Are the conditions ready for revolution?

So at last we have come full circle. The revolution that started on the streets four decades ago, then went underground, has returned to the streets once again.

You’ve probably become aware of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has spawned spin-offs in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, D.C. and supposedly a thousand other cities including Missoula, Montana.

What you probably didn’t know is that it was exactly 42 years ago this weekend when the Weatherman revolutionary organization took to the streets of Chicago to “bring the war home” — namely the war of communist-inspired “workers” against the oppressor imperialists.

The protests — called “Days of Rage” — were intended to use opposition to the Vietnam War to galvanize a true communist revolution in the streets. It was supposed to be the culmination of a resolution that came out of a National Council meeting of Students for  Democratic Society the year before that demanded direct action to bring down the system.

Indeed, the resolution was titled enthusiastically (if sophomorically) “The Elections Don’t Mean Sh-t — Vote Where the Power Is — Our Power Is In The Street.”

But it turned out that the power of the Weathermen was not in the street. The Days of Rage protest was a dismal failure, resulting in a change in strategy for the next 10 years that led Bill Ayers and his fellow Weathermen to throw bombs from the shadows instead of leading protests in the streets. Then in the early 1980s, when Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd and other Weather Underground fugitives came up for air, a new strategy emerged that would put 1960s radicals into suits and skirts and “mainstream” them into positions of power and influence where they could “create the conditions for the development of a successful revolutionary movement and party,” as they wrote in their 1974 manifesto “Prairie Fire.”

Anyone who doesn’t think they were earnest about their vow to make a lifetime of war against the “imperial U.S.” simply hasn’t been paying attention. These people were not playing games when they took to the street or started throwing bombs, and they are not playing games today. They are deadly serious.

You can certainly read many recent writings and utterances by any of the Weather Underground radicals to see that they remain committed to revolution, but it is their appearances in 1969 that provide the blueprint to their lifelong goal of revolution and exactly what it would entail should they ever gain power.

According to Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers, writing for UPI in 1970, when Bill Ayers attended a protest organization meeting in November 1969 in Washington, D.C., he was asked what the Weatherman program was.

“Kill all the rich people,” Ayers answered. “Break up their cars and apartments.”

“But aren’t your parents rich?” he was asked.

“Yeah,” Ayers said. “Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”

Nor were they just talking in the abstract about the pleasure of killing rich people. Indeed, Bernardine Dohrn — who is now Bill Ayers’ wife — is quoted in the same article by Franks and Powers as exulting in the deaths of Sharon Tate and her Hollywood friends who were victims of the brutal Manson Family murders of 1969.

“Dig it!” Dohrn is quoted as telling 400 people who had gathered in Flint, Mich., in December 1969 for a “war council”: “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”

It is such rhetoric, such a gleeful account of symbolic cannibalism by the poor against the rich, that makes it hard to swallow the nonsense spouted last week at the Wall Street protest by none other than Frances Fox Piven, the co-author of the 1960s strategy to destroy the federal government by bankrupting it through entitlement programs.

Piven enthusiastically assured the crowd of mindless drones who had occupied Wall Street because they had nothing better to do (like go to a job) that the nation’s financiers and bankers are not just greedy and thieves, “but they are also cannibals... because they are eating their own — US!”

That kind of rhetoric is typical of what is being heard across the country, including from the president and Democratic leaders, about the business community on Wall Street and elsewhere. It is impossible not to interpret the vitriolic attacks on capitalism as the latest phase of the same Marxist propaganda that created 70 years of slavery in Russia, killed 60 million people in China and turned North Korea into a basketcase. But that doesn’t mean the gullible among us won’t be lapping up the rhetoric with the same intensity that a dog goes after its own vomit.

But forget emotion; let’s just look at the facts.

This latest plan to occupy “enemy territory” started quietly on Sept. 17 in New York. An agitprop poster featuring a variation of the old Soviet hammer and sickle and the red star of communism shouted that, “Wall St. belongs to us,” and proclaimed, “Let the U.S. Days of Rage begin.”

That latter slogan was a reference not to Bill Ayers and SDS (who are supposedly irrelevant these days) but to those so-called “Day of Rage” protests in the Mideast, which have brought down three governments so far.

The goal of the protesters in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement (or at least their unacknowledged leaders) is no different than what it was in Cairo or Tripoli. Indeed, Wade Rathke called the Occupy Wall Street movement an “anti-banking jihad,” using the rhetoric of Islamic holy war to warn bankers that violence was coming. No surprise, Rathke, the founder of ACORN “community organizers” got his start as a foot soldier in Students for a Democratic Society, the precursor of the Weather Underground.

Rathke, Piven and the rest of the “generals” of this jihad want nothing less than the collapse of the American government and economy, and though they might not put President Obama in a cage the way Egypt did with President Hosni Mubarak, they would certainly do much worse to President George W. Bush should they ever get their hands on him.

This protest that started on Sept. 17 was not unanticipated. It has been contrived by labor leaders such as Steven Lerner of SEIU (the Service Employees International Union), who said as long ago as March that he was planning to disrupt Wall Street in order to “destabilize the folks that are in power,” “put banks on the edge of insolvency,” and “cause a new financial crisis.”

It is also supported by people such as Van Jones, the former green jobs czar in the Obama administration, who “coincidentally” was holding a conference in Washington last week that had the misleading name of “Take Back the American Dream.” The real emphasis wasn’t on the American Dream at all, but on “taking” wealth — not taking it BACK, mind you, but taking it AWAY — from those who had earned it. And that’s the same emphasis you find it Occupy Wall Street.

It’s no wonder, therefore, that Jones told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell (himself a declared socialist): “You are going to see an American Fall, an American Autumn, just like we saw the Arab Spring. You can see it right now with these young people on Wall Street. Hold onto your hats, we’re going to have an October offensive to take back the American dream and to rescue America’s middle class.”

Maybe so. I mean the communists and socialists definitely need to get the middle class on their side or the whole movement will fail, so now it is just a question of how smart we in the middle class are. Are we paying attention? Do we understand the difference between “hope” and “change” yet? Or can we still be played for suckers?