Osawatomie, Autumn 1975, no. 3
Weather Underground
Newsletter of the Weather Underground summarizing the latest happenings in the underground, including articles about the Weather Underground’s class analysis; the Prisoner’s Rights Movement; book reviews on radical women; the power of film; the Weather Underground bombing of Kennecott Corporation; Portuguese Revolution; toolbox on socialism; Boston busing crisis; Korea; fiction; country music.
Weather Underground
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Autumn 1975, no. 3
underground press
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism
New Left
Prairie Fire was a 188-page political manifesto published by the Weather Underground in 1974. It was written primarily by <span>Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn and </span>articulated the radical splinter group's ideology, endorsed revolutionary violence, and, according to Jonah Raskin, "embodied a muffled desperation that underlay the bravado about Third World liberation." <span>The name for the manifesto was derived from the writings of Chinese Communist revolutionary, Mao Zedong. In his “Little Red Book,” he wrote, “a single spark can set a prairie fire" as an analogy for revolution. The ideas in the book drew not only on Maoist philosphy, but also Marxist/Leninism. The manifesto encourages a mix of mass-organizing and clandestine revolutionary violence. "Never disassociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence," the author's argued. "To leave people unprepared to fight the state," they said, "is to seriously mislead them about the inevitable nature of what lies ahead." "Prairie Fire" was distributed in radical bookstores, food coops, headshops, on college campuses and many other places that movement activists met. It was met with a combination of strong emotions throughout the Left. Ultimately, the ideological arguments articulated in "Prairie Fire" led to a new split in the Weather Underground, with some gravitating toward the "Prairie Fire Collective," which favored mass-based, above-ground revolutionary politics, and the "May 19th Communist Organization," which remained underground and pulled off the infamous Brinks robbery in 1981. </span><br /><br />Ron Jacobs, who has chronicled the history of the Weather Underground, reflects on Prairie Fire <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2004/07/24/the-weather-underground-s-prairie-fire-statement-thirty-years-on/">here</a> and <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3469-a-second-wind-for-weather-underground-the-prairie-fire-statement">here</a>.<br /><br />Raskin's reflection on the manifesto on its 45th anniversary can be read <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/288105/prairie-fire-weather-underground">here</a>.
Weather Underground
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1974
small press publication
RAT Subterranean News, issue 15, October 29-November 18, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including baking bread; a critique of the Weather Underground; Angela Davis; George Jackson; Quebec independence; working-class white women; American "concentration camps"; abortion; welfare rights; the Young Lords; the West Side Women's Center; a report from Asia; Black Power poetry.
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 29-November 18, 1970
underground press