2- “One Nation” JOBS, PEACE, JUSTICE, March on Washington, DC
2-9 KEEP SPACE FOR PEACE Week
4- Arrest Dick Cheney Now, at the Broadmoor, 7:30am
5- Arrest George W. Bush Now, at the Broadmoor, 7:30am
6- Erik Larson, “Devil in the White City,” CC Armstrong Hall, 7pm
7- National day of action to defend education, DC
7-16 YEAR NINE of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
8- Day of the Heroic Guerrilla
10- Indigenous Peoples Day
10- 350.ORG’s Global Work Party
11- NPR’s Scott Simon, Protest “Evening with a Pro-war Shill,” CC Armstrong Hall, 7pm
11- CLIMATE CHAOS demonstration, DC
12- Day of Solidarity with Laos
14- Reel Injun documentary, CC Cornerstone, 6pm
15- The Heretics documentary, CC Cornerstone, 2:30pm
19- Citizens Project Election Forum, Stargazers Theater, 5pm
19- International Media Democracy Day
20- Churchill v CU, Appeals court oral arguments, Denver, 2:30
26- STREET THEATER for Glenn Beck, World Arena, 7pm
26- PP-ACLU forum “Role of Faith in Elections, CC, 7pm
30- Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, DC
Tag Archives: Laos
Cool Runnings vs selling out the whales
Forget putting together a Winter Olympic delegation to tap into your nationality’s PR budget, the real money is in the International Whaling Commission. Right now Japan is showering aid to nations willing to enroll in the IWC, to help Japan overturn the whaling moratorium. The IWC convenes a special session tomorrow in Florida and Greenpeace reports the whales have just lost the majority.
Of great concern is that the US and New Zealand appear to want to switch sides, despite Candidate Obama’s pledge to support the whaling moratorium.
The traditional pro-whaling nations of Japan, Norway, Iceland, Peru and Russia have allied with land-locked entities to vote to resume whaling. Mali and Mongolia are among recent recruits. Other aid recipients include Antigua, Barbuda, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Panama, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, St Kitts, and the Solomon Islands.
Anti-whaling leader Australia is joined by Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Switzerland and San Marino.
Other members include Argentina, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, People’s Republic of China, Republic of the Congo, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Eritrea, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, The Gambia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Republic of Guinea, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Republic of Korea, Kiribati, Laos, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mexico, Monaco, Nauru, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Palau, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Senegal, Slovak Republic, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Tanzania, Togo, Tuvalu, United Kingdom and Uruguay.
If your nation isn’t on the list, contact your state department. Forget assembling a tropical bobsled team, you’ll be able to pay your own way to Sochi, because the big money is in killing whales.
Beyond MLK worship: Beyond Vietnam
“A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” —
Martin Luther King Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence
Full text of 1967 speech below.
Riverside Church, New York City, 4 April 1967
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines:
“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
“I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.”
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
“For the sake of those boys,
for the sake of this governent,
for the sake of hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence,
I cannot be silent.”Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
“Surely we must see
that the men we supported
pressed them to their violence.”As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission — a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men — for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the “Vietcong” or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
“Before long they must know
that their government has sent them
into a struggle among Vietnamese,
and the more sophisticated surely realize
that we are on the side of the wealthy
and the secure
while we create hell for the poor.”They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at re-colonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change — especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us – not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged.
“Somehow this madness must cease.”
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong-inflicted” injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the Unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on — save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front — that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the north” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
“We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam.”
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them — the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
“When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights
are considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of
racism,
materialism
and militarism
are incapable of being conquered.”Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:
“Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”
“A nation that continues
year after year
to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death.”If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
• End all bombing in North and South Vietnam
• Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
• Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
• Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
• Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting The War
Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
“If we do not act
we shall surely be dragged down
the long and shameful corridors of time
reserved for those who possess
power without compassion,
might without morality,
and strength without sight.”There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy-and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said,
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken — the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.”
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.”
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
The People Are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”
A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept – so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force – has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says :
“Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world – a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.
Top 10 secret armies of the CIA
Found this on the web, will try to retrace provenance, worth a read: The United States have a well known history of providing military support to countries in need. But from time to time, the US Government has provided secret forces. While many are successful, there have also been a number of failures. This is a list of the ten top secret armies of the CIA.
1. Ukrainian Partisans
From 1945 to 1952 the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukranian partisan units which had originally been organised by he Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.2. Chinese Brigade in Burma
After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000 man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.3. Guatemalan Rebel Army
After Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz legalised that country’s communist party and expropriated 400,000 acres of United Fruit banana plantations, the CIA decided to overthrow his government. Guatemalan rebels were trained in Honduras and backed up with a CIA air contingent of bombers and fighter planes. This army invaded Guatemala in 1954, promptly toppling Arbenz’s regine.4. Sumatran Rebels
In an attempt to overthrow Indonesian president Sukarno in 1958, the CIA sent paramilitary experts and radio operators to the island of Sumatra to organise a revolt. With CIA air support, the rebel army attacked but was quickly defeated. The American government denied involvement even after a CIA b-26 was shot down and its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, was captured.5. Khamba Horsemen
After the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the CIA began recruiting Khamba horsemen – fierce warriors who supported Tibet’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama – as they escaped into India in 1959. These Khambas were trained in modern warfare at Camp Hale, high in the rocky mountains near Leadville, Colorado. Transported back to Tibet by the CIA operated Air American, the Khambas organised an army number at its peak some 14,000. By the mid-1960s the Khambas had been abandoned by the CIA but they fought on alone until 1970.6. Bay of Pigs Invasion Force
In 1960, CIA operatives recruited 1,500 Cuban refugees living in Miami and staged a surprise attack on Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Trained at a base in Guatemala, this small army – complete with an air force consisting of B-26 bombers – landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 19, 1961. The ill-conceived, poorly planned operation ended in disaster, since all but 150 men of the force were either killed or captured within three days.7. L’armee Clandestine
In 1962, CIA agents recruited Meo tribesmen living in the mountains of Laos to fight as guerrillas against Communist Pathet Lao forces. Called l’armee Clandestine, this unit – paid, trained, and supplied by the CIA – grew into a 30,000 man force. By 1975 the Meos – who had numbers a quarter million in 1962 – had been reduced to 10,000 refugees fleeing into Thailand.8. Nung Mercenaries
A Chinese hill people living in Vietname, the Nungs were hired and organised by the CIA as a mercenary force, during the Vietnam war. Fearsome and brutal fighters, the Nungs were employed throughout Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Nungs proved costly since they refused to fight unless constantly supplied with beer and prostitutes.9. Peruvian Regiment
Unable to quell guerrilla forces in its eastern Amazonian provinces, Peru called on the US for help in the mid-1960s. The CIA responded by establishing a fortified camp in the area and hiring local Peruvians who were trained by Green Beret personnel on loan from the US army. After crushing the guerrillas, the elite unit was disbanded because of fears it might stage a coup against the government.10. Congo Mercenary Force
In 1964, during the Congolese Civil War, the CIA established an army in the Congo to back pro-Western leaders Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. The CIA imported European mercenaries and Cuban pilots – exiles from Cuba – to pilot the CIA air force, composed of transports and B-26 Bombers.11. The Cambodian Coup
For over 15 years, the CIA had tried various unsuccessful means of deposing Cambodia’s left-leaning Prince Norodom Sihanouk, including assassination attempts. However, in March, 1970, a CIA-backed coup finally did the job. Funded by US tax dollars, armed with US weapons, and trained by American Green Berets, anti-Sihanouk forces called Kampuchea Khmer Krom (KKK) overran the capital of Phnom Penh and took control of the government. With the blessing of the CIA and the Nixon administration, control of Cambodia was placed in the hands of Lon Nol, who would later distinguish himself by dispatching soldiers to butcher tens of thousands of civilians.12. Kurd Rebels
During the early 1970s the CIA moved into eastern Iraq to organize and supply the Kurds of that area, who were rebelling against the pro-Soviet Iraqi government. The real purpose behind this action was to help the shah of Iran settle a border dispute with Iraq favourably. After an Iranian-Iraq settlement was reached, the CIA withdrew its support from the Kurds, who were then crushed by the Iraqi Army.13. Angola Mercenary Force
In 1975, after years of bloody fighting and civil unrest in Angola, Portugal resolved to relinquish its hold on the last of its African colonies. The transition was to take place on November 11, with control of the country going to whichever political faction controlled the capital city of Luanda on that date. In the months preceding the change, three groups vied for power: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). By July 1975, the Marxist MPLA had ousted the moderate FNLA and UNITA from Luanda, so the CIA decided to intervene covertly. Over $30 million was spent on the Angolan operation, the bulk of the money going to buy arms and pay French and South African mercenaries, who aided the FNLA and UNITA in their fight. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, US officials categorically denied any involvement in the Angolan conflict. In the end, it was a fruitless military adventure, for the MPLA assumed power and controls Angola to this day.14. Afghan Mujaheedin
Covert support for the groups fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was stepped up during the administration of Ronald Reagan. The operation succeeded in its initial goal, as the Soviets were forced to begin withdrawing their forces in 1987. Unfortunately, once the Soviets left, the US essentially ignored Afghanistan as it collapsed into a five-year civil war followed by the rise of the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban. The Taliban provided a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.15. Salvadoran Death Squads
As far back as 1964, the CIA helped form ORDEN and ANSESAL, two paramilitary intelligence networks that developed into the Salvadoran death squads. The CIA trained ORDEN leaders in the use of automatic weapons and surveillance techniques, and placed several leaders on the CIA payroll. The CIA also provided detailed intelligence on Salvadoran individuals later murdered by the death squads. During the civil war in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, the death squads were responsible for 40,000 killings. Even after a public outcry forced President Reagan to denounce the death squads in 1984, CIA support continued.16. Nicaraguan Contras
On November 23, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a top secret National Security Directive authorising the CIA to spend $19 million to recruit and support the Contras, opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. In supporting the Contras, the CIA carried out several acts of sabotage without the Congressional intelligence committees giving consent – or even being informed beforehand. In response, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, prohibiting the CIA from providing aid to the Contras. Attempts to find alternate sources of funds led to the Iran-Contra scandal. It may also have led the CIA and the Contras to become actively involved in drug smuggling. In 1988, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations concluded that individuals in the Contra movement engaged in drug trafficking; that known drug traffickers provided assistance to the Contras; and that ‘there are some serious questions as to whether or not US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua’.17. Haitian Coup
In 1988, the CIA attempted to intervene in Haiti’s elections with a ‘covert action program’ to undermine the campaign of the eventual winner, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Three years later, Aristide was overthrown in a bloody coup that killed more than 4,000 civilians. Many of the leaders of the coup had been on the CIA payroll since the mid-1980s. For example, Emmanuel ‘Toto’ Constant, the head of FRAPH, a brutal gang of thugs known for murder, torture, and beatings, admitted to being a paid agent of the CIA. Similarly, the CIA-created Haitian National Intelligence Service (NIS), supposedly created to combat drugs, functioned during the coup as a ‘political intimidation and assassination squad.’ In 1994, an American force of 20,000 was sent to Haiti to allow Aristide to return. Ironically, even after this, the CIA continued working with FRAPH and the NIS. In 2004, Aristide was overthrown once again, with Aristide claiming that US forces had kidnapped him.18. Venezuelan Coup Attempt
On April 11, 2002, Venezuelan military leaders attempted to overthrow the country’s democratically-elected left-wing president, Hugo Chavez. The coup collapsed after two days as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and as units of the military joined with the protestors. The administration of George W. Bush was the only democracy in the Western Hemisphere not to condemn the coup attempt. According to intelligence analyst Wayne Madsen, the CIA had actively organised the coup: ‘The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel, headed by a lieutenant colonel on loan from the US Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help organise the coup against Chavez.
Declaration of Independence
“Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam”
By the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reprinted in Ramparts (May 1967), pp. 33-37.
OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church–the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage–leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor–both black and white–through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam con tinued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest G eorgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years–especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t us ing massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearl y to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today–my own government.
For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a Civil Rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission–a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the “brotherhood of man.” This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men–for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my minstry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life?
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Inde pendence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watc hed again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators–our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunificatio n with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change–especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy–and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us–not their fellow Vietnamese–the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are ra rely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them–mostly children.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medic ine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building?
Now there is little left to build on–save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts’? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF–that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize th at we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more ess ential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land?
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the m ilitary junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them_the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant.
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence–when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, a nd then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Genev a Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and bu ilt up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggre ssion as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores.
At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world , for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words: “Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans a re forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinkin g that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricatin g ourselves from this nightmare:
1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build-up in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary.
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within th e American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy–and laymen–concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound c hange in American life and policy.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken–by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triple ts of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: ” This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling difference s is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlef ields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense aga inst communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the lan d are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hos tility to poverty, racism, and militarism.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world–a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter–but beautiful–struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell th em the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
The US – Islam War nears halfway mark
![The US – Islam War nears halfway mark The US – Islam War nears halfway mark](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/iraq-resistance-kick-out.jpg)
I have to do more research, but I’m pretty sure October 7, 2009 should mark the HALFWAY POINT of the US-ISLAM WAR. I realize the Pentagon brass are calling for fifty years more of insurgency suppression in Afghanistan and Iraq, but if we grant them no more time than for America’s longest military intervention, we’ve got another eight years before beating our humiliating retreat.
Those who insist we could have won the Vietnam War, would have our murderous troops there still. No foreign occupation has succeeded in modern times, with the ongoing exception of Israel, which by its swallowing of Palestine has been skewing the definition of occupation to the Old Testament model of mass extermination. The treacherous method worked against the Native Americans, it may still doom the (Palestinian) Native Israelis.
Afghanistan and Iraq remain occupations, where Vichy puppet governments prosecute genocide against the native resistance. How long before Americans lose their stomach for continuous bloody repression? I cannot account for the Russians in Chechnya, but on the US-Islam front, we are halfway there.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, we may already have surpassed half the civilian death tolls in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It’s hard to say, the US “doesn’t do body counts” now, and we didn’t then either. Our own military casualties grew exponentially in Vietnam. If such statistics bear comparison, today’s numbers cannot be but comparable.
It’s being whispered that American casualties are approaching a multiple of a thousand mark. Official soldier deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are conjectured to be reaching a round number.
I’m not told how many US mercenaries are being killed. We have as many hired-guns contracted as government soldiers. Want to lay odds on how many body bags they’ve required?
Nor are we told how many US soldiers are being wounded, many of them with injuries which would not have sustained their lives in Vietnam. Surely there is a sad gray area of injury which we could round up as it approximates death.
Message to the Tricontinental
Che Guevara, 1967
“Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”
Jose Marti
Twenty-one years have already elapsed since the end of the last world conflagration; numerous publications, in every possible language, celebrate this event, symbolized by the defeat of Japan. There is a climate of apparent optimism in many areas of the different camps into which the world is divided.
Twenty-one years without a world war, in these times of maximum confrontations, of violent clashes and sudden changes, appears to be a very high figure. However, without analyzing the practical results of this peace (poverty, degradation, increasingly larger exploitation of enormous sectors of humanity) for which all of us have stated that we are willing to fight, we would do well to inquire if this peace is real.
It is not the purpose of these notes to detail the different conflicts of a local character that have been occurring since the surrender of Japan, neither do we intend to recount the numerous and increasing instances of civilian strife which have taken place during these years of apparent peace. It will be enough just to name, as an example against undue optimism, the wars of Korea and Vietnam.
In the first one, after years of savage warfare, the Northern part of the country was submerged in the most terrible devastation known in the annals of modern warfare: riddled with bombs; without factories, schools or hospitals; with absolutely no shelter for housing ten million inhabitants.
Under the discredited flag of the United Nations, dozens of countries under the military leadership of the United States participated in this war with the massive intervention of U.S. soldiers and the use, as cannon fodder, of the South Korean population that was enrolled. On the other side, the army and the people of Korea and the volunteers from the Peoples’ Republic of China were furnished with supplies and advise by the Soviet military apparatus. The U.S. tested all sort of weapons of destruction, excluding the thermo-nuclear type, but including, on a limited scale bacteriological and chemical warfare.
In Vietnam, the patriotic forces of that country have carried on an almost uninterrupted war against three imperialist powers: Japan, whose might suffered an almost vertical collapse after the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; France, who recovered from that defeated country its Indo-China colonies and ignored the promises it had made in harder times; and the United States, in this last phase of the struggle.
There were limited confrontations in every continent although in our America, for a long time, there were only incipient liberation struggles and military coups d’etat until the Cuban revolution resounded the alert, signaling the importance of this region. This action attracted the wrath of the imperialists and Cuba was finally obliged to defend its coasts, first in Playa Giron, and again during the Missile Crisis.
This last incident could have unleashed a war of incalculable proportions if a US-Soviet clash had occurred over the Cuban question.
But, evidently, the focal point of all contradictions is at present the territory of the peninsula of Indo-China and the adjacent areas. Laos and Vietnam are torn by a civil war which has ceased being such by the entry into the conflict of U.S. imperialism with all its might, thus transforming the whole zone into a dangerous detonator ready at any moment to explode.
In Vietnam the confrontation has assumed extremely acute character istics. It is not out intention, either, to chronicle this war. We shall simply remember and point out some milestones.
In 1954, after the annihilating defeat of Dien-Bien-Phu, an agreement was signed at Geneva dividing the country into two separate zones; elections were to be held within a term of 18 months to determine who should govern Vietnam and how the country should be reunified. The U.S. did not sign this document and started maneuvering to substitute the emperor Bao-Dai, who was a French puppet, for a man more amiable to its purposes. This happened to be Ngo-Din-Diem, whose tragic end – that of an orange squeezed dry by imperialism — is well known by all.
During the months following the agreement, optimism reigned supreme in the camp of the popular forces. The last pockets of the anti-French resistance were dismantled in the South of the country and they awaited the fulfillment of the Geneva agreements. But the patriots soon realized there would be no elections -unless the United States felt itself capable of imposing its will in the polls, which was practically impossible even resorting to all its fraudulent methods. Once again the fighting broke out in the South and gradually acquired full intensity. At present the U.S. army has increased to over half a million invaders while the puppet forces decrease in number and, above all, have totally lost their combativeness.
Almost two years ago the United States started bombing systematically the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in yet another attempt to overcome the belligerance [sicj of the South and impose, from a position of strength, a meeting at the conference table. At first, the bombardments were more or less isolated occurrences and were adorned with the mask of reprisals for alleged provocations from the North. Later on, as they increased in intensity and regularity, they became one gigantic attack carried out by the air force of the United States, day after day, for the purpose of destroying all vestiges of civilization in the Northern zone of the country. This is an episode of the infamously notorious “escalation”.
The material aspirations of the Yankee world have been fulfilled to a great extent, regardless of the unflinching defense of the Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery, of the numerous planes shot down (over 1,700) and of the socialist countries aid in war supplies.
There is a sad reality: Vietnam — a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples — is tragically alone. This nation must endure the furious attacks of U.S. technology, with practically no possibility of reprisals in the South and only some of defense in the North — but always alone.
The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory.
When we analyze the lonely situation of the Vietnamese people, we are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.
U.S. imperialism is guilty of aggression — its crimes are enormous and cover the whole world. We already know all that, gentlemen! But this guilt also applies to those who, when the time came for a definition, hesitated to make Vietnam an inviolable part of the socialist world; running, of course, the risks of a war on a global scale-but also forcing a decision upon imperialism. And the guilt also applies to those who maintain a war of abuse and snares — started quite some time ago by the representatives of the two greatest powers of the socialist camp.
We must ask ourselves, seeking an honest answer: is Vietnam isolated, or is it not? Is it not maintaining a dangerous equilibrium between the two quarrelling powers?
And what great people these are! What stoicism and courage! And what a lesson for the world is contained in this struggle! Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people – to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the “Great Society” have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.
The largest of all imperialist powers feels in its own guts the bleeding inflicted by a poor and underdeveloped country; its fabulous economy feels the strain of the war effort. Murder is ceasing to be the most convenient business for its monopolies. Defensive weapons, and never in adequate number, is all these extraordinary soldiers have – besides love for their homeland, their society, and unsurpassed courage. But imperialism is bogging down in Vietnam, is unable to find a way out and desperately seeks one that will overcome with dignity this dangerous situation in which it now finds itself. Furthermore, the Four Points put forward by the North and the Five Points of the South now corner imperialism, making the confrontation even more decisive.
Everything indicate [sic] that peace, this unstable peace which bears that name for the sole reason that no worldwide conflagration has taken place, is again in danger of being destroyed by some irrevocable and unacceptable step taken by the United States.
What role shall we, the exploited people of the world, play? The peoples of the three continents focus their attention on Vietnam and learn theIr lesson. Since imperialists blackmail humanity by threatening it with war, the wise reaction is not to fear war. The general tactics of the people should be to launch a constant and a firm attack in all fronts where the confrontation is taking place.
In those places where this meager peace we have has been violated which is our duty? To liberate ourselves at any price.
The world panorama is of great complexity. The struggle for liberation has not yet been undertaken by some countries of ancient Europe, sufficiently developed to realize the contradictions of capitalism, but weak to such a degree that they are unable either to follow imperialism or even to start on its own road. Their contradictions will reach an explosive stage during the forthcoming years-but their problems and, consequently, their own solutions are different from those of our dependent and economically underdeveloped countries.
The fundamental field of imperialist exploitation comprises the three underdeveloped continents: America, Asia, and Africa. Every country has also its own characteristics, but each continent, as a whole, also presents a certain unity.
Our America is integrated by a group of more or less homogeneous countries and in most parts of its territory U.S. monopolist capitals maintain an absolute supremacy. Puppet governments or, in the best of cases, weak and fearful local rulers, are incapable of contradicting orders from their Yankee master. The United States has nearly reached the climax of its political and economic domination; it could hardly advance much more; any change in the situation could bring about a setback. Their policy is to maintain that which has already been conquered. The line of action, at the present time, is limited to the brutal use of force with the purpose of thwarting the liberation movements, no matter of what type they might happen to be.
The slogan “we will not allow another Cuba” hides the possibility of perpetrating aggressions without fear of reprisal, such as the one carried out against the Dominican Republic or before that the massacre in Panama — and the clear warning stating that Yankee troops are ready to intervene anywhere in America where the ruling regime may be altered, thus endangering their interests. This policy enjoys an almost absolute impunity: the OAS is a suitable mask, in spite of its unpopularity; the inefficiency of the UN is ridiculous as well as tragic; the armies of all American countries are ready to intervene in order to smash their peoples. The International of Crime and Treason has in fact been organized. On the other hand, the autochthonous bourgeoisies have lost all their capacity to oppose imperialism — if they ever had it — and they have become the last card in the pack. There are no other alternatives; either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution.
Asia is a continent with many different characteristics. The struggle for liberation waged against a series of European colonial powers resulted in the establishment of more or less progressive governments, whose ulterior evolution have brought about, in some cases, the deepening of the primary objectives of national liberation and in others, a setback towards the adoption of pro-imperialist positions.
From the economic point of view, the United States had very little to lose and much to gain from Asia. These changes benefited its interests; the struggle for the overthrow of other neocolonial powers and the penetration of new spheres of action in the economic field is carried out sometimes directly, occasionally through Japan.
But there are special political conditions, particularly in Indo-China, which create in Asia certain characteristics of capital importance and play a decisive role in the entire U.S. military strategy.
The imperialists encircle China through South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, South Vietnam and Thailand at least.
This dual situation, a strategic interest as important as the military encirclement of the Peoples’ Republic of China and the penetration of these great markets — which they do not dominate yet — turns Asia into one of the most explosive points of the world today, in spite of its apparent stability outside of the Vietnamese war zone.
The Middle East, though it geographically belongs to this continent, has its own contradictions and is actively in ferment; it is impossible to foretell how far this cold war between Israel, backed by the imperialists, and the progressive countries of that zone will go. This is just another one of the volcanoes threatening eruption in the world today.
Africa offers an almost virgin territory to the neocolonial invasion There have been changes which, to some extent, forced neocolonial powers to give up their former absolute prerogatives. But when these changes are carried out uninterruptedly, colonialism continues in the form of neocolonialism with similar effects as far as the economic situation is concerned.
The United States had no colonies in this region but is now struggling to penetrate its partners’ fiefs. It can be said that following the strategic plans of U.S. imperialism, Africa constitutes its long range reservoir; its present investments, though, are only important in the Union of South Africa and its penetration is beginning to be felt in the Congo, Nigeria and other countries where a violent rivalry with other imperialist powers is beginning to take place (in a pacific manner up to the present time).
So far it does not have there great interests to defend except its pretended right to intervene in every spot of the world where its monopolies detect huge profits or the existence of large reserves of raw materials.
All this past history justifies our concern regarding the possibilities of liberating the peoples within a long or a short period of time.
