Click on the headline to link to an American Left History book review entry A Norman Mailer Novel As History-Pentagon 1967-Armies Of The Night, for some background about the famous 1967 March on the Pentagon.
Markin comment:
Earlier this month I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on the peace and/or anti-war question:
If I was asked to name the number one political cause that I have fought for in my life, and I thought about it for a few moments, the answer would have to be the peace, or put a better way, the anti-war question. I will just quickly draw a distinction between the two terms for purposes of this commentary. Of course, everybody and their brother and sister wants peace, talks about peace, would love to see in their lifetimes, and so on. By this they mean, usually, no wars, or at least just little ones, or may an occasional civil war or something like that. Mainly though, truth to tell, no wars to intrude on their daily lives, and certainly nothing that they have to take up arms about, or worst, sent their children with those selfsame arms to fight. Sunday speech peace is what this attitude boils down to. We have heard that noise from politicians, high and low, for an eternity. And for a fair part of my political youth, truth to tell, that kind of peace, that kind of striving for peace as a political activist, if not quite put in that hard-boiled a manner had great appeal.
Yes, but I am a big boy now, and have been for quite awhile. Thus, sweet Sunday speech peace preachments leave nothing but a bitter taste in my mouth. First of all, as a historical materialist by political inclination I know that there are some wars, like the class struggle wars that I don not want to be peaceful about, at least if the bourgeoisies of the world get in our way as they usually do. Or certain wars for national self-determination by oppressed nations, like the Vietnam War that caused me to re-evaluate my “peace” principles on more than one occasion back in the 1960s. Or wars fought by progressive, or at least smaller sized and helpless entities against bigger, bullying ones. So no, in the year 2010, I do not want to fight for “peace at any price.” And while I am no inveterate war-monger by any means thems the facts. As to the anti-war part of the question I think that I can stand on that position a little better, a little more truthfully, by opposing the wars that world imperialism, and in the first instance American imperialism, constantly throw at us, including today’s Iraq and Afghan occupations for starters.
That said, let me go back to that Vietnam War anti-war experience or rather experiences for they will be illustrative of the transformation of my search for “peace” to that of class justice in this wicked old world. Early on in that war, before the massive escalations of the mid-1960s, I would characterize my position as pacifistic in the universal sense reflecting a Catholic Worker-type position tinged with not a little unkempt social-patriotism toward the American government. As the bombs kept endlessly falling on that benighted country and I studied and learned more about the historic struggle of the Vietnamese against foreign oppression I came to support their struggles under the rubric of a war of national liberation. As I moved further left I held quasi-positions (quasi in the sense of ill-formed, or not fully worked out in those hectic times when one could not move fast enough leftward, and as importantly, theoretically leftward) that the anti-war movement should act as an active “second front” in the Vietnamese national liberation struggle by “bringing the war home” (and rather passive toward what ultimately needed to be done to the American government). Finally, finally I came closer to Bolshevik positions on the war question, the need to defend a workers state (in whatever condition, that too evolved over time), the need to do with and in the American military to bring the war to an end the Bolshevik way.
That said, this particular series of entries from the archives of the Spartacist League would have made life infinitely easier if I had had access to them in those days as expressions of a clear way forward for the anti-war movement that I (and not I alone) was getting increasingly frustrated with as it got mired into bourgeois defeatism, and then into oblivion as that war wound down. Unfortunately I did not initially read this material until some time in the mid-1970s. I will make additional individual comments on each entry.
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Markin comment on Beyond October 21: From Protest to Power
In an earlier entry today discussing some of the personal history of my political evolution on the anti-war question I mentioned that in 1965 I was not totally committed to a philosophy of non-violence action for political change nor was I totally committed to working within the bourgeois parliamentary system. (See From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) - The Struggle Against Class Collaboration In The Anti-War Movement- New York Peace Parade Statement (1965).) By 1967, in the aftermath of the hard governmental suppression of the black riots that expressed an elementary outrage at the reality of ghetto life, a suppression supported by Martin Luther King and other black leaders, the first stirrings of armed self-defense by the Black Panthers out in Oakland, California, and the successive escalations of the Vietnam War by the Johnson Administration, I was becoming somewhat radicalized. And, more importantly, less and less wedded to those core, essentially left-liberal beliefs, that drove my earlier political views.
