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.
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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:
No question that by 1969 everyone involved in the anti-war movement in America, including this writer, should have known that the twin strategies of getting a “peace” president elected (variously Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, hell, even Lyndon Johnson compared to one Richard Milhous Nixon) and the ever-growing but ever futile strategy of same old, same old “mass marches” were played out, were bankrupt whatever value they had held in previous years. This writer, at least, got the message loud and clear that 1969 was a watershed year for a new strategy. Although I had always been (and remain now pretty much true to that concept) a “to the streets”-oriented politico at some point what you are doing in those streets and who you are bringing into them becomes problematic.
Endless student-(and other assorted, mainly, young people although not yet many working class kids) driven marches were not working. Adding in dissident Democrats and others of “good will” was not going to shift the balance. That SWP-CP-left liberal- driven "popular front" strategy was strictly counter-posed to what was needed by 1969. And that is where this issue of the GI Voice is valuable. The notion of posing a workers-student anti-war general strike that would shift the axis from reliance on those so-called “good will” people to the people who could shut things down, the workers, was strictly speaking the beginning of wisdom. A late recognition of the power of the working class as decisive in the struggle, to be sure, late even by this son of the working class, but also as a bridge to get to their sons and brothers, and it was mainly their sons and brothers (and my brothers and me) who were fighting the war in Vietnam by 1969.
Students, workers, and then, at some point, worker-soldiers added to the mix. Ya, that’s the ticket. It pains me even today to realize that if we had acted on that class axis maybe we could have “won.” And aided the heroic fighters of the DNV and South Vietnamese National Liberation Front is a serious way, as well. If you want to castigate the U.S. Socialist Workers Party for their role in the 1960s defeat of our side by the American imperial state the struggle against the Vietnam War this is the heart of the matter. The military defeat that the Vietnamese ultimately inflicted on the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies owed relatively little to our efforts whatever public relations kudos the Vietnamese may have issued post hoc. But the cost was high, too high, and we could have helped cut it. The CP Stalinists I will not even mention. They were just doing what they had done since the late 1930s but the SWP, as I found out later, “knew” better. You should burn with rage over that knowledge even today.
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