[...continued from the last post...]In our case, the Bus Riders Union, a grassroots, anti-racist organization of several hundred active members, 3,000 dues paying members, and 50,000 on-the-bus supporters in Los Angeles has taken a strong stand of unconditional opposition to a U.S. war against Iraq.
That is, we reject the myth of “inspections” and oppose the already murderous sanctions that have been imposed on Iraq. But more important than our “position,” we are taking our views out on the buses in English, Spanish, and Korean.
It will be the construction of independent social movements—independent of the two party war system, independent of labor union bureaucracies—that can build broad united fronts with many other forces in society, but must begin with their own political independence, their own social base.
It is hard for individuals to build a base, only organizations can build a base, and within that individual organizers are critical.
There are many groups on the ground already doing this important work, I have used my own organization, the Labor/Community Strategy Center and one of our frontline grassroots membership organizations, the Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros, as an example of on-the-ground organizing to build the antiracist, anti-imperialist tendency in the broad antiwar front.
If you are an unaffiliated activist, find an organization that is closest to your own political views, and work to build it.
If you do not see a group with which you agree that meets your needs, think of organizing one. But it must involve a direct outreach to new people, door to door, worker to worker, bus rider to bus rider.
An internet mobilization of isolated people who show up for big marches, march to a designated spot, listen to speeches that denounce the war, and go home is not a movement, is not powerful enough to challenge the empire or its policies. Those events are important and essential, but not sufficient.
Create Political Crises Inside Existing Institutions—Force Someone To Do Something. The broad antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s forced actual institutions to change their policies, and created crises inside many mainstream institutions in the U.S.
The recent efforts, for example, to get city councils all over the United States to vote antiwar resolutions are very positive models, for many of those elected officials changed their votes because of grassroots pressure. But we have to go beyond votes.
A few examples: Campaigns against Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Halliburton, Bechtel and other war manufacturers and profiteers—including challenging corporate recruiters on campus.
Campaigns to push unions and universities to carry out specific actions. For example, students can organize to stop ROTC on their campus.
Unions can organize to reject military contractors from pension funds or call one hour, one day, or longer antiwar work stoppages.
Student and worker organizations can be a part of major campaigns against military (not “defense”) spending.
There has been a discussion of “civil disobedience” and “militancy” which is good, but often it is put forth as a tactic without an objective. During the war in Vietnam the campaign against Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm, drove Dow recruiters off campuses.
It was just one example of a campaign with specifically targeted demands that could be evaluated both by the level of new support, but also the actual changes in policy.
Its goal was to punish corporations that profited from war crimes, to develop an anti-corporate, anti-imperialist sensibility among students, to challenge the traditionally safe and upwardly mobile haven of the campus for corporate recruitment, and in turn, to pressure some corporations who in turn would put pressure on the government to end the war. We need a similar assessment of targets today.
Challenging the Base of the Pro-War Democrats. Tariq Ali, an editor of New Left Review, has written that the “soft underbelly” of the British antiwar movement is their opposition to England’s participation in the war “without UN approval,” assuming that if Bush and Blair did twist enough arms to get those votes the war would be O.K.
At this point, that contradiction will not be confronted because the U.S. and Britain squandered their “diplomatic” cards and in fact begun to launch the most hostile attack on the United Nations.
Still, his point is that any antiwar movement that is essentially saying, “Invade Iraq, but do it right” is not anti-imperialist and is vulnerable to cooptation and compromise.
In the U.S. however, the soft underbelly of the antiwar movement is its love affair with, or addiction to, the Democratic Party.
Bush has written off the antiwar movement as mainly rooted in pro-Democratic party voters and forces. He has some reason to be right.
If Clinton or Gore were leading this war, would the antiwar liberals be as active, or active at all? Would the AFL-CIO, with its weak but important antiwar resolutions, be visible at all to challenge the Democratic gravy train?
Would many Black Democrats who benefited from Clinton’s massive patronage machine stand up against him? No. And Bush knows it.
