From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- “Victory To The Vietnamese Revolution!-The War And The Class Struggle” (1972)

Click on the headline to link to the Karl Liebknecht Internet Archive copy of his famous 1915 anti-war tract, The Main Enemy Is At Home!

Markin comment:

I had not originally intended to include this document along with today’s three other related posts but the headline and the substance of article do a rather nice job of summing up what it took me over a decade of my youth to figure out. The lessons: we had a side we wanted to win in the Vietnam War (and it was not the U.S.) and the struggle against imperialist war, is a central component of any program of class struggle under conditions of modern imperialism. Like I said in an earlier post I did not read this material posted today until sometime in the mid-1970s long after DRV-NLF had resolved the question militarily. I could have saved myself some hellious inner turmoil if I had. Finally, I note that this article also parallels most of my own thinking, retrospectively, on the Vietnam War. It is as close as I got to a revolutionary position on that struggle at the time; I did get around to figuring out things better later (and more quickly).

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Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution!

The War and the Class Struggle

—from RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972 (Revolutionary Communist Youth, then the name of the youth organization affiliated with the Spartacist League)

Roused out of apathy by Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam war students began a massive strike wave on Friday, April 21. On campuses across the country, the RCY is working to extend the student strikes to the working class by raising demands to turn students toward left-wing and anti-war groupings in the unions, and by raising among workers the crucial need for labor strikes against imperialist war. At Brandeis University in Boston for example, a work-stoppage committee was set up, under the direction of the RCY, to contact anti-war workers both on and off campus. At Boston University, already on strike against marine recruiters and the war. the RCY participated in the seizure of the Administration Building, then suggested, and was prominent in building, a defense squad and picket line. While sharply attacking the illusion that student actions by themselves can end the war, the RCY supports student strikes against the war and participates militantly in building such strikes, seeking to extend them to the organized working class. At Columbia University in New York City the RCY participated in militant picketing of buildings and. at mass strike meetings, presented demands aimed at defending and extending the strike, through a working-class orientation. The fact that Columbia workers met separately and voted for a work stoppage on Friday showed the practicality and immediate urgency of working with anti-war workers. At the University of California, Berkeley, all unionized campus workers are on strike for state recognition of their unions. The RCY has been fighting to build student support for the strike with militant picket lines and seeking to link student anti-war sentiment to the workers' struggles. At UCLA and Los Angeles City College, RCYers raised the need to expand the student Strike to a workers' strike, despite SWP/YSA opposition and obstructionism.

The role of the various revisionist tendencies in the current strike wave demonstrates their refusal to formulate working-class strategy for social struggles. Simple campus militancy, supported by various Maoists and leftover New Leftists, can lead at best to starting summer vacation a few weeks early. PL/SDS, while calling for "militant actions," has limited its demands to calling on the universities to divest themselves of "evil" stockholdings and ROTC. The mirror image of PL/SDS's adventurist student vanguardism is the reformist student vanguardism pushed by the SWP/YSA and its front group SMC, which also ignores the need for working-class struggle, calling for students to turn campuses into "anti-war universities." The SWP/YSA seeks to use the student strikes to build its peace rallies as a left cover for McGovern-Muskie-Lindsay's presidential campaign.

The Labor Committee took a sectarian and abstensionist position on the student strikes, calling on the Columbia student strikers to "abandon anarchist tactics, "adopt the full (reformist) program of the Labor Committee, and call for a city-wide meeting of the entire "non-ruling class population" on the basis of a "common-interest program." The Workers League covered its capitulation to the SWP/YSA's pop front by super-sectarianism, demanding repudiation of middle-class student strikes and "posing the question of April 22" and the building of a labor party in '72. At Boston University, the WL's Pat Connolly was the only personal a mass student meeting to vote against calling a student strike!

For Labor Strikes Against the War!

Contrary to SMC claims that "in 1968 the anti-war movement forced Johnson to stop the bombing and invasion" (Columbia SMC leaflet), the re-escalation demonstrates that neither the anti-war movement nor student strikes by themselves can force U.S. imperialism out of Indochina. In fact, in 1968 Johnson did not stop the bombing: he merely moved it from the North to the South where the overall bombing was increased. Nixon only withdrew U.S. troops from Cambodia after he had opened the Cambodian border to successive waves of South Vietnamese Army invasions. U.S. aerial bombings, and last year the re-invasion of U.S. troops.

The present anti-war movement and student strikes have no real impact on the actual course of the war because they lack the social
power to challenge U.S. capitalism. Only the working class has both the social interest and the social power to fight imperialist war. The Cambodia-Kent-Jackson State student strike, while demonstrating the unquestionable opposition to the war of the overwhelming majority of students, ultimately had no real effect on U.S. government policy. On the other hand, the recent West Coast dock strike, if it had been extended to war goods, would have made it logistically impossible for the U.S. to maintain a military presence in Vietnam. Because ten thousand striking dock workers offer a far greater potential threat to capitalism than a million striking students, capitalist politicians like McGovern will support student strikes at the same time they call on Nixon to bust the dock strike.

Student strikes must be extended to labor strikes; the anti-war movement must be turned into an anti-capitalist movement. Radical students must turn their efforts toward support to the only real way of fighting imperialism: class struggle.

All Indochina Must Go Communist!

The liberal defenders of imperialism are quick to seek to turn the revulsion against Nixon's re-escalation to their own advantage. Bella Abzug, for example, rushed up to Columbia in an attempt to rally the striking students around her electoral ambitions. The elementary duty to exclude the class enemy from the student strikes must he linked with ceaseless political exposure of the liberals and fake-lefts who bring the bourgeoisie's program into the strikes. The liberals' call to "set the date" only means that "date" when the Vietnamese revolution is crushed and a pro-American government stabilized. The SMC's emphasis on the single issue of troop withdrawal plays straight into Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy of replacing U.S. soldiers with soldiers of the Saigon puppet government. To draw a hard line between those who oppose imperialism and those who seek a more popular, less costly way to buttress it. the student strikes must take sides with the embattled working people of Vietnam. They must oppose to the class collaborationist of the U.S. anti-war movement and of the Vietnamese Stalinists the demands:

MILITARY VICTORY TO THE NLF/ DRV! ALL INDOCHINA MUST GO COMMUNIST!