“It often happens with ‘egalitarians’ that a hole, a special escape hatch from the drab uniformity of life, is created — for themselves.”

– Murray Rothbard in Messianic Communism in the Protestant Reformation (an exerpt from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith)

“…I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation..I believe in the absolute minimum of government.”

“But to destroy [the State] at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, holding down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society”

(Letter from Engels to Philipp Van Patten, April 18, 1883)

In short, they saw state as a coercive, violent tool to protect and perpetuate an act of theft and prevent property owners from reasserting their control of property. This is why Marxism can’t abide no government or even a small government. It needs a big government to keep those nasty individualists and capitalists in check and prevent them from holding on to their stuff.  Some of us, however, would not like to be  “held down” in the manner suggested by Engels.

The idea of using violence to supress property rights is not new, its even illustrated negatively in a parable of Jesus Christ, when he portrays wicked tenants who think they own the owners property and hence attempt, as workers, to take control of the owners property  (Luke 20:9-15).

“In the last days of December the plans were completed, and the warrants went out by the thousands to Department of Justice officials across the country. The target date for te raids was to be January 2.

In Chicago, when the Republican State Attorney Hoyne learned that the Democractic administration was planning a raid, he made ready for his own raid to steal  the thunder of the administration. On January 1, state and local officials swooped down in Chicago in 300 separate raids, picking up 200 prisoners. Hoyne complained that they would have had more prisoners except that the Department of Justice tipped off the radicals that the state was raiding.”

from The Palmer Raids 1919-1920: An Attempt to Suppress Dissent by Edwin R. Hoyt

Rudd seems to remain on a similar page politically (as far as I can tell), though he appears to have renounced the violent aspects of his strategy (although, existing forms of socialism imply a certain amount of violence, the violence of the state, and he appears to remain committed to that) .

He said (a few quotes from the full paper, Che and Me):

“I was a Guevarista, a member of the cult of Che.  That meant not only putting up multiple posters with Che’s image on the wall in my room during college, but whole-heartedly accepting the theory that a small armed group could spark revolution by actually beginning military action.”

“One thing we hadn’t stopped to notice was that Che, in October, 1967, using precisely the same strategy that we proposed to use, had already been defeated and killed in Bolivia…Blinded by my love and admiration for ‘the Heroic Guerilla,’ as Fidel had dubbed Che, I didn’t want to see that there was a fatal flaw in the theory.  It didn’t work.”

“This is a tough thing to write, since it puts me close to the camp of right-wingers who have always attacked Che as a murderer and a terrorist, but I believe that by the end of his life, after the years of blood and to-the-death struggles of the Cuban revolution, Che had become both homicidal and suicidal.”

“…personally, I’ve long ago opted out of the cult of Che which I joined over forty years ago. It’s impossible for me to look on Che as the great revolutionary hero anymore;”

I find this interesting, because Mark Rudd was not your run-of-the-mill person who looked up to Che. He was trying to bring Che Guevara’s war to the U.S.A., he was an American Guevarista if there ever was one. The Cuban government even invited him over to visit as a delegate while he was with the SDS.

I’m certainly glad Mark Rudd’s vision was not imposed on America in the 1970s. I’m glad the Weather Underground was a failure and never got very far “off the ground” so to speak. Their case is a perfect example of  how out of touch with reality people can get in their own little subcultures.  Gee… Even the Black Panthers, Vietnam leaders, and Cuban leaders voiced major concerns and some of them warned the Weather Underground not to go ahead with this. And in the case of the Weather Underground, getting “out of touch” meant causing chaos, blowing up things, and becoming fugitives.

I’m also glad that Mark Rudd has lost his ‘rose colored’ glasses about Che Guevara. Now, if only he’d forsake socialism and its inherent violence and also stop dreaming that Obama is going to fix things!  If Arlo Guthrie became a Ron Paul fan, who’s to say Mark Rudd couldn’t come around some day and ditch socialism!