Socialist Action /June 1999
Socialists Played a Key Role in Mobilizing Against the
Vietnam War:
Lessons of a Winning Antiwar Movement
By CAROLE SELIGMAN
 The U.S. war against the people of Vietnam
lasted 15 years. By its end in 1975, the Vietnamese had won a victory against
the mightiest nation of all time. But it came at the cost of over 4 million
dead, millions wounded, the countryside poisoned, and the economy destroyed.
The United States lost over 58,000 killed; hundreds of thousands wounded;
at least a half-million vets suffering from postwar psychological trauma
or chemical poisoning, with hundreds of thousands drug-addicted and imprisoned;
and an economy that had provided both "guns and butter" for the
last time. By 1971, before the war ended, a post-World War II trend of steadily-improved
living standards for American workers had been permanently reversed.
Vietnam was no mistake. The policies that led to this brutal war were
the conscious policies of a capitalist class willing to use any and all
means to maintain the private-profit system at virtually any price.
Yet the antiwar movement in this country made the price that the U.S.
ruling class had to pay too high at home, while the Vietnamese made the
price too high abroad.
During the 10 years of the anti-war movement from 1965-1975, the revolutionary
Marxist wing of the movement, represented at that time by the Socialist
Workers Party* (SWP), went from being a small minority within a small movement
to part of the leadership of a movement of millions.
Our strategic approach
Underlying the approach of the revolutionary wing of the anti-war movement,
which began as a mostly student movement, was the Marxist view that the
working class is the only class with the potential and actual power to transform
society.
Related to that idea, is the know-ledge we have from studying history
that masses of people generally only move into political action when they
perceive their self-interest is affected. With these ideas in place, the
task for the antiwar movement was to appeal to the masses of American people.
Our strategy was a working-class strategy with these components: mass
action, independence from ruling- class politics and parties, and principled
demands on the government that respect the rights of the Vietnamese people
for self-determination.
Our strategy was internationalist; we sought to link the interests of
the Vietnamese revolution with the interests of American working people.
Each aspect of this strategy was based on the idea that only a mass working-class
movement could force the U.S. out of its war. Mass action provided the alternative
to the government, and independence from the Democratic and Republican
parties and principled demands kept the movement from being coopted
by the ruling class.
The tactics advocated by the revolutionaries flowed from this basic strategy.
The mass actions we advocated were street demonstrations called for by united
fronts of all who could agree to come together in common antiwar actions.
We organized them to be peaceful and legal demonstrations with permits.
In the beginning of the movement (not that far removed in time from the
Joe McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s) there was a significant amount of
red-baiting, intimidation, and even physical attacks on the antiwar movement.
It was important to make it as easy as possible for people to take their
first tentative steps into opposition to their government.
The revolutionaries of the SWP promoted the tactic of peaceful, legal
street demonstrations because we had the confidence that the movement would
be able to win a majority over to the antiwar cause, and this method would
put no roadblocks in the way of that goal.
The strategy of independence was tactically implemented through the creation
of independent, single issue, anti-war committees and single-issue united
front coalitions, usually organized to build a specific action with a date,
time, and place.
Some coalitions lasted for more than one action while others were so
tenuous that they were really ad-hoc coalitions that could only stay together
for one event, and then the political differences between the organized
participants drove them apart.
The student movement, having organized first, and being the most supportive
of self-determination for the Vietnamese, generally played the role of the
left-wing in the broad coalitions that formed to carry out city-wide, regional,
or national demonstrations.
They were the left-wing because they were the most resistant to the electoral
aspirations of the organized reformists in the peace movement-the Communist
Party, the Social Democrats, and assorted liberals, who, every time an election
campaign came around, tried to get the movement to support the "lesser
of two evils" candidates instead of demonstrating against the war.
This problem got more difficult as the movement got bigger. At first
there weren't any anti-war candidates. Later, when the American casualties
started to become unacceptable to larger numbers of the American people,
even Johnson and Nixon ran for president on promises to de-escalate the
war.
"Bring the troops home now!"
The slogans the revolutionaries advocated for the movement likewise reflected
our strategic orientation to the working class. "End the war in Vietnam.
Bring our troops home now!" was the central demand that revolutionaries
promoted in the antiwar movement.
Believe it or not, it took several years before the majority of the organized
antiwar movement came to agree with that slogan. The conscious reformists,
who played a big role in the organized movement, counterposed slogans advocating
a "negotiated" solution to the war.
But the revolutionaries said that Washington had no right to negotiate
for anything in Vietnam and that the only demand on the U.S. government
that honored the right of the Vietnamese people to determine their own destiny
was to withdraw.
This "Out Now!" slogan was also a thoroughly revolutionary
slogan because the biggest obstacle to the success of the Vietnamese revolution
was the United States. To withdraw the U.S. troops, bombs, and bases was
to guarantee the reunification of Vietnam and the carrying out of a social
revolution.
But there was a third and very important reason for the slogan to bring
our troops home now, and that was the strategy of building the movement
into a working-class movement with the social power to affect the actions
of the U.S. government.
Reaching out to the GIs
The U.S. government and capitalist media did everything in their power
to convince the public that the student demonstrations were against the
GIs and would even lead to their deaths. So the slogan of bringing the troops
home was a concrete way of reaching out to the soldiers with the message
that the antiwar movement would save their lives.
Antiwar sentiment soon became so strong among the soldiers that the strongest
military machine in the world became an unreliable fighting force in Vietnam.
In 1971 Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote, in the Armed Forces Journal
an article titled the "Collapse of the Armed Force." He noted
that [the bad] "conditions among American forces in Vietnam have only
been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917
and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917."
He documents the existence, in 1971, of 144 underground newspapers published
on or aimed at U.S. military bases, at least 14 GI dissent organizations,
and 11 to 26 off-base antiwar GI coffeehouses.
One of the biggest debates in the antiwar movement, a debate held almost
twice a year for 10 years, was whether or not to call another mass street
demonstration.
The revolutionary wing of the movement was consistent in calling for
escalating street demonstrations. This was the form that made it possible
to reach more and more workers-and soldiers as well-as objective events
changed their minds.
There were those who argued that the government ignored the antiwar movement,
so what was the point of demonstrating against it? The publication in 1972
of the "Pentagon Papers" (documents released by former government
consultants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo) proved once and for all that
the government only pretended to ignore the movement.
At the time the government decided to give up its effort to win the war,
they had already calculated that the capitalist system would have more to
lose vis a vis the American population than if they persisted in escalating
and trying to militarily defeat the Vietnamese people.
While it is true that the movement didn't develop into the kind of a
movement that could prevent the next series of U.S. interventions into the
affairs and revolutions, of other countries (Chile, Panama, Grenada, Iraq,
Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, and many more), it did alter and narrow
the U.S. government's prerogatives in future ventures.
In order to deprive U.S. imperialism of the ability to use its military
might against other countries and revolutions, we will need more than an
antiwar movement. We will need an organized working class who wants to take
control of society and run society in its own name.
During the Vietnam War era, the organized labor movement never joined
in the antiwar actions in a major way, with some exceptions among hospital
workers, teachers, and other progressive unions. That is a major reason
that the antiwar movement couldn't go beyond its single issues of ending
the war, to ending the U.S. war machine permanently.
That will take more than a movement. That will take a revolution.
Socialist Action /June 1999 |