If we stop to analyze Africa we shall observe that in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea, Mozambique and Angola the struggle is waged with relative intensity, with a concrete success in the first one and with variable success in the other two. We still witness in the Congo the dispute between Lumumba’s successors and the old accomplices of Tshombe, a dispute which at the present time seems to favor the latter: those who have “pacified” a large area of the country for their own benefit — though the war is still latent.
In Rhodesia we have a different problem: British imperialism used every means within its reach to place power in the hands of the white minority, who, at the present time, unlawfully holds it. The conflict, from the British point of view, is absolutely unofficial; this Western power, with its habitual diplomatic cleverness — also called hypocrisy in the strict sense of the word — presents a facade of displeasure before the measures adopted by the government of Ian Smith. Its crafty attitude is supported by some Commonwealth countries that follow it, but is attacked by a large group of countries belonging to Black Africa, whether they are or not servile economic lackeys of British imperialism.
Should the rebellious efforts of these patriots succeed and this movement receive the effective support of neighboring African nations, the situation in Rhodesia may become extremely explosive. But for the moment all these problems are being discussed in harmless organizations such as the UN, the Commonwealth and the OAU.
The social and political evolution of Africa does not lead us to expect a continental revolution. The liberation struggle against the Portuguese should end victoriously, but Portugal does not mean anything in the imperialist field. The confrontations of revolutionary importance are those which place at bay all the imperialist apparatus; this does not mean, however, that we should stop fighting for the liberation of the three Portuguese colonies and for the deepening of their revolutions.
When the black masses of South Africa or Rhodesia start their authentic revolutionary struggle, a new era will dawn in Africa. Or when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies.
Up to now, army putsches follow one another; a group of officers succeeds another or substitute a ruler who no longer serves their caste interests or those of the powers who covertly manage him — but there are no great popular upheavals. In the Congo these characteristics appeared briefly, generated by the memory of Lumumba, but they have been losing strength in the last few months.
In Asia, as we have seen, the situation is explosive. The points of friction are not only Vietnam and Laos, where there is fighting; such a point is also Cambodia, where at any time a direct U.S. aggression may start, Thailand, Malaya, and, of course, Indonesia, where we can not assume that the last word has been said, regardless of the annihilation of the Communist Party in that country when the reactionaries took over. And also, naturally, the Middle East.
In Latin America the armed struggle is going on in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia; the first uprisings are cropping up in Brazil [sic]. There are also some resistance focuses which appear and then are extinguished. But almost all the countries of this continent are ripe for a type of struggle that, in order to achieve victory, can not be content with anything less than establishing a government of socialist tendencies.
In this continent practically only one tongue is spoken (with the exception of Brazil, with whose people, those who speak Spanish can easily make themselves understood, owing to the great similarity of both languages). There is also such a great similarity between the classes in these countries, that they have attained identification among themselves of an international americano type, much more complete than in the other continents. Language, habits, religion, a common foreign master, unite them. The degree and the form of exploitation are similar for both the exploiters and the men they exploit in the majority of the countries of Our America. And rebellion is ripening swiftly in it.
We may ask ourselves: how shall this rebellion flourish? What type will it be? We have maintained for quite some time now that, owing to the similarity of their characteristics, the struggle in Our America will achieve in due course, continental proportions. It shall be the scene of many great battles fought for the liberation of humanity.
Within the frame of this struggle of continental scale, the battles which are now taking place are only episodes — but they have already furnished their martyrs, they shall figure in the history of Our America as having given their necessary blood in this last stage of the fight for the total freedom of man. These names will include Comandante Turcios Lima, padre Camilo Torres, Comandante Fabricio Ojeda, Comandantes Lobaton and Luis de la Puente Uceda, all outstanding figures in the revolutionary movements of Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru.
But the active movement of the people creates its new leaders; Cesar Montes and Yon Sosa raise up their flag in Guatemala; Fabio Vazquez and Marulanda in Colombia; Douglas Bravo in the Western part of the country and Americo Martin in El Bachiller, both directing their respective Venezuelan fronts.
New uprisings shall take place in these and other countries of Our America, as it has already happened in Bolivia, and they shall continue to grow in the midst of all the hardships inherent to this dangerous profession of being modern revolutionaries. Many shall perish, victims of their errors, others shall fall in the touch battle that approaches; new fighters and new leaders shall appear in the warmth of the revolutionary struggle. The people shall create their warriors and leaders in the selective framework of the war itself – and Yankee agents of repression shall increase. Today there are military aids in all the countries where armed struggle is growing; the Peruvian army apparently carried out a successful action against the revolutionaries in that country, an army also trained and advised by the Yankees. But if the focuses of war grow with sufficient political and military insight, they shall become practically invincible and shall force the Yankees to send reinforcements. In Peru itself many new figures, practically unknown, are now reorganizing the guerrilla. Little by little, the obsolete weapons, which are sufficient for the repression of small armed bands, will be exchanged for modern armaments and the U.S. military aids will be substituted by actual fighters until, at a given moment, they are forced to send increasingly greater number of regular troops to ensure the relative stability of a government whose national puppet army is desintegrating before the impetuous attacks of the guerrillas. It is the road of Vietnam it is the road that should be followed by the people; it is the road that will be followed in Our America, with the advantage that the armed groups could create Coordinating Councils to embarrass the repressive forces of Yankee imperialism and accelerate the revolutionary triumph.
America, a forgotten continent in the last liberation struggles, is now beginning to make itself heard through the Tricontinental and, in the voice of the vanguard of its peoples, the Cuban Revolution, will today have a task of much greater relevance: creating a Second or a Third Vietnam, or the Second and Third Vietnam of the world.
We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism — and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capitals, raw materials, technicians and cheap labor, and to which they export new capitals — instruments of domination — arms and all kinds of articles; thus submerging us in an absolute dependance [sic].
The fundamental element of this strategic end shall be the real liberation of all people, a liberation that will be brought about through armed struggle in most cases and which shall be, in Our America, almost indefectibly, a Socialist Revolution.
While envisaging the destruction of imperialism, it is necessary to identify its head, which is no other than the United States of America.
We must carry out a general task with the tactical purpose of getting the enemy out of its natural environment, forcing him to fight in regions where his own life and habits will clash with the existing reality. We must not underrate our adversary; the U.S. soldier has technical capacity and is backed by weapons and resources of such magnitude that render him frightful. He lacks the essential ideologic motivation which his bitterest enemies of today — the Vietnamese soldiers — have in the highest degree. We will only be able to overcome that army by undermining their morale — and this is accomplished by defeating it and causing it repeated sufferings.
But this brief outline of victories carries within itself the immense sacrifice of the people, sacrifices that should be demanded beginning today, in plain daylight, and which perhaps may be less painful than those we would have to endure if we constantly avoided battle in an attempt to have others pull our chestnuts out of the fire.
It is probable, of course, that the last liberated country shall accomplish this without an armed struggle and the sufferings of a long and cruel war against the imperialists — this they might avoid. But perhaps it will be impossible to avoid this struggle or its effects in a global conflagration; the suffering would be the same, or perhaps even greater. We cannot foresee the future, but we should never give in to the defeatist temptation of being the vanguard of a nation which yearns for freedom, but abhors the struggle it entails and awaits its freedom as a crumb of victory.
It is absolutely just to avoid all useless sacrifices. Therefore, it is so important to clear up the real possibilities that dependent America may have of liberating itself through pacific means. For us, the solution to this question is quite clear: the present moment may or may not be the proper one for starting the struggle, but we cannot harbor any illusions, and we have no right to do so, that freedom can be obtained without fighting. And these battles shall not be mere street fights with stones against tear-gas bombs, or of pacific general strikes; neither shall it be the battle of a furious people destroying in two or three days the repressive scaffolds of the ruling oligarchies; the struggle shall be long, harsh, and its front shall be in the guerrilla’s refuge, in the cities, in the homes of the fighters – where the repressive forces shall go seeking easy victims among their families — in the massacred rural population, in the villages or cities destroyed by the bombardments of the enemy.
They are pushing us into this struggle; there is no alternative: we must prepare it and we must decide to undertake it.
The beginnings will not be easy; they shall be extremely difficult. All the oligarchies’ powers of repression, all their capacity for brutality and demagoguery will be placed at the service of their cause. Our mission, in the first hour, shall be to survive; later, we shall follow the perennial example of the guerrilla, carrying out armed propaganda (in the Vietnamese sense, that is, the bullets of propaganda, of the battles won or lost — but fought — against the enemy). The great lesson of the invincibility of the guerrillas taking root in the dispossessed masses. The galvanizing of the national spirit, the preparation for harder tasks, for resisting even more violent repressions. Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.
We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centers of entertainment; a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be; make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline. He will even become more beastly, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to appear.
And let us develop a true proletarian internationalism; with international proletarian armies; the flag under which we fight would be the sacred cause of redeeming humanity. To die under the flag of Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of Brazil — to name only a few scenes of today’s armed struggle — would be equally glorious and desirable for an American, an Asian, an African, even a European.
Each spilt drop of blood, in any country under whose flag one has not been born, is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his own country. And each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one’s own country.
The time has come to settle our discrepancies and place everything at the service of our struggle.
We all know great controversies rend the world now fighting for freedom; no one can hide it. We also know that they have reached such intensity and such bitterness that the possibility of dialogue and reconciliation seems extremely difficult, if not impossible. It is a useless task to search for means and ways to propitiate a dialogue which the hostile parties avoid. However, the enemy is there; it strikes every day, and threatens us with new blows and these blows will unite us, today, tomorrow, or the day after. Whoever understands this first, and prepares for this necessary union, shall have the people’s gratitude.
Owing to the virulence and the intransigence with which each cause is defended, we, the dispossessed, cannot take sides for one form or the other of these discrepancies, even though sometimes we coincide with the conten- tions of one party or the other, or in a greater measure with those of one part more than with those of the other. In time of war, the expression of current differences constitutes a weakness; but at this stage it is an illusion to attempt to settle them by means of words. History shall erode them or shall give them their true meaning.
In our struggling world every discrepancy regarding tactics, the methods of action for the attainment of limited objectives should be analyzed with due respect to another man’s opinions. Regarding our great strategic objective, the total destruction of imperialism by armed struggle, we should be uncompromising.
Let us sum up our hopes for victory: total destruction of imperialism by eliminating its firmest bulwark: the oppression exercized by the United States of America. To carry out, as a tactical method, the peoples gradual liberation, one by one or in groups: driving the enemy into a difficult fight away from its own territory; dismantling all its sustenance bases, that is, its dependent territories.
This means a long war. And, once more we repeat it, a cruel war. Let no one fool himself at the outstart and let no one hesitate to start out for fear of the consequences it may bring to his people. It is almost our sole hope for victory. We cannot elude the call of this hour. Vietnam is pointing it out with its endless lesson of heroism, its tragic and everyday lesson of struggle and death for the attainment of final victory.
There, the imperialist soldiers endure the discomforts [sic] of those who, used to enjoying the U.S. standard of living, have to live in a hostile land with the insecurity of being unable to move without being aware of walking on enemy territory: death to those who dare take a step out of their fortified encampment. The permanent hostility of the entire population. All this has internal repercussion in the United States; propitiates the resurgence of an element which is being minimized in spite of its vigor by all imperialist forces: class struggle even within its own territory.
How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!
And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people — how great and close would that future be!
If we, in a small point of the world map, are able to fulfill our duty and place at the disposal of this struggle whatever little of ourselves we are permitted to give: our lives, our sacrifice, and if some day we have to breathe our last breath on any land, already ours, sprinkled with our blood let it be known that we have measured the scope of our actions and that we only consider ourselves elements in the great army of the proletariat but that we are proud of having learned from the Cuban Revolution, and from its maximum leader, the great lesson emanating from his attitude in this part of the world: “What do the dangers or the sacrifices of a man or of a nation matter, when the destiny of humanity is at stake.”
Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people’s unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
The Port Huron Statement
Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper, and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national convention meeting in Port Huron, Michigan, June 11-15, 1962. It is represented as a document with which SDS officially identifies, but also as a living document open to change with our times and experiences. It is a beginning: in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with society.
published and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society 112 East 19 Street New York 3, New York GRamercy 3-2181
INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people — these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration “all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than “of, by, and for the people.”
Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology — these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.
Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.
Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.
Values
Making values explicit — an initial task in establishing alternatives –
* is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities — “free world”, “people’s democracies” — reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the universities brought as moral enlightenment. Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised — what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it? — are not thought to be questions of a “fruitful, empirical nature”, and thus are brushed aside.
Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique — the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image — but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining “how we would vote” on various issues.
Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be “tough-minded”.
In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories — but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convenience people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles. Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human relationships, and social systems.
We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs. We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things — if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to “posterity” cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been “competently” manipulated into incompetence — we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.
Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.
This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism — the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man — we merely have faith in his potential.
Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.
Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.
As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness we affirm is not self-elimination. On the contrary, we believe in generosity of a kind that imprints one’s unique individual qualities in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further, to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished according to individual will. Finally, we would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.
As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles:
* that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
* that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
* that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;
* that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilities the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to related men to knowledge and to power so that private problems — from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation — are formulated as general issues.
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
* that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
* that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
* that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.
Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions — cultural, education, rehabilitative, and others — should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.
In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent because it requires generally the transformation of the target, be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions — local, national, international — that encourage nonviolence as a condition of conflict be developed.
These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital to understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern world.
The Students
In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations of individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against racial bigotry.
The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their success or failure in gaining objectives — at least not yet. Nor does the significance lie in the intellectual “competence” or “maturity” of the students involved — as some pedantic elders allege. The significance is in the fact the students are breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.
If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious “inner emigration.” It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as “inevitable”, bureaucracy as “just circumstances”, irrelevance as “scholarship”, selflessness as “martyrdom”, politics as “just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too.”
Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for “low success, and won’t risk high failure.” There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.
“Students don’t even give a damn about the apathy,” one has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately-constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.
Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.
But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education itself. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral guardian of the young. The accompanying “let’s pretend” theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training center for those who want to spend their lives in political pretense, and discourages initiative from more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university “prepares” the student for “citizenship” through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded in a teacher-student relation analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical separation of student from the material of study. That which is studied, the social reality, is “objectified” to sterility, dividing the student from life — just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government. The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex technological and social structure, has produced and exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed to: an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research and scholarship; a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; a loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.
There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness of present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift to the value standards of business and administrative mentality within the university. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape under-financed colleges and universities, not only making them more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop “human relations” or morale-producing” techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel — say, a television set — passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more “tolerant” than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system — as opposed to its more rhetorical function of “searching for truth” — is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
The Society Beyond
Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse Pointe: the serious poet burns for a place, any place, or work; the once-serious and never serious poets work at the advertising agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness of people “giving up” all hope of changing things; the faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed “international affairs” fourteenth on their list of “problems” but who also expected thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and other forms, Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective effort at directing their own affairs.
Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order — but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because compelling issues are fast disappearing — perhaps there are fewer breadlines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society — but, then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy, and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind’s problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full democracy never worked anywhere in the past — but why lump qualitatively different civilizations together, and how can a social order work well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed forever to the domination of today?
There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise. While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future qua future is uncertain — America is without community, impulse, without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its quantity of rockets.
The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation — the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.
The very isolation of the individual — from power and community and ability to aspire — means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again.
Politics without Publics
The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.
A crucial feature of the political apparatus in America is that greater differences are harbored within each major party than the differences existing between them. Instead of two parties presenting distinctive and significant differences of approach, what dominates the system if a natural interlocking of Democrats from Southern states with the more conservative elements of the Republican party. This arrangement of forces is blessed by the seniority system of Congress which guarantees congressional committee domination by conservatives — ten of 17 committees in the Senate and 13 of 21 in House of Representatives are chaired currently by Dixiecrats.
The party overlap, however, is not the only structural antagonist of democracy in politics. First, the localized nature of the party system does not encourage discussion of national and international issues: thus problems are not raised by and for people, and political representatives usually are unfettered from any responsibilities to the general public except those regarding parochial matters. Second, whole constituencies are divested of the full political power they might have: many Negroes in the South are prevented from voting, migrant workers are disenfranchised by various residence requirements, some urban and suburban dwellers are victimized by gerrymandering, and poor people are too often without the power to obtain political representation. Third, the focus of political attention is significantly distorted by the enormous lobby force, composed predominantly of business interests, spending hundreds of millions each year in an attempt to conform facts about productivity, agriculture, defense, and social services, to the wants of private economic groupings.
What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privatelyheld power is the organized political stalemate: calcification dominates flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization, frustration is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress becomes less and less central to national decision-making, especially in the area of foreign policy. In this context, confusion and blurring is built into the formulation of issues, long-range priorities are not discussed in the rational manner needed for policymaking, the politics of personality and “image” become a more important mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords each voter a challenging and real option. The American voter is buffeted from all directions by pseudo-problems, by the structurally-initiated sense that nothing political is subject to human mastery. Worried by his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation of views, he quits all pretense of bothering.
A most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling for changes in these conditions. Only a handful even are calling on the President to “live up to” platform pledges; no one is demanding structural changes, such as the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party. Rather than protesting the state of politics, most politicians are reinforcing and aggravating that state. While in practice they rig public opinion to suit their own interests, in word and ritual they enshrine “the sovereign public” and call for more and more letters. Their speeches and campaign actions are banal, based on a degrading conception of what people want to hear. They respond not to dialogue, but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen sees even greater inclination to shun the political sphere. The politicians is usually a trumpeter to “citizenship” and “service to the nation”, but since he is unwilling to seriously rearrange power relationships, his trumpetings only increase apathy by creating no outlets. Much of the time the call to “service” is justified not in idealistic terms, but in the crasser terms of “defending the free world from communism” — thus making future idealistic impulses harder to justify in anything but Cold War terms.
In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all government activity is rationalized in Cold War anti-communist terms, it is somewhat natural that discontented, super-patriotic groups would emerge through political channels and explain their ultra-conservatism as the best means of Victory over Communism. They have become a politically influential force within the Republican Party, at a national level through Senator Goldwater, and at a local level through their important social and economic roles. Their political views are defined generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists: complete individual freedom in the economic sphere, non-participation by the government in the machinery of production. But actually “anticommunism” becomes an umbrella by which to protest liberalism, internationalism, welfarism, the active civil rights and labor movements. It is to the disgrace of the United States that such a movement should become a prominent kind of public participation in the modern world — but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the United States that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican Party in the South and an exclusion of the “leftist” elements of the national GOP.
The Economy
American capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State. Many of us comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment compensation, and other social services in our lifetimes. Even with one-fourth of our productive capacity unused, the majority of Americans are living in relative comfort — although their nagging incentive to “keep up” makes them continually dissatisfied with their possessions. In many places, unrestrained bosses, uncontrolled machines, and sweatshop conditions have been reformed or abolished and suffering tremendously relieved. But in spite of the benign yet obscuring effects of the New Deal reforms and the reassuring phrases of government economists and politicians, the paradoxes and myths of the economy are sufficient to irritate our complacency and reveal to us some essential causes of the American malaise.
We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the “affluent society”, including many of our own generation. We hear glib reference to the “welfare state”, “free enterprise”, and “shareholder’s democracy” while military defense is the main item of “public” spending and obvious oligopoly and other forms of minority rule defy real individual initiative or popular control. Work, too, is often unfulfilling and victimizing, accepted as a channel to status or plenty, if not a way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding and controlling self and events. In work and leisure the individual is regulated as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hardsell soft-sell, lies and semi-true appeals and his basest drives. He is always told what he is supposed to enjoy while being told, too, that he is a “free” man because of “free enterprise.”
The Remote Control Economy. We are subject to a remote control economy, which excludes the mass of individual “units” — the people — from basic decisions affecting the nature and organization of work, rewards, and opportunities. The modern concentration of wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. From World War II until the mid-Fifties, the 50 biggest corporations increased their manufacturing production from 17 to 23 percent of the national total, and the share of the largest 200 companies rose from 30 to 37 percent. To regard the various decisions of these elites as purely economic is short-sighted: their decisions affect in a momentous way the entire fabric of social life in America. Foreign investments influence political policies in under-developed areas — and our efforts to build a “profitable” capitalist world blind our foreign policy to mankind’s needs and destiny. The drive for sales spurs phenomenal advertising efforts; the ethical drug industry, for instance, spent more than $750 million on promotions in 1960, nearly for times the amount available to all American medical schools for their educational programs. The arts, too, are organized substantially according to their commercial appeal aesthetic values are subordinated to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial market as much as the humanistic marketplace of ideas. The tendency to over-production, to gluts of surplus commodities, encourages “market research” techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers — we learn to buy “smart” things, regardless of their utility — and introduces wasteful “planned obsolescence” as a permanent feature of business strategy. While real social needs accumulate as rapidly as profits, it becomes evident that Money, instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value and Profitability, instead of social use, a pivotal standard in determining priorities of resource allocation.
Within existing arrangements, the American business community cannot be said to encourage a democratic process nationally. Economic minorities not responsible to a public in any democratic fashion make decisions of a more profound importance than even those made by Congress. Such a claim is usually dismissed by respectful and knowing citations of the ways in which government asserts itself as keeper of the public interest at times of business irresponsibility. But the real, as opposed to the mythical, range of government “control” of the economy includes only:
1. some limited “regulatory” powers — which usually just ratify industry policies or serve as palliatives at the margins of significant business activity;
2. a fiscal policy build upon defense expenditures as pump-priming “public works” — without a significant emphasis on “peaceful public works” to meet social priorities and alleviate personal hardships;
3. limited fiscal and monetary weapons which are rigid and have only minor effects, and are greatly limited by corporate veto: tax cuts and reforms; interest rate control (used generally to tug on investment by hurting the little investor most); tariffs which protect noncompetitive industries with political power and which keep less-favored nations out of the large trade mainstream, as the removal of barriers reciprocally with the Common Market may do disastrously to emerging countries outside of Europe; wage arbitration, the use of government coercion in the name of “public interest” to hide the tensions between workers and business production controllers; price controls, which further maintains the status quo of big ownership and flushes out little investors for the sake of “stability”;
4. very limited “poverty-solving” which is designed for the organized working class but not the shut-out, poverty-stricken migrants, farm workers, the indigent unaware of medical care or the lower-middle class person riddled with medical bills, the “unhireables” of minority groups or workers over 45 years of age, etc.
5. regional development programs — such as the Area Redevelopment Act
* which have been only “trickle down” welfare programs without broad authority for regional planning and development and public works spending. The federal highway program has been more significant than the “depressed areas” program in meeting the needs of people, but is generally too remote and does not reach the vicious circle of poverty itself.
In short, the theory of government “countervailing” business neglects the extent to which government influence is marginal to the basic production decisions, the basic decision-making environment of society, the basic structure or distribution and allocation which is still determined by major corporations with power and wealth concentrated among the few. A conscious conspiracy — as in the case of pricerigging in the electrical industry — is by no means generally or continuously operative but power undeniably does rest in comparative insulation from the public and its political representatives.
The Military-Industrial Complex. The most spectacular and important creation of the authoritarian and oligopolistic structure of economic decision-making in America is the institution called “the militaryindustrial complex” by former President Eisenhower, the powerful congruence of interest and structure among military and business elites which affects so much of our development and destiny. Not only is ours the first generation to live with the possibility of world-wide cataclysm — it is the first to experience the actual social preparation for cataclysm, the general militarization of American society. In 1948 Congress established Universal Military Training, the first peacetime conscription. The military became a permanent institution. Four years earlier, General Motor’s Charles E. Wilson had heralded the creation of what he called the “permanent war economy,” the continuous use of military spending as a solution to economic problems unsolved before the post-war boom, most notably the problem of the seventeen million jobless after eight years of the New Deal. This has left a “hidden crisis” in the allocation of resources by the American economy.
Since our childhood these two trends — the rise of the military and the installation of a defense-based economy — have grown fantastically. The Department of Defense, ironically the world’s largest single organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except for a war-induced boom immediately after “our side” bombed Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing dependence on military outlay — from 1941 to 1959 America’s Gross National Product of $5.25 trillion included $700 billion in goods and services purchased for the defense effort, about one-seventh of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition. The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 workers are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense; iron and steel, petroleum, metal-stamping and machine shop products, motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum and machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their work to the same cause.
The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced in the 1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine profile of General Dynamics said: “The unique group of men who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S. manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or less permanent business.” Little has changed since Wilson’s proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944 days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active prime war-supply contracts.
Military Industrial Politics. The military and its supporting business foundation have found numerous forms of political expression, and we have heard their din endlessly. There has not been a major Congressional split on the issue of continued defense spending spirals in our lifetime. The triangular relation of the business, military and political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat Carl Vinson’s remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported out a military construction bill of $808 million throughout the 50 states, for 1960-61: “There is something in this bill for everyone,” he announced. President Kennedy had earlier acknowledged the valuable anti-recession features of the bill.
Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti-recession measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: the impossibility of receiving support for such a measure identifies a crucial feature of defense spending: it is beneficial to private enterprise, while welfare spending is not. Defense spending does not “compete” with the private sector; it contains a natural obsolescence; its “confidential” nature permits easier boondoggling; the tax burdens to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to consumer as a “cost of production.” Welfare spending, however, involves the government in competition with private corporations and contractors; it conflicts with immediate interests of private pressure groups; it leads to taxes on business. Think of the opposition of private power companies to current proposals for river and valley development, or the hostility of the real estate lobby to urban renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical Association to a paltry medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists to foreign aid; these are the pressures leading to the schizophrenic public-military, private-civilian economy of our epoch. The politicians, of course, take the line of least resistance and thickest support: warfare, instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up for: after all, the Free World is at stake (and our constituency’s investments, too).
Automation, Abundance, and Challenge. But while the economy remains relatively static in its setting of priorities and allocation of resources, new conditions are emerging with enormous implications: the revolution of automation, and the replacement of scarcity by the potential of material abundance.
Automation, the process of machines replacing men in performing sensory, motoric and complex logical tasks, is transforming society in ways that are scarcely comprehensible. By 1959, industrial production regained its 1957 “pre-recession” level — but with 750,000 fewer workers required. In the Fifties as a whole, national production enlarged by 43 percent but the number of factory employees remained stationary, seventenths of one percent higher than in 1947. Automation is destroying whole categories of work — impersonal thinkers have efficiently labeled this “structural unemployment” — in blue-collar, service, and even middle management occupations. In addition it is eliminating employment opportunities for a youth force that numbers one million more than it did in 1950, and rendering work far more difficult both to find and do for people in the forties and up. The consequences of this economic drama, strengthened by the force of post-war recessions, are momentous: five million becomes an acceptable unemployment tabulation, and misery, uprootedness and anxiety become the lot of increasing numbers of Americans.
But while automation is creating social dislocation of a stunning kind, it paradoxically is imparting the opportunity for men the world around to rise in dignity from their knees. The dominant optimistic economic fact of this epoch is that fewer hands are needed now in actual production, although more goods and services are a real potentiality. The world could be fed, poverty abolished, the great public needs could be met, the brutish world of Darwinian scarcity could be brushed away, all men could have more time to pursue their leisure, drudgery in work could be cut to a minimum, education could become more of a continuing process for all people, both public and personal needs could be met rationally. But only in a system with selfish production motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than war-based, undemocratic rather than “stockholder participative” as “sold to us”, does the potentiality for abundance become a curse and a cruel irony:
1. Automation brings unemployment instead of mere leisure for all and greater achievement of needs for all people in the world — a crisis instead of economic utopia. Instead of being introduced into a social system in a planned and equitable way, automation is initiated according to its profitability. American Telephone and Telegraph holds back modern telephone equipment, invented with public research funds, until present equipment is financially unprofitable. Colleges develop teaching machines, mass-class techniques, and TV education to replace teachers: not to proliferate knowledge or to assist the qualified professors now, but to “cut costs in education and make the academic community more efficient and less wasteful.” Technology, which could be a blessing to society, becomes more and more a sinister threat to humanistic and rational enterprise.
2. Hard-core poverty exists just beyond the neon lights of affluence, and the “have-nots” may be driven still further from opportunity as the high-technology society demands better education to get into the production mainstream and more capital investment to get into “business”. Poverty is shameful in that it herds people by race, region, and previous condition of infortune into “uneconomic classes” in the so-called free society — the marginal worker is made more insecure by automation and high education requirements, heavier competition for jobs, maintaining low wages or a high level of unemployment. People in the rut of poverty are strikingly unable to overcome the collection of forces working against them: poor health, bad neighborhoods, miserable schools, inadequate “welfare” services, unemployment and underemployment, weak politician and union organization.
3. Surplus and potential plenty are waste domestically and producers suffer impoverishment because the real needs of the world and of our society are not reflected in the market. Our huge bins of decomposing grain are classic American examples, as is the steel industry which, in the summer of 1962, is producing at 53 percent of capacity.
The Stance of Labor. Amidst all this, what of organized labor, the historic institutional representative of the exploited, the presumed “countervailing power” against the excesses of Big Business? The contemporary social assault on the labor movement is of crisis proportions. To the average American, “big labor” is a growing cancer equal in impact to Big Business — nothing could be more distorted, even granting a sizable union bureaucracy. But in addition to public exaggerations, the labor crisis can be measured in several ways. First, the high expectations of the newborn AFL-CIO of 30 million members by 1965 are suffering a reverse unimaginable five years ago. The demise of the dream of “organizing the unorganized” is dramatically reflected in the AFL-CIO decision, just two years after its creation, to slash its organizing staff in half. From 15 million members when the AFL and the CIO merged, the total has slipped to 13.5 million. During the post-war generation, union membership nationally has increased by four million — but the total number of workers has jumped by 13 million. Today only 40 percent of all non-agricultural workers are protected by any form or organization. Second, organizing conditions are going to worsen. Where labor now is strongest — in industries — automation is leading to an attrition of available work. As the number of jobs dwindles, so does labor’s power of bargaining, since management can handle a strike in an automated plant more easily than the older mass-operated ones.
More important perhaps, the American economy has changed radically in the last decade, as suddenly the number of workers producing goods became fewer than the number in “nonproductive” areas — government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation. Since World War II “white collar” and “service” jobs have grown twice as fast as have, “blue collar” production jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational areas of the new economy, but almost all of its entrenched strength in contracting areas. As big government hires more, as business seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the like, the conditions will become graver still. Further, there is continuing hostility to labor by the Southern states and their industrial interests — meaning ” runaway plants, cheap labor threatening the organized trade union movement, and opposition from Dixiecrats to favorable labor legislation in Congress. Finally, there is indication that Big Business, for the sake of public relations if nothing more, has acknowledged labor’s “right” to exist, but has deliberately tried to contain labor at its present strength, preventing strong unions from helping weaker ones or from spreading or unorganized sectors of the economy. Business is aided in its efforts by proliferation of “right-to-work” laws at state levels (especially in areas where labor is without organizing strength to begin with), and anti-labor legislation in Congress.
In the midst of these besetting crises, labor itself faces its own problems of vision and program. Historically, there can be no doubt as to its worth in American politics — what progress there has been in meeting human needs in this century rests greatly with the labor movement. And to a considerable extent the social democracy for which labor has fought externally is reflected in its own essentially democratic character: representing millions of people, no millions of dollars; demanding their welfare, not eternal profit. Today labor remains the most liberal “mainstream” institution — but often its liberalism represents vestigial commitments self-interestedness, unradicalism. In some measure labor has succumbed to institutionalization, its social idealism waning under the tendencies of bureaucracy, materialism, business ethics. The successes of the last generation perhaps have braked, rather than accelerated labor’s zeal for change. Even the House of Labor has bay windows: not only is this true of the labor elites, but as well of some of the rank-and-file. Many of the latter are indifferent unionists, uninterested in meetings, alienated from the complexities of the labor-management negotiating apparatus, lulled to comfort by the accessibility of luxury and the opportunity of long-term contracts. “Union democracy” is not simply inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated problem of rankand -file apathy to the tradition of unionism. The crisis of labor is reflected in the coexistence within the unions of militant Negro discontents and discriminatory locals, sweeping critics of the obscuring “public interest” marginal tinkering of government and willing handmaidens of conservative political leadership, austere sacrificers and business-like operators, visionaries and anachronisms — tensions between extremes that keep alive the possibilities for a more militant unionism. Too, there are seeds of rebirth in the “organizational crisis” itself: the technologically unemployed, the unorganized white collar men and women, the migrants and farm workers, the unprotected Negroes, the poor, all of whom are isolated now from the power structure of the economy, but who are the potential base for a broader and more forceful unionism.
Horizon. In summary: a more reformed, more human capitalism, functioning at three-fourths capacity while one-third of America and two-thirds of the world goes needy, domination of politics and the economy by fantastically rich elites, accommodation and limited effectiveness by the labor movement, hard-core poverty and unemployment, automation confirming the dark ascension of machine over man instead of shared abundance, technological change being introduced into the economy by the criteria of profitability — this has been our inheritance. However inadequate, it has instilled quiescence in liberal hearts — partly reflecting the extent to which misery has been over-come but also the eclipse of social ideals. Though many of us are “affluent”, poverty, waste, elitism, manipulation are too manifest to go unnoticed, too clearly unnecessary to go accepted. To change the Cold War status quo and other social evils, concern with the challenges to the American economic machine must expand. Now, as a truly better social state becomes visible, a new poverty impends: a poverty of vision, and a poverty of political action to make that vision reality. Without new vision, the failure to achieve our potentialities will spell the inability of our society to endure in a world of obvious, crying needs and rapid change.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE WARFARE STATE
Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the whole living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family depend on the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development is concentrated on military ends. The press mimics conventional cold war opinion in its editorials. In less than a full generation, most Americans accept the military-industrial structure as “the way things are.” War is still pictured as one more kind of diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories of past “policy necessities” that preceded the wonderful economic boom of 1946. The facts that our once-revolutionary 20,000 ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled by 50 megaton weapons, that our lifetime has included the creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that “greater” weapons are to follow, that weapons refinement is more rapid than the development of weapons of defense, that soon a dozen or more nations will have the Bomb, that one simple miscalculation could incinerate mankind: these orienting facts are but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous separates the citizen from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the result of a lifetime saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where could we begin, even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can only assume things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University of Kentucky says, “we regard peace and war as fairy tales.” And a child has asked in helplessness, perhaps for us all, “Daddy, why is there a cold war?”
Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is the moral history of the twentieth century, from the First World War to the present. A half-century of accelerating destruction has flattened out the individual’s ability to make moral distinction, it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private worry and public silence.
To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology itself, determines the political and social character of the state being defended — that is, defense mechanism themselves in the nuclear age alter the character of the system that creates them for protection. So it has been with American, as her democratic institutions and habits have shriveled in almost direct proportion to the growth of her armaments. Decisions about military strategy, including the monstrous decision to go to war, are more and more the property of the military and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians assuming a ratifying role instead of a determining one. This is increasingly a fact not just because of the installation of the permanent military, but because of constant revolutions in military technology. The new technologies allegedly require military expertise, scientific comprehension, and the mantle of secrecy. As Congress relies more and more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the existing chasm between people and decision-makers becomes irreconcilably wide, and more alienating in its effects.
A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to “sell” the need for congressional appropriations, to conceal various business scandals, and to convince the American people that the arms race is important enough to sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare. So confusion prevails about the national needs, while the three major services and the industrial allies jockey for power — the Air Force tending to support bombers and missilery, the Navy, Polaris and carriers, the Army, conventional ground forces and invulnerable nuclear arsenals, and all three feigning unity and support of the policy of weapons and agglomeration called the “mix”. Strategies are advocated on the basis of power and profit, usually more so than on the basis of national military needs. In the meantime, Congressional investigating committees — most notably the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee — attempt to curb the little dissent that finds its way into off-beat magazines. A huge militant anticommunist brigade throws in its support, patriotically willing to do anything to achieve “total victory” in the Cold War; the government advocates peaceful confrontation with international Communism, then utterly pillories and outlaws the tiny American Communist Party. University professors withdraw prudently from public issues; the very style of social science writing becomes more qualified. Needs in housing, education, minority rights, health care, land redevelopment, hourly wages, all are subordinated — though a political tear is shed gratuitously — to the primary objective of the “military and economic strength of the Free World.”
What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this human sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected the quandaries and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated nation in a turbulent world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes a sheer inability to react to a sequence of new problems.
Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence of poised nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former colonial powers. In the both areas, the Soviet Union and the various national communist movements have aggravated internation relations in inhuman and undesirable ways, but hardly so much as to blame only communism for the present menacing situation.
Deterrence Policy
The accumulation of nuclear arsenals, the threat of accidental war, the possibility of limited war becoming illimitable holocaust, the impossibility of achieving final arms superiority or invulnerability, the approaching nativity of a cluster of infant atomic powers; all of these events are tending to undermine traditional concepts of power relations among nations. War can no longer be considered as an effective instrument of foreign policy, a means of strengthening alliances, adjusting the balance of power, maintaining national sovereignty, or preserving human values. War is no longer simply a forceful extension of foreign policy; it can obtain no constructive ends in the modern world. Soviet or American “megatonnage” is sufficient to destroy all existing social structures as well as value systems. Missiles have (figuratively) thumbed their nosecones at national boundaries. But America, like other countries, still operates by means of national defense and deterrence systems. These are seen to be useful so long as they are never fully used: unless we as a national entity can convince Russia that we are willing to commit the most heinous action in human history, we will be forced to commit it.
Deterrence advocates, all of them prepared at least to threaten mass extermination, advance arguments of several kinds. At one pole are the minority of open partisans of preventive war — who falsely assume the inevitability of violent conflict and assert the lunatic efficacy of striking the first blow, assuming that it will be easier to “recover” after thermonuclear war than to recover now from the grip of the Cold War. Somewhat more reluctant to advocate initiating a war, but perhaps more disturbing for their numbers within the Kennedy Administration, are the many advocates of the “counterforce” theory of aiming strategic nuclear weapons at military installations — though this might “save” more lives than a preventive war, it would require drastic, provocative and perhaps impossible social change to separate many cities from weapons sites, it would be impossible to ensure the immunity of cities after one or two counterforce nuclear “exchanges”, it would generate a perpetual arms race for less vulnerability and greater weapons power and mobility, it would make outer space a region subject to militarization, and accelerate the suspicions and arms build-ups which are incentives to precipitate nuclear action. Others would support fighting “limited wars” which use conventional (all but atomic) weapons, backed by deterrents so mighty that both sides would fear to use them — although underestimating the implications of numerous new atomic powers on the world stage, the extreme difficulty of anchoring international order with weapons of only transient invulnerability, the potential tendency for a “losing side” to push limited protracted fighting on the soil of underdeveloped countries. Still other deterrence artists propose limited, clearly defensive and retaliatory, nuclear capacity, always potent enough to deter an opponent’s aggressive designs — the best of deterrence stratagems, but inadequate when it rests on the equation of an arms “stalemate” with international stability.
All the deterrence theories suffer in several common ways. They allow insufficient attention to preserving, extending, and enriching democratic values, such matters being subordinate rather than governing in the process of conducting foreign policy. Second, they inadequately realize the inherent instabilities of the continuing arms race and balance of fear. Third, they operationally tend to eclipse interest and action towards disarmament by solidifying economic, political and even moral investments in continuation of tensions. Fourth, they offer a disinterested and even patriotic rationale for the boondoggling, belligerence, and privilege of military and economic elites. Finally, deterrence stratagems invariably understate or dismiss the relatedness of various dangers; they inevitably lend tolerability to the idea of war by neglecting the dynamic interaction of problems — such as the menace of accidental war, the probable future tensions surrounding the emergence of ex-colonial nations, the imminence of several new nations joining the “Nuclear Club,” the destabilizing potential of technological breakthrough by either arms race contestant, the threat of Chinese atomic might, the fact that “recovery” after World War III would involve not only human survivors but, as well, a huge and fragile social structure and culture which would be decimated perhaps irreparably by total war.
Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States. Both sides have behaved irresponsibly — the Russians by an exaggerated lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists rather than on proponents of nonviolent conflict and coexistence. But we do contend, as Americans concerned with the conduct of our representative institutions, that our government has blamed the Cold War stalemate on nearly everything but its own hesitations, its own anachronistic dependence on weapons. To be sure, there is more to disarmament than wishing for it. There are inadequacies in international rule-making institutions — which could be corrected. There are faulty inspection mechanisms — which could be perfected by disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and evasiveness — which do not erase the fact that the Soviet Union, because of a strained economy, an expectant population, fears of Chinese potential, and interest in the colonial revolution, is increasingly disposed to real disarmament with real controls. But there is, too, our own reluctance to face the uncertain world beyond the Cold War, our own shocking assumption that the risks of the present are fewer than the risks of a policy re-orientation to disarmament, our own unwillingness to face the implementation of our rhetorical commitments to peace and freedom.
Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible war
* when vision and change are required, our government pursues a policy of macabre dead-end dimensions — conditioned, but not justified, by actions of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the war which seems to close will not be fought between the United States and Russia, not externally between two national entities, but as an international civil war throughout the unrespected and unprotected human civitas which spans the world.
The Colonial Revolution
While weapons have accelerated man’s opportunity for self-destruction, the counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American peoples. Against the individual initiative and aspiration, and social sense of organicism characteristic of these upsurges, the American apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.
It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts that surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand the facts of “underdevelopment”: in India, man and beast together produced 65 percent of the nation’s economic energy in a recent year, and of the remaining 35 percent of inanimately produced power almost three-fourths was obtained by burning dung. But in the United States, human and animal power together account for only one percent of the national economic energy — that is what stands humanly behind the vague term “industrialization”. Even to maintain the misery of Asia today at a constant level will require a rate of growth tripling the national income and the aggregate production in Asian countries by the end of the century. For Asians to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of Europeans, less than $2,000 per year for a family, national production must increase 21-fold by the end the century, and that monstrous feat only to reach a level that Europeans find intolerable.
What has America done? During the years 1955-57 our total expenditures in economic aid were equal to one-tenth of one percent of our total Gross National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then it has been a fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development is needed — we have helped little, seeming to prefer to create a growing gap between “have” and “have not” rather than to usher in social revolutions which would threaten our investors and out military alliances. The new nations want to avoid power entanglements that will open their countries to foreign domination — and we have often demanded loyalty oaths. They do not see the relevence of uncontrolled free enterprise in societies without accumulated capital and a significant middle class — and we have looked calumniously on those who would not try “our way”. They seek empathy — and we have sided with the old colonialists, who now are trying to take credit for “giving” all the freedom that has been wrested from them, or we “empathize” when pressure absolutely demands it.
With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was guided by a concern for foreign investment and a negative anti-communist political stance linked to a series of military alliances, both undergirded by military threat. We participated unilaterally — usually through the Central Intelligence Agency — in revolutions against governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Iran. We permitted economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy: fruit in Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa (with whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly: America’s “foreign market” in the late Fifties, including exports of goods and services plus overseas sales by American firms, averaged about $60 billion annually. This represented twice the investment of 1950, and it is predicted that the same rates of increase will continue. The reason is obvious: Fortune said in 1958, “foreign earnings will be more than double in four years, more than twice the probable gain in domestic profits”. These investments are concentrated primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, neither region being an impressive candidate for the long-run stability, political caution, and lower-class tolerance that American investors typically demand.
Our pugnacious anti-communism and protection of interests has led us to an alliance inappropriately called the “Free World”. It included four major parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada, Great Britain, and India. It also has included through the years Batista, Franco, Verwoerd, Salazar, De Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem, Chiang Kai Shek, Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud, Ydigoras — all of these non-democrats separating us deeply from the colonial revolutions.
Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government seems to have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped areas. It accepted “neutralism” as a tolerable principle; it sided more than once with the Angolans in the United Nations; it invited Souvanna Phouma to return to Laos after having overthrown his neutralist government there; it implemented the Alliance for Progress that President Eisenhower proposed when Latin America appeared on the verge of socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements about the Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist government in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural oratory, it suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing the world’s resources with those who have been previously dominated. These were hardly sufficient to heal the scars of past activity and present associations, but nevertheless they were motions away from the Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President ordered the Cuban invations, and while the American press railed about how we had been “shamed” and defied by that “monster Castro,” the colonial peoples of the world wondered whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways (we had never supported Castro, even on the eve of his taking power, and had announced early that “the conduct of the Castro government toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba” would be a main State Department concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign policy are now further suspect in the wake of the Punta Del Este foreign minister’s conference where the five countries representing most of Latin America refused to cooperate in our plans to further “isolate” the Castro government.
Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers have reacted to new problems with old “gunboat” remedies, often thinly disguised. The feeble but desirable efforts of the Kennedy administration to be more flexible are coming perhaps too late, and are of too little significance to really change the historical thrust of our policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly mostly as a result of the worldwide population explosion that cancels out the meager triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat of population to economic growth is simply documented: in 1960-70 population in Africa south of the Sahara will increase 14 percent; in South Asia and the Far East by 22 percent; in North Africa 26 percent; in the Middle East by 27 percent; in Latin America 29 percent. Population explosion, no matter how devastating, is neutral. But how long will it take to create a relation of thrust between America and the newly-developing societies? How long to change our policies? And what length of time do we have?
The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race to industrialize the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms, socialisms, neutralisms along the way — or it can slow the pace of the inevitable and default to the eager and self-interested Soviets and, much more importantly, to mankind itself. Only mystics would guess we have opted thoroughly for the first. Consider what our people think of this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda. Fed by a bellicose press, manipulated by economic and political opponents of change, drifting in their own history, they grumble about “the foreign aid waste”, or about “that beatnik down in Cuba”, or how “things will get us by” . . . thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that Americans can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing forty percent of its goods.
Anti-Communism
An unreasoning anti-communism has become a major social problem for those who want to construct a more democratic America. McCarthyism and other forms of exaggerated and conservative anti-communism seriously weaken democratic institutions and spawn movements contrary to the interests of basic freedoms and peace. In such an atmosphere even the most intelligent of Americans fear to join political organizations, sign petitions, speak out on serious issues. Militaristic policies are easily “sold” to a public fearful of a democratic enemy. Political debate is restricted, thought is standardized, action is inhibited by the demands of “unity” and “oneness” in the face of the declared danger. Even many liberals and socialists share static and repititious participation in the anti-communist crusade and often discourage tentative, inquiring discussion about “the Russian question” within their ranks — often by employing “stalinist”, “stalinoid”, trotskyite” and other epithets in an oversimplifying way to discredit opposition.
Thus much of the American anti-communism takes on the characteristics of paranoia. Not only does it lead to the perversion of democracy and to the political stagnation of a warfare society, but it also has the unintended consequence of preventing an honest and effective approach to the issues. Such an approach would require public analysis and debate of world politics. But almost nowhere in politics is such a rational analysis possible to make.
It would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues of the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between persons of every opinion — on television, on platforms and through other media. It would seem, too, that there should be a way for the person or an organization to oppose communism without contributing to the common fear of associations and public actions. But these things do not happen; instead, there is finger-pointing and comical debate about the most serious of issues. This trend of events on the domestic scene, towards greater irrationality on major questions, moves us to greater concern than does the “internal threat” of domestic communism. Democracy, we are convinced, requires every effort to set in peaceful opposition the basic viewpoints of the day; only by conscious, determined, though difficult, efforts in this direction will the issue of communism be met appropriately.
Communism and Foreign Policy
As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system. The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of organized opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized. The Communist Party has equated falsely the “triumph of true socialism” with centralized bureaucracy. The Soviet state lacks independent labor organizations and other liberties we consider basic. And despite certain reforms, the system remains almost totally divorced from the image officially promulgated by the Party. Communist parties throughout the rest of the world are generally undemocratic in internal structure and mode of action. Moreover, in most cases they subordinate radical programs to requirements of Soviet foreign policy. The communist movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation.
But present trends in American anti-communism are not sufficient for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to and counter communist movements in the world. In no instance is this better illustrated than in our basic national policy-making assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military means. On this assumption rests the monstrous American structure of military “preparedness”; because of it we sacrifice values and social programs to the alleged needs of military power.
But the assumption itself is certainly open to question and debate. To be sure, the Soviet state has used force and the threat of force to promote or defend its perceived national interests. But the typical American response has been to equate the use of force — which in many cases might be dispassionately interpreted as a conservative, albeit brutal, action — with the initiation of a worldwide military onslaught. In addition, the Russian-Chinese conflicts and the emergency !! throughout the communist movement call for a re-evaluation of any monolithic interpretations. And the apparent Soviet disinterest in building a first-strike arsenal of weapons challenges the weight given to protection against surprise attack in formulations of American policy toward the Soviets.
Almost without regard to one’s conception of the dynamics of Soviet society and foreign policy, it is evident that the American military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult the encouragement of skepticism, anti-war or pro-democratic attitudes in the communist systems. America has done a great deal to foment the easier, opposite tendency in Russia: suspicion, suppression, and stiff military resistance. We have established a system of military alliances which of even dubious deterrence value. It is reasonable of suggest the “Berlin” and “Laos” have been earth-shaking situations partly because rival systems of deterrence make impossible the withdrawal of threats. The “status quo” is not cemented by mutual threat but by mutual fear of receeding from pugnacity — since the latter course would undermine the “credibility” of our deterring system. Simultaneously, while billions in military aid were propping up right-wing Laotian, Formosan, Iranian and other regimes, American leadership never developed a purely political policy for offering concrete alternatives to either communism or the status quo for colonial revolutions. The results have been: fulfillment of the communist belief that capitalism is stagnant, its only defense being dangerous military adventurism; destabilizing incidents in numerous developing countries; an image of America allied with corrupt oligarchies counterposed to the Russian-Chinese image of rapid, though brutal, economic development. Again and again, America mistakes the static area of defense, rather than the dynamic area of development, as the master need of two-thirds of mankind.
