Screed 5:
GOALS OF THE SYMBIONESE
The list of goals or objectives of the Symbionese is a more skillful and coherent document than the constitutional one given in Screed 4. Before the burning of the Concord home used as headquarters by the Information Unit of the SLA, the list was unknown. A copy of it was picked up by police among the ashes, and a full transcript was placed in the kit of communications sent to Station KPFA and the Hearst family in February. My transcript is from the photocopy of the original document.
There are not many errors. Moreover, there are few or none of the specifically Black expressions which occur in other documents of the SLA. And in addition, this screed contains flourishes which, though often vague and trite, indicate a real concern for efficient and evocative English. Taken together with the ideas described in the fourteen separate articles of the document, these facts tell us a good deal about the main author. I take it that this author was a white person, probably a female, certainly college-educated, coming from a literate middle-class background, and the veteran of years of bloodless reformism and revolutionism in radical student circles of Telegraph Avenue or the HaightAshbury. She has enough mental capacity to avoid the circlings and overlappings endemic among SLA writers; she keeps theory and fact appropriately separated; alone among her SLA colleagues, she has mastered the rudiments of philosophic abstraction.
The items she lists as "goals" offer a flagrant testimony about the plethora of social issues which have chased one another across the American mind in the past decade. Only half of them are revolutionary or political in any traditional sense. Others take up pensions (8), marriage
(9), child-care centers (11), "ecology" (13), the rent-control ideas adored in university and Black circles at Berkeley and elsewhere (14), and the rule of love and "meaningful relationships" which was so much mooted in the age when hippies painted flowers on their autos and we spoke of "flower children". Reading the list, we seem to be reviewing the history of university and press liberalism from 1962 to 1972.
Though there are plenty of references to warfare and struggle among the sixteen "goals" on the list, the emphasis of the document as a whole is peaceful enough. It belongs to the literature of protest rather than the literature of revolution, and undoubtedly speaks of the time when the Federation was more important than the Army. The pedantic list of "five basic needs of life" given in the concluding paragraph is from a school textbook. The slogan which follows it ("If the quest for freedom") is unknown elsewhere.
THE GOALS OF THE SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY
1.To unite all oppressed people into a fighting force and to destroy the system of the capitalist state and all its value systems. To create in its place a system and [ie, ofJ sovereign nations that are in the total interest of all its races and people, based on the true affirmation of life, love, trust, and honesty, freedom and equality that is truly for all.
2.To assure the rights of all people to self determination and the rights to build their own nation and government, with representatives that have shown through their actions to be in the interest of their people. To give the right to all people to select and elect their own representatives and governments by direct vote.
3.To build a people's federated council, who will be a male and female of each People's Council or Sovereign Nation of The Symbionese Federation of Nations, who shall be the representatives of their nations in the forming of trade packs [ie, pacts] and unified defense against any external enemy that may attack any of the free nations of the federation and to form other aids to each others' needs.
4.To aid and defend the cultural rights of all the sovereign nations of The Symbionese Federation, and to aid each nation in the building of educational and other institutions to meet and serve this need for its people.
5.To place the control of all the institutions and industries, of each nation into [sic] the hands of its people. To aid sovereign nations of the federation to build nations where work contributes concretely to the full interest and needs of its workers and the communal interest of its communities and its people and the mutual interest of all within the federation of nations.
6.To aid and defend the rights of all oppressed people to build [sic] nations which do not institute oppression and exploitation, but rather does institute the environment of freedom and defends that freedom on all levels and for all of the people, and by any means necessary.
7.To give back to all people their human and constitutional rights, liberty, equality and justice and the right to bear arms in the defense of these rights.
8.To create a system where our aged are cared for with respect, love, and kindness and aided and encouraged to become assets in their own ways to their nations and to their communal community. That the life that moves around them is not a frightening and murderous one and where life is not a fear, but rather one of love and feeling and of unity.
9.To create a system and laws that will neither frirce people into nor force them to stay into [sic] personal relationships that they do not wish to be in, and to destroy all chains instituted by legal and social laws of the capitalist state which acts as a reinforcing system to maintain this form of imprisonment.
10.To create institutions that will aid, reinforce and educate the growth of our comrade women and aid them in making a new true and better role to live in life and in the defining of themselves as a new and free people.
11.To create new forms of life and relationships that bring true meanings of love to people's relationships, and to form communes on the community level and bring the children of the community into being the responsibility of the community, to place our children in the union of real comradeship and in the care and loving interest of the revolutionary community.
12.To destroy the prison system, which the capitalist state has used to imprison the oppressed and exploited, and thereby destroy the love, unity, and hopes of millions of lives and families. And to create in its place a system of comradeship and that of group unity and education on a communal and revolutionary level within the community, to bring home our
daughters and sons, and sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, and welcome them home with love and a new revolutionary comradeship of unity.
13.To take control of all state land and that of the capitalist class and to give back the land to the poeple. To form laws and codes that safeguard that no person can own the land, or sell the land, but rather the nations' people own the land and use it for their needs and interest to live. No one can own or sell the air, the sky, the water, the trees, the birds, the sun, for all of this world belongs to the people of this earth.
14.To take controls [sic] of all buildings and apartment buildings of the capitalist class and fascist government and to totally destroy the rent system of exploitation.
I5.To build a federation of nations, who shall formulate programs and unions of actions and interests that will destroy the capitalist value system and its other anti-human institutions and who will be able to do this by meeting all the basic needs of all of the people and their nations. For they will be all able to do this because each nation will have full control of all of its industries and institutions and does not run them for profit, but in the full interest of all the people of its nation.
16.To destroy all forms and institutions of Racism, Sexism, Ageism, Capitalism, Fascism, Individualism, Possessiveness, Competiveness and all other such institutions that have made and sustained capitalism and the capitalist class system that has oppressed and exploited all of the people of our history.
By this means and the mutual aid and unity of each nation within The Symbionese Federation, will each nation be able to provide to each person and couple and family free of cost the five basic needs of life, which are food, health care, housing, education and clothing, and in this way allowing people to be able to find and form new values and new systems of relationships and interests based on a new meaning to life and love.
IF THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM IS DEATH
THEN BY THE DEATH OF THE ENEMY WILL BLACK AND OTHER OPPRESSED PEOPLE FIND AND REGAIN THEIR FREEDOM
The stipulation that all delegations to the "War Council" be of "two persons, one female and one male (if possible)" is drawn from a major preoccupation of the Americans today. In several places, including Clause 12, one learns the penalty for activities adjudged in conflict with the aims of the "War Council". It is significant that people who dropped away from the Symbionese movement when the Federation yielded preeminence to the Army have refused to help the authorities or inform the press.
There is little evidence to show that the "War Council" in its strictly warlike function received important support from other groups. The brilliant success of the SLA in the Foster killing and Hearst kidnapping produced a somewhat different constellation. Collectively named "the coalition", a dozen small organizations, all political and militant, all either Black or Black-dominated, permitted themselves to be lined up as supporters and monitors of the Hearst food giveaway program.