Defeat the Pro-War Democrats. Since September 11 the Democratic Party has given sycophant a bad name, as Democratic Minority Leaders Gephardt and Daschle have openly boasted they have given George Bush a blank check on ‘the war on terrorism’ The Democrats, with very few exceptions, have supported every Homeland Security, “anti-terrorism” Pentagon spending bill, and war resolution Bush has asked for.
Worse, the leading Democratic presidential front runners and party leaders have tried to act as super-hawks, accusing Bush of not spending enough on “domestic” counter-terrorism, and asking for further attacks on North Korea as well.
The strategy of hawks and opportunists like John Kerrey, Richard Gephardt, Tom Daschle, and Joseph Lieberman has been:
1) Posture pro-war, so that if the war goes well they can take credit for their loyalty, and if the war goes badly it can hurt Bush, without the Democrats being in any way vulnerable to being “antiwar”;
2) Hope “the economy” continues its downhill spiral, so that in 2004, if the war goes badly and so does the economy, the Democrats can position themselves as the “party of change” without having done anything to change anything.
(Kerry is running as a chameleon, a pro-war and antiwar candidate depending on the audience, but his votes have been strongly supportive of Bush.)
It is essential for the antiwar movement to begin targeting the Democratic Hawks in mass demonstrations—not just Bush; to target Kerry, Gephardt, Daschle, and Lieberman now, with signs that oppose their presidential candidacies.
Begin the Democratic and Green Party Antiwar Campaigns Now. As the presidential elections grow closer, the very difficult debates about how progressives should vote, including a possible anti-Bush united front, or a possible Green Party revolt, can be debated in greater specificity as the actual roles of each candidate are made more clear.
But right now the Democratic “peace” candidates include former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, civil rights official Al Sharpton, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, and former U.S. Senator Carol Mosely Braun.
Apparently, Ralph Nader has spoken at several antiwar rallies, but in Los Angeles, neither Nader nor the Greens have been a visible force in the broad antiwar united front.
That does not preclude a Green presidential campaign as a viable tactic, but it does reflect some of the weakness of the Green’s as an antiwar alternative so far.
Given the system’s two party dictatorship, and
“winner take all” electoral system, and the power of a very conservative white majority, buttressed by a racist electoral college system, the ultimate
game plan for an antiwar, antiracist electoral strategy faces a series of interrelated dilemmas.
While very liberal candidates can occasionally do well in Democratic party primaries, in the final vote, Kucinich, Dean, Sharpton, or Mosely Braun have very little chance to win.
Then if a Kerry or Gephardt is nominated, the Democrats will move even further to the Right to try to attract “Reagan Democrats.”
This will drive many people into the Green party, and Democratic liberals will scream that Nader is the cause of their problem, when in fact the Democrats have moved to the Right consistently since George McGovern in 1972.
The point is that while it will be very hard to nominate, let alone elect a Democrat who will in any way campaign on a platform that is objectively antiwar, that effort must be made.
While it will be hard to push the Green’s to really become more than a white anti-corporate populist group, that effort must also be made.
It is not really necessary to debate among ourselves (many of us are not Democrats in the first place) which Democrat should be supported, but I do think some participation in progressive Democratic campaigns is one piece of the puzzle, as is building the antiracist and antiwar wings of the Green party.
At some point we will have to debate what to do if
a Gephardt is the Democratic nominee and Nader runs again.
That is, should the priority be to develop an anti-Bush united front or to take the risk to try to dramatically expand the Green Vote, with the
high probability it would hurt the Democrats?
The main objective in the present, however, is to create many mass electoral campaigns with a strong antiwar platform, especially those who would be willing to challenge Bush NOW.
Groups with a grassroots base can help organize candidates’ nights and get both the antiwar candidates to forge some type of principled united front, and try to compel pro-war candidates to attend and be held accountable for their views, with the understanding that their pro-war politics may hurt their chances for winning state primaries for president.
Reach Out to the GIs with Compassion but Also Firmness—We Do Not Want U.S. GIs to be Killed, or to be Killers. During the war in Vietnam, U.S. GIs were recruited through the draft from some of the poorest areas of the country, with vast overrepresentation of Black and Latino working class youth.
