether the two million dollars worth originally offered, or the subsequent six million demanded and given, or for that matter ten million, would ensure the return of his daughter. On the other hand, the SLA's demands themselves were hardly intelligible in terms of a primary interest in feeding poor people.

In the beginning, the food distribution was stupidly and callously handled, and the amounts delivered were inadequate. This was partly because the SLA demanded that the distribution begin in an unrealistically short time, and partly because the machinery for feeding people in need does not really exist in this "post-industrial democracy." Over subsequent weeks, however, the distribution and quality of the food was much improved. Then, in the midst of a two-and-a-half-week SLA silence, complaints were heard from Remiro and Little about their mistreatment at San Quentin, and their inability to hold a press conference. This produced SLA communiqué number 3, whose purpose was to secure the public hearing for Remiro and Little, but which launched a bitter and unjustified attack on the food as "hog feed"; on the alleged failure to provide more than $8 worth per head; on the fact that extra food was donated (as though this reduced Hearst's commitment, whereas it actually increased the amount of food); and on the fact that all the food was supposed to be distributed within a month, whereas Hearst had evolved a plan to distribute the food over a year and in effect to set up an ongoing relief program called People In Need, which could receive additional donations.

This conflict produced a fascinating irony: "I can understand the SLA's frustration or anger on the food program," Hearst told reporters after the complaints of communique no. 3, "because basically we made the initial mistake of thinking that a supplemental program that would last a long time would be more desirable than one that would be over rather quickly." The prospective recipients might well have agreed. The SLA, however, may have wanted the food distributed quickly as a prelude to the next phase of negotiations, the freeing of Remiro and Little. (As of this writing, there are indications that Remiro and Little themselves will ask the SLA to free Patricia Hearst, a gesture that would indicate some measure of political sense and humanity on the part of the SLA.)

The SLA' s emergence is directly attributable to the collapse of the organized Left at the end of the Sixties, and its continuing failure to regroup itself and revive. In periods of demoralization, such acts of desperate violence are often conceived as protests against inaction itself, and vigilante groups like the SLA see themselves as substitutes for the missing mass organizations. The very presence of a mass movement acts as a restraint on destructive violence, since it creates a moral community for people in revolt.

ley, Nancy Ling Perry is a personality burdened by too much guilt, too heavy dope, too new roots and too searing an exposure to the moral rot and relentless hypocrisy of the American system. As a result, she has evolved a view of that reality which is perceptive with the insight of the truly mad:

"When I was in high school in 1963-64, 1 witnessed the first military coup, against we the people of this country. I saw us passively sit by our t.v.'s and unconsciously watch as the militarily armed corporate state took over the existing government and blatantly destroyed the constitution that some of us still believed in. .. . the coup was simply accom'plished by assassinating the then president john kennedy, and then assassinating any. further opposition to the dictator who was to take power; that dictator is the current president richard nixon. In 1964 I witnessed these and other somewhat hidden beginnings of the military/corporate state which we now live in. And I heard my teachers and the government-controlled media spread lies about what had happened. I saw the Civil Rights protests, the killings and bombings of my black brothers and sisters and the conditioned reactions of extreme racism in my school and home. ... I told my teachers and my family and friends, that I felt we were all being used as pawns and puppets, and that those who had taken over the government were trying to keep us asleep and in a political stupor. I asked my teachers to tell me what happened in Nazi Germany; I asked them to tell me the meaning of fascism; I asked them to tell me the meaning of genocide; and when I began to hear about a war in Vietnam, I asked them to tell me the meaning of imperialism. The answer to all my questions then was either silence, or a reply filled with confusion and lies, and a racist pride and attitude that well, after all, it was all for us."

Nancy Ling Perry seems to have witnessed the coup as a Goldwaterite. She drifted through the culture, into "consciousness raising," hard drugs, and the revolutionary remnants of the movement. She began to work with prisoners at Vacaville. She was concerned about racism. She worked at "Fruity Rudy's" orange juice stand on the Berkeley campus and gave $130 a week, virtually her entire paycheck, to prisoners. One aspect of her, personality, reported by her employer at the orange juice stand, provides a stark insight into her perspective: "She has claustrophobia. That's why I hope they don't catch her. She would flip out in jail. At first she was just doing clean-up work for me. It took her six months before she could work up enough nerve to work in the cart. Even then she had to have a lot of breaks. She couldn't stand to be closed up." [italics added]

To understand the burdens of Nancy Ling Perry's personality is not to explain away her deep concern for the black prisoners closed within the walls of America's racist jails. It is to understand the blinding intensity of that concern. It is to understand her nightmare vision of the prison beyond the prison walls, not as a metaphor for oppression (as Bernardine Dohrn might use it) but as the literal truth, and in that way to understand how her vision of liberation and freedom could end in the death of Marcus Foster: "I have close ties and feelings with our incarcerated brothers and sisters," she wrote. "What they have taught me is that,

if people on the outside do not understand the necessity of defending them through force of arms, then it is because these people on the outside do not yet realize that they are in an immediate danger of being thrown into concentration camps themselves, tortured, or shot down in the streets for expressing their beliefs." [italics added]

The vectors of fear, love, and hatred that such anxiety produces all worked in Nancy Perry's psyche in a matrix of revolution. The killing of Marcus Foster is explained in terms of being cornered: "there are no alternatives," the walls are closing in. Revolution is defined as breaking out. "The only way to destroy fear is destroy the makers of fear, the murderer and the oppressor revolutionary violence is nothing but the most profound means of achieving internal as well as external balance." [italics added] Revolution is thus not a matter of masses, of constituencies, of revolutionary agencies, programs and policies. Revolution is an act of the will: "My name was Nancy Ling Perry, but my true name is Fahizah. What that means is one who is victorious, and I am one who believes in the liberation and victory of the people, because I have learned that what one really believes in will come to pass."

If there is a lesson to be learned from the SLA, it is that in a society as violently racist, exploitative and aggressively heartless as America's, we cannot afford to be without an organized mass movement of the Left. For what the Left means in human terms is a moral community of hope-the revolutionary possibility of a better way. [end}