Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line

—Socialist Workers Party [US] Education for Socialist Bulletins—

Party II

a. The Impact on Capitalists, Unions, and Students

By Jack Barnes

[“The Impact on Capitalists, Unions, and Students,” by Jack Barnes, first appeared in the June 5, 1970 issue of The Militant]

The American events of May 1970 did not lead, as the French events of May 1968 did, to a general strike of the working class. Nevertheless the American events marked a new high point in antiwar consciousness and action by important sectors of the American people and may prove to have opened the door to the most decisive struggles yet waged against American imperialism’s war in Southeast Asia.

Three events occurred in May that either were unique in the history of the antiwar movement or represented turning points both in the struggle against the war and the deepening radicalization in the United States:

American students conducted the biggest student strike in the history of the world.
Sections of the capitalist class split publicly not only over the war but over its effects on their ability to rule the United States.
The first large layer of AFL-CIO unions and unionists publicly repudiated the line of support to the war that George Meany and his cohorts have developed in the name of organized labor for half a decade.
The strike that swept the nation’s campuses in May revealed that the American students have a political potential and weight that they themselves had never suspected.

On a national scale, in educational institutions of every type and level, the strike demonstrated without question that the deeply felt hatred for the American imperialist war in Southeast Asia and the willingness to oppose it have passed far beyond a radical vanguard of the students. Virtually an entire generation is involved.

The May actions against the war were not limited to the campus organizations previously engaged in protest. A number of all-Black universities and colleges organized against the war --even before the Augusta and Jackson murders; at some all-women’s schools newly formed women’s liberation committees sparked the actions; high school and junior high students had large-scale strike actions with widespread participation by the Third World youth. Official student governments and faculty bodies joined in.

This massive response to the invasion of Cambodia and the murder of the Kent students marks a new stage in the American student movement.

For the first time, the students, on a broad scale, took a step beyond mass protest to winning control of some of the wide range of facilities of the American universities. These “antiwar universities” were used as a base from which to organize their actions and propaganda against the war and campus complicity with the war machine, and to reach out to other key sectors of the population --the GIs, the Third World communities, the labor movement—to involve them in the struggle to get the troops out of Southeast Asia.

On the campuses, as a result of these events, there is a new consciousness of what it is possible to accomplish. There has also been a favorable shift in the relationship of forces between the antiwar students and sympathetic faculty on one side, and the direct agents of capitalism -- the administrators, trustees, and regents -- on the other.

Under the impact of these events, the coming months will see continuing campus struggle --with a greater chance of success than ever. Struggles will be waged to eliminate restrictive rules regulating the social, political, and personal lives of the students and against every aspect of campus complicity with the war machine.

Attempts to turn the large and varied resources and the apparatus of the universities away from the projects and priorities of the ruling class, trustees, and administrators will increase. The orientation will be to turn the university resources toward the projects and priorities of the students in the struggle against the war, against repression and oppression of Third World people and women, against exploitation of resources and pollution of the environment by unfettered big business.

With the May events under their belts, the students will more frequently and in greater numbers use their newly won positions of strength on the campuses to link up with and organize support for the struggles of the working class, the oppressed nationalities, and women. More and more often, campus facilities will be opened to embattled forces off the campuses and experiences will be exchanged.

The degree of control over university resources and facilities will vary from campus to campus. But the basic strategic concept—winning and then using the vast resources of the American universities as a powerful base from which to link up with the coming mighty social struggles against American capitalism -- has been given a trial run, its validity and the experience will not be forgotten. Another valuable addition to the capital of the entire movement has been the appearance on many campuses of broad strike councils. They implemented the tasks decided on in mass campus meetings, and represented the forces of the upsurge in a way no single organization could. This form will undoubtedly be refined, improved, and used on a broader scale at the next stage of the struggle. This kind of democratic leadership committee, which can unite forces in a large struggle and be viewed as the legitimate authority of a mass upsurge, is an important example for GIs, Third World communities, and the labor movement.

The May events open a new chapter for the growth of the Young Socialist Alliance in numbers, geographical extension, and political experience and influence. The need for and the role of a nationwide revolutionary socialist youth organization with a political program and strategy that links campus rebellion to the key political fight against American capitalism can, be understood today by thousands of radical students who were not sure of this a month ago.

The May events detonated an open rift in the ruling class all the way up to the Nixon cabinet and precipitated a deep sense of crisis publicly expressed by a wide spectrum of spokesmen for the ruling class.

The difference in attitude from the time of the march on Washington in November 1969 is illustrated by the shift in even Nixon’s public posture. In November he said protests could have no effect on his policy, and demonstratively let it be known that he was watching a football game on TV during the demonstration.

In May he conceded an area for the demonstrators near the White House where he “could hear the protest,” told the nation he couldn’t sleep a wink all night before the demonstration, and went out at dawn to “discuss” with some of the demonstrators.