Our paranoia about the Soviet Union has made us incapable of achieving agreements absolutely necessary for disarmament and the preservation of peace. We are hardly able to see the possibility that the Soviet Union, though not “peace loving”, may be seriously interested in disarmament.
Infinite possibilities for both tragedy and progress lie before us. On the one hand, we can continue to be afraid, and out of fear commit suicide. On the other hand, we can develop a fresh and creative approach to world problems which will help to create democracy at home and establish conditions for its growth elsewhere in the world.
Discrimination
Our America is still white.
Consider the plight, statistically, of its greatest nonconformists, the “nonwhites” (a Census Bureau designation).
1. Literacy: One of every four “nonwhites” is functionally illiterate; half do not complete elementary school; one in five finishes high school or better. But one in twenty whites is functionally illiterate; four of five finish elementary school; half go through high school or better.
2. Salary: In 1959 a “nonwhite” worker could expect to average $2,844 annually; a “nonwhite” family, including a college-educated father, could expect to make $5,654 collectively. But a white worker could expect to make $4,487 if he worked alone; with a college degree and a family of helpers he could expect $7,373. The approximate Negro-white wage ratio has remained nearly level for generations, with the exception of the World War II employment “boom” which opened many better jobs to exploited groups.
3. Work: More than half of all “nonwhites” work at laboring or service jobs, including one-fourth of those with college degrees; one in 20 works in a professional or managerial capacity. Fewer than one in five of all whites are laboring or service workers, including one in every 100 of the college-educated; one in four is in professional or managerial work.
4. Unemployment: Within the 1960 labor force of approximately 72 million, one of every 10 “nonwhites” was unemployed. Only one of every 20 whites suffered that condition.
5. Housing: The census classifies 57 percent of all “nonwhite” houses substandard, but only 27 percent of white-owned units so exist.
6. Education: More than fifty percent of America’s “nonwhite” high school students never graduate. The vocational and professional spread of curriculum categories offered “nonwhites” is 16 as opposed to the 41 occupations offered to the white student. Furthermore, in spite of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, 80 percent of all “nonwhites” educated actually, or virtually, are educated under segregated conditions. And only one of 20 “nonwhite” students goes to college as opposed to the 1:10 ratio for white students.
7. Voting: While the white community is registered above two-thirds of its potential, the “nonwhite” population is registered below one-third of its capacity (with even greater distortion in areas of the Deep South).
Even against this background, some will say progress is being made. The facts bely it, however, unless it is assumed that America has another century to deal with its racial inequalities. Others, more pompous, will blame the situation on “those people’s inability to pick themselves up”, not understanding the automatic way in which such a system can frustrate reform efforts and diminish the aspirations of the oppressed. The one-party system in the South, attached to the Dixiecrat-Republican complex nationally, cuts off the Negro’s independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment, along with labor’s accomodation to the “lily-white” hiring practises, guarantees the lowest slot in the economic order to the “nonwhite.” North or South, these oppressed are conditioned by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel, all their potential is circumscribed, thwarted and often extinguished. Automation grinds up job opportunities, and ineffective or non-existent retraining programs make the already-handicapped “nonwhite” even less equipped to participate in “technological progress.”
Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the “nonwhites” are being “accepted” and “rising” gradually. They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are “better off”. They hear the President talking about Negroes and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that the world is generally moving toward integration. They don’t drive through the South, or through the slum areas of the big cities, so they assume that squalor and naked exploitation are disappearing. They express generalities about “time and gradualism” to hide the fact that they don’t know what is happening.
The advancement of the Negro and other “nonwhites” in America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism, but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure. The economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility, new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white man of the same stratum. More important than the World War II openings was the colonial revolution. The world-wide upsurge of dark peoples against white colonial domination stirred the separation and created an urgancy among American Negroes, while simultaneously it threatened the power structure of the United States enough to produce concessions to the Negro. Produced by outer pressure from the newly-moving peoples rather than by the internal conscience of the Federal government, the gains were keyed to improving the American “image” more than to reconstructing the society that prospered on top of its minorities. Thus the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954, theoretically desegregating Southern schools, was more a proclamation than a harbinger of social change — and is reflected as such in the fraction of Southern school districts which have desegregated, with Federal officials doing little to spur the process.
It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy lept ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the “blemish” of bigotry.
To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat-Republican alliance, President Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of “enforcement, not enactment”, implying that existing statuatory tools are sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices, and seems interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to vote. On the other hand, he has appointed at least four segregationist judges in areas where voter registration is a desperate need. Only two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration, have been proposed — the President giving active support to neither. But even this legislation, lethargically supported, then defeated, was intended to extend only to Federal elections. More important, the Kennedy interest in voter registration has not been supplemented with interest in giving the Southern Negro the economic protection that only trade unions can provide. It seems evident that the President is attempting to win the Negro permanently to the Democratic Party without basically disturbing the reactionary one-party oligarchy in the South. Moreover, the administration is decidedly “cool” (a phrase of Robert Kennedy’s) toward mass nonviolent movements in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners and their intervention in situations of racial tension is always after the incident, not before. Kennedy has refused to “enforce” the legal prerogative to keep Federal marshals active in Southern areas before, during and after any “situations” (this would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate the Southerners in Congress because of its “insulting” features).
While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy with the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with the $50 billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half a “white wage”, stymie and slow fundamental progress, it remains to be appreciated that the ultimate wages of discrimination are paid by individuals and not by the state. Indeed the other sides of the economic, political and sociological coins of racism represent their more profound implications in the private lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness of the citizen. While hungry nonwhites the world around assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully interracial world becomes a biological probability, most Americans persist in opposing marriage between the races. While cultures generally interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America — and perhaps glad of it. The white lives almost completely within his immediate, close-up world where things are tolerable, there are no Negroes except on the bus corner going to and from work, and where it is important that daughter marry right. White, like might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the “nonwhite”, however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around “different people”, he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedoms to the “nonwhite”, the white loses his personal subjective freedom by turning away “from all these damn causes.”
White American ethnocentrism at home and abroad reflect most sharply the self-deprivation suffered by the majority of our country which effectively makes it an isolated minority in the world community of culture and fellowship. The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions. The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus’ advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere. And it is well that we keep this as a background when trying to understand why racism stands as such a steadfast pillar in the culture and custom of the country. Racial-xenophobia is reflected in the admission of various racial stocks to the country. From the nineteenth century Oriental Exclusion Acts to the most recent up-dating of the Walter-McCarren Immigration Acts the nation has shown a continuous contemptuous regard for “nonwhites.” More recently, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Korematsu, and our cooperation with Western Europe in the United Nations add treatment to the thoroughness of racist overtones in national life.
But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing place.
WHAT IS NEEDED?
How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America? These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and structural alternatives are needed to obtain these ends?
1. Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goal. The strategy of mutual threat can only temporarily prevent thermonuclear war, and it cannot but erode democratic institutions here while consolidating oppressive institutions in the Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while giving rhetorical due to the ideal of disarmament, persists in accepting mixed deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen first-strike and second-strike weapons, counter-military and counter-population inventions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla warriors, etc. The convenient rationalization that our weapons potpourri will confuse the enemy into fear of misbehaving is absurd and threatening. Our own intentions, once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since the President has indicated we might in certain circumstances be the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will become more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare to “preempt” us, and we (expecting the worst from the Russians) will nervously consider “preemption” ourselves. The symmetry of threat and counter-threat lead not to stability but to the edge of hell.
It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence, “credible” to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans should be presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming and disarmed world — national and international — should be created while the disarming process itself goes on. The long-standing idea of unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature of American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated in their ~~~ potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocate when done regardless of reciprocation, openly ~~~ significant period of future time. Their ~~~ should not be to strip America of weapon, ~~~ produce a climate in which disarmament can be ~~~ with less mutual hostility and threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear test moratorium, withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union, proposals to experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone of controversy; cessation of all apparent first-strike preparations, such as the development of 41 Polaris by 1963 while naval theorists state that about 45 constitutes a provocative force; inviting a special United Nations agency to observe and inspect the launchings of all American flights into outer space; and numerous others.
There is no simple formula for the content of an actual disarmament treaty. It should be phased: perhaps on a region-by-region basis, the conventional weapons first. It should be conclusive, not open-ended, in its projection. It should be controlled: national inspection systems are adequate at first, but should be soon replaced by international devices and teams. It should be more than denuding: world or at least regional enforcement agencies, an international civil service and inspection service, and other supranational groups must come into reality under the United Nations.
2. Disarmament should be see as a political issue, not a technical problem. Should this year’s Geneva negotiations have resulted (by magic) in a disarmament agreement, the United States Senate would have refused to ratify it, a domestic depression would have begun instantly, and every fiber of American life would be wrenched drastically: these are indications not only of our unpreparedness for disarmament, but also that disarmament is not “just another policy shift.” Disarmament means a deliberate shift in most of our domestic and foreign policy.
1. It will involve major changes in economic direction. Government intervention in new areas, government regulation of certain industrial price and investment practices to prevent inflation, full use of national productive capacities, and employment for every person in a dramatically expanding economy all are to be expected as the “price” of peace.
2. It will involve the simultaneous creation of international rulemaking and enforcement machinery beginning under the United Nations, and the gradual transfer of sovereignties — such as national armies and national determination of “international” law — to such machinery.
3. It will involve the initiation of an explicitly political — as opposed to military — foreign policy on the part of the two major superstates. Neither has formulated the political terms in which they would conduct their behavior in a disarming or disarmed world. Neither dares to disarm until such an understanding is reached.
4. A crucial feature of this political understanding must be the acceptance of status quo possessions. According to the universality principle all present national entities — including the Vietnams, the Koreans, the Chinas, and the Germanys — should be members of the United Nations as sovereign, no matter how desirable, states.
Russia cannot be expected to negotiate disarmament treaties for the Chinese. We should not feed Chinese fanaticism with our encirclement but Chinese stomachs with the aim of making war contrary to Chinese policy interests. Every day that we support anti-communist tyrants but refuse to even allow the Chinese Communists representation in the United Nations marks a greater separation of our ideals and our actions, and it makes more likely bitter future relations with the Chinese.
Second, we should recognize that an authoritarian Germany’s insistence on reunification, while knowing the impossibility of achieving it with peaceful means, could only generate increasing frustrations among the population and nationalist sentiments which frighten its Eastern neighbors who have historical reasons to suspect Germanic intentions. President Kennedy himself told the editor of Izvestia that he fears an independent Germany with nuclear arms, but American policies have not demonstrated cognisance of the fact that Chancellor Adenauer too, is interested in continued East-West tensions over the Germany and Berlin problems and nuclear arms precisely because this is the rationale for extending his domestic power and his influence upon the NATO-Common Market alliance.
A world war over Berlin would be absurd. Anyone concurring with such a proposition should demand that the West cease its contradictory advocacy of “reunification of Germany through free elections” and “a rearmed Germany in NATO”. It is a dangerous illusion to assume that Russia will hand over East Germany to a rearmed re-united Germany which will enter the Western camp, although this Germany might have a Social Democratic majority which could prevent a reassertion of German nationalism. We have to recognize that the cold war and the incorporation of Germany into the two power blocs was a decision of both Moscow and Washington, of both Adenauer and Ulbricht. The immediate responsibility for the Berlin wall is Ulbricht’s. But it had to be expected that a regime which was bad enough to make people flee is also bad enough to prevent them from fleeing. The inhumanity of the Berlin wall is an ironic symbol of the irrationality of the cold war, which keeps Adenauer and Ulbricht in power. A reduction of the tension over Berlin, if by internationalization or by recognition of the status quo and reducing provocations, is a necessary but equally temporary measure which could not ultimately reduce the basic cold war tension to which Berlin owes its precarious situation. The Berlin problem cannot be solved without reducing tensions in Europe, possibly by a bilateral military disengagement and creating a neutralized buffer zone. Even if Washington and Moscow were in favor disengagement, both Adenauer and Ulbricht would never agree to it because cold war keeps their parties in power.
Until their regimes’ departure from the scene of history, the Berlin status quo will have to be maintained while minimizing the tensions necessarily arising from it. Russia cannot expect the United States to tolerate its capture by the Ulbricht regime, but neither can America expect to be in a position to indefinitely use Berlin as a fortress within the communist world. As a fair and bilateral disengagement in Central Europe seems to be impossible for the time being, a mutual recognition of the Berlin status quo, that is, of West Berlin’s and East Germany’s security, is needed. And it seems to be possible, although the totalitarian regime of East Germany and the authoritarian leadership of West Germany until now succeeded in frustrating all attempts to minimize the dangerous tensions of cold war.
The strategy of securing the status quo of the two power blocs until it is possible to depolarize the world by creating neutralist regions in all trouble zones seems to be the only way to guarantee peace at this time.
4. Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted as part of the total disarming process. These “disarmament experiments” can be of several kinds, so long as they are consistent with the principles of containing the arms race and isolating specific sectors of the world from the Cold War power-play. First, it is imperative that no more nations be supplied with, or locally produce, nuclear weapons. A 1959 report of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences predicted that 19 nations would be so armed in the near future. Should this prediction be fulfilled, the prospects of war would be unimaginably expanded. For this reason the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union should band against France (which wants its own independent deterrent) and seek, through United Nations or other machinery, the effective prevention of the spread of atomic weapons. This would involve not only declarations of “denuclearization” in whole areas of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, but would attempt to create inspection machinery to guarantee the peaceful use of atomic energy.
Second, the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since its creation in 1949, NATO has assumed increased strength in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense of Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a full-scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized, not so much because of NATO’s existence but because of the general unimportance of much of Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when even American-based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an invasion, and when “thaw sectors” are desperately needed to brake the arms race, one of at least threatening but most promising courses for American would be toward the gradual diminishment of the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated “disengagement” of parts of Central Europe.
It is especially crucial that this be done while America is entering into favorable trade relations with the European Economic Community: such a gesture, combining economic ambition with less dependence on the military, would demonstrate the kind of competitive “co-existence” America intends to conduct with the communist-bloc nations. If the disengaged states were the two Germanies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, several other benefits would accrue. First, the United States would be breaking with the lip-service commitment to “liberation” of Eastern Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation. But the end of “liberation” as a proposed policy would not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on the “menace of capitalist encirclement”. This policy, geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most pro-Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the past have indicated some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested. If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished, and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to disarming would be generated.
Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is currently being practised and praised. American military strategists are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent, based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords of military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by the German Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and negotiation.
The Industrialization of the World
Many Americans are prone to think of the industrialization of the newlydeveloped countries as a modern form of American noblesse, undertaken sacrificially for the benefit of others. On the contrary, the task of world industrialization, of eliminating the disparity between have and have-not nations, is as important as any issue facing America. The colonial revolution signals the end of an era for the old Western powers and a time of new beginnings for most of the people of the earth. In the course of these upheavals, many problems will emerge: American policies must be revised or accelerated in several ways.
1. The United States’ principal goal should be creating a world where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and international cooperation. To many this will seem the product of juvenile hallucination: but we insist it is a more realistic goal than is a world of nuclear stalemate. Some will say this is a hope beyond all bounds: but is far better to us to have positive vision than a “hard headed” resignation. Some will sympathize, but claim it is impossible: if so, then, we, not Fate, are the responsible ones, for we have the means at our disposal. We should not give up the attempt for fear of failure.
2. We should undertake here and now a fifty-year effort to prepare for all nations the conditions of industrialization. Even with far more capital and skill than we now import to emerging areas, serious prophets expect that two generations will pass before accelerating industrialism is a worldwide act. The needs are numerous: every nation must build an adequate intrastructure (transportation, communication, land resources, waterways) for future industrial growth; there must be industries suited to the rapid development of differing raw materials and other resources; education must begin on a continuing basis for everyone in the society, especially including engineering and technical training; technical assistance from outside sources must be adequate to meet present and long-term needs; atomic power plants must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America’s idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately without changing our military allocations. This might catalyze a “peace race” since it would demand a response of such magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and “coexistence” spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets to carry on simultaneously.
3. We should not depend significantly on private enterprise to do the job. Many important projects will not be profitable enough to entice the investment of private capital. The total amount required is far beyond the resources of corporate and philanthropic concerns. The new nations are suspicious, legitimately, of foreign enterprises dominating their national life. World industrialization is too huge an undertaking to be formulated or carried out by private interests. Foreign economic assistance is a national problem, requiring long range planning, integration with other domestic and foreign policies, and considerable public debate and analysis. Therefore the Federal government should have primary responsibility in this area.
4. We should not lock the development process into the Cold War: we should view it as a way of ending that conflict. When President Kennedy declared that we must aid those who need aid because it is right, he was unimpeachably correct — now principle must become practice. We should reverse the trend of aiding corrupt anti-communist regimes. To support dictators like Diem while trying to destroy ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about American “principle”, and is bound to lead to even more authoritarian revolutions, especially in Latin America where we did not even consider foreign aid until Castro had challenged the status quo. We should end the distinction between communist hunger and anti-communist hunger. To feed only anticommunists is to directly fatten men like Boun Oum, to incur the wrath of real democrats, and to distort our own sense of human values. We must cease seeing development in terms of communism and capitalism. To fight communism by capitalism in the newly-developing areas is to fundamentally misunderstand the international hatred of imperialism and colonialism and to confuse and needs of 19th century industrial America with those of contemporary nations.
Quite fortunately, we are edging away from the Dullesian “either-or” foreign policy ultimatum towards an uneasy acceptance of neutralism and nonalignment. If we really desire the end of the Cold War, we should now welcome nonalignment — that is, the creation of whole blocs of nations concerned with growth and with independently trying to break out of the Cold War apparatus.
Finally, while seeking disarmament as the genuine deterrent, we should shift from financial support of military regimes to support of national development. Real security cannot be gained by propping up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education. Military aid is temporary in nature, a “shoring up” measure that only postpones crisis. In addition, it tends to divert the allocations of the nation being defended to supplementary military spending (Pakistan’s budget is 70% oriented to defense measures). Sometimes it actually creates crisis situations, as in Latin America where we have contributed to the growth of national armies which are opposed generally to sweeping democratization. Finally, if we are really generous, it is harder for corrupt governments to exploit unfairly economic aid — especially if it is to plentiful that rulers cannot blame the absence of real reforms on anything but their own power lusts.
5. America should show its commitment to democratic institutions not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making domestic democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and hatred toward the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist propaganda trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If respect for democracy is to be international, then the significance of democracy must emanate from America shores, not from the “soft sell” of the United States Information Agency.
6. America should agree that public utilities, railroads, mines, and plantations, and other basic economic institutions should be in the control of national, not foreign, agencies. The destiny of any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders with economic interests within. We should encourage our investors to turn over their foreign holdings (or at least 50% of the stock) to the national governments of the countries involved.
7. Foreign aid should be given through international agencies, primarily the United Nations. The need is to eliminate political overtones, to the extent possible, from economic development. The use of international agencies, with interests transcending those of American or Russian self-interest, is the feasible means of working on sound development. Second, internationalization will allow more long-range planning, integrate development plans adjacent countries and regions may have, and eliminate the duplication built into national systems of foreign aid. Third, it would justify more strictness of supervision than is now the case with American foreign aid efforts, but with far less chance of suspicion on the part of the developing countries. Fourth, the humiliating “hand-out” effect would be replaced by the joint participation of all nations in the general development of the earth’s resources and industrial capacities. Fifth, it would eliminate national tensions, e.g. between Japan and some Southeast Asian areas, which now impair aid programs by “disguising” nationalities in the common pooling of funds. Sixth, it would make easier the task of stabilizing the world market prices of basic commodities, alleviating the enormous threat that decline in prices of commodity exports might cancel out the gains from foreign aid in the new nations. Seventh, it would improve the possibilities of non-exploitative development, especially in creating “soft-credit” rotating-fund agencies which would not require immediate progress or financial return. Finally, it would enhance the importance of the United Nations itself, as the disarming process would enhance the UN as a rule-enforcement agency.
8. Democratic theory must confront the problems inherent in social revolutions. For Americans concerned with the development of democratic societies, the anti-colonial movements and revolutions in the emerging nations pose serious problems. We need to face these problems with humility: after 180 years of constitutional government we are still striving for democracy in our own society. We must acknowledge that democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but have roots in historical experience; they cannot always be demanded for any society at any time, but must be nurtured and facilitated. We must avoid the arbitrary projection of Anglo-Saxon democratic forms onto different cultures. Instead of democratic capitalism we should anticipate more or less authoritarian variants of socialism and collectivism in many emergent societies.
But we do not abandon our critical faculties. Insofar as these regimes represent a genuine realization of national independence, and are engaged in constructing social systems which allow for personal meaning and purpose where exploitation once was, economic systems which work for the people where once they oppressed them, and political systems which allow for the organization and expression of minority opinion and dissent, we recognize their revolutionary and positive character. Americans can contribute to the growth of democracy in such societies not by moralizing, nor by indiscriminate prejudgment, but by retaining a critical identification with these nations, and by helping them to avoid external threats to their independence. Together with students and radicals in these nations we need to develop a reasonable theory of democracy which is concretely applicable to the cultures and conditions of hungry people.
TOWARDS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Every effort to end the Cold War and expand the process of world industrialization is an effort hostile to people and institutions whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East-West military threat and the postponement of change in the “have not” nations of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater democracy in America. The major goals of a domestic effort would be:
1. America must abolish its political party stalemate. Two genuine parties, centered around issues and essential values, demanding allegiance to party principles shall supplant the current system of organized stalemate which is seriously inadequate to a world in flux. It has long been argued that the very overlapping of American parties guarantees that issues will be considered responsibly, that progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore America will remain stable instead of torn by class strife. On the contrary: the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues and makes responsible presentation of choice to the electorate impossible, that guarantees Congressional listlessness and the drift of power to military and economic bureaucracies, that directs attention away from the more fundamental causes of social stability, such as a huge middle class, Keynesian economic techniques and Madison Avenue advertising. The ideals of political democracy, then, the imperative need for flexible decision-making apparatus makes a real two-party system an immediate social necessity. What is desirable is sufficient party disagreement to dramatize major issues, yet sufficient party overlap to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains that “we can’t expect everything at once” we must ask if we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation. Every time he refers to “circumstances beyond control” we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time he speaks of the “unpleasantness of personal and party fighting” we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable when the dark peoples of the world call for American support.
2. Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through which political information can be imparted and political participation encouraged. Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be created that engage people with issues and express political preference, not as now with huge business lobbies which exercise undemocratic power, but which carry political influence (appropriate to private, rather than public, groupings) in national decision-making enterprise. Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues. These do not exist in America in quantity today. If they did exist, they would be a significant politicizing and educative force bringing people into touch with public life and affording them means of expression and action. Today, giant lobby representatives of business interests are dominant, but not educative. The Federal government itself should counter the latter forces whose intent is often public deceit for private gain, by subsidizing the preparation and decentralized distribution of objective materials on all public issues facing government.
3. Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished, and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted. The first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion and press should be seen as guarantees, not threats, to national security. While society has the right to prevent active subversion of its laws and institutions, it has the duty as well to promote open discussion of all issues — otherwise it will be in fact promoting real subversion as the only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate the fears and apathy from national life it is necessary that the institutions bred by fear and apathy be rooted out: the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Committee, the loyalty oaths on Federal loans, the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, the Smith and McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating these blighting institutions is the process of restoring democratic participation. Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and atrophy of the participation.
4. Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry.
We can no longer rely on competition of the many to insure that business enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have become the few. Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be socially responsible or to develop a “corporate conscience” that is democratic. The community of interest of corporations, the anarchic actions of industrial leaders, should become structurally responsible to the people — and truly to the people rather than to an ill-defined and questionable “national interest”. Labor and government as presently constituted are not sufficient to “regulate” corporations. A new re-ordering, a new calling of responsibility is necessary: more than changing “work rules” we must consider changes in the rules of society by challenging the unchallenged politics of American corporations. Before the government can really begin to control business in a “public interest”, the public must gain more substantial control of government: this demands a movement for political as well as economic realignments. We are aware that simple government “regulation”, if achieved, would be inadequate without increased worker participation in management decision-making, strengthened and independent regulatory power, balances of partial and/or complete public ownership, various means of humanizing the conditions and types of work itself, sweeping welfare programs and regional public government authorities. These are examples of measures to re-balance the economy toward public — and individual — control.
5. The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A truly “public sector” must be established, and its nature debated and planned. At present the majority of America’s “public sector”, the largest part of our public spending, is for the military. When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of “government spending” is wrapped up in the “permanent war economy”.
