Indicting Two Generations

...Although the older generation regards the tiny revolutionary minority's penchant for force as "counterproductive," its likely retort is that in the present state of American culture violence is a reasonable act...

...In short, the nature of the first revolutionary impulse among U.S...

...Long since alienated by the futile, bloody and costly conflict that has prevented the nation from addressing its human needs, students were newly incensed when a President ostensibly elected to end the war extended it into Cambodia...

...In New Haven, where Black Panther Lonnie Mc-Lucas was on trial for murder, demonstrating students combined their concern for Panther chairman Bobby Seale (also under indictment and awaiting trial) with their opposition to the war in the most perplexing fashion...

...But as Max Eastman, an ardent Marxist in his earlier days, confessed, although the ultimate objective of Marxist doctrine was indeed economic democracy, it misconceived the realities of 20th-century industrial society...

...as it was achieved by other Western nations--for whom Marxist revolt was originally designed--this new balance rendered them immune from the virus of violent class struggle...

...The violence resulting from the desperation of the young over American society's sterility, however, will certainly complicate rather than cure the problem which prompted it...

...Another rallying cause is the attainment of equal justice for racial minorities, still beset--more than a century after slavery's abolition--by substandard housing, segregated education and insufficient technical training for entering into the mainstream of an increasingly industrialized society...

...The second movement, the one led by today's students, is radically different from that of the '30s: It lacks working-class support and its goals are both diverse and vaguely defined...

...In other words, they were fundamentally opposed to things as they are and not to the "system," for they included among their protests the issue of inadequate student representation in the government of universities...

...The first movement was "Leninist" in the sense that it disavowed terror, sds and the Black Panthers, on the other hand, are "Stalinist" or "Maoist" in that they engage in violence of every kind, from the occupation of college buildings to arson against rotc headquarters to battles with policemen...

...Rather, it is a universal phenomenon, induced by a combination of self-righteous perfectionism and a sense of impotence characteristic of the young...

...It is surely one of the ironies of our times that a segment of our youth has resorted to terror tactics because it has been confronted with the moral and human inadequacy of an affluent technological culture...

...The higher rate of unemployment among Negroes, particularly young Negroes, has contributed to the bitterness of the Black Panther party (the only real proletarian group in a bourgeois paradise...

...The war in Vietnam, of course, remains the most prominent source of discontent among our youth...

...If not directly inspired, that rebel-ion was obviously influenced by Marxist beliefs...

...workers and intellectuals proved to be both false and irrelevant to a free government in the West...

...This streak of violence has consistently been interpreted as an extension of the fierceness of the American frontier, but it is clearly not peculiar to the United States...

...They attacked the "Establishment" and the "Military-Industrial Complex," but these capitalist symbols merely served to define their dissatisfaction with the status quo...

...The first was activated by the world depression of the 1930s, which sharpened the workers' discontent over the seeming inability of our free-enterprise system to provide justice in modern industry...

...Because it denied individual freedom and wiped out all potential centers of economic power except the state, its historical fulfillment in Russia during the '30s was Stalinism, a despotism...

...In the United States, meanwhile, liberal democracy --falsely labeled by the Marxist creed as the "stooge" of property owners--did finally adjust to the economic and social necessities of the time...

...With the New Deal came not only the social securities of the "welfare state" but the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively, establishing a tolerable equilibrium of power between the trade unions and management...

...While the young express an abundance of seemingly disjointed grievances, their attitude might best be described as a general moral uneasiness--a lack of respect for a culture that boasts of affluence and technical efficiency, but has failed to achieve ethical integrity and humanness...

...The rebels will say that America's lack of a sense of priorities, its failure to achieve racial justice, its unwillingness to heed, let alone solve, the worsening air and water pollution--these have presented the young with terrible dilemmas that generate the rage from which violence springs...

...And since this situation has been bequeathed to them by their elders, our second revolution indicts both generations...

...The most important difference between the current revolt and its predecessor, however, is not one of motivations and objectives, but of methods...

...This equilibrium worked to correct the truly monstrous injustices of early American industrialism...

...Rock throwing and lead-pipe fusillades seem to be their standard revolutionary response...