What stunned even members of Nixon’s own cabinet and drove them to public expressions of dismay was neither the Cambodian invasion nor the Kent massacre. It was the mass eruption of outraged protest against them, which they feared would completely discredit and permanently isolate the Nixon administration.

Similarly, spokesmen for the ruling class outside the Nixon administration expressed alarm not because of basic disagreement over imperialist foreign policy, but because the May events convinced them of the real possibility that social upheavals generated by the expansion of the war threaten the future of American capitalism.

Former Chief Justice Earl Warren gave the following estimate in a speech on May 15:

“We are, indeed, in a crisis. We have . . . a divisiveness n our society to a degree of intensity that has not been equaled in the past hundred years.”

The day before, John W. Gardner, a Republican and former cabinet member of the Johnson administration, released to the national press a speech in which he said: “And while each of us pursues his selfish interest and comforts himself by blaming others, the nation disintegrates. I use the phrase soberly: The nation disintegrates.”

In the “extraordinary reaction” to Nixon’s Cambodian invasion, Gardner saw evidence that a “crisis of confidence in our leadership” has been growing. “The seeming abrupt reversal of implied commitments deepened the question in the minds of millions of Americans as to whether they can believe the promises of their leaders.”

James Reston, of The New York Times, writing from Washington two days later saw Nixon “in deep trouble” because, like Johnson, “he is increasingly up against the dilemma of getting out of Vietnam quicker than he planned or not being able to govern the country. His advisers recognize the changed mood in the capital. They thought, when they came to power, that they were dealing with a foreign war, and they now see that they are dealing with a rebellion against that war, and maybe even with a revolution at home.”

Another top figure of the Johnson administration, McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, warned on May 15: “Not only must there be no new incursion of Americans across the Cambodian border, but nothing that feels like that to the American public must happen again. . . . Any major action of this general sort~ if undertaken in the same fashion as the Cambodian decision—now that the domestic effects of that decision are visible—would tear the country and the administration to pieces. At the very least the Congress would stop money for the war, and the chances of general domestic upheaval would be real.”

Thus, while attempting to maintain the image of unity behind the myth that his “Vietnamization” policy was ending the war, Nixon has actually opened a credibility gap deeper than the Johnson administration ever faced. He has set into motion a greater public outpouring of opposition within his own class than that which forced his predecessor from office. This open rift in the ruling class, itself a consequence of the May events, creates the conditions for further and broader expressions of mass opposition to the war.

No powerful organization outside the government has supported the White House-Pentagon policies on the war throughout its entire escalation more fervently than the AFL-CIO bureaucracy headed by George Meany. This has effectively blocked the strongest social force in the country, the organized working class, from participating in the growing antiwar movement But the May events opened a public fissure in this seeming monolith.

The example of the students and the pressure from workers, whose growing disenchantment with the war and its effects had found no expression in the top union bureaucracy, combined in May to explode the claim that Meany’s pro-war line represents the sentiments of a majority, let alone all, of American labor.

Three major developments highlight the breakup of this logjam: Under the impact of the Kent killings and telegrams from locals around the country, on May 7 the national convention of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding withdrawal of all American troops from Southeast Asia. AFSCME is the eighth largest union in the AFL-CIO and represents 490,000 workers.

In New York an important section of the union movement, including locals affiliated to the AFL-CIO, the Alliance for Labor Action and independent unions, for the first time called a street demonstration against the war. Some 25,000 New Yorkers were mobilized on May 21 in a common labor-student effort The sponsors included New York unions with large Black and Puerto Rican memberships. The rally drew a larger percentage of Black and Puerto Rican participants than any previous antiwar action.

On May 18, 452 Bay Area elected union officials and shop stewards placed a full-page ad in the San Francisco Examiner differentiating themselves from Nixon’s policies, asserting their disbelief and distrust in anything the government says about the war, and demanding that U.S. troops be brought home from Vietnam and Cambodia now.

These open breaks in the labor bureaucracies make it possible for opponents of the war inside the unions to effectively argue their view and mobilize the sentiment against the war that already exists among millions of American workers. They can realistically begin to translate that opposition into effective antiwar action.

The antiwar movement outside the unions now has a totally new opportunity to use the resolutions, endorsements, actions, and official statements of sections of the labor movement to solicit support, aid and participation in antiwar actions from other sections.

Now that the ice has been broken, a new problem for the capitalist rulers can materialize in the near future: When the next major actions of the antiwar struggle begin— that is, when the May events find their logical continuation—big sections of organized labor could be involved from the beginning. Both a qualitative change in the composition and character of street actions and the beginning of job actions against the war, loom as real possibilities.

Unlike France’s May events of two years ago a revolutionary situation did not develop in May 1970 in the United States. But a preview could be seen of the forces that, if combined in mass political action against the policies of the American government, could shake capitalism to its foundations.