Smash Monogamy

The Smash Monogamy Campaign was an effort by members of the Weather Underground to extinguish all aspects of individuality within its members.

Background

In his book Destructive Generation, David Horowitz points out the goal of the campaign:

Any notion that people can have responsibility for one person, that they can have that ‘out’ - we have to destroy that notion in order to build a collective; we have to destroy all ‘outs,’ to destroy the notion that people can lean on one person and not be responsible to the entire collective. ... Once monogamy was smashed, couples who in some cases had been together for years were harangued until they admitted their 'political errors' and split apart. The next logical step was group sex. The Purpose was not pleasure so much as welding together an enforced unity of the body. ... Weather sex was like the developing Weather politics - a search for the "exemplary deed." One of the last taboos was homosexuality, and the Weather command forced itself toward experimentation in this direction, instructing male and female cadres to 'make it' with members of the same sex.

Politics

The movement was wholly political, yet Bill Ayers and his followers had a relatively easy time cloaking the real goal which was driven from the start toward political ends by casting it as extremely offensive assaults on morality. Ayers wrote:

We experimented feverishly because we were kids, and because our instincts were anarchistic, vigorous and unrestrained. One night after a fierce and bloody demonstration in Washington, a hundred of us created a moaning sexual pageant in a loft off Dupont Circle, flaunting and parading our outrageous exuberance.

The parade of "outrageous exuberance" is designed to elicit a response, to which the revolutionary can then point at the "moralist" and accuse the "moralist" of politicizing social issues, even though they are political right from the start. In this sense, the revolutionary builds their own cake, then gets to eat it too.

Collectivism

Susan Stern, author of the book With the Weathermen: The Personal Journey of a Revolutionary Woman wrote about the following events:

Beverly, according to Stern, was the only member of the collective to call Rudd on this male chauvinism. But as the collective meeting wore on, and as Rudd successfully encouraged the other collective members to vent their anger at the pair, Beverly's resistance crumbled, and her spirit broke. In the subsequent session, Rudd turned the criticism on Stern. Although collective members acknowledged that Stern was the most energetic and successful high school organizer in the collective, Rudd charged that she was not working for the revolution, but was instead working for her own ego gratification, her own self-aggrandizement. On and on, hour after hour, the collective, with Rudd's encouragement and approval, attacked Stern's alleged egocentrism. When the session ended, Rudd took the Weather Bureau's designated Seattle collective leader, Carol, to bed. Stern, shell-shocked, fell asleep upstairs but was awakened several hours later when she heard Georgia, the other woman sleeping in Stern's room, cry out "No, please no." Rudd, having finished his organizing downstairs, was now attempting to get into bed with Georgia. He answered Georgia's cry by insisting taht she, Georgia, together with Carol, "had to assume command of the collective," and that she "had to strengthen herself to fight the reactionary tendencies within the collective." Georgia continued to resist Rudd, confessing to him that she loved one of the other Seattle Weathermen. Rudd replied: "You have to put the demands of your collective above your love. Nothing comes before the collective."

See also

• Collectivism
• Bill Ayers
• Mark Rudd

External links

• Smash Monogamy: Sexual Revolution to Political Revolution
• "Everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed": Bill Ayers, the Weathermen and the Days of Rage, Organizing, orgies, escalating violence - it all climaxed for the Weathermen at the Days of Rage in Chicago in '69
• Hating Valentine’s, Why Islamists and the radical Left loathe the Day of Love.