They were trained to kill and be killed for an imperialist war of aggression. Since Vietnam, the U.S. has become even more sophisticated—focusing on a “volunteer” army and an even greater emphasis on aerial bombardment and missile attacks.
Militarily it has focused even more Pentagon funds on technological weapons that can pulverize entire countries (like nuclear bombs without the radioactive fallout), even as threats of U.S. nuclear weapons still are raised.
The plan is for U.S. troops to come in after the murderous bombardment that will terrorize civilian and military opposition, and then—the most horrible of terms—“mop up.”
That is, walk over the dead bodies, those who have not been pulverized or incinerated by the “smart bombs.”
The U.S. government knows that a majority of the U.S. electorate (more white, more middle class) still supports imperialist wars but does not want to see their own sons and daughters killed in the process, and has evolved its war plans accordingly.
During the war in Vietnam, the antiwar movement—through GI coffeehouses and very effective “draft resistance” counseling, agitation, and political education—argued with the GIs that the war was wrong, and that they were being used to commit war crimes against civilian populations and to put down a revolution led by a Third World people.
Those same arguments hold today, but we need to add several additional ones.
First, the U.S. has contempt for its GIs and is using them. How many people are now on the streets with signs, almost 40 years later, “Vietnam veteran, will work for food”?
How many drug addicts and alcoholics are walking the streets still in post-Vietnam syndrome?
How many GIs are suffering from Gulf War Syndrome after the U.S. Army denied for years there was any such condition, and accused the soldiers of lying? Veterans health benefits are being cut, and now a six month wait to get medical assistance and doubling of co-payments for prescription drugs.
As Dennis Kucinich observed, “There are 17,000 nursing home beds needed for veterans, but it has cut 5,000 beds. No money in the budget for 250,000 homeless veterans. It has however, asked for $108 million for new cemeteries.”
Second, the “volunteer” army is still generated by young Black and Latino men facing jail and unemployment, who see the “army” as a “career.”
Yet, many do not want to fight. Today’s news had a story of a young Black man who had joined the army to try to get out of a gang life, and was having an emotional breakdown on the frontlines of Kuwait, terribly afraid of dying never seeing his family again.
In essence the army is still primarily based on forced conscription and we should speak to GIs with an awareness that they are not “free” to “be all that they can be.”
Third, we have to face squarely the role of the new “volunteer” army in generating a new generation of out of control men, many of whom have been turned into rapists, brutalizers, and killers by their commanding officers.
These young men are not only being trained to kill oppressed peoples the world over, but they are also turning that violence against themselves, their families, and society.
A recent article indicated that virtually every woman in the Airforce academy had been raped by fellow “class mates.” It was almost part of the “basic training” as the men felt protected by the system and the women were afraid to protest.
If the U.S. has the kind of military training that considers the raping of women integral to its orientation, imagine the treatment of any oppressed peoples under U.S. military occupation, or the families of the “servicemen” when they return.
Similarly, four soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina are accused of killing their wives, three of the soldiers had recently returned from Afghanistan.
The Special Forces spokespeople explained that the murdering of wives by returning servicemen was not unique to Ft. Bragg. Indeed!
The Pentagon has reported 11,000 cases of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse last year among military families, and everyone knows those abuses are so underreported that the number could be ten times as high.
The U.S. soldiers are being revved up to kill in Iraq, that is their job. A young man in the army just killed himself. The army said the “stress” of wanting to go into combat and having the deadline postponed and postponed led him to take his own life.
Imagine 250,000 troops on a hair trigger just waiting to kill—what are we producing and what will happen to them and us when they return home?
We need parents of GIs and former GIs and Vets to help lead the antiwar movement, for they know the enormous lifetime cost of being a trained killer for a series of unjust wars of aggression and conquest.
We need to reach out to GIs and explain firmly and clearly that they are both being used in an imperialist war, but also that they are being trained to be violent and out-of-control human beings who will return a menace to themselves, their loved ones, and society. They should turn against the war.
Expanding the Demands to Talk About the World War.
The antiwar movement is situated in a worldwide movement for self-determination in which peoples all over the world are seeking independence from U.S. domination.