However, I was also not committed to the total break from the system that some of my friends, and as were virtually all of my girlfriends of the period. (One girlfriend, who I was crazy about, actually was calling for victory to the National Liberation Front, a very left position in that year.) Ironically, ironically today anyway, I was in the position of arguing that it was still possible to work in the system for social change if only we could find the right bourgeois politicians (read: Robert Kennedy) to talk “sweet” reason to. Needless to say, all those friends and girlfriends were to the left of me, mainly working with SDS, or its offshoots, and made life hell for me. Naturally, as well, relations with most of those girlfriends tended to wilt on the vine (quaint expression, right?)
But hear me out, and hear me out admittedly from today’s perspective on this. In the United States in 1960, a country with no working class party, reformist, centrist, or revolutionary, what was a dirt poor working class kid crazy for politics and crazy for social change with a little rough justice thrown in, to do? Especially in Massachusetts, the king hellion locale for putting political careers and “good works” together. So, see it wasn’t me to blame okay. Actually let’s blame the Stalinists of the American Communist Party for tying us to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party back in the 1930s when there was a good change to built a mass workers party. Hey, I don’t mind kicking the Stalinists around politically once in a while. Ya, let’s blame them.
Blame aside though, 1967 and the October March on the Pentagon that the leaflet below was addressed to was just the kind of action that I saw as necessary, “levitating” pranks and all, to grow the anti-war movement. For what purpose? Well, for one, at this point to solidify the call for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam which I had begun to take up as against my previous wish-washy “Stop the War” position. But you already know the real purpose. To pressure Senator Robert Kennedy (whose position on Vietnam was actually to the right of mine at that point) to break finally with Johnson and run against him in 1968. Such, boys and girls, is politics. It ain’t always pretty.
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Beyond October 21:
From Protest to Power
—from Spartacist leaflet distributed at 21 October 1967 anti-Vietnam War march in Washington, D.C.
The April 15th mobilization was at once the greatest success of the official peace movement and definitive evidence of its political bankruptcy. The series of demonstrations leading up to the April 15th affair not only had no effect on government policy, but the escalation of the war appears to have coincided with each demonstration. The complete ineffectiveness of the April 15th march and the cynical indifference of the Johnson administration to anti¬war sentiment has engendered a hysterical hatred of the "power structure" and a sense of frustration among the most active sections of the anti-war movement. Isaac Deutscher caught the problem exactly when he said that he'd exchange the whole huge April I5th mobilization for just one dock strike.
Mass Action—Not Kamikazes
There is widespread sentiment to make the demonstrations more aggressive, dramatic and personally involving. The result has been a turn toward self-sacrifice and personal heroics in direct physical confrontations with the "war machine." The notion that the sheer strength of will of its opponents can end the war has its logical culmination in the hippies'project to "raise the Pentagon." Except for satisfying masochistic demonstrators and sadistic cops, nothing is gained from such "confrontations." Whether the demonstrators fight back or not, under these circumstances the odds are all on the side of the cops. Such direct action is as ineffectual as large, orderly demonstrations, and more expensive to the movement in terms of bruised bodies, jail sentences and money.
Personal sacrifice can never substitute fora mass movement and it is necessary to understand this in developing a perspective for anti-war movement. This does not mean reverting to the simple pacifist humanitarianism of the official peace movement in order to get middle-class liberals on the picket lines. What, it does mean is tapping the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American society; the black ghetto uprisings and rash of militant strikes indicate the depth and explosiveness of this discontent. Some of this discontent is with the war itself, or things related to the war such as the inflation eating into real wages. But all of it stems from the fundamentally oppressive character of American capitalism, o which the slaughter of the rebellious Vietnamese peasantry is simply the most dramatic external manifestation.
You WILL Go
Closely related to the tendency of anti-war radicals to think in terms of personal assaults on the "system" is the draft-resistance campaign which has become the principal organizing focus of the purging of radicals from the army strengthens the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. The government still seeks to screen radicals out of the service. Radicals, rather than going off to prison or Canada, would be far more effective educating their fellow soldiers. The Americans who suffer most from the war are the soldiers in Vietnam, and as the war grows longer and bloodier. discontent among G.I.s and its effect on prosecuting the war could be very great indeed
Perhaps more important is the effect of student draft avoidance particularly the frenzied scrambling after 2-S deferments, which are available only to the intellectually or financially privileged on the attitude of working-class draftees. The majority of draftees are vaguely disquieted about the war and disgruntled about being drafted during a shooting war, where they could get killed. But they accept the draft as a fact of life, and the idea of refusing to go is completely alien to their whole mode of thinking They view the "we won't go" movement as motivated by physical cowardice, holier-than-thou moralism and a desire on the part of spoiled college kids to avoid the harshness of army life. The anti-war movement will never break out of the campuses and coffee-houses, and reach the masses, unless young radicals share the common experiences of all working class youth, in serving a few years in the army. Only by such measures can the debilitating, and potentially dangerous, isolation of bohemian intellectuals from the mass of the working class, so characteristic of the American left, be overcome.
For Anti-War Strike Actions
The widespread feeling that the continual repetition of big marches is ineffectual and demoralizing is correct. However, kamikaze tactics are not the answer. It is necessary for the anti-war movement to achieve the maximum social power it can muster in protests. To this end. the Spartacist League advocates concretely building for a one-day general strike in factories, offices, ghetto neighborhoods and schools as the next national mobilization. Given the existing strength of the anti-war movement, and proper organizing, such a mobilization could bring out huge numbers of workers and students, and have a severe effect on whole segments of the economy. Even on this modest scale, such a demonstration would put the "fear of god" into the government, because it would mean the anti-war movement had gone far beyond accepted forms of protest and attacked the very foundations of American capitalism production. Such a strike would be infinitely more effective than this endless series of marches whether or not decorated by the bloodied heads of martyrs.
Toward Conscious Class Struggle
Apart from being a more effective form of protest, the proposed general strike would enable the anti-war movement to widen its base among forces other than political activists and particularly to strengthen organized anti-war sentiment among workers. It would be an excellent way for anti-war trade unionists to organize among their fellow workers and inject the war question into trade union politics. Since the trade union bureaucracy would certainly oppose it the fight over the proposed strike would reinforce the increasing rank and file discontent in the unions. In fact, in many places, the strike would not only be around anti-war demands, but economic issues as well. It would then be a protest of general social discontent, and would help lay the basis for a mass revolutionary socialist party.
Protest or Power
To the extent that most anti-war activists think in terms of politics, they mean running "peace-conscience" candidates, whose sole activity consists of about six weeks of electioneering. This type of discontinuous and one-sided activity can never build an effective movement. In fact, it is seen as a gesture of protest and nothing more. However, the fundamental weakness of this type of peace candidate is not organizational inefficiency, but political. The general social program of most of these candidates the type of program King or Spock would run on is not substantially different from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, who. for purely opportunistic reasons, are unwilling to oppose Johnson. The official leadership of the anti¬war movement reinforces the hegemony of the Democratic Party, purged of the personal noxiousness and "aggressiveness" of Johnson. King or Spock would simply be a tryout for Robert Kennedy in '72.
Even on the question of the war itself, a program which implicitly supports American capitalism is self-defeating. The Vietnamese war is not unique. It is simply the largest in a series of colonial wars that the U.S. and all other imperialist powers have been fighting for the past century and will continue to fight until capitalism is overthrown in its main centers. In brief, the U.S. is in Vietnam to suppress a peasant revolution which challenges the dominance of U.S. business in Asia. It is futile to oppose the intervention in Vietnam while supporting the economic system which generates that intervention and the ideology that legitimatizes it.
Toward a Labor Party
Moreover, a political movement built solely around the war is incapable of unifying the various forces of discontent within American society. On the contrary, the necessary support given to the suppression of the American working class by establishment "doves" Wayne Morse is a leading Congressional advocate of government strike-breaking while the liberal establishment, including King, unanimously supported the bloody suppression of the ghetto risings—is a major obstacle to building a mass anti-war movement. Only such a revolutionary Labor Party, projecting a long-term struggle in the interest of the working masses, represents the kind of qualitative political change needed to create a serious break with the traditional parties and counter the political apathy of most workers. With the widespread discontent over the war, the rising militancy and restiveness in the labor movement, and the explosiveness of the black ghettos, the prospect for initiating such a party is better now than at any time in the last twenty years.
The anti-war movement can force Johnson to withdraw U.S. troops only if he is more afraid of it than of the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution. No demonstration, however effective and militant, can do this. Only a movement capable of taking state power can. The anti-war movement has no future except as a force for building a party of revolutionary change.
The Vietnamese War has opened many people's eyes to the horrors and injustices inherent in the mainstream of American politics. Nothing short of a fundamental change in the class axis of those politics will eliminate, these injustices.