In fact, if war is to be avoided, the “permanent war economy” must be seen as an “interim war economy”. At some point, America must return to other mechanisms of economic growth besides public military spending. We must plan economically in peace. The most likely, and least desirable, return would be in the form of private enterprise. The undesirability lies in the fact of inherent capitalist instability, noticeable even with bolstering effects of government intervention. In the most recent post-war recessions, for example, private expenditures for plant and equipment dropped from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while unemployment surged to nearly six million. By good fortune, investments in construction industries remained level, else an economic depression would have occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per capita living standards will remain unsensational while the economy stagnates. The main private forces of economic expansion cannot guarantee a steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from recession — especially in a demilitarizing world. Government participation in the economy is essential. Such participation will inevitably expand enormously, because the stable growth of the economy demands increasing “public” investments yearly. Our present outpour of more than $500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly involving government solutions. And in future recessions, the compensatory fiscal action by the government will be the only means of avoiding the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening rate of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European Common Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here is expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.
All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions to our present social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness to enlarge the “public sector” greatly. Unless we choose war as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a non-military nature — a major intervention into civilian production by the government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:
1. How should public vs. private domain be determined? We suggest these criteria: 1) when a resource has been discovered or developed with public tax revenues, such as a space communications system, it should remain a public source, not be given away to private enterprise;
2. when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should maintain control of an industry; 3) when national objectives contradict seriously with business objectives as to the use of the resource, the public need should prevail.
3. How should technological advances be introduced into a society? By a public process, based on publicly-determined needs. Technological innovations should not be postponed from social use by private corporations in order to protect investment in older equipment.
4. How shall the “public sector” be made public, and not the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of “public servants”? By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions of human needs according to problems easiest for computers to solve. Second, the bureaucratic pileups must be at least minimized by local, regional, and national economic planning — responding to the interconnection of public problems by comprehensive programs of solution. Third, and most important, by experiments in decentralization, based on the vision of man as master of his machines and his society. The personal capacity to cope with life has been reduced everywhere by the introduction of technology that only minorities of men (barely) understand. How the process can be reversed
* and we believe it can be — is one of the greatest sociological and economic tasks before human people today. Polytechnical schooling, with the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences, is one method. The transfer of certain mechanized tasks back into manual forms, allowing men to make whole, not partial, products, is not unimaginable. Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision. These are but a fraction of the opportunities of the new era: serious study and deliberate experimentation, rooted in a desire for human fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.
5. America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.
6. A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty. At a bare minimum it should include a housing act far larger than the one supported by the Kennedy Administration, but one that is geared more to low-and middleincome needs than to the windfall aspirations of small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic to the quality of communal life than to the efficiency of city-split highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime human right just as vital as food, shelter and clothing — the Federal government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged, not just by making medical care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among children and younger people. Third, existing institutions should be expanded so the Welfare State cares for everyone’s welfare according to read. Social security payments should be extended to everyone and should be proportionately greater for the poorest. A minimum wage of at least $1.50 should be extended to all workers (including the 16 million currently not covered at all). Equal educational opportunity is an important part of the battle against poverty.
7. A full-scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals) about gradualism, property rights, and law and order. The executive and legislative branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement and enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No Federal cooperation with racism is tolerable — from financing of schools, to the development of Federally-supported industry, to the social gatherings of the President. Laws bastcuing school desegregation, voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against the Dixiecrats specifically, and the national complacency about the race question generally. Especially in the North, where one-half of the country’s Negro people now live, civil rights is not a problem to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight against poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly endemic to all areas of American life.
8. The promise and problems of long-range Federal economic development should be studied more constructively. It is an embarrassing paradox that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors but a “radical” and barely influential project to most Americans. The Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to transmit power from the $1 billion Colorado River Storage Project is a disastrous one, interposing privately-owned transmitters between public-owned power generators and their publicly (and cooperatively) owned distributors. The contracy trend, to public ownership of power, should be generated in an experimental way.
The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing the underdeveloped areas of the United States, but is only a drop in the bucket financially and is not keyed to public planning and public works on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs to lure industries and some grants to improve public facilities to “lure industries.” The current public works bill in Congress is needed and a more sweeping, higher priced program of regional development with a proliferation of “TVAs” in such areas as the Appalachian region are needed desperately. It has been rejected by Mississippi already however, because of the improvement it bodes for the unskilled Negro worker. This program should be enlarged, given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal authorities.
d. We must meet the growing complex of “city” problems; over 90% of Americans will live in urban areas in the next two decades. Juvenile delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase, slums, urban tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the individual in the city — all are problems of the city and are major symptoms of the present system of economic priorities and lack of public planning. Private property control (the real estate lobby and a few selfish landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the cities as corporations are on the national level. But there is no comprehensive way to deal with these problems now midst competing units of government, dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism (saprophitic to the sick central cities), high infrastructure costs and on one to pay them. The only solutions are national and regional. “Federalism” has thus far failed here because states are rural-dominated; the Federal government has had to operate by bootlegging and trickle-down measures dominated by private interests, and the cities themselves have not been able to catch up with their appendages through annexation or federation. A new external challenge is needed, not just a Department of Urban Affairs but a thorough national program to help the cities. The model city must be projected — more community decision-making and participation, true integration of classes, races, vocations — provision for beauty, access to nature and the benefits of the central city as well, privacy without privatism, decentralized “units” spread horizontally with central, regional, democratic control — provision for the basic facility-needs, for everyone, with units of planned regions and thus public, democratic control over the growth of the civic community and the allocation of resources.
e. Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally-ill in 1959 than there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously wanting; existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion for rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to meet the anticipated needs of the future.
f. Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must be either re-oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.
g. Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted to the province of the various states and local units. In fact, there is no good reason why America should not progress now toward internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational system — children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through a United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding. In the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America is fantastic. This is an area where “minimal” requirements hardly should be considered as a goal — there always are improvements to be made in the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and many more teachers for them, programs to subsidize the education of the poor but bright, etc.
h. America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity and pent-up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal government should finance small farmers’ cooperatives, strengthen programs of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor -Peace and related UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped to either become productive enough to survive “industrialized agriculture” or given help in making the transition out of agriculture –
* the current Rural Area Development program must be better coordinated with a massive national “area redevelopment” program. i. Science should be employed to constructively transform the conditions of life throughout the United States and the world. Yet at the present time the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National Science Foundation together spend only $300 million annually for scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. One-half of all research and development in America is directly devoted to military purposes. Two imbalances must be corrected — that of military over non-military investigation, and that of biological-natural-physical science over the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must then include planning for the human use of science: by anticipating the political consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the discovery and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved production of food, to international communications systems, to technical problems of disarmament, and so on. For the newly-developing nations, American science should focus on the study of cheap sources of power, housing and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc. Further, science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community: the International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further cooperation between the science communities of all nations.
Alternatives to Helplessness
The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next election — but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether nor a determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible problems. Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness of visions, refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions to be avoided. Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing hope, we reinforce despair.
The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible, is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?
1. In exploring the existing social forces, note must be taken of the Southern civil rights movement as the most heartening because of the justice it insists upon, exemplary because it indicates that there can be a passage out of apathy.
This movement, pushed into a brilliant new phase by the Montgomery bus boycott and the subsequent nonviolent action of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides has had three major results: first, a sense of self-determination has been instilled in millions of oppressed Negroes; second, the movement has challenged a few thousand liberals to new social idealism; third, a series of important concessions have been obtained, such as token school desegregation, increased Administration help, new laws, desegregation of some public facilities.
But fundamental social change — that would break the props from under Jim Crown — has not come. Negro employment opportunity, wage levels, housing conditions, educational privileges — these remain deplorable and relatively constant, each deprivation reinforcing the impact of the others. The Southern states, in the meantime, are strengthening the fortresses of the status quo, and are beginning to camouflage the fortresses by guile where open bigotry announced its defiance before. The white-controlled one-party system remains intact; and even where the Republicans are beginning under the pressures of industrialization in the towns and suburbs, to show initiative in fostering a two-party system, all Southern state Republican Committees (save Georgia) have adopted militant segregationist platforms to attract Dixiecrats.
Rural dominance remains a fact in nearly all the Southern states, although the reapportionment decision of the Supreme Court portends future power shifts to the cities. Southern politicians maintain a continuing aversion to the welfare legislation that would aid their people. The reins of the Southern economy are held by conservative businessmen who view human rights as secondary to property rights. A violent anti-communism is rooting itself in the South, and threatening even moderate voices. Add the militaristic tradition of the South, and its irrational regional mystique and one must conclude that authoritarian and reactionary tendencies are a rising obstacle to the small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements.
The civil rights struggle thus has come to an impasse. To this impasse, the movement responded this year by entering the sphere of politics, insisting on citizenship rights, specifically the right to vote. The new voter registration stage of protest represents perhaps the first major attempt to exercise the conventional instruments of political democracy in the struggle for racial justice. The vote, if used strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes theoretically eligible to vote, will be decisive factor in changing the quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent statesmanship.
More important, the new emphasis on the vote heralds the use of political means to solve the problems of equality in America, and it signals the decline of the short-sighted view that “discrimination” can be isolated from related social problems. Since the moral clarity of the civil rights movement has not always been accompanied by precise political vision, and sometimes not every by a real political consciousness, the new phase is revolutionary in its implication. The intermediate goal of the program is to secure and insure a healthy respect and realization of Constitutional liberties. This is important not only to terminate the civil and private abuses which currently characterize the region, but also to prevent the pendulum of oppression from simply swinging to an alternate extreme with a new unsophisticated electorate, after the unhappy example of the last Reconstruction. It is the ultimate objectives of the strategy which promise profound change in the politics of the nation. An increased Negro voting race in and of itself is not going to dislodge racist controls of the Southern power structure; but an accelerating movement through the courts, the ballot boxes, and especially the jails is the most likely means of shattering the crust of political intransigency and creating a semblence of democratic order, on local and state levels.
Linked with pressure from Northern liberals to expunge the Dixiecrats from the ranks of the Democratic Party, massive Negro voting in the South could destroy the vice-like grip reactionary Southerners have on the Congressional legislative process.
2. The broadest movement for peace in several years emerged in 1961-62. In its political orientation and goals it is much less identifiable than the movement for civil rights: it includes socialists, pacifists, liberals, scholars, militant activists, middle-class women, some professionals, many students, a few unionists. Some have been emotionally single-issue: Ban the Bomb. Some have been academically obscurantist. Some have rejected the System (sometimes both systems). Some have attempted, too, to “work within” the System. Amidst these conflicting streams of emphasis, however, certain basic qualities appear. The most important is that the “peace movement” has operated almost exclusively through peripheral institutions — almost never through mainstream institutions. Similarly, individuals interested in peace have nonpolitical social roles that cannot be turned to the support of peace activity. Concretely, liberal religious societies, anti-war groups, voluntary associations, ad hoc committees have been the political unit of the peace movement, and its human movers have been students, teacher, housewives, secretaries, lawyers, doctors, clergy. The units have not been located in spots of major social influence, the people have not been able to turn their resources fully to the issues that concern them. The results are political ineffectiveness and personal alienation.
The organizing ability of the peace movement thus is limited to the ability to state and polarize issues. It does not have an institution or the forum in which the conflicting interests can be debated. The debate goes on in corners; it has little connection with the continuing process of determining allocations of resources. This process is not necessarily centralized, however much the peace movement is estranged from it. National policy, though dominated to a large degree by the “power elites” of the corporations and military, is still partially founded in consensus. It can be altered when there actually begins a shift in the allocation of resources and the listing of priorities by the people in the institutions which have social influence, e.g., the labor unions and the schools. As long as the debates of the peace movement form only a protest, rather than an opposition viewpoint within the centers of serious decision- making, then it is neither a movement of democratic relevance, nor is it likely to have any effectiveness except in educating more outsiders to the issue. It is vital, to be sure, that this educating go on (a heartening sign is the recent proliferation of books and journals dealing with peace and war from newly-developing countries); the possibilities for making politicians responsible to “peace constituencies” becomes greater.
But in the long interim before the national political climate is more open to deliberate, goal-directed debate about peace issues, the dedicated peace “movement” might well prepare a local base, especially by establishing civic committees on the techniques of converting from military to peacetime production. To make war and peace relevant to the problems of everyday life, by relating it to the backyard (shelters), the baby (fall-out), the job (military contracts) — and making a turn toward peace seem desirable on these same terms — is a task the peace movement is just beginning, and can profitably continue.
3. Central to any analysis of the potential for change must be an appraisal of organized labor. It would be a-historical to disregard the immense influence of labor in making modern America a decent place in which to live. It would be confused to fail to note labor’s presence today as the most liberal of mainstream institutions. But it would be irresponsible not to criticize labor for losing much of the idealism that once made it a driving movement. Those who expected a labor upsurge after the 1955 AFL-CIO merger can only be dismayed that one year later, in the Stevenson-Eisenhower campaign, the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education was able to obtain solicited $1.00 contributions from only one of every 24 unionists, and prompt only 40% of the rankand -file to vote.
As a political force, labor generally has been unsuccessful in the postwar period of prosperity. It has seen the passage of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin laws, and while beginning to receiving slightly favorable National Labor Relations Board rulings, it has made little progress against right-to-work laws. Furthermore, it has seen less than adequate action on domestic problems, especially unemployment.
This labor “recession” has been only partly due to anti-labor politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has too often seen itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy tends to be cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of the Union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists. Without a significant base, labor’s pressure function is materially reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.
There are some indications, however, that labor might regain its missing idealism. First, there are signs within the movement: of worker discontent with the economic progress, of collective bargaining, of occasional splits among union leaders on questions such as nuclear testing or other Cold War issues. Second, and more important, are the social forces which prompt these feelings of unrest. Foremost is the permanence of unemployment, and the threat of automation, but important, too, is the growth of unorganized ranks in white-collar fields with steady depletion in the already-organized fields. Third, there is the tremendous challenge of the Negro movement for support from organized labor: the alienation from and disgust with labor hypocrisy among Negroes ranging from the NAACP to the Black Muslims (crystallized in the formation of the Negro American Labor Council) indicates that labor must move more seriously in its attempts to organize on an interracial basis in the South and in large urban centers. When this task was broached several years ago, “jurisdictional” disputes prevented action. Today, many of these disputes have been settled — and the question of a massive organizing campaign is on the labor agenda again.
These threats and opportunities point to a profound crisis: either labor continues to decline as a social force, or it must constitute itself as a mass political force demanding not only that society recognize its rights to organize but also a program going beyond desired labor legislation and welfare improvements. Necessarily this latter role will require rank-and-file involvement. It might include greater autonomy and power for political coalitions of the various trade unions in local areas, rather than the more stultifying dominance of the international unions now. It might include reductions in leaders’ salaries, or rotation from executive office to shop obligations, as a means of breaking down the hierarchical tendencies which have detached elite from base and made the highest echelons of labor more like businessmen than workers. It would certainly mean an announced independence of the center and Dixiecrat wings of the Democratic Party, and a massive organizing drive, especially in the South to complement the growing Negro political drive there.
A new politics must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision. Labor’s role is no less unique or important in the needs of the future than it was in the past, its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.
The creation of bridges is made more difficult by the problems left over from the generation of “silence”. Middle class students, still the main actors in the embryonic upsurge, have yet to overcome their ignorance, and even vague hostility, for what they see as “middle class labor” bureaucrats. Students must open the campus to labor through publications, action programs, curricula, while labor opens its house to students through internships, requests for aid (on the picket-line, with handbills, in the public dialogue), and politics. And the organization of the campus can be a beginning — teachers’ unions can be argued as both socially progressive, and educationally beneficial university employees can be organized — and thereby an important element in the education of the student radical.
But the new politics is still contained; it struggles below the surface of apathy, awaiting liberation. Few anticipate the breakthrough and fewer still exhort labor to begin. Labor continues to be the most liberal — and most frustrated — institution in mainstream America.
4. Since the Democratic Party sweep in 1958, there have been exaggerated but real efforts to establish a liberal force in Congress, not to balance but to at least voice criticism of the conservative mood. The most notable of these efforts was the Liberal Project begun early in 1959 by Representative Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. The Project was neither disciplined nor very influential but it was concerned at least with confronting basic domestic and foreign problems, in concert with sever liberal intellectuals.
In 1960 five members of the Project were defeated at the polls (for reasons other than their membership in the Project). Then followed a “post mortem” publication of the Liberal Papers, materials discussed by the Project when it was in existence. Republican leaders called the book “further our than Communism”. The New Frontier Administration repudiated any connection with the statements. Some former members of the Project even disclaimed their past roles.
A hopeful beginning came to a shameful end. But during the demise of the Project, a new spirit of Democratic Party reform was occurring: in New York City, Ithaca, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, California, and even in Mississippi and Alabama where Negro candidates for Congress challenged racist political power. Some were for peace, some for the liberal side of the New Frontier, some for realignment of the parties — and in most cases they were supported by students.
Here and there were stirrings of organized discontent with the political stalemate. Americans for Democratic Action and the New Republic, pillars of the liberal community, took stands against the President on nuclear testing. A split, extremely slight thus far, developed in organized labor on the same issue. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached against the Dixiecrat-Republican coalition across the nation.
5. From 1960 to 1962, the campuses experienced a revival of idealism among an active few. Triggered by the impact of the sit-ins, students began to struggle for integration, civil liberties, student rights, peace, and against the fast-rising right wing “revolt” as well. The liberal students, too, have felt their urgency thwarted by conventional channels: from student governments to Congressional committees. Out of this alienation from existing channels has come the creation of new ones; the most characteristic forms of liberal-radical student organizations are the dozens of campus political parties, political journals, and peace marches and demonstrations. In only a few cases have students built bridges to power: an occasional election campaign, the sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration activities; in some relatively large Northern demonstrations for peace and civil rights, and infrequently, through the United States National Student Association whose notable work has not been focused on political change.
These contemporary social movements — for peace, civil rights, civil liberties labor — have in common certain values and goals. The fight for peace is one for a stable and racially integrated world; for an end to the inherently volatile exploitation of most of mankind by irresponsible elites; and for freedom of economic, political and cultural organization. The fight for civil rights is also one for social welfare for all Americans; for free speech and the right to protest; for the shield of economic independence and bargaining power; for a reduction of the arms race which takes national attention and resources away from the problems of domestic injustice. Labor’s fight for jobs and wages is also one labor; for the right to petition and strike; for world industrialization; for the stability of a peacetime economy instead of the insecurity of the war economy; for expansion of the Welfare State. The fight for a liberal Congress is a fight for a platform from which these concerns can issue. And the fight for students, for internal democracy in the university, is a fight to gain a forum for the issues.
But these scattered movements have more in common: a need for their concerns to be expressed by a political party responsible to their interests. That they have no political expression, no political channels, can be traced in large measure to the existence of a Democratic Party which tolerates the perverse unity of liberalism and racism, prevents the social change wanted by Negroes, peace protesters, labor unions, students, reform Democrats, and other liberals. Worse, the party stalemate prevents even the raising of controversy — a full Congressional assault on racial discrimination, disengagement in Central Europe, sweeping urban reform, disarmament and inspection, public regulation of major industries; these and other issues are never heard in the body that is supposed to represent the best thoughts and interests of all Americans.
An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the “peace credentials” of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them.
The University and Social Change. There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.
First, the university is located in a permanent position of social influence. Its educational function makes it indispensable and automatically makes it a crucial institution in the formation of social attitudes. Second, in an unbelievably complicated world, it is the central institution for organizing, evaluating, and transmitting knowledge. Third, the extent to which academic resources presently is used to buttress immoral social practice is revealed first, by the extent to which defense contracts make the universities engineers of the arms race. Too, the use of modern social science as a manipulative tool reveals itself in the “human relations” consultants to the modern corporation, who introduce trivial sops to give laborers feelings of “participation” or “belonging”, while actually deluding them in order to further exploit their labor. And, of course, the use of motivational research is already infamous as a manipulative aspect of American politics. But these social uses of the universities’ resources also demonstrate the unchangeable reliance by men of power on the men and storehouses of knowledge: this makes the university functionally tied to society in new ways, revealing new potentialities, new levers for change. Fourth, the university is the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.
These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness
* these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.
1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.
2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.
3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.
4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.
5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.
6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities.
But we need not indulge in allusions: the university system cannot complete a movement of ordinary people making demands for a better life. From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter. The power of students and faculty united is not only potential; it has shown its actuality in the South, and in the reform movements of the North.
The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people, and an awakening community of allies. In each community we must look within the university and act with confidence that we can be powerful, but we must look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice.
To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum — research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.
As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus and community across the country. If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.
The Movement and the Workers
By C. Van Lydegraf
Second edition, May 1972
About the second edition:
By 1969 “The Movement” had become a real force with its own identity. And just because there was promise of success in the air, the new revolutionaries were attacked by a lot of people who had supposed that they would be the ones to head up the revolution.
“The Movement and the Workers” was written at that time. It welcomed the new activists but it also tried to examine failings and mistakes and wrong ideas in order to get at sources and causes. It is not a law of history that we endlessly repeat every old mistake.
No modern imperialist country has yet produced a mass revolutionary force that is effective and enduring. This is what makes critical examination of our own understanding and performance such a necessity. Once we can get a clear idea about what is right and what is wrong in our efforts we will already be well on the way to realizing our great potential as a strategic force.
Our problem is how to deal with all the ways that the US empire still uses to control our lives and have its way with us so that it can go on looting and oppressing, even if only on a shrinking portion of the globe.
If the piece were being written now, in May of 1972 rather than in early 1969, I would place less emphasis on overall economic demands and more on collective ways of living and resisting. People should struggle to re-appropriate the loot of empire however they can – by strikes or whatever means.
But this should be done for survival and for revolution; we get nowhere if we only compete for a lot of junk commodities. Unions don’t make workers into a revolutionary class – for that we have to live, think, and fight collectively. Income beyond survival needs and our special skill can be used to build the revolution and to sabotage the evil works of the empire. It’s the only way to live purposefully and joyfully.
* * * * *
At the end of the original text, a new section has been added with comments on events since the time of the first printing.
A revolutionary is not one who becomes revolutionary with onset of the revolution, but one who defends the principles and slogans of the revolution when reaction is most violent and when liberals and democrats vacillate to the greatest degree…
– V.I. Lenin
THE MOVEMENT AND THE WORKERS – BREAKING THROUGH THE SYSTEM FIX
In the 19th century Karl Marx referred to workers as the grave-diggers of capitalism. In the second half of the 20th century some people are asking whether the modern industrial workers are not more likely to bury the revolution than make it.
Movement people are bombarded with contradictory contentions as to the present and future role of these workers and the Establishment-oriented trade unions.
In such political essays, workers are usually presented as purely economic creatures. They may be automated and educated, but for all that they are still pictured as being moved exclusively by calculations of selfish material gain. Robinson Crusoes all, though surrounded by push-buttons.
Assuming that the “affluent society” will go on and on, pessimists write off workers as hopeless. They think that they will have to find someone other than workers to make the revolution – or there won’t be one.
Ritualists from older times rush to “defend” the workers’ good name and give us impassioned assurance that the workers are still programmed for revolution by the laws of political economy. Only there have been delays in the action.
Thus, choice is apparently limited either to giving up or placing hope in prayer-like incantations which have lost their magic. It is no wonder that a new generation of rebels seeks to find a new course. This impulse grows into a passion after exposure to the cowardice, treachery, and shabby maneuvering exhibited by many leaders once regarded as revolutionary communists. Such was the role of the Khrushchev group in the Soviet Union and similar groups in other places including the US.
Most of the new activists were completely alienated from the traditional left. There was at first not enough contact with, or understanding of, the continuing revolutionary struggle in China and other countries to offset these negative reactions. The new movements were temporarily cut off from any close contact with a scientific analysis of revolutionary history.
Naturally enough, Cuba became the Mecca and Che Guevara the prophet of the activists, adding thereby a touch of Latin romance and more than a little of anarchism and military syndicalism. Cuban experience seemed to confirm the idea that a liberation army can do without a party: the guerrilla army leads the revolution to victory without much support from the working class. Regis Debray later converted this speculation into an entire system in his book, Revolution in the Revolution. But puffing it up only makes it more visible and less convincing.
Ours is a society developed and structured in quite a different way than pre-revolutionary Cuba, even if we leave aside the matter of whether Debray does not misread Cuban experience.
So, repelled by deserters and sectarian mini-groups, the new movements set to house-cleaning. Everything went, garbage, furniture, heirlooms. This leaves most old-generation-left veterans feeling like a motherless child, grudging their loss and calling up old memories. But what is important is that the way is now open for new solutions to correct old mistakes and failures.
But not yet having adequate solutions, the new generation takes to borrowing. The result is the damndest eclectic mish-mash that ever was. It is nothing to be alarmed about. All great revolutionary break-throughs have emerged in fierce conflict with obsolete ideas.
The new collection draws upon Fidel and Che heavily, but also from classic Marxism-Leninism. From anarchism and existentialism and pragmatism it derives pure activism. It takes something from US agrarian populism. It often does all this without knowledge of original sources or consideration of historical circumstances. The whole is seasoned with dashes of psychedelia, sex, and pot.
In the hot-house climate of the movement absurd things blossom in a flash. But so widespread is the growth of the revolutionary struggle, that in the end its basic ideas penetrate everywhere. Its leaders from Marx to Mao and Ho become universally known. Through all the muddle the movement grows and painfully solves problems one after the other.
A clear example is the growth of the Black Panther Party and the political impact of its spokesmen, notably Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, but including others. There are now, for the first time since the murder of Malcolm X, leaders who promise to make their own revolutionary understanding and policy meaningful in the lives of their people – and this is a most decisive and strategic constituency. It has been many years since any organization or party has been able to do this. Which makes this a major political event for our country.
If the movement is going to be able to join with white workers to produce our own leap forward, it will first have to work hard to relate to actual fact and not to some dream-world.
Workers individually, as a class, and as part of the entire society are not moved by economics alone. They are structured into the system in a thousand ways just as “middle class” students are. Not in the same roles, but quite as effectively.
What is more, students and intellectuals are not necessarily and entirely middle class. Manual and mental labor are social divisions of labor, but not economic classes as such. Most white collar workers, including PhDs, sell labor power to the boss just like any dishwasher or carpenter and sometimes on worse terms. At the same time, many skilled jobs require workers who are educated. Students and intellectuals who do not make it into status jobs usually end up in the ranks of the workers.
It IS a bit easier to expose the system in the midst of a shattering economic crisis. But it is never easy to radicalize workers. It was not easy even in 1933-35. The process of mass radicalization began among the 17 million unemployed who had no work and who were not all of working class origin to start with. It took some time and enormous effort; it was not spontaneous. Class and long range goals, and political, social, and moral issues all figured in the movement.
The capacity for commitment, sacrifice heroism and comradeship, willingness to put common good ahead of selfish interests – these traits are not a monopoly of young intellectuals. And there is something to be said for the disciplined collective effort and organization which workers are able to produce.
No one can expect the new left to know all these things instantly. But longtime “Marxists” who ignore BASIC Marxism while quoting Marx in the most superior accents imaginable – they have no excuse. They offer Marxism to the new movements in the sorriest condition possible.
Some young people (among them Greg Calvert, Carl Davidson who have written in New Left Notes and in the Guardian) have picked up on this mangled Marxism uncritically. The result is that they deny even some obvious facts such as the effects of bribery and corruption of important parts of the working class through their sharing in a part of the loot of imperialism. On the part of the older opportunists and sectarians (who invented it) this denial is outright falsification of Marx and Lenin. It is also a less than honest attempt to gain friends in labor by flattery and overlooking shortcomings. The young, in this case, are guilty of no more than thoughtlessly aping their elders.
If the new left essayists will take the time to read more carefully the Communist Manifesto and some of Lenin, that will be a very great gain for the movement.
Competition among workers, sectional and selfish interests, short-term favors, plus social pressure and national and racial chauvinism have quite often diverted various groups of workers, and even entire national contingents, from a revolutionary role to one that is either passive or reactionary in its effect. The US imperialists of today have a very great mass of wealth from super-profiteering and they have had a rather lengthy period of relative prosperity in which to manipulate various sections of the population.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that communists (the Marxists of a century ago) are those who concern themselves with the overall class interests of the workers and not just some craft or national sector, and with the future, not just a momentary selfish advantage.
In the 1920s Lenin, writing about Europe and North America in the book Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, stated, “…There (in the West), the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, unfeeling covetous, petty-bourgeois ‘labor aristocracy’ imperialistically-minded, and bribed and corrupted by imperialism, represents a much stronger stratum than in our country.” Revolutions are made by facing problems, not by denying that they exist. Taking state power is a big job, still in the future. Meanwhile, things must be done to open the way. Workers are still the prime movers and shakers at the social base – calling up this force is the generative act which shapes the future – motivity is its product.
NEW BEGINNINGS – ASSORTED HANGUPS
The new movements did not stop with repudiation of reformist and timid spokesmen who had presided over the decline of the left. The reactionary labor bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and other parts of the system’s liberal front also came under heavy fire. The NAACP monopoly of speaking for all Negroes was shattered by young and militant Blacks. Within the movements, high-handed bureaucratic ways were replaced by the new-style near-anarchy of “participatory democracy.”
This political storm gathered and took shape with the US capitalist economy as “healthy” as it ever gets and with its military and diplomatic strength at an all time peak. But for all its might, the US experienced major military and policy defeats one after another in China, Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam.
This exposure of the inner weakness of the US colossus was a major event in the growth and education of the new left. The political action which brings this lesson home through militant tactics of confrontation and de-sanctification is a very great achievement. Another strong point of the new actionists is the fact that, having seen through the deceptions of imperialism, they take the side of the future, renouncing prospects of elite and privileged careers.
The movements were repelled by opportunist misuse of logic and dialectic to cover failure and cowardice. Being unready to detect and correct bad theory, they turned to the concept of direct action. But without the orientation which comes from scientific theory, bold plans and daring deeds can cover underlying frustration and feelings of impotency when confronted by a powerful enemy. In these circumstances, even earnest efforts to cope with social problems and class struggle easily turn into phantasmagoria.
Recently a systematic politics of frustration has been patched together and offered as a “new stage,” usually called neo-capitalism. What is important here is not the authors’ intentions or the froth of the theoretics, but its content and effect.
The aimlessness of pure direct-action and the passivity of dropping out is to be “improved” by substituting a more sophisticated “neo-Marxism” no. 1001. The common starting point of these efforts is to declare that imperialism is not essential to US capitalism and that the owners themselves will soon discard it as outmoded and too crude. The arms race will soon fade away for the same reason.
This purely imaginary elimination of imperialism is asserted as if it were obvious fact without need of proof or argument. To help the wish pass as an idea, it is added that by planned obsolescence and “consumerism” (the selling of junk commodities, the expansion of credit) the system can get by nicely with an expanded home market. All the fuss and bother of exporting capital and keeping up the massive and costly military establishment is not necessary.
The source of this glittering vision of transfiguration seems to be a hope of getting around the presumed desertion of the revolution by the workers. Now the contradictions and consequences of imperialism may be dealt with apart from basic economics, state power, and revolution.
Having started with purely economic man, the theorists have now dispensed with basic economics entirely. Solutions may be looked for in juggling books, planning, sociology, advertising, psychology, media, and tactics. Here the “new working class” – that is the graduate student and others with special training and skills – can take care of everything. Marx’s proletarian is still welcome to the revolution, but only as a guest; no longer is he the source of power.
The system will no longer need nasty wars or the genocide of Blacks, Browns, Reds, much less fellow Whites. Internationalism becomes a highly moral pleasure, self-satisfying and purging and not calling for anyone to shed blood in obsolete wars of liberation.
The self-contained US can easily be re-structured. There can be a rational society dwelling amid peace and luxury while crass materiality is scorned. Since only the imperialists benefit from the obsolete empire, while workers remain pure, (even though they gave up their own class revolution to chase after commodities) communism can come at once. There might even be left over things for generous distribution to poor and undeveloped countries.
The new theorists do not examine these absurdities which they have brought into the world. They do not indicate awareness of them nor offer explanations. They are content that they have exorcised the innermost being of US capitalism by officially declaring imperialism to be no more than a ghost. It is exhilarating to think of confronting a ruling power reduced to a body of zombies without class aims. Such is the content of “neo-capitalism.” But the achievements of the new left, such as its withering criticism of the life – and the weaknesses of the old left – are not strengthened by such fantasy.
It is also true that the historic left had a genuinely positive side – this will have its impact as the record is better understood. But doctrinaire solutions of 20 or 30 years standing, combined with inability to define, much less resolve, new facts and problems, or relate to new people with new ways, can in no way further the cause of Marxism or social change and revolution. There is nothing to teach unless we are first willing to learn.
The new activists are wrong in a number of things, but the contempt which they express for distorted Marxism and bad advice is highly justified and valuable. Marxists within the movement, both the old and the young, have to be able to help work out genuine solutions to problems rather than hawk useless cure-alls. Action is aimless without the purposefulness which comes from theory. But theory that is not integrated with the action is lifeless and turns into just another obstacle, Only the combination of theory derived from practice and practice enlightened by theory can create that basic orientation which is urgently needed by the entire movement, but which is achieved so painfully and with so many false turns.
THE ROOTS OF EMPIRE AND THE CRISIS IN OUR LIVES
Imperialism as a full blown stage in our history dates from about the turn of the century, but its roots go back to the earliest colonizers.
The first Europeans to set up enclaves on the Atlantic seaboard built their plantations and businesses by taking advantage of refugees from political and religious persecution and so availed themselves of indentured servants and convict labor. The conditions of these workers were very near to those of outright slavery, which itself was quickly established in the middle and southern colonies with the importation of Black slaves from Africa. The land for these colonial free enterprises was “granted” by the King of England, but in fact it was seized by driving off and exterminating the native red Indians.
Many northern as well as southern family fortunes of the founding fathers rested on one or more of the three corners of colonial trade: sailing sugar and molasses to New England, rum, spirits, and tobacco to Europe, slaves from Africa to the West Indies and the Southern colonies, and repeat. After the invention of the cotton gin, the textile industry was worked into the scheme, with the middle and southern Atlantic coast turning to slave breeding for the middle and western slave states as the soil was exhausted in the east. To serve this new branch of the economy, the slave trade from Africa was closed out with great humanitarian ceremonies.
Later a vast part of the present territory of the US was “purchased” from France, which had seized title by sending canoe expeditions down the Mississippi and up its western branches. Additional wars were cooked up to clear out the various Indian tribes such as the Cheyenne, Sioux, Apache, Nez Perce from the west generally, and the nation of Mexico from Texas, the Southwest and California. Alaska, which had been stolen by agents of the Russian Tsar, was purchased from that ruler without regard to the Indian, Aleut, and Eskimo inhabitants. Hawaii was annexed by threats and the British were pushed out of the Oregon Territory.
Unequal treaties were ceremonially signed with the Indians remaining after the wars, giving them empty promises in return for real land and resources. In sum, the foundation of all the special advantages, the productive “genius,” and the exceptional wealth of the USA commences with the plain and simple seizure by force of arms and genocide of the common property and lives of the original Americans. It rests equally upon the labor and life blood of millions of Black slaves.
The vision of the shining, clean young-giant of a nation built by the sweat and toil of free farmers on free-land and free workers in free enterprise is one of the original big lies. For generations going back to middle age European feudalism, the Christian churches and the earliest merchants, traders, shop keepers, and manufacturers have busily taught contempt for the rights and the lives of the dark-skinned heathen whom they regard as less than human.
The attitudes and habits of imperial white supremacy came with the first settlers. They continued in effect right through the war of independence, when we exercised our right of revolution (in the name of all mankind). We did not recognize the crimes of colonizing as crimes at all; most people justified the practice, and many actively pushed expansion to the west. All our schools still teach the conquest of the west as a mark of national greatness. In our schools, not only African-American history is butchered; so is our entire history, especially that of labor.
Only with the abolitionists and John Brown is there a small break with the rationale of slavery and genocide, only then does it seem possible that the words of the Declaration of Independence may one day be taken seriously by the people and used against the exploiters and oppressors. This is the positive side of our history – but we have still not found it possible to do what is needed to eliminate the slave-making and colonizing nature of our society. John Brown’s unfulfilled goal is at the heart of the contemporary crisis.
It is true that most people in the 1840-1850 decade owned no slaves, drew no income directly from the plantations, hunted down no fugitives. Many were quite as free, in their own opinion, from guilt in the matter as were most Germans 100 years later in the matter of the gas-oven deaths of millions of fellow Germans and Europeans – most of whom also happened to be white, but were also Jews, reds, Poles, Russians and others cast out of the human race by the Nazi race laws – their law and order. (These laws had an ideological prototype in the pioneering slogan of the expanding US: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”)
When the fascist crimes of German, Italian, and Japanese empire are compared with the performance of the U .S. in Vietnam and in the ghettos in this country, there remains no grounds for a plea of ignorance – the essential identity is clear.
Land piracy and genocide are the ultimate source of all those “natural’ geographic, climatic, and ethnic virtues usually cited to account for the exceptionally “high standard of living” of the US.
The methods of modern imperialism are still brutal enough, but they are habitually covered by indirect and sophisticated technique. The real content of still more efficient and intensive oppression and extermination is revealed only when they are effectively resisted as in Vietnam. The historic seizure of the rich lands of the Indians now serves as a model to imitate everywhere. This is the pattern of the US take-over of ranches and oil wells and iron ore mines in Venezuela, the same in Brazil with coffee added, tin in Bolivia, copper in Chile, bananas in Guatemala, oil in the middle east, not long ago it was Cuban sugar and Chinese rice as well.
The modern equivalent of Black slave labor is not confined to the US. It is reproduced in the low prices paid for the oil, iron, and bananas of the new style colonies and in the inflated prices which the monopolists command for their cloth, machines, guns, and “protection” which they export in return. This produces underdevelopment and misery in Africa, South and Central America, Asia, even Canada. It is the cause of starvation wages in Brazil, the Congo, in Panama.
The cavalry, whiskey, and trading goods used against Indians have counter-parts in the jets, napalm, bombs, and peace-corps of today.
Not content with strip-mining humanity, imperialism proceeds to strip-mine the source of life, the earth itself.
Colossal amounts of precious and limited minerals, raw materials, and other resources are being rapidly and wastefully consumed, and in such a way that land, air, and water are spoiled and poisoned in the process. A very large proportion of basic industrial supplies and some kinds of food and agricultural products come here from abroad. Some have estimated that the US consumes about 60% of all raw materials entering into production in the capitalist world, and that we import about the same amount of that from outside our borders.
The US does in fact have bases in all parts of the world. It does spend 100 billion per year on military projects. It is expanding its capital investments abroad. It does make higher profits there. It does expand its holdings in other countries. It does control sources of cheap raw materials. It does try to police the world. It does send AFL-CIO labor traitors abroad with money and threats to contain and destroy labor struggle there.
To reverse all that would cripple precisely most of the greatest corporations and fortunes of the vast industrial and financial and commercial sub-empires of the US General Motors and Standard Oil, Aramco, DuPont, and General Electric are not easy to write-off. Such a reversal would also shatter the plush world of the high military.
The record demolishes the contention that there is no corruption of workers, or other parts of the people, by US imperialism and that the boasted affluence of our society has no effect upon most of the people. The idea is equally unsupportable that by manipulating domestic markets the US economy can get along quite well without the export of capital or extortionate terms of trade and war budgets.
Those who have wiped out imperialism with a stroke of the pen should look again: it is still in business and not for our health but to make super-profit and hang on to power and survive.
It is totally irrelevant whether in theory our country might have developed in another way under different historical circumstances. The fact is that the US right now plays top imperial hog. If we are to speculate, we might consider whether, if tables were reversed, the US would not more nearly resemble India or Indonesia, than it would a small auxiliary economy such as that of Sweden or Switzerland. The real rather than fantastic difference between imperialism and its victims is precisely that between relative affluence and utter misery.
Liberation, if it is to be genuine, must mean that at home and in Africa and Asia and Latin America all the special privileges of US imperialism will have to be undone. There can be no more exchanging the production of a year’s labor of a US worker (priced at $20,000 by the monopoly corporations) for products which represent more than an entire working life for the laborer in a colonized economy (rated at about $400 per year by the unequal terms of trade).
The argument that the US worker does not have any part of the system’s affluence can only be tested by comparing with world standards, depression levels, and long range trends.
Compared to India – the US is affluent. Compared to US 1933 – the US 1968 is affluent. Compared to US families below the level of $3,000 per year – US $12,000 per year is affluent. This is not at all to say that the worker who makes a comparatively large wage has the good life. He still lives his life on the terms of the system.
Those who deny affluence assume that it is good. Since capitalism is bad and cannot do good, affluence must be denied. Actually, under capitalism, affluence is nothing else but a shorter or longer period of increasing economic activity when in a given country fewer people are starving and more are sharing in the consumption of luxury commodities. While this is more tolerable than fighting each day to live to the next, there is no cause to fear that the system has got it made.
The relative prosperity of the US is the product of tightening up exploitation and oppression world-wide and is proving to be very shaky. To pursue the goal of personal enrichment is to live in a fool’s paradise.
One who undertakes to disprove the existence of affluence among workers is Carl Davidson. (Guardian, Nov. 23, 1968, page 6.) He follows in the footsteps of many old left writers who always “prove” this with data about average wages and minimum budget needs. He cited a 1967 average of $116 take home wage for a family of four. He breaks down this figure into several lower categories to show that most families of industrial workers get a good deal less than that. He gives one higher average, that of 3.3 million construction workers who take home $127 per week.
Of course this is peanuts on the scale of bourgeois standards of income in this country. And the fact is that even the highest figure does not guarantee that any family will be able to meet its material requirements plus what have come to be defined as our needs. Even $20,000 or $30,000 a year would still not compare to the system’s higher salary levels. It still is not the good life – it still is caught up in the rat-race. What is more decisive is that under the political economy of imperialism, if a million or so workers “rise” to the $20,000 income level, then they will be used to hold down and grind the face of 500 times that number elsewhere so that imperialism gets ten or a hundred times its money’s worth out of the high price it paid for their labor. This is why, at times, big business men are quite willing to bargain with official labor.
Further, an average which conceals the existence of lower paid groups also conceals the higher wages which make the average come out. Davidson’s lower categories REVEAL the existence of much higher paid groups than any he mentions. It can be no secret that at $6 PLUS an hour, and double time for overtime, many construction workers make $12,000 per year and more.
On the west coast, longshoremen have averaged $9,000 and $10,000 per year and more in the larger ports. In reporting union enforcement of penalties for pilfering cargo, William Gettings, International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union Northwest regional director, states that for a first offense a longshoreman loses work for 60 days, this being equal to a fine of about $2,000. On a second offense a man loses his job plus “… a $235 pension (monthly) for the rest of his life, $13,000 in severance pay and welfare benefits…” (Case of 27-year man convicted of taking two bottles of liquor. Seattle Times, 12-6-68.)
In a family with the equivalent of two such $ 12,000 incomes, (here we are not concerned with whether it comes from moonlighting, overtime, extra worker, playing landlord etc., only with comparing family totals) the total would be $24,000. A family with two $3,000 incomes, only $6,000. The difference is the equivalent of the income of 6 low wage workers. The 4 to 1 ratio assumed here is smaller than many actual cases, which can go to 10 to 1 and more. Again, this is very small when compared to income of big capitalists and management; ratios can go to 1000 to 1. When all the relevant conclusions are drawn from economic data, the result is different than when only those supporting one’s wishful thinking are taken into account. The system has been able to divide and co-opt some of the workers. This fact needs to be faced and dealt with and not ignored and hidden from view.
Even the very real decline in real wages often cited contributes to relative affluence. The better organized workers concentrated in the biggest corporations and more prosperous trades have won the biggest share of the increases and benefits. Those in weaker unions or not organized such as workers in retail trade, some parts of food, and agriculture, hospital workers, local government, and school and college staff other than higher paid teaching posts, are all worse off. In addition to lower wages, they have inferior medical service and pay more proportionately for rent and food which show the highest price rises.
Persons not limited to the world of statistics, but who have some contact with actual skilled workers, know that corruption exists. Corruption is the willingness to put selfish gain ahead of class solidarity or public interest. A small but significant number of workers are also landlords, dabble in real estate or stocks, own beer taverns etc. Certain union contracts are basically job trusts. Sons, in-laws, buddies get the jobs and the apprenticeships. For the best jobs, there are no openings for Blacks or women or outside young persons. Jurisdictional squabbles are everyday stuff. The impact of all this goes far beyond those directly involved.
This pattern is not purely economic. The whole society orients the worker toward competition in accumulating things, doing his job, taking orders and allotting all responsibility for major decision making to bosses and politicians. The worker’s bag is supposed to be limited to baseball, football, TV beer and cards. He should support his family, produce the real wealth and be content to know that he is as good as anyone, maybe a little better. Of this “structured and channeled life style” the new theorists display not the foggiest notion. Many veterans know these things very well but either take it as normal, or being ashamed of it, talk nonsense and babble about class conscious militant and revolutionary-minded workers about to rise and dump the AFL-CIO mis-leaders in the ash can.
Poverty, starvation, and affluence are not mutually exclusive; in the US they exist at the same time and often side by side. Poverty is the necessary foundation for affluence under capitalism and imperialism which make their super-profits from exploitation and oppression.
The existence of poverty is a spur to insure a supply of loyal and industrious labor. It is also a source of profit for ghetto landlords, merchants, and sweat-shop employers who are an essential part of the total system. Why should the system eliminate if it could, anything so useful and indispensable?
The superior conditions of the better-off parts of labor are always fragile and subject to change. But even in bad times, the most favored are not hit quite so hard or so soon by wage cuts and unemployment, evictions etc. So the competition and division pressures are built into the whole structure. Against this, the only weapon of the workers is their political understanding and class solidarity. This is what scabs in union office are trying to destroy when they commit labor to support crimes against other working people, as, for example, war in Vietnam.
This negative side has to be analyzed and faced. It does not mean that everything is lost or that workers must be written off as a revolutionary force. It does mean that the class interest of workers must be defined in terms of 1969, US and not in terms of 1933. The heart of the matter is that, contrary to surface appearances, there is no real security or future prospects for the majority of workers in the individual or craft rat-race for the biggest chunk of pie. The only way to win is to fight the entire system. Since time is not unlimited, we have to start learning to do this.
COMPANY MEN WITH A UNION CARD
Business Unionism rests on the basis of capitalist economics including a portion of the proceeds from imperialism. This is not just pure and simple sell-out and crude bribery. There is a social base and there are ideological roots.
Since World War II, there has been a decline in class conscious action among workers. Many officially recognized unions have become more conservative, even reactionary, in their total role. This is so in spite of some upsurges in strike action and even where, by way of exception, some unions like the former Mine Mill union and the ILWU continue to give lip service to radical positions on some issues.
This does not mean that workers deliberately sell out by the millions. Nor is it only that they are sold against their will by Meany, Reuther, and Bridges, although that happens. The trap is not so simple.
Business unionism flies two main banners, “collective bargaining” and the “partnership of business and labor.” Collective bargaining is the hard won right of workers to be represented by their unions. This right was a life and death matter to workers who had no other way to defend their right to live and improve their conditions.
Collectivity is a very good thing. But today it usually means for one trade, one industry, one corporation, one union, one craft, one crew. It often comes down to a small group of high seniority, highly skilled, better paid old timers in the union whom the officers pay the most attention in order to stay in power. This has great effect upon those next in line for the better jobs and positions. When wild-cat strikes erupt from below, even these are not often connected with radical social or political aims. Usually they are limited to seeking gains in relative standing within the existing structure.
As for bargaining, it once meant more than it literally implies; now it is an accurate definition of what goes on. Usually it goes something like this: union officials and company representatives, with professional assistance from highly paid corporation, union, and federal lawyers and experts, determine how much the company will be willing to pay for continued labor co-operation and peace and how little the workers may be willing to accept. It is determined how to distribute that price to he best effect among various demands, and what the union may be willing to give up in return. Finally, a method of selling the entire package to members and to the public must be decided upon.
In an earlier day of more militant action, demands concerned many very basic things, such as across the board increases o a living wage level, union recognition, seniority to prevent blacklisting of militant workers, anti-discrimination clauses or fair and rotating hiring and dispatching procedures. Rank and file workers on strike often were decisive in the negotiating committees. Political and social issues were part of union activity. Free Tom Mooney, defend the Scottsboro Boys, unemployment benefits, and social security for everybody, all working people, by many unions.
Typical demands at present are quite different. Big increases for the 5 or 6 dollar an hour level, small or no increases for new hires. Wages for women, young people, and jobs usually filled by Black workers still move around the $1.65 per hour minimum or less. Hospital, dental, medical care for the permanent workers of one company, higher pensions for 20 and 30 year men of one company or association.
Of course, when even a few thousand families gain added health services or better pensions, this is good for them individually. But when the benefit” is a concealed pay-off designed to divide them from fellow-workers and from millions of oppressed now taking up the fight against the common enemy, that benefit has too high a price. It is the price of supporting, or contributing to, by passive consent, such things as the spread of fascism, aggressive war and national and racial oppression and genocide. It is to accept the ruling class trap – take whatever you can today and to hell with all the rest.
The alternative is not to give up health service or better pensions. It is to fight for adequate protection for all the working people, as well as those unable to work. Granting exclusive rights to some and denying the same to others is a basic strategy of the system. This is also true in different ways in the educational system, the draft, and all major institutions of the Establishment. Divide and rule is still its basic strategy and best tactic.
Such bargains seem reasonable; they make the big companies pay. But they build up more and more privilege and offer little or nothing to the young, the women, the minority workers. They also raise health and housing costs out sight for everyone else due to medical rackets, etc. They take the government off the hook. Such deals are reactionary in social content – they divide the workers and the people. “Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost” replaces the old union slogan, “one for all and all for one.”
A worker with so much depending on his boss and the company is open to all kinds of pressure to go along with the system. This does not put the worker in the same class with all the big and middling parasites who make it big on unearned income. The co-opted worker is not the main enemy. But if facts of this kind are not faced it will be a thousand times more difficult to create a new radical and revolutionary working class force.
How can old fighters with much experience get sucked into such traps? How can they allow the collective class weapon, the union, to be turned into a mere business institution for the benefit of the boss and a few high paid workers? Why don’t lower paid workers rebel? What happened to international solidarity, especially with the Black and the Vietnamese workers and our long range common interest against our common enemy?
KARL MARX: “WAGE LABOR RESTS EXCLUSIVELY ON COMPETITION BETWEEN THE LABORERS.”
Communist Manifesto, 1848
Part of the answer (in general we do not expect to find full answers at once, but only to open up some new directions and new questions) WAS the treachery and desertion of a class struggle outlook by onetime left workers and radicals in the unions who formerly worked to keep alive the revolutionary background and the democratic and anti-slavery traditions of struggle of the labor movement.
But it is also a fact that the left has never taken seriously the reactionary side of US history: so far the dangerous de-facto involvement and entrapment of parts of the people in the crimes of the system have been ignored.
Partly for this reason, after World War II the left was not prepared to meet the heavy attack of US super-egotism and arrogance disguised as “patriotic” resistance to world communism. A very big defeat was suffered through the failure of most of the left to vigorously defend Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were framed and executed on a treason charge by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as a major blow against the left.
Timidity and panic of this sort opened the way for the Establishment to launch a big brain-washing throughout the nation. With the left weakened, conservatives were able to take advantage of the workers’ need for unions to consolidate their own control and policy. This was made easier by the fact that workers often depend upon one occupation, one boss, one location, one union and are thus vulnerable to blacklisting and have little recourse if thrown on the street.
Productive workers are usually proud of that role. But they are almost entirely cut off from decision making powers in important matters. The only place they have an effective voice is in the union and in a token way by voting. And the union now tells them that the system is really OK. It just needs tuning up and a patch or two.
If workers resist and oppose this line they jeopardize all their benefits from the union which are very real to the individual workers. The dispatcher will pass them by for good jobs or for any job at all. The BA (business agent) will not go to bat for them and may even help to get them fired or sent to jail.
Some unions with a left militant background did not give way at once. But with steady pressure and the growth of war boom, they too fell into line. Again, the west coast longshoremen (ILWU) are an example. This union, unlike most, opposed the Vietnam war – in words and in convention resolutions. But its members make a very good living out of the boom in shipping due to the need for supplies to murder Vietnamese. The union has yet to take its first action to halt such traffic. (Some individuals have.) Outright company unions do not do a much more effective job of scabbing on fellow-workers.
The excuse of the union officers is, “We cannot do anything by ourselves, we would be crushed.” In reality they are out to get all the “blood money,” as Bridges calls it, that they can. (He has a running dialogue going with the Navy over jurisdiction over civil service loaders of ammunition from Navy dumps, as at Bangor, WA.) A few years ago, Bridges made his notorious modernization and mechanization agreement which traded working rules and conditions for a few millions in a special union fund. In five years, the stevedoring and shipping companies made an extra profit of close to 100 million on the deal. The ILWU is not worse than others, it is only that the hypocrisy is more repulsive because of all the “left” talk.
Unions serve a need in defending the livelihood and conditions of workers and their right to organize has to be defended against those who wish to weaken and destroy the labor movement.
But at the same time union members are also victimized by scabs in union offices at business executive salaries running from $25,000 a year up to $150,000 and more, with lifetime pensions to boot. They are also protected from membership control by devices like union dues check-off by the boss and by government imposed regulations, reports, FBI surveillance, fines for militant action, compulsory arbitration and conspiracy laws etc. Many unions are also big investors in business, real-estate, banks and insurance companies.
No one is more loyal to imperialism or more ready to do its dirty work than a “labor statesman” like George Meany. But the Establishment is not sentimental. If one of them gets a little out of line he may be sent to jail like Jimmy Hoffa. In tough times, or if it offers more profit, the partnership of business and labor will be dumped and the bosses will go back to plain and simple union busting.
What workers need is their own version of a new left movement to clean house in labor. They need organization with a class outlook and fighting muscle instead of a mere business expediting machine for carrying cut the boss’s and the government’s labor relations policies. It is not possible to transform the labor movement by trying to out wheel and deal the professional labor skates. It is necessary to oppose them with a movement which serves the genuine class interest of working people.
These facts are not given so that others may feel superior to the industrial workers. Whether loading napalm or running a computer for General Motors, or teaching school, every person in the US is involved in imperialism in some way and has both a responsibility to fight against it as well as an interest in doing so – except for imperialists and their camp-followers. The first step toward effective struggle is to see that it is necessary and accept the responsibility.
The line of denial of the effects of corruption and bribery by the imperialist system is worse than mere passivity, it is self-defeating. If the fact is denied, who will try to change it? Workers and most of the people are not the criminals; they only carry the criminals on their backs. This is what has to be changed.
Lower income workers are also affected by the competitive forces which corrupt many high paid workers. But their situation is different. Many are un-organized; for others there are unions which make little, if any effort to improve wages and conditions. Wages are near or below minimums. (Waitresses and hotel workers, laundry and hospital, farm, clerks, many office and government workers.) Things happen like no wage increases at all, or 4 to 6 cent increases frozen into three year contracts. Speed up and cutting of staff goes on constantly.
A big part of keeping these workers in their place is the sex, color, and age discrimination and division tactic. This is enforced not only by the individual boss, but by the whole system.
Women are a very large part of the work force in these industries. So are Blacks and minority national groups. The inferior sex rationale is in full force. If there is a working husband or son in the house, then the woman is making “extra” money, or at least it is hers and not his to control, sometimes. If there is no man, then with children to support, the problem may be posed as one of personal hardship, broken family, illness etc. – a case worker type problem – or self-blame may be picked up from the bosses’ tradition that workers are stupid. Anyone who has more than average education or other qualification does not work long in such jobs without being asked by some other worker: “What is someone like you doing in this hole?”
In these industries there were formerly many left-minded activists. During the cold war and McCarthy period they were cleaned out by top union officials, by jailings, prosecutions, and firings. In some cases, like maritime and logging, they succeeded in transforming the occupation from low-paid to high-paid and gradually joined the “labor aristocracy.” This poses the critical problem: how to support the justified demands of low-paid workers for wages and conditions without repeating once more that characteristic pattern of labor opportunism and reformism?
The answer is not necessarily in new radical unions. Workers are loyal to even very bad unions knowing how much worse off they would be with no unions. And consider the present AFL-CIO push to co-opt the Agricultural Workers organization of Delano which threatened to actually organize farm workers in a militant and slightly radical way. The bureaucrats know a million ways to sabotage struggle while condemning the ranks for apathy and indifference.
Workers are inevitably concerned with immediate conditions – both to hold whatever they have and to make gains if they can. But petty reforms or even substantial gains of themselves do not change the system in the slightest. The only way to break through the vicious circle of petty reforms (this is called economism or pure and simple trade-unionism – but it is NOT non-political, it is political on the side of the system) is basically a mass understanding that the working people as a total social group, that is as a class, cannot beat the system; the pre-condition of real change is to take it over and do it in. One way this understanding grows is when workers demand not just what is reasonable and easy for the boss to grant, but also fight for those social and political demands which the system should be able to deliver, but which it is unable or unwilling to concede.
The criticism made above of some shallow thinking among part of the new left does not mean that they have not done some great things which can help to solve these problems. Analysis and theory is still a good deal behind the action and politics. But this does not mean everything is one big floundering mess, as some think. There are a number of solid starting points to move ahead from:
1.
Action against the Vietnam war and to support Black liberation has been a very hard blow to the public image and moral posturing of the system.
2.
Action at home too has helped to show that imperialism is not invincible; it can be successfully resisted.
3.
There are people, mainly the young, who have the ability and the guts to reject the values of the system and live for something other than conspicuous consumption covered by a false rationale. This is the REAL importance of the rejection of consumerism – not its projection into a fantastic market solution for capitalism.
The rejection of consumerism and waste and junk commodities and poisoning our lives and our environment, which we referred to as strip mining the earth above indicts one of the biggest of the crimes of imperialism.
If we consider this crime in the context of the Cultural Revolution slogan – fight self-interest, promote public interest – we will be able to get closer to the heart of the problem of the labor movement and the genuine interests of the workers. Labor demands must be conceived in a way which meets collective rather than purely selfish interest.
In addition to seeking collective action and collective controls over our productive and intellectual lives, we need to organize a unified social bloc as collective consumers. Individual competition and consumerism is another non-solution and a trap for all working people. Realizing this, how do we move?
For example, we should not put forward or support, but should oppose creating any more separatist company and union health, hospital, and dental plans. We should fight for such care for all people who need it. Existing plans should be taken into a general plan. We should see to it that public health services come under the control and direction of consumers, not the government and the medical elite. Pensions, social security, disability, and unemployment compensation – these should all be re-examined as universal social rights and as obligations of society, rather than as objects of craft bargaining. Educational opportunities for workers and work opportunities for students offer another field where new directions and new demands are required. There is a need to fight for financing at the expense of profits and waste and the war budget. (Some individual union members with whom this has been discussed object to criticizing present union contract demands for health benefits. All support a general demand for universal care at state expense. Most young workers and all students consulted favor the present wording.)
There is a need for workers to sponsor an entirely new approach to taxes and budgeting to take the load off the lowest paid workers and the unemployed and to work out new concepts of social welfare. These should be based on the idea of providing all the social services in the most effective and collective way under community and consumer control and organization.
In particular there should be a fight against expanding the Madison Avenue nightmare concept of mechanized domestic factories grinding out channeled little American lives by the efforts of menial female and child labor. Everything that can be done better socially and with trained and skilled labor should be done collectively, co-operatively, and without waste and poisonous by-products. Laundry, food preparation and storage, heating, housing, cleaning, and above all transportation are some things which need to be socialized and collectivized to go along with adequate child care as part of the liberation of women, without which there will be no genuine liberation of anybody.
In sum unions should remain in the field of politics and social action but they should be forced to get back on the side of the workers and the people by an uprising from below. Certain things need to be kept in mind:
The economy is a closely intermingled mix of private and state – no major sector can be dealt with separately.
Black workers and Black community may no longer be ignored or used; they will have an equal and strategic weight in all decisions and structure.
The US economy and politics are international. Nothing will serve labor which does not accord with the needs of oppressed workers in other countries. So long as imperialism exists there will be oppression and exploitation, but meanwhile we can fight against all acts of aggression, all unequal treaties, discriminatory laws and tariffs. We can interfere with the military and diplomatic and cultural implementation of imperialism.
The general inability of students and intellectuals to relate the immediate concerns of workers to the general class and public interest is a mountain size road-block in the way of creating a new labor-left. Our generation of young people have become the voice of radical politics and of the future because they have arrived at exactly the right time.
The system is undergoing a severe crisis in credibility caused by the gaping chasm between its liberal pose and its contrastingly miserable fascist and genocidal performances in Vietnam and in the ghettos.
When the Establishment took fright from the first Soviet Sputnik, it hastily created college level educational factories and drew in hundreds of thousands and millions of new students. They could not all be safe conservatives from stable families. Furthermore, the draft began to haunt and channel their lives. They were expected to assume the chores of running the Establishment and defend it loyally – in return for good position and pay and much status. But the breakdown of the liberal rationale by hard facts and revolutionary ideas filtering in spite of everything spoiled the plan.
Many students already questioned the emptiness of a life of collecting material gadgets as the big deal. Without too many immediate obligations, not tied to a boss or conservative union – they were free to think. The system needed them, but for a while it had no real controls over them.
The students made free to reject the values of the universities and to determine their own personal direction, to do their thing. The role of the student and the impact of Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Black struggles fitted them to rebel. Some became directly political, some tried to drop out of the system’s anti-culture.
Ironically – the same things which alienated the young people from the Establishment and turned them into radicals and carriers of a new wave of revolutionary excitement, also took forms which alienated them from the workers who remained straight – socially and politically – for the workers were not yet hit directly by the crisis in the super-structure. Later it reaches the workers in the crisis of the military and manpower. …
The intellectual gets disgusted with the conservatism he sees in the worker who is supposed to gain the most from revolution and is to be its chief maker, but who seems not interested. So when the intellectual wants to be friendly because he has heard about Marxism and the need for a working class base – then he does not know what to do and he invents a hundred theories and dozens of organizing projects.
On other subjects the intellectual would do his thing – he would study the problem. This one seems simple – it is pure economics. The workers are assumed to be paid off and hopeless or else they do not know yet that they are poor and can never make it. So the intellectual must prove to the workers that they really are poor.
There is arrogance in this: the assumption that working people will respond only to economic bait – that they are not capable of the same social, political, and moral judgment and motivation and commitment as the student, who in turn may not have yet tried himself out on unemployment compensation or relief-check living. This is snobbery not based on facts.
The movement needs better answers as to the roots of conservatism in the labor movement, what exactly are the problems and outlook of workers. After learning some of this, better grounds for unity in action can be worked out. There should not be illusions that the direction of seeking solutions proposed here is easy to carry out successfully – few real solutions are.
BREAKING THROUGH THE TRAP
When the US took charge of the bankrupt business which came to it as spoils after World War II, it fully expected to be a success because of its superior assets as compared to fascist Germany and Japan.
The US surpasses the axis powers in many ways. It delivers flaming death from the air instead of from obsolete gas ovens. It has computerized all of the planning. It has 2000 and more bases scattered all around in an effort to make a jailhouse out of the entire globe. It has dropped more explosives on one small part of Asia than were used by all countries in all of World War II.
But it too is losing. It has overtaxed its strength and is slipping down the hill. Costs continue to mount while the returns cannot keep pace. The US has set world records in exporting capital and armed force and in importing profits and looted materials. But this in turn has provoked a new world record in resistance which the U .S. is unable to overcome.
The present crisis is a crisis of overexpansion – of gulping down too many indigestibles. This crisis is different in form than that of 1929 which was world wide but broke out first in the domestic economy of the US. This economy is now internationalized. It has exported its contradictions on a world scale where they grow faster than ever.
This crisis is more severe than any before: any one of several main features are potentially fatal to imperialism.
There is that world wide resistance which exposes the boasted military power of the US. Small peoples beat the stuffing out of it. The military is spread thin, trying to hang on everywhere. It gets disorganized and panicky and costs soar. The rank and file of the armed forces become disaffected, and these men and women are mostly young workers.
The democratic and liberal pretensions of the system are rapidly discredited and with the loss of popular support, allies get shaky.
The big corporations make the profit; costs are paid mostly by the government. As these costs rise, the dollar trembles, inflation and higher taxes threaten the middle and poor sections of the people and the weaker parts of the war distorted economy. This uneven effect widens the gap between rich and poor. Alienation increases between those who profit from war and oppression and those who pay the costs.
The eventual crack-up casts its shadow before. This sharpens all the more the clash between the liberal rationale and hard facts for the young people and intellectuals who are being prepared to organize and supervise the dirty work.
Those peoples fighting imperialism abroad, as, for example, Vietnamese and Cubans, have not generally demanded restitution or punishment fitting to the crimes of the US. They have merely said: “Yankee go home.” But there is at home a strong contingent of peoples also oppressed even while embedded in the society and economy of the US. They begin to find themselves as distinct peoples differing from others only in that their colonial and oppressed status is internal to the US rather than external.
But as to these peoples, Black, Red Indian, and Brown Mexican-American, where shall they invite the Yankee to go? He has made his home here on the spot and there is no other convenient place.
Black people speak as those who have had to live with and for the US the longest. They say – get out of my house, my community, and my hair. But they add – Burn, Baby, Burn. In this slogan the Black appears not as a rearguard or second front of world resistance, but as its spearhead and vanguard – this is the Black version of Death to Imperialism.
If we of the white movements do not do an adequate job in helping to deal with “our own” imperialists, this will not affect in the least the commitment of all the others to oppose and defeat and eventually destroy imperialism. In fact, they may rather soon cut off the world network of pipe-lines through which the US pumps out force and violence and pumps back loot. But hang-ups and hanging back on our part can cost very, very much in terms of what is takes to do the job and how soon we too as a people will be liberated from the consequences of imperialism and capitalism.
The world cannot longer afford the military and domestic havoc which is the inevitable residue of imperialist profit-making. An important factor in this is that strip-mining of all available portions of the earth for wasteful (and ultimately suicidal) consumption practiced by the US.
As an example, transportation is a necessity – but two or three private cars in a family and an acre of paving for every half acre of crops is criminal. This social practice provokes hatred no matter how sanctified it may be to General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford because of the high profits which it brings in. The same must be said of every other idle and wasteful and duplicative consumption of metal, food, land, and water. Even worse are the filthy and reckless methods which poison and pollute land, air, and water. And from gutting the land mass and fouling the air, the system is turning its attention to the world’s oceans.
This is a great unpardonable crime of imperialism. Mass deprivation versus the world hog is a time-bomb with very few years on the fuse.
The new left has made a preliminary thrust at this target and has begun to make ecology an issue. If followed up, this can become a prime meeting point of the new movements and the basic class interests of the workers and the public interests of the world’s peoples.
But people in the US should not console themselves with illusions. Whatever else the future may or may not bring, it will not include imperialism, which is beyond salvage. The system is running overtime to conceal the fact that its time is running out. It wants to prolong its criminal existence.
What the system needs to conceal is exactly what we need to expose. This will speed up our common liberation; people have everything to gain in this universal struggle. It is within our power to take our place in the fight.
THREE YEARS LATER, May 24, 1972
Note: Since the first printing of “The Movement and the Workers” is exhausted it seems important to comment on what has happened since early 1969 and this second printing in 1972.
Just as work on this edition was getting started, there came a happy interruption in the form of mass upsurge of anti-war actions and demonstrations. These actions are aimed at Nixon’s desperate efforts to salvage the US’s losing military gamble in SE Asia by one more escalation of its genocidal war in Vietnam.
Life interrupts writing, which is good. In addition, the reactionary liberal “political authorities” have been caught with their mouth open solemnly pronouncing the wasting away of the movement and the death of revolution. This saves wasting time and effort to answer.
Revolution in our country is at its beginning; there has been no real test of basic strategies. Our choices seem unclear. Our initial clashes have begun to show strong and weak points on each side. And the enemy is bearing down on all the real and invented weaknesses hammering the movement to discredit the revolutionary groups and leaders (and using freaked-out and weak ones) to discredit the whole idea.
Sure enough, we are still weak. But without analyzing US imperialism and the best ways to fight it, and the history and psychology of our people, there can’t be a functional evaluation and criticism of how we go about things. Only a wipe-out. If we observe how the empire tries to control its home front, we see that our mistakes and failings have taken place in the middle of furious movement and there are tremendous gains and accomplishments to show for it.
The empire has used all its material, geographical, and technical and spiritual resources to prevent revolution; economic and educational institutions along with climate, space, and land; national arrogance and pride and racism, sexism, chauvinism, individualism, competition, careerism, and family controls, pacifism, cultural, and radio-TV news manipulations.
The loyalty inspectors and people monitors of the empire are on the alert to use all weaknesses on the left, new or old, to make the new activists either fall back into old reformist opportunism or to over-correct with super-left weirdness and so to flounder helplessly.
In the face of all that, the new left has done very well on many strategic points. This is possible largely due to the resistance of, and the successes won by, the Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Angolan, Mozambiquan, and Palestinian, Brazilian, Cuban, and many more peoples. These Third World peoples have created crises for the US empire that are favorable to changes here. These crises continue to expand.
The whole country now know what the rest of the world has known a long time: that the US is not a misunderstood great democratic country, it is a rapacious empire. Masses of people have begun (only begun but still, it’s a beginning) to repudiate white supremacy, national chauvinism, and the authority of the state. People have seen the use by police of violence and terror and assassination, followed by more selective repressions against the most rebellious designed to isolate them and divide the peoples.
People know that the US government rests on force and violence. They can see that there are no moral limits to empire genocide, that expediency is the rule, and that only peoples’ revolutionary resistance can set any limits. But people also see that even very small countries can win against the empire for all its violence and genocide.
Aggressive competition is no longer unchallenged gospel. The nuclear competitive-oppressive family is under fire; people want to learn how to live better collectively. A massive women’s rebellion is building up. It is also under heavy counter-revolutionary pressure and has its problems with factionalism and sometimes go-it-alone ideas. But its basic attack upon sexism and oppression reaches the largest potentially revolutionary force in this country and that brings it into collision with the system and the empire. The US empire did not invent either racism or sexism but it is their biggest promoter, protector, and defender; without such fascist controls the empire cannot survive.
Pushed by Black and Brown resistance and by a new consciousness of how they are being used and destroyed, young women and men of working class origins have been revolting in the armed forces and in the prisons.
The empire depends on these institutions to keep it going. When it loses control here, it cannot last a lot longer.
These are things that we have learned both from world revolution and from our own lives and our best rebels. They are the greatest things to happen in our country, ever. That is why they are sneered at and despised and feared by our enemies. And by cowards and fools parasiting on the movement. These are the main trends in our revolution – Humpty-Dumpty can’t be put back together again. And not the least reason is that many Black, Brown, and white revolutionaries, men and women, have shown that they are ready to go beyond talk and are prepared to die for this good and sufficient cause – but they are also able to survive and fight on.
In this context, the whole long list of past and present failings and foolish ideas is not so depressing. Things like slow learning, rejection for too long a time of past experience, uncertain analysis, uncritical acceptance of freak and dope culture in its entirety, anarchist individualism, rejection of class ideology and understanding, weak organization, bravado and boasting, and so on. All these are serious things, but they are not the main point in evaluating the recent past. (Even though they have to be changed to move ahead.) What is decisive now is that a good many of the old bars to revolutionary action have been broken and breaches made. We haven’t been able to handle so much all at once and we haven’t been able to break on through – but the way is open.
In order to move on, we have to see which of our shortcomings are the most damaging at any particular time and deal with then. We also have to deal with some of the heavier lies being laid on our movements.
Some of those trying to shoot us down say that anti-imperialist politics is nothing but a guilt trip, a moral do-gooding self-purge and a general drag. This is picked up by promoter types hanging around the movement. They say that everyone has to move off of their own oppression. Purely. Which is another way of saying that everyone should just try to do her/his own thing. That is, no revolutionary collectivity, unity, and togetherness in action to win. But how else do you win against an empire that is organizing and oppressing on a world-wide basis?
Move off your own oppression – sure. But – sometimes you have to say but – not all oppressions are equal or even the same kind of thing at all. So what happens with us? The old national arrogance cuts in and there is a “competition” of oppressions. My own usually comes first, then the rest follow in a regular hierarchy of oppressions.
The main put-down is to deny the great importance of the strategic insight to be gained from studying Vietnamese, Chinese, and Black and Brown resistance and wars of liberation.
For the heart of world reality – the nature of the resistance – is the fight to be free of imperial domination of any sort; this is now the center of world-wide revolution. This is steadily, day by day, destroying the old order of things and creating a new and human society – along with new human beings. This does not give us all the answers; it does put the right questions and it indicates directions that we need to take.
Our own oppressions are relative to those of the rest of this world. But only resistance can transform oppression into a revolutionary force. Our resistance depends on a whole lot of things. Class and revolutionary consciousness, experience in struggle and making revolution, numbers as well as organization, mass organizations, movements, having a people’s army and a party with good politics and strategy – allies, the state of the enemy, his resources and skill, and technology and weapons.
Once we see how we fit into this world picture, we can go on from there.
Some people claim that the anti-imperialist movement is not revolutionary because it is led by young people and sometimes by middle-class students instead of by workers. This is pushed by groups that pronounce themselves to be Marxist-Leninist – such as the Communist Party, Revolutionary Union, and a few Trotskyist sects, along with the Progressive Labor Party. One thing they all do in common is to present themselves as the chief advocates of the discovery by Karl Marx of the revolutionary role of the working class. But what they do with that is not to try to destroy imperialism but to the contrary, they wipe out Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and how to make the revolution in the imperialist stage of the capitalist system.
Every reactionary quality of the establishment-controlled trade unions (mostly long ago described and denounced by Lenin) is praised, or rationalized, or hid by these lecturers who are revolutionary only in words. They cover up for reactionary labor officials by shouting that every piddling reform or petty economic demand is the key to revolution. They denounce anyone who won’t praise reactionary unions to the skies. Any militant political or anti-imperialist confrontation they denounce as premature and adventurous. They ignore the fact that in practice any significant reforms or concessions by the system have always come after revolutionary initiative and struggle, not from liberal pleadings.