The Strategy Center has generated a new document, Towards a Program of Resistance, that goes into detail on the strategy, tactics, and politics of an anti-imperialist program. Here are a few examples of how the movement can also broaden the scope of the war against the Bush war machine.
· The demand for Reparations for Black people in the U.S., the African nations and peoples, and other peoples of the African Diaspora are both just and urgent, and also call into question the entire history of conquest and racism of the U.S.
As such, they can help generate a transformative movement based on self-determination for Black people in the U.S., in solidarity with oppressed peoples throughout the world.
· Self-determination for the Palestinian People—a politically and economically viable self-determination and the return of all land taken for Israeli settlements and annexations.
Throughout the Middle East and the Arab World the U.S. $5 billion in annual support for Israel that prevents Palestinian self-determination is a deeply felt and urgent issue, and will expand anti-U.S. imperialist sentiment in the region until those policies are reversed.
· Self-determination for Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, and other Latin American and Third World move-ments. The U.S. policy of dictating “regime change” to the Palestinians, Iraqis, and trying to overthrow and sabotage progressive governments that place any restrictions on capitalist markets and profits is at the core of the Bush “war against the world.”
It expands by military means what the Clinton administration tried to achieve by primarily economic and political threats.
· Motions of censure against the United States in the United Nations. The U.S. has used the United Nations to its will, boycotting its resolutions, withholding its dues, and using Kofi Annan as its representative.
It has boycotted the World Conference Against Racism, refused to sign the Kyoto Accords, refused to join the International Criminal Court.
There are some who simply say the UN is a fig leaf, but right now the UN is a critical forum in which antiwar forces throughout the world want to pursue their debate and disagreement with the U.S.
U.S. Stop!
There is no need to make glib prognoses and predictions. The short-term military power of the United States and its barbaric use of armed force and weapons of mass destruction is the greatest threat to world peace and stability.
The U.S. scares the hell out of everyone, but many are hoping for its overextension and decline.
We need to make it clear that we know the U.S. has its sights on virtually every nation, every progressive movement, and the efforts to chal-lenge U.S. forces in Palestine, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Los Angeles are part of a larger worldwide strategy.
It is now 11 PM Wednesday, March 19, 2003, tomorrow in Los Angeles we will assemble at Olvera Street, in the heart of a Latino area of downtown, and march to the federal building.
We will share our sense of outrage, denounce the war, and wonder, if not out loud then to our-selves, what can we possibly do to stop this massacre, to stop the U.S. barbarians breaking down the gates of Iraq.
I write strategy for therapy as well as for a sense of orientation. I am part of an organi-zation. I will march with 100 or more of Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union members and friends, and feel a simultaneous sense of power and powerlessness as we march and chant and the bombs continue to fall.
For all of us in “the movement,” fighting against racism in a racist country, fighting against imperialism in the heart of the empire is a daunting, and at times, a lonely journey.
This essay is an effort to explain that the Bush administration faces profound international contradictions, and the nascent antiwar movement has achieved enormous victories in a very short time, with an even harder job ahead.
Each individual, each group, has to have the most soul-searching debate about the best path to take to advance our objectives.
Fortunately, we have cards to play, options to choose from, opportunities to raise the stakes and join an international united front in which people all over the world join us in asking, “How can we stop the United States?”
In that context, living and working in the belly of the beast gives us an enormous international responsibility. Our resistance can give encouragement and hope to people fighting on our side who are often in struggles far more advanced than our movement—part of a worldwide united front against U.S. imperialism. It makes you feel it is worth fighting another day, and every day.
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Eric Mann is a long-time organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers.
He is the director of the Labor/community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and a member of the Bus Riders Union.
His latest book, Dispatches from Durban: First-hand Commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies can be ordered at
www.frontlinespress.comThe Strategy Center’s Towards a Program of Resis-tance can be ordered at
www.thestrategycenter.orgHe can be reached at ericmann@mindspring.com.
Thanks to Lian Hurst Mann and Layla Welborn of the Strategy Center for their political editing and collaboration on this essay.
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