Patty Hearst and the SLA's militarist disaster
The SLA made a mockery of left politics. Every progressive cause and socialist principle got grotesquely bent out of shape when it passed through the SLA.
Women’s liberation, for example, degenerated into a celebration of a “feminist bomb” built by the women SLA members while their demand for women to lead the armed bank robberies resulted in fatalities. They kicked a pregnant female bank clerk who miscarried as a result, and shot dead a female bank customer. This killed was desperately rationalised by the SLA through the very unfeminist defining of a woman through her husband, a doctor, which apparently made her a “bourgeois pig”, too.
The SLA was always going to wind up as no more than a policing problem for the capitalist order, not a political challenge to it. The SLA was effectively wiped out in a shoot-out with an LAPD SWAT team.
Hearst was among the few survivors, however, and she turned state witness in return for a reduced sentence. Thanks to the “resources and connections of a Hearst”, this was reduced through presidential commutation (under Jimmy Carter) and then a presidential pardon (under Bill Clinton). She was reunited with her first and true love of privilege.
The SLA’s political dysfunction lay behind their swift fall. There were mitigating circumstances for its chosen path – establishment politics had been uglified through imperialist war rampages, the overthrow of other nations’ governments that were not to the liking of big capital, and the sometimes-brutal abuse of human rights at home. For violent and lawless, look no further than the services rendered for the American corporate class by the US capitalist state.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/patty-hearst-and-slas-militarist-disaster
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