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rer ai a ante oll diel | We joined the SLA separately, not knowing each other at the time, but for similar reasons, as we later discovered, namely, that we could no longer tolerate the quality and conditions of our private and public lives ~- repressive education that was no more than an assembly line for making obedient slaves, boring and humiliating johs, declining "standards of living", and a polluted, ugly environ- . ment. And, as far as we could see, things were getting worse. All the reforms we fought for in the '60's had failed, or been taken back, and were inadeauate to start with. All of us | were frustrated with the divided factions of the so-called revolutionary left. “That movement was based.on guilt, on always making “the revolution for somebody else, in the. name of somebody else's oppression, supposedly Yreater than our , own. It was dominated by egotistical leader-bureaucrats and leader-stars who cared only about their “"yevolutionary" _Gareers. They led a maks of follower-lackeys who*proved their own decrepitude by tolerating and in fact creating such leaders. The confusion of anti-war groups, sexual liheratian- groups and national liberation groups were all presenting the. image of militant opposition, hut-we wanted to do more than .* merely talk back -to "the -TV ‘screen. ~We were looking for brothers and sisters who felt.as urgently as we did that ‘the time to seize back our lives was now. The Symbionese people we contacted were self-disciplined, serious and efficient revolutionary cadres, willing to risk anything in order to gain everything. When we joined in the first founding conference of the Symbionese Federation last June, we thought we had found a place for ourselves in a revolutionary organization that was on its way beyond the Left, old and “new". We joined in August. . , a During the early stage-of the writing of the original Declaration of the Symbionese Federation ~-- not the - same one that the SLA had published in the papers -- hasic contradictions had already bequn to emerge among the member- ship. Although some of the brothers and sisters asserted that to create a positive vision of a new society reauired _ gerious thinking -- a clear and comprehensive theory and strategy -- others insisted that all that was necessary was to put yourself into situations where your ass would get kicked and armed bravery would do the rest. Some of the brothers and sisters were complaining about the lack of democracy within the organization. The justification for this was always that we were in a "state of war." Le It increasingly became apparent to us that the - Symbionese Federation was not fundamentally opposed to the