As for criticizing unions that are conservative, or their elite-minded status-conscious members who fall into racist, sexist, and other fascist-like social conduct – such criticism is looked upon as total treason by all of these groups. What they do is to try to use people’s love of great revolutionary countries and their leaders like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung, as political stock in trade to confuse the real nature of our own revolutionary tasks here and now in our actual situation.
Lenin declared that the class basis of conservative unionism is the privileged position of special sections of workers (and even of entire classes and nations in some respects) in the imperialist countries. Those who push the mythical “purely revolutionary” worker of the US ignore the existence of that privilege and its effects and never deal with the record or the facts. They show the kind of Leninists they are by totally ignoring Lenin’s great work on this subject.
Even the better off workers are, of course, not the most privileged people in this country. It is also true that young people and students, all but the poorest, most despised racial and sexual outcasts, share in some ways and amounts in empire privilege and all are influenced by US arrogance in some degree.
There is another version of the pure class struggle line which argues that the best way for workers here to help liberation fighters of other countries is to overthrow the system right here at home in their own self interest. Sounds plausible.
The catch is that right now, US workers are a long way from making a revolution. In practice, it comes to worker’s unions negotiating their contracts to improve their own conditions and get more money while those overseas shed more blood and their homes are devastated by the US war machines made and delivered by us on improved terms. This conveniently one-sided “class” self-interest turns out to be not love and peoplehood or collectivity and solidarity, but pure selfishness and people-eating competitiveness in disguise.
The official labor movement of the US has bought its respectability and its bargaining right by abandoning the unorganized and the poor at home and the entire working population of the Third World. That is why it is still a minority of workers in the US and is unable to organize those who need it the most. More, it is uninterested in the fate of the oppressed either at home or abroad.
That this is very real is shown by the action of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union in its recent strike (that was almost unanimously supported by the left) but which right from the very first made provision to work all war supplies for the US genocide in Vietnam while the strike was on. This is a Union that is officially on record as being opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Way back in 1919, Seattle longshoremen were not afraid to strike and shut down the port to stop shipments of machine guns for US counter-revolutionary intervention Siberia and helped to end that aggression against the Russian people. It is still true today that a revolutionary is one who understands (like those 1919 strikers) that there will never be an anti-capitalist revolution or the building of a new society in our own country until anti-imperialist consciousness and love and solidarity actions among workers breaks through those narrow business union deals with the empire and its bosses. Check it out – if you work for a boss – chances are that your job and your union, if any, are hot-beds of sexism, racism, dog eat dog competition, and elitism and arrogance.
Isn’t it better to risk some time, money, hard work, even a job, to collectively fight all that than to tolerate it and participate in and go along with a system that rests on oppression and genocide? Especially when those selfish craft and small group advantages and privileges can only add up to a life that is mean and sub-human in its essence.
Not far down the road, the imperial way of life is going to meet even heavier weather. Most of the world is already working at knocking out the US empire, and they are winning. When the empire goes down, the stakeholders are going to lose their stakes. Ordinary people don’t have that much to lose. In the long run, even the workers who right now are better off will gain too. I do not mean that they will have more cars and cabin cruisers and mortgages. They can have a better life in quality and human relationships and the security of a purpose for living – a meaningful job to do – and collective ways of using utilities and resources.
Meanwhile, everybody can fight to re-appropriate the loot of the empire in whatever way they can – by strikes or other means.
But that is not revolutionary unless we are living, thinking, and fighting collectively and using our energy and income and skill to build revolution and to sabotage the empire.
Consider the evidence now coming out of Vietnam, Korea, China. People who live on minimum incomes as compared to most of us are already living more human satisfying lives. In many cases they are having better medical care and live in healthier surrounding, eat healthier foods, have much more assurance about the future than do we. For all of the richness in this country, most of our lives are made miserable by the system.
While the empire still hangs on to power, poor and low income people have to solve survival problems. But merely to stay alive on the terms of this system just reproduces the problems bigger and sicker than ever. If a few people do “rise” into the class of families that have enough income to compete in consumption, they are still trapped in a horrible sick society rat-race and often have even less control over their lives than before.
Recently, with some temporary slowing up of action at home, Nixon and most of the media (Time, Life, TV etc.) started in a big way to promote pacifism and non-violence and gradual legal processes as against direct action. (For others, of course, not themselves.) To a small extent they use the old moral sermons, but coming from the bloody establishment this is not all that convincing. So they have created for the use of liberals outside and inside the movement a new twist. What they say now is this: violence has been tried on and it’s a failure; it turns people off too.
What has actually happened is something we could have anticipated. Events have shown that the established and highly organized violence of the state is still stronger than the weakly developed and little practiced power of the people. But even our small trial encounters show that people are happy whenever they get in a stout blow and are not turned off at all by direct action and violence when it is necessary, as for example, as it is used by the Vietnamese.
Mass opposition and hatred for the war in Vietnam has grown most ,just recently when there has been the most forceful action against imperialism both in the Third World and at home. More than ever before. You can not win fighting an empire that you allow to choose which weapons you can use.
Which doesn’t mean that non-violent activity is not also a useful and effective tactic sometimes; and it doesn’t keep some people who believe in non-violence from doing important things against the war.
But practice proves that what is going to bring down the empire and defeat its colonizing wars is the resistance of the intended victims and their wars of liberation together with supporting actions here at home and elsewhere. No popular referendum is going to convert Republican Nixon anymore than it did Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Both of them got elected by promising to end the war. People shouldn’t wear the blinders and the handcuffs offered by the system; neither should they get discouraged if the empire doesn’t fall at the first blow, as some seemed to expect.
In dealing with the negative and weakening things that happen here, we shouldn’t forget what happens in other places. The imperialists are getting beat right around the world because the liberation fighters are stronger in the ways that count the most. And getting stronger, battle by battle. When we see some of our formerly active and organized parts of the left momentarily in kind pf bad shape, we have to remember that we are not the whole universe. Revolution moves on in China. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Panama, South Africa (Azania), Guinea Bissau, Peoples Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Yemen. Even in the US, more people than ever have this feeling that something has gone terribly wrong here and that some profoundly good things are happening over there where people are making revolution. Within this good situation on the overall scene, we have some urgent unfinished business here.
We are only beginning to be conscious of the extent to which we are controlled and shaped by living in the empire; above all we who are white have been conditioned by super brain washing. Dealing with this has to be the first responsibility of any revolutionary movement among workers of the oppressor nation, as much or more than with other groups.
The revolutionary left in this country is largely unorganized and untogether. No group or combination has shown us how we can overcome the competitiveness, egoism, and elitism that the US is saturated with.
We see and admire the results of magnificently led and organized people of other countries. But because we have been burned a few times we are afraid to get into it. There is even sometimes a philosophy that we should let everything happen spontaneously, by itself. If the Third World people followed that thought, there would be no world-revolution for us to relate to. Which shows that this is an idea that in practice is another white US luxury trip. We would just fight when the spirit moves us – till then the world can wait, if it wants our help.
There is always a heavy danger (more for us, but not unknown in the Third World) in bureaucratic structures and elite leaderships. All the same, our only chance to build a new life is to start working hard to get some together action and collectivity and deal with our hang-ups as we go. If we don’t build our own collectivity, we will just continue to be controlled by the dictates and institutions of the enemy – which is a much worse thing – no matter how free we may imagine that we are.
People who already feel this need and are trying to come together now find some traps already waiting. There are those groups mentioned before who want to limit the movement to working for liberal reforms within the system. The CP, PL, and the Socialist Workers Party are well known for these practices. Newer groups that had some roots in the new left like RU and the New American Movement do the same but are less well known.
The processes of co-optation go through many stages and operate also in Black and Brown struggles as it did in Vietnam and in China; in these countries empire-oriented liberals and reactionaries produced Diem and Thieu in Vietnam and Chiang Kai-shek in China, while the revolution was producing Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, and Kim Il Sung. Some give way, but many stand fast and remain revolutionary all their lives. Here too, many are standing up to both the government’s repressions and to all the blandishments of Babylon, while a few are folding up.
To avoid opportunist traps and still not get into the other trap of super-left isolation, we need to think a lot about the many people who, although they are still conservative in various ways, are now moving toward the left. (Which is one reason why both Nixon and the Democrats are maneuvering desperately in this election.) What this opens to revolutionaries is to push the leftward motion further at every opportunity. When great leaps do come, they arise from a whole accumulation of experience and energy.
But a revolutionary cannot allow her/himself to become a social worker helping people get along better within the system. S/he, on the contrary, sees material and spiritual survival as depending on getting involved with more people In more forms of confrontation with the system and becoming more closely organized and collective with each other, and more in solidarity with the revolutionaries of the world.
The empire hasn’t gotten over its crisis; it’s getting in deeper. We know that when it is gone there will be awful hang-overs and putrid remains to deal with. We also see that we can create a collective society able to cope with all that.
Revolutionaries have many jobs, but it adds up to this: we have to smash the empire and the system that feeds on empire so that we will then have the opportunity to build our new human and collective life – there is no other way.
How long before we learn from Vietnam?
![How long before we learn from Vietnam? How long before we learn from Vietnam?](https://notmytribe.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/vietnam-afghanistan-map.jpg)
Americans can’t
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as fighting
spills into
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Southwest Asia
could be
Southeast,
Cambodia
and Laos
WUO terrorized government property
To clarify, the terrorist acts for which Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground are being demonized targeted only property damage and resulted in no casualties. Here is a list of 25 bombings attributed to the WUO, with notes from the FBI files, and the original communiques.
BOMBINGS BY WEATHERMEN / WEATHER UNDERGROUND
October 7, 1969
Haymarket Police Statue in Chicago. The Weathermen later claim credit for the bombing in their book, Prairie Fire.
December 6, 1969
Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago. The WUO claims responsibility in Prairie Fire, stating it is a protest of the fatal police shooting of Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969.
May 10, 1970
National Guard Association building in Washington, D.C. is bombed.
June 6, 1970
San Francisco Hall of Justice. (WUO claims credit for bombing although no explosion occurred. Months later, workmen locate an unexploded bomb).
June 9, 1970
New York City Police headquarters. The Weathermen state this is in response to “police repression.”
July 27, 1970
United States Army base at The Presidio in San Francisco, on the 11th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
September 12, 1970
California Men’s Colony prison break for Timothy Leary.
October 8, 1970
Marin County courthouse. WUO states this is in retaliation for the killings of Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, and James McClain.
October 10, 1970
Queens traffic-court building. WUO claims this is to express support for the New York prison riots.
October 14, 1970
Harvard Center for International Affairs. WUO claims this is to protest the war in Vietnam.
March 1, 1971
United States Capitol. WUO states this is to protest the invasion of Laos.
August 29, 1971
Office of California Prisons, allegedly in retaliation for the killing of George Jackson.
September 17, 1971
New York Department of Corrections in Albany, New York. In protest of the killing of 29 inmates at Attica State Penitentiary.
October 15, 1971
MIT research center, William Bundy’s office.
May 19, 1972
Pentagon. “in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi.”
May 18, 1973
103rd Police Precinct in New York. WUO states this is in response to the killing of 10-year-old black youth Clifford Glover by police.
September 28, 1973
ITT headquarters in New York and Rome, Italy. WUO states this is in response to ITT’s alleged role in the Chilean coup earlier that month.
March 6, 1974
Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare offices in San Francisco. WUO states this is to protest alleged sterilization of poor women. In the accompanying communiqué, the Women’s Brigade argues for “the need for women to take control of daycare, healthcare, birth control and other aspects of women’s daily lives.”
May 31, 1974
California Attorney General office. WUO states this is in response to the killing of six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
June 17, 1974
Gulf Oil Pittsburgh headquarters. WUO states this is to protest the company’s actions in Angola, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
September 11, 1974
Anaconda Corporation. WUO states this is in retribution for Anaconda/Rockefeller’s alleged involvement in the Chilean coup the previous year.
January 29, 1975
State Department. WUO states this is in response to escalation in Vietnam.
June 16, 1975
Banco de Ponce, NYC. WUO states this is in solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers.
September, 1975
Kennecott Corporation. WUO states this is in retribution for Kennecott’s alleged involvement in the Chilean coup two years prior.
WUO COMMUNIQUES:
Communiqué #1, May 21, 1970
Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn.
I’m going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.
This is the first communication from the Weatherman underground.
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five or twenty-five years of our lives in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we’ve been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know the lines are drawn revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.
Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world.
Ché taught us that “revolutionaries move like fish in the sea.” The alienation and contempt that young people have for this country has created the ocean for this revolution.
The hundreds and thousands of young people who demonstrated in the Sixties against the war and for civil rights grew to hundreds of thousands in the past few weeks actively fighting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the attempted genocide against black people. The insanity of Amerikan “justice” has added to its list of atrocities six blacks killed in Augusta, two in Jackson and four white Kent State students, making thousands more into revolutionaries.
The parents of “privileged” kids have been saying for years that the revolution was a game for us. But the war and the racism of this society show that it is too fucked-up. We will never live peaceably under this system.
This was totally true of those who died in the New York townhouse explosion. The third person who was killed there was Terry Robbins, who led the first rebellion at Kent State less than two years ago.
The twelve Weathermen who were indicted for leading last October’s riots in Chicago have never left the country. Terry is dead, Linda was captured by a pig informer, but the rest of us move freely in and out of every city and youth scene in this country. We’re not hiding out but we’re invisible.
There are several hundred members of the Weatherman underground and some of us face more years in jail than the fifty thousand deserters and draft dodgers now in Canada. Already many of them are coming back to join us in the underground or to return to the Man’s army and tear it up from inside along with those who never left.
We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.
Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go.
For Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, and for all the revolutionaries who are still on the move here, there has been no question for a long time now—we will never go back.
Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.
Never again will they fight alone.
/May 21, 1970/
Communique #2, June 9, 1970
SLIP NR 12 / 1909 / JUNE9-70 / POLICE HDQTRS / 77 BOMB EXPLOSION-240 CENTRE ST-POLICE HDQTRS-UNK
DAMAGE AND INJURIES AT THIS TIME — DETAILS LATER
Tonight, at 7 P.M., we blew up the N.Y.C. police headquarters. We called in a warning before the explosion.
The pigs in this country are our enemies. They have murdered Fred Hampton and tortured Joan Bird. They are responsible for 6 black deaths in Augusta, 4 murders in Kent State, the imprisonment of Los Siete de la Raza in San Francisco and the continual brutality against Latin and white youth on the Lower East Side.
Some are named Mitchell and Agnew. Others call themselves Leary and Hogan. The names are different but the crimes are the same.
The pigs try to look invulnerable, but we keep finding their weaknesses. Thousands of kids, from Berkeley to the UN Plaza, keep tearing up ROTC buildings.
Nixon invades Cambodia and hundreds of schools are shut down by strikes. Every time the pigs think they’ve stopped us, we come back a little stronger and a lot smarter. They guard their buildings and we walk right past their guards. They look for us—we get to them first.
They build the Bank of America, kids burn it down. They outlaw grass, we build a culture of life and music.
The time is now. Political power grows out of a gun, a Molotov, a riot, a commune … and from the soul of the people.
WEATHERMAN
Communiqué #3, July 31, 1970
From the /Berkeley Tribe/, July 31, 1970. The Red Mountain Tribe.
July 26, 1970
The Motor CityThis is the third communication from the Weatherman underground.
With other revolutionaries all over the planet, Weatherman is celebrating the 11th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Today we attack with rocks, riots and bombs the greatest killer-pig ever known to man—Amerikan imperialism.
Everywhere we see the growth of revolutionary culture and the ways in which every move of the monster-state tightens the noose around its own neck.
A year ago people thought it can’t happen here. Look at where we’ve come.
Nixon invades Cambodia; the Cong and all of Indochina spread the already rebelling US troops thin. Ahmed is a prisoner; Rap is free and fighting. Fred Hampton is murdered;
the brothers at Soledad avenge—”2 down and one to go.” Pun and several Weatherman are ripped; we run free. Mitchell indicts 8 or 10 or 13; hundreds of thousands of freaks plot to build a new world on the ruins of honky Amerika.
And to General Mitchell we say: Don’t look for us, Dog; We’ll find you first.
For the Central Committee, Weatherman Underground
Communiqué #4, September 18, 1970
From /San Francisco Good Times/, September 18, 1970. /San Francisco Good Times/.
September 15, 1970. This is the fourth communication from the Weatherman Underground.
The Weatherman Underground has had the honor and pleasure of helping Dr. Timothy Leary escape from the POW camp at San Luis Obispo, California.
Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and creeps.
LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.
Now we are at war.
With the NLF and the North Vietnamese, with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Al Fatah, with Rap Brown and Angela Davis, with all black and brown revolutionaries, the Soledad brothers and all prisoners of war in Amerikan concentration camps we know that peace is only possible with the destruction of U.S. imperialism.
Our organization commits itself to the task of freeing these prisoners of war.
We are outlaws, we are free!
(signed) Bernardine Dohrn
Clarifying a few terms…
Because some have expressed disdain at the mere thought of being considered right wing apologists… aka people who wish to accommodate and justify right wing philosophy, here are a few things to remember: Catchwords and phrases, talking points, something you might see on a bumper sticker; using these will probably get you tagged as a right wing loon. And in at least some cases the tag would fit perfectly.
examples: Love it or leave it (one recently) The Police are always right, If you have done nothing wrong why would you fear the police?, Support Our Troops, These Colors Never Run.
Recycling myths like: left wing liberals were the reason we lost in Nam… FALSE. Right Wing planners like Westmoreland, Johnson, Nixon, Al Hague, and the “Super Patriots” who supported them, were much more of a coherent and consistent reason for the loss of the VietNam War by the United States. The new crop of such losers is causing America to be drawn into yet another defeat.
Also contributing much to the American loss in VietNam was the courage and resourcefulness of the VietMinh, that’s Charley to some…
For those who don’t remember anything about it, these guys used a mix of primitive and modern technologies, small arms, improvised explosives and equipment taken from American, Australian, French and South Vietnamese soldiers, tactics which were also a mix of ancient and modern, to defeat the above named governments, even against a Shock and Awe campaign of greater magnitude than the one currently being played in Iraq.
Also like Iraq, there was never a war declared between the United States and The Democratic Republic (Hanoi).
Much as it pisses off those who see the POWs as uncompromising heroes, (some were) and the Hanoi Hilton as a hellhole, (it was) it should also be remembered that the Hanoi Hilton is about a standard in third world jails. And since the North Vietnamese didn’t do a “show trial” followed by an execution every time they captured an American airman, the treatment they accorded the Americans was one hell of a lot better than that accorded to the VietCong prisoners by the Saigon government.
a lot of Americans will scream loudly that American soldiers didn’t torture captured Charleys. Given the readiness these same people have shown to rationalize torture at Gitmo and worse places, i tend to doubt that. Probably not widespread but not nonexistent either.
But on the other hand, the Saigon government DID torture and summarily execute captured “terrorists” “rebels” “insurgents”.
Leave us remind everybody that the Americans captured in North VietNam and Cambodia and Laos had exactly the same legal status as the captured Charleys had in the South. No more, no less.
It was a combination of supporting an openly repressive government and the determination and resourcefulness of the “enemy” that dashed the American intervention in SE Asia.
The same things that are now dragging down America in South WEST Asia.
Empires are destined to fall, usually very soon after they are declared to be Empires. Such as the one declared by George Bush Senior when he proclaimed a New World Order, which is being dishonorably carried on by his son, King George the Incredibly Stupid.
Another talking point is that VietNam and Iraq were fought for American freedom.
They were not, nor has any war in which America has been engaged since 1814. To say otherwise is to propagate a myth, if you believe that myth, if you know it is false but say it anyway it is ramped up all the way to a Deliberate Lie.
The military did not fight for our freedom, they did not give us our freedom, or our rights, we do NOT OWE them our obedience, or the willing surrender of our rights.
Especially annoying (not to mention stupid) is the repeated attempt to make us believe that Freedom means we are free to do as we are told, to say only what we are allowed to say, and that we have some moral obligation to support the wars started by people who have anointed themselves our “Leaders”.
Some of my fellow Christians are of the strong delusion that God has commanded us to obey George Bush because he is supposedly “OUR” King.
This particular myth was also used by the Tories to denounce the Continental Congress and the rebels in the army during the Revolution.
It was shouted from pulpits across the Colonies by pastors, who, like Ted Haggard and Benny Hinn and Franklin Graham and Dobson… had sold their priesthood and their souls to a tyrant.
Here’s a quick formula to remember Shock and Awe = the use of fear as a weapon = Terrorism.
The proponents of Shock and Awe, like George and his supporters, are therefore Terrorists.
You don’t like that, try beating it out of me, and all the while try to forget that that too, is Terrorism.
Paying reparations will make US as poor as Chad
Noam Chomsky has just written that the US should pay reparations for the damages done to Iraq’s infrastructure by the US invasion and occupation. While I can’t disagree with the justice of this, doing it would make America as poor as the country of Chad.
And why stop with reparations for US damages done to iraq? How about paying damages done to Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, Nicaragua, El Salvador, God can we stop now, though the list is still quite incomplete?
One of the most galling things about US war supporters is there constant refrain that they are supporting the constant war only to help Iraqis out! Just the other day on this blog a poster was spouting this line of crap, too. Plus, usually in the same breath they are condemning the Islamic community as being full of barbarians, all the while praying to their Christian God of War. Yes, they are on a great Crusade to help the heathen out!
So why don’t these people dig out THEIR pocketbooks, and make those reparations then, instead of playing stupid and pretending that they are bringing heaven to earth for Arabs? US war supporters have to be about the most shameless human beings imaginable. If there is a Christian Hell for hypocrites?, then they definitely got the ticket. And if we as a nation get forced to actually make reparations, then we’ll all be in Hell alongside them.
Vietnam vet selective memory
Am I to deduce by your Vietnam Veteran cap that you served in the Vietnam War? May I say, of course, thank you for your service, and sorry for what you had to endure, and I would be interested to hear about it sometime, eagerly, but that’s it. Answering your country’s call to arms was honorable, but what your country did in Southeast Asia, by means of the guns it gave you, was not. Misguided would not even be the word, our leaders were warmongers led by munitions profiteers. Misguided was your role following criminal orders but you eventually figured that out.
Our profound national sense of shame for the Vietnam War was not even a question once the true nature of the conflict became revealed. As a result the war in Vietnam ended and our troops came home under a black cloud. Sorry, Mr. Veteran, about that cloud, nothing personal, but you could have considered the karma you brought unto yourself by participating over there. Anyway, you drew the short straw. Don’t now try to dress it up.
Don’t tell me now you could have won in Vietnam if it hadn’t been for the American people turning to peace. What? Left to do your job you could have killed millions more Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians enough to have subdued them? Is that what you’re saying? America’s decimation of those peoples wasn’t enough for you?
You [We] got your butt kicked by those determined Asians is what happened. Like every single anti-colonial movement in modern times, the occupied peoples prevailed. The American public pulled your asses out of that fire is what happened, lest you be killed but take 50 Vietnamese lives with you, many of them civilian. That was the ratio of our deaths to theirs. You apologized for that, and we’ll make you apologize again if you’re now going to change your tune.
Who would have guessed we’d have to give you nostalgic vets a kick in the pants again? What part of genocide, or atrocity, or travesty, or grand scale tragedy, don’t you understand? “Vietnam” as we call it, our war on the Vietnamese, was wrong, it was an incredible abuse of power, of our superior strength, of our incredible inhumanity. You were there.
Justice delayed, denied, for now
Not to worry, not to worry. The Bush and GOP plan to indemnify themselves from responsibility for their war crimes will be to scant avail. Let them pass whatever bill they want.
It’s true, justice delayed is justice denied. And it is depressingly ungratifying to see criminals legislate themselves legitimacy. But the representatives at the United Nations have settled for this delay before.
Not long ago our nation was at war with the people of Vietnam. Our imperialist interventions eventually turned toward the people of Cambodia and Laos in illegal acts of aggression. There was absolutely no other nation powerful enough to bring us to account, and because of our veto power on the Security Council, any number of Nations United could not condemn us or stop us.
The U.N. delegates settled for delayed justice. They said, in effect, we may not stop you now, but that doesn’t make what you are doing right or legal. They agreed that there would be no statute of limitations for breaches of international law, neither should any nation be able to exclude itself from the law’s jurisdiction.
In 1968 the U.N. General Assembly made explicit the universal jurisdiction of the war crimes conventions. The Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity ensured that nobody could consider themselves beyond the reach of international rule of law.
Article 1, part (b) defines the universal illegality of war crimes, “even if such acts do not constitute a violation of the domestic law of the country in which they were committed.”
Article 4 reads that no nation’s laws can redefine what are understood to be war crimes, that “statutory or other limitations shall not apply to the prosecution and punishment of the crimes referred to in articles 1 and 2 of this Convention and that, where they exist, such limitations shall be abolished.”
The torturers and warmongers can delay their appointment with the hangman, but the scurryng around to jerrymander the law is a good sign. Bush and co are showing the discomfort of knowing that justice awaits.