HAP P EN I N G S
529
martialed. An unknown number of white soldiers shipped out for
Chicago with plans to express their sympathy for the demonstrators at
the most dramatic moment. They were stationed on the outskirts of the
city and never called to duty, probably because the High Command
realized that the six-monthers of the Illinois National Guard were more
trustworthy. In any case, the Guard units might have been equally
susceptible to the blandishments of the demonstrators; but no appeal
was made until Wednesday afternoon, when a leaflet explaining the
Mobilization's goals, "To The Troops," ! was circulated .
Another leaflet, "To The Police,"2 also appeared Wednesday. It
began, "Our argument in Chicago is not with you"; and made the point
that the cops' present working conditions - a twelve-hour-day with no
overtime pay - were dictated by Daley, not the Mobilization. But it
was too late - the self-fulfilling prophecy - "Pigs!" - had already been
made. And in any case, civil treatment from the police would have cost
the Mobilization its public-relations victory.
Leo Whalen
HAPPENINGS FOR REAL
What's astonishing about the interpretations of the European
student movements in both the Soviet and the Western Press is that
they're
in
perfect agreement. Despite certain predictable differences in
formulation, all the critiques point to the same weakness, to what is
apparently considered the Achilles' heel of the movement: its inability
to shake neo-capitalist society to its foundations.
Now one need not be an expert in revolution (or even a professor
of sociology) to grasp immediately that Germany especially is not in
1968 in a "revolutionary" situation - at least according to Lenin, who
held the "impossibility of the system continuing as before" an essential
aspect of any revolution. On the one hand, the Communists make this
point: revolutions, and the organization of revolutionary forces, follow
certain normal stages of development, which must bear some relation
to the social and historical structure of the system under attack. A
I.
See page 549.
2. See page 550.
