Re: [Marxism] Bay Area United Against War Meeting

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bob Morris writes: "It occurs to me that the Vietnam protests were so
effective because a) they were a new idea, b) tended to be huge and thus got
major attention (which is the whole point, right?) but now such actions have
almost become routine and thus get much less attention."

There were lots of smaller protests during the Vietnam War following the
really big ones. By the early 70's they had become so routine that a good
section of the radical left decried them as liberal "peace crawls." And
quite often they got very little press coverage and even less TV exposure.
All the arguments you're hearing today against antiwar demonstrations we
heard back then. 

What kept the antiwar movement doing these large public protests were a) the
student movement and b) the tactical decisions of the SWP and its youth
wing, the YSA. The student movement, because this was continually being
refreshed by incoming first-year college students every year, and for
several years, each incoming class was coming in more radicalized than the
previous one. It was not unusual for student activists to give up on the
perspective of mass public protests, but there were always plenty of newer
activists to replace them. The tactics of the SWP/YSA because at least that
time those groups in their practical antiwar activity had their feet firmly
planted on the ground of American realities, and their cadre provided a
stabilizing (if sometimes domineering) backbone for antiwar coalitions. It
should be noted also that the CPUSA played a similar role AT TIMES, but did
not have nearly as much of a presence in the student movement as the SWP
did. 

What was an issue even then, but immensely moreso today, is that at bottom
the problem is POLITICAL. This was reflected in the ups-and-downs of the
antiwar movement. Protests in ODD years were large: 1967, 1969, 1971. On
*even* years they were much smaller, as those were election years. In the
SWP-YSA, we attributed those smaller turnouts to "election year pressure,"
but really what it comes down to is the fairly reasonable proposition --if
you imagine that you're living in as democracy-- that is you can't convince
politicians to change course, then the thing to do is to change the
politicians.

The reality is that the movement in those years did not come up with
anything like the Green Party over the last decade that could at least BEGIN
to offer *masses* of people a POLITICAL alternative. The SWP insisted on
running narrow, sectarian "socialist election campaigns." The CP remained
tied to a strategy of transforming the Democratic Party by supporting the
more liberal Democrats. 

TODAY you see something similar except that there is now a large layer of
fairly experienced but unaffiliated radicals and socialists who are the core
of the Green Party financial and activist base, and groups like the SWP/YSA
of old are qualitatively smaller and (so it seems to me) quite a bit less
coherent politically. But the biggest "except" is that there is no mass
radicalization of a depth and breadth in any way comparable to the youth
radicalization of the 1960's. That was the "fuel" of the mass antiwar
protests that is lacking today.

THAT, BTW, is why I am so extremely interested in the Obama phenomenon. The
extreme polarization of support between Obama and Clinton along AGE lines
suggests to me that something is happening here and we don't know what it
is. 

Joaquin


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