“The problem of sexism within the New Left went a lot deeper,” writes David Gilbert in My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond. While the second wave of feminism saw the rise of women articulating, as Gilbert recalls, how women were oppressed and needed to join the fight against all forms of oppression, many of us remember the response to the November 1964 publication of “The Position of Women in SNCC” from a prominently, much admired, hard working Black activist, Stokely Carmichael, “the position of women in SNCC is prone.”

Luckily for us, Ella Baker slept at night and did her work for SCLC and SNCC upright, during the day. But, as we now know, there were women here and there who accepted Carmichael’s retort and surrounded Dr. King and many other men on the Left - in a prone position, of course.

Radical feminist organizations continued to form by the spring of 1967, and as Gilbert recalls, the concept of women’s liberation reached SDS. At its first women’s caucus in June, activist Marilyn Buck rose to the stage and spoke while men in the audience “hooted and whistled.” Paper planes floated toward Buck, and someone shouted at her, “I’ll liberate you with my cock.” “A gem,” writes Gilbert, for if only these crude comments were exceptional rather than typical.

How many on the Left mourned Marilyn Buck’s death in 2010 by recalling her struggles not only against the system but within the Left, the so-called opposition to oppressive thoughts and actions?

David Gilbert is still an activist even while facing life at Auburn Correctional Facilities in New York. He remembers, and his struggle to “grapple” with the direction he is taking, is ours. His guiding questions are our guiding questions: “How does or doesn’t this particular path advance the interests of the oppressed?” “What self-interests do I have here and how do they complement or conflict with the goals of the struggle?”

At times while I read Gilbert’s Love and Struggle, I remembered Amaze, and how we stood outside the building complex where I lived on campus in Ethiopia wondering how she, a tired woman, would make it home to an area of corrugated homes off campus. She worked longer than usual that day for the four faculty members she cooked, cleaned, and washed clothes for everyday. As I walked with her a few steps, I saw another Ethiopian in a pick up. I waved to him and asked if he could take Amaze at least to the campus gate some distance away.

He turned the key and drove off as I looked at Amaze. She did not look at me, but she straightened her back, hugged me, and characteristically waved, “Ciao.” And she walked.

I saw her the next morning as she walked toward the complex, a bucket of water in one hand and with the other just touching the bucket held firmly on her head. This was a few years ago, and I imagine Amaze walking in a very public corner.

In the U.S., the podiums and stages of Leftist gatherings still honor the voices and “expertise” of men with a few notable white women thrown in for a display of “diversity.”

The Amazes anywhere are never asked to attend and speak about gentrification, foreclosure, inadequate health care and food supply or the devastating daily encounters of sexism among the oppressed.

The “anti-imperialist Left” of the 1960s and early 1970s, writes Gilbert, with its “predominately white women’s movement” and rampant sexism, distanced itself from frontline national liberation struggles and gravitated toward defining women’s issues from a white and often middle-class perspective. It is no wonder that younger generation of women, with limited knowledge about any history, let alone the 1960s an 1970s, think of “free love” when I have mentioned the women’s movement. Free love, Gilbert notes, served as a tool “to make women sexually available rather than as an opening to let love and equality flourish.”

Sexism was on the national agenda, but organizations like the old-line Marxist Progressive Labor Party “saw class as the fundamental contradiction, with problems like racism and sexism as secondary.” Such organizations agreed that opposition to “male chauvinism” was in order, but “male chauvinism” raises no eyebrows, and, as Gilbert notes, limits the problem to “the realm of ideas and culture,” which obscures the “fundamental structural problem” that pointed to “oppression within the working class and the Left.” Consequently, women who called for “independent forms of organization” were labeled “divisive.”

When finally the Left took up the campaign for women’s liberation, the “problem” was labeled “male supremacy…a systematic power structure who origins preceded capitalism and played a control role in shaping society.”

At the 1969 SDS National Convention, Gilbert describes the atmosphere as intense, and battles for leadership positions between the Progressive Labor Movement, SDS, and the Black Panther Party were “fought over intensely.” Gilbert and others anticipated the “widely-revered” Black Panther Party’s address to the convention. It starts out great, Gilbert recalls, until a spokesman for the BPP, when asked about women’s liberation, “dismissed it as ‘pussy power.’”

Oh, the good ole days of struggle! No wonder young people today, predominately in the Western world, admire the creation of Lady Gaga and fewer still objected to the tabloid’s reference to Beyonce’s “baby bump.”

Today’s liberated woman is not in any danger of falling prey to reflecting on the conditions that find them existing “nowhere” since so many men “love” when so many women are “prone.”

By the time the sexism of the good ole days of the 1960s and 1970s became the norm, “a macho concept of struggle” was in place. The “humanistic basis for our militancy got lost,” Gilbert admits. It is not an either/or dichotomy, adopt non-violence or passivism. Rather Gilbert asks us to recognize how and why the “militarist direction was wrong, morally and strategically.” It filed the prisons and the graves with the young but did what for the older Amaze or prevented the murder of Eleanor Bumpurs by police ordered to evict her.

While the leadership of SDS believed that “armed propaganda,” - “actions designed to educate about the oppressor and to show that there are ways to fight back without being crushed” - would be a more effective way of for white youth to achieve a level of struggle beneficial to the oppressed, SDS’s tactics sought “military victories.”

The Storms Troopers did arrive, however. They were effective! They have become the State! And our liberated are identified by the insignia they wear on clothing designed predominantly by men who admire the objects they cover with their fabrics and their visions. Hollow “liberation,” purchased at Macy’s, J.P. Penny’s, Target, Wal-Mart, as the liberated are informed not by the experiences and resistance activism of Annie Mae Aquash or Bessie Head, but by corporate-sponsored entertainers and corporate-think educational institutions. Some women want to suit up in camouflage and army boots, tote an M-16 rifle, and help the U.S. Empire kill mostly women and children. Take our history of struggle out of the classroom across the U.S., from K-12 and at the so-called higher institutions of learning, and what do you have: Corporate liberation!

Yes, the times they are a changin’, we are told, and even Dylan’s back, supporting the Zionists’ oppression of Palestinian women and children.

Others, Rosa Luxemburg continues, with “weak nerves” might not worry…

I wonder what a thinkers and activists such as Luxemburg, a woman who served time in prison for the cause before she was captured and executed in January, 1919, would think about the progress of the Left in the U.S.

Where are the revolutionaries? Where are the revolutionary men and women? What Left movement would permit the struggle of more women to provide protection for their children in war zones, to locate water not contaminated by U.S. oil companies, and to feed children with virtually no income (as I witnessed in Ethiopia) while their governments receive millions for the development of armies and surveillance technology? Or would Luxemburg consider the Left’s contentment with the so-called “sexual revolution” a victory for humanity?

No revolution developed as a result of “free love” and misogyny. So what do the men as well as the women who submit to patriarchy fear?

“For revolutionaries,” Gilbert writes, “our prime focus is on the consciousness and mobilization of the people.”

I agree. Revolutionaries do not exclude the voices, the minds, the experiences and daily struggles, small “s” of women, reinforcing male supremacy, witnessed in the perpetual drumming of warmongers and in the corporate shuffling and destruction of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Yellow lives. Revolutionaries, to use Luxemburg’s words, must reject “imperialism and militarism in all their forms” - “a real and proper rejection that is meant seriously this time, and that would apply even in the event of war.”

Revolutionaries make the seemingly impossible--possible!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.