Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line

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

Part I. The Antiwar Strategy of the SWP and the YSA

1. From “The Next Phase of American Politics”

[The following is an excerpt from “The Next Phase of American Politics,” the political resolution adopted by the 1965 convention of the Socialist Workers Party. The resolution assessed the political situation in the U. S. after Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in the 1964 presidential elections. Johnson had the overwhelming support of labor, the Black community, and the radical movement largely because of his promises of “peace” and popular fears that his conservative Republican opponent, Goldwater, would escalate the Vietnam conflict into a major war. An exception to the stampede to support Johnson as a lesser evil was the presidential campaign of SWP candidates Clifton DeBerry and Edward Shaw. The .SWP campaign denounced the war, warned of further escalation under Johnson, and demanded immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U. S. forces.

[Published in May 1965, the resolution predicted. That “the key to the next phase of American politics lies in the fate of the unstable coalition of diverse and basically incompatible social forces gathered around the Johnson Administration.” The bombings of North Vietnam had already produced the first cracks in this coalition, expressed in student demonstrations and teach-ins and the first large anti-Vietnam-war protest in Washington, D. C. on April 17, 1965. (The complete text of this resolution can be found in SWP Discussion Bulletin , Volume 25, No.2.)] .

Experience makes it ever-plainer for all to see that Johnson’s real war is not against poverty but against the poverty stricken colonial masses. Each step he takes in foreign policy shows that at all hazards he is out to stem the tide of revolt against capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination. Johnson’s real policy was actually exposed right in the middle of last year’s election campaign. Using the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964 as a pretext for naked imperialist aggression, he savagely ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. At the same time a bipartisan resolution was rushed through Congress backing Johnson and giving him a free hand for further acts of aggression. Johnson and the Democrats, no less than Goldwater and the Republicans, were proven ready to risk war to serve imperialist ends. Even before the 1964 elections, Johnson’s conduct had refuted practitioners of lesser-evil politics who persisted in touting him as a man of peace and the Democrats as a party of peace.

Once elected Johnson lost no time in applying the Goldwater foreign policy line which the voters had rejected at the polls. Within three weeks he intervened militarily in support of the hated imperialist puppet, Tshombe, in the Congo. U. S. planes airlifted Belgian paratroops for an assault on Stanleyville. There the Belgians, aided by U. S.-armed white mercenaries in Tshombe’s employ, launched a murderous assault on the Congolese freedom fighters. Subsequent disclosures revealed that the whole thing had been done with a prearranged plan which had obviously been worked out while Johnson was campaigning for election as a man of peace.

Last February Johnson launched what has proven to be a continuing series of bombing assaults on North Vietnam. Use of American air power against South Vietnamese freedom fighters has simultaneously been stepped up. In both cases death and destruction is being rained upon the civilian population and their possessions. A big new buildup of U. S. ground troops has begun in South Vietnam. All these acts of aggression bring closer the danger of another Korean-type war in Southeast Asia, the possibility of a direct military confrontation with China which now possesses nuclear potential, and the peril of a general nuclear war.

With the whole world already apprehensive over the war danger in Vietnam, Johnson proceeded to order a massive U. S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic. The first excuse of protecting American and foreign lives quickly wore thin. Washington policy makers then shifted toward explanations adding up to the assertion that the United States will not allow another Cuba in Latin America. Taking no chances on another Castro evolving out of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, Johnson has intervened in support of the military dictatorship and against the Dominican constitucionalistas who appear to have widespread popular support. The basic aim is to see that no new government takes power in the Dominican Republic, or anywhere else without U.S. consent. The intent will be to bend the constitucionalistas to this policy through whatever combination of political maneuvers and military pressures the situation may require. Johnson can afford to be flexible about the exact composition of the Dominican government provided its members pass a CIA-FBI security check. His main aim will be to disarm the insurgent masses and restore firm police rule over them.

