Click on the headline to link to the GI Voice archival website for an outline copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me. *******
G.I. Voice was published by the Spartacist League for about one year starting in 1969 and ending in 1970. They published 7 issues total and represented the SL’s attempt to intervene with their politics inside the U.S. Army then occupying and fighting brutal war in Vietnam. There was a growing G.I. anti-war movement and this was in part the SL’s attempt to win over militant G.I.s to the views of the SL.
—Riazanov Library******
Markin comment on this series:
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
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Markin comment on this issue:
Doing anti-war GI work is tough work, tough work as epitomized by this main points outlined in this issue concerning certain pitfalls involved in the work, and by focusing in on the slogan around the question of a GI-Workers Alliance then, and today by creating propaganda, and in certain circumstances agitating for, soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. Such formations require the seriousness, steadiness and stability of trade union work combined with the far-flung apparatus of a political legal defense committee.
As the main focus of the polemic addresses in detail this no easy task. First, to avoid the obvious political shenanigans and one-trick pony grand stand plays by groups like Youth Against War and Fascism more appropriate to a college campus (if there even, especially when the deal goes down and the heat is on like it was on many American campuses in the 1960s. Scenes, I am sure, that are hard for today’s youth to imagine. The closest situations today, for example, would be the anti-globalization demonstrations in place like Seattle, Pittsburgh and Italy over the past several years). And secondly, to avoid getting totally mired, consciously mired in legal defense work that takes on the character of social work "hand-holding" as performed in those days by the U.S. Socialist Workers Party. In that regard the very clear point made that “permitting” anti-war GIs to lead the various “peace crawls” and other mass formations while symbolically important toward the later part of the 1960s was no substitute for more dramatic, well-thought out direct actions linked to the organized labor movement.
In thinking about the old anti-war GI organizing days that has been prompted by online discovery of this material I began to realize that in important ways organizing GIs is very similar to organizing oppositional caucuses in trade unions. And that point makes sense when you face the hard reality that the vast bulk of the “grunts” then, and now, perhaps more so now, are working class and minority kids. Thus, like with the young workers you are trying to attract to an oppositional caucus in the trade unions, you have to “win your spurs” with the grunts by avoiding adventurism of the kind noted above, by knowing chapter and verse military rights (and constitutional rights, no always the same thing), by keeping on the right side of legal orders, and by being ready to link to outline organizations when the heat, the inevitable military brass heat, comes down. In short, win the same kind of authority as in the trade unions. Obviously there are dramatic differences, the difference between being merely fired and winding up behind some barb-wired stockade for taking bold direct actions being the most obvious, between a civilian trade union and a soldiers and sailors union but our long-term approach would, in effect, be similar. And that, my friends, is a point worth noting, seriously noting, for the future.
Note: In communist politics, and not just in communist politics, there has always been a distinction drawn, depending on circumstances, between general propaganda tasks and out-front, in-your-face agitation. I always like to draw the contrast between our current, mainly propagandistic, tasks regarding organizing anti-war soldiers and our episodic ability to agitate for such programmatic points with the following example drawn from fairly recent experience. We have been putting forth periodic GI anti-war organizing propaganda since before the start of the Iraq War in 2003. And, as this series of articles indicates, that is always appropriate. However in late 2005 and early 2006 there was an eruption of discontent by active-duty solders in America and Iraq, especially over repeated tours of duty in what seemed like an endless war (and if recent events are any indication may still be closer to that characterization than the Obama administration would have us believe) and heavy causality counts for a patently aimless war. We, on a very small level, had some success linking up with some anti-war GIs and agitating around our points, especially the union issue. However, like many things in politics, timing is crucial, and that anti-war military wave receded by early 2007 and since that time we have held to a mainly propaganda campaign around those issues.
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