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.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
This issue addresses head-on the question of racism in the military, a major stumbling block to class unity during the Vietnam War era, and a question still at issue today in the military even though a black man, Barack Obama, as President of the United States leads the American imperial state in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other more episodic military adventures. The other issue, around the May Day events in France, would actually have to be re-written today in light of our current better understand that, soldier or civilian, we as revolutionaries do not want to take political responsibility for running the bourgeois state and therefore will not run for the executive offices of that state (although we would run for certain legislature positions as, in Lenin’s phrase, “tribunes of the people” and are not precluded from supporting working-class candidates from other leftist organizations, depending on their programs).
Note: Those of us who have been involved in the communist movement for years have gotten used to reading political literature that contains a fairly high level of polemical and analytical material that is somewhat abstract, or at least would be abstract to novice radical (or wannabe radical) politicos or military personnel. A GI-oriented paper, without ducking the hard issues of imperialism, class struggle, and the various oppressions present under the current capitalist system and without “dumbing down” (the average military person has had enough, more than enough, of that from the cradle to boot camp) should be written in language that most GIs can understand, and maybe get a chuckle out of. This issue did a fairly good job of that, including the chuckle part (the model letters to the editor).
No comments:
Post a Comment