The Dominican intervention marks a new stage in the imperialist drive to crush all revolutionary upheavals. Johnson’s cynical bypassing of the OAS in his unilateral military action exposes the imperialist hypocrisy concerning inter-American “cooperation.” Little pretense remains of supporting an “Alliance for Progress” to bring about needed social reforms. The Dominican intervention shows that any social reform movement undertaken without Washington’s authorization faces the threat of direct U. S. attack. . It also raises grave new dangers of a counter-revolutionary assault on socialist Cuba with direct U. S. participation. Through the Johnson doctrine, U. S. imperialism is taking a further long stride toward setting itself up as world policeman over the limits to which any social reform will be allowed. In keeping with that perspective the Pentagon is presently reevaluating the draft policy that will be needed to provide a bigger conscript army for the purpose.

Parallel with Johnson’s new long stride toward the nuclear brink, Washington propagandists have been resorting more and more to McCarthy-type charges of an “international communist conspiracy.” That tune is being played in all keys in the Dominican Republic, as it has been in Vietnam, the Congo, and as it will be wherever freedom fighters revolt against the puppet regimes of imperialism in their countries. Use of the hateful McCarthyite technique in matters of foreign policy implies parallel attempts to employ it within this country in an effort to gag critics of the bipartisan imperialist foreign policy. Similarly, it is not accidental that the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the ban on travel to Cuba coincided with Washington’s military intervention in the Dominican Republic. The Johnson administration’s present gestures toward public discussion of its Vietnam policy with critics at home does not mark any departure from the long-established policy of witch-hunting critics of foreign policy. It simply reflects differences within the ruling class over Johnson’s tactics in opposing the colonial revolution. It also reflects empirical resort to a temporary expedient which they hope will blunt swelling criticism. The ruling powers have no intention of setting foreign policy through public discussion.

Growth of internal opposition to the bipartisan foreign policy reflects the mounting impact of the colonial revolution upon the people of the United States. From its inception, the Cuban revolution has aroused considerable sympathy within this country, especially among students. A number of young people were thereby’ drawn into general opposition to Washington’s policies, some moving all the way to acceptance of socialist ideas. Today an even-larger new wave of opposition to the antidemocratic foreign and domestic policies of imperialism is coming into being around the Vietnam issue, its forces composed of ‘a broad layer of activists in the student movement itself. Centering on the campuses, the protest movement over Vietnam is attracting greater numbers of students than in the case of Cuba in the early Sixties, and there is a marked rise in faculty support as well. The brutal application of the Johnson doctrine now unfolding in the Caribbean is bound to broaden and intensify the movement even further. It lends cogency to the central issue brought to the fore by the teach-in movement, namely, the right of the American people to decide questions of war and peace. No thinking person would take seriously the old argument that “there wouldn’t be time” for a vote about military intervention in Vietnam and U. S. occupation of Santo Domingo.

Development of the teach-ins over the Vietnam issue offers a vehicle which, despite its amorphous nature, can be used to help build a genuine opposition to imperialist war. Originating out of sentiments against imperialist policy in Vietnam, the teach-ins are essentially an integral part of the antiwar movement. They are not to be viewed as substitutes for, but rather as catalysts leading toward, various actions of an avowedly anti-imperialist nature. Assemblies like the teach-ins serve primarily as a forum where a meaningful anti-imperialist policy can be argued out, provided that all viewpoints have the right to be heard. Our task in such forums is to refute fake peace advocates who call upon the imperialists to be more “democratic,” who exonerate the imperialist aggressors by blaming “both sides,” who seek to keep the peace movement mired down in the swamp of capitalist politics.

As against such peace fakers our task is to explain that U. S. imperialist policy, and that policy alone, obstructs peace. There can be no peace until all US troops are withdrawn from abroad and the peoples of other lands are allowed to settle their own affairs without US intervention. Such a peaceful policy cannot be attained through either a Democratic or Republican administration. Both parties are capitalist parties and are therefore irrevocably tied to the, imperialist policies inherent in the capitalist system. Peace can be won only by breaking definitively with capitalist politics and taking the road of independent, anticapitalist political action.

We fully support demonstrations which are explicitly against imperialist foreign policy, no matter how limited the specific demands may be. As in the case of the student March On Washington, a flat demand that Johnson end the war in Vietnam affords a principled basis for united action toward specific anti-imperialist ends. The March also set a further good example through its non-exclusionist policy toward all who supported its central demand and through recognition of the right of all participating groups to distribute their own literature. Such insