RE: A post-October 25 redbaiting and split drive is underway: response to Weinberg

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robin argues in this thread for basically cloning the U.S. SWP's tactics
in the antiwar movement of the Vietnam epoch for today. I think doing
that is a mistake, at least on the level Robin presents it.

Those tactics belonged to an epoch where Stalinism held a great
influence among progressive circles. And as Robin indicates, what was
really behind the "single issue" versus "multi issue" debate was an
entirely different discussion -- whether or not the antiwar movement
should support "peace" democrats. 

Much more furious and significant than the single versus multi issue
debate, however, was the issue of the antiwar demand -- immediate and
unconditional withdrawal, "Out Now!" , versus variations on the theme of
negotiate. That debate was much more important because it touched on a
matter of principle, self-determination, even though in the way things
were posed then it seemed the two were inextricably intertwined..

In retrospect, I think the "single issue" versus "multi issue" aspect of
the debate was way overdone. 

BOTH sides wanted to relate the war to other issues. The "single issue"
side did this through organizing contingents, speakers, and the kind of
material and arguments it put out in its literature. So did the "multi
issue" side. This was, to a very significant degree, albeit not
exclusively, a debate created by the competition for influence between
the CP and the SWP. On its face, and abstracting from the antiwar
demand, it is a relatively minor disagreement, because the SWP was just
as convinced as anyone else that you could not mobilize opposition to
the war without relating to all sorts of other questions, and it did so,
in the antiwar work, quite consciously and systematically.

Translated to today's terms, the issue amounts to things like "debating"
whether money for jobs not for war should be considered a "demand"
alongside end the war or end the occupation, or whether it should be
considered part of the explanation and motivation for the antiwar
demand. 

The one part of the debate that wasn't phony was that at times some
forces wanted to "move on" from the war to "other issues," i.e., abandon
the fight around the war as the central focus of the protests. The SWP's
other arguments against "multi-issue" were, at best, formalistic. It
isn't really true that the students who rallied around the SMC would
have been put off by demands against racism or repression. And part of
the motivation for this was that the SWP wanted to push the quite narrow
YSA as the vehicle through which student radicalism *ought* to find
expression, and viewed multi-issue student formations as "opponents."
Nor was this sectarianism limited to the student arena. 

The SWP didn't just oppose antiwar activists being channeled into
Democratic Party campaigns. The SWP also opposed efforts to create
independent political expressions in the electoral arena of the antiwar
and other social movements, counterposing to such broader efforts its
own very narrow socialist propaganda candidacies. 

It's pigeon-hole approach to classifying parties as being on this or
that side of the class line wasn't very political, and tremendously
undercut the argument against the Democrats. Underlying this was the
SWP's more-revolutionary-than-thou vanguardism, the idea that it was the
chosen party to lead the American revolution. 

The obvious thing to counterpose to supporting allegedly antiwar
Congresscritters was genuinely antiwar independent candidates drawn from
and rooted in the social movements of those days. 

Such candidacies were rejected as "petty-bourgeois" -- and this by a
party that formally at least was for a "workers and farmers government,"
i.e., a government based on an alliance between different classes, the
U.S. working class and the (nonexistent) U.S. peasantry. 

*Even if* one were to concede that formations like peace and freedom
represented fundamentally the interests of the petite-bourgeoisie rather
than initial motion by working people towards independent political
action, the SWP's ultra-purist refusal to support them makes no sense,
even in terms of the  SWP's own stated approach to politics. If both
such a party and the SWP had become mass parties, the SWP's stated
programmatic approach would require calling for a government based on an
alliance of those two forces. 

Or looked at another way. The SWP called for independent Black
candidates and party. The SWP supported the few such candidacies that
emerged, as well as the more significant excursion of the Chicano
movement into the electoral arena, the Raza Unida Party. It would call
on all working people and progressive minded individuals to support such
candidates. But the SWP's position was to oppose independent electoral
action by Blacks and Latinos if they succeeded in allying with
significant forces outside their own communities in formations like
Peace and Freedom. So if the support of progressives outside the Black
or Chicano communities for independent electoral action becomes so great
that not only do they want to back the Chicanos who are doing it but
ally with them in a joint slate, THEN the SWP said no.

The reason for that was simply that the sole legitimate vehicle for that
to take place among working people as a whole had already been created,
and it was the SWP. 

I cite these to show that, as SWP founder Jim Cannon once said, in
politics there are the "good" reasons that people give for what they are
doing, and then there are the REAL reasons. And like in election
tactics, there was a significant element of organizational sectarianism
in the SWP's choice of tactics in the antiwar movement.

Those of us involved especially in the YSA in those years should think
back on discussions we had with "independents" and among ourselves
around the question of the SMC remaining a "single issue" group, that a
"multi issue" group would inevitably have bad politics (otherwise the
people in it would simply join the YSA) and so on. Let's just say
dialectics wasn't our strong suit.

As for the two big sides in the antiwar debate, it is notable that
*neither* side, neither approach, succeeded in massively drawing in the
layers of the population that were most against the war, the Black,
Chicano and Puerto Rican communities, and making them the leading force
in the movement, nor did this happen in the pre-Iraq invasion movement
nor does it seem to be happening today. 

That the sentiment in the communities of oppressed peoples could be
turned into massive protest was proven by the Chicano moratorium and
some other efforts. But none of the main tactical approaches of the
major wings of the antiwar movement succeeded in mobilizing that
sentiment. 

Perhaps that was simply not meant to be at that stage -- although it is
a difficult proposition to accept. The idea that Blacks or Chicanos were
dealing with other, more immediate and pressing issues of day-to-day
survival doesn't make sense to me. The war and the draft were totally
immediate and pressing issues of day-to-day survival for those
communities. (I do think another factor often cited, the generalized
repression against these communities, and the selective incarceration or
assassination of leaders, undoubtedly played a major role in this -- the
example of the Chicano Moratorium is once again weighty evidence.) 

But for all that, I don't remember this contradiction --that the most
politically advanced, most combative, most militant, most independent,
most antiwar segments of the population, the communities of the
oppressed nationalities and especially Black, Chicano and Puerto Rican
youth, did not have tremendous weight and participation in antiwar
coalitions or protests-- having been a central overriding concern of the
various wings of the  antiwar movement's leadership.

Why wasn't it a central, overriding concern? What does that say about
the antiwar movement of those years and some of its limitations? Those
are questions worth pondering.

I believe a lot of the current structures of this new antiwar movement
as it exists today are the result 
of trying to grapple with precisely those sorts of issues. It may *seem*
like the tactical debate posed now is the same one as back then, and the
right thing to do is simply to dust off the arguments from 30-odd years
ago conveniently collected and documented in Fred Hallstead's book "Out
Now!"

But I believe that the tactical (and in reality strategic) debate today
is taking place on an entirely different level, one that builds on the
accomplishments of the earlier movement , but also tries to grapple with
some of its limitations. This is a much broader framework for the
discussion on what is to be done than we operated with back then. And
although many strands and elements, or aspects, of this discussion
remain the same (the question of the Democrats), it would be in my
opinion a step backward to frame things now as they were framed then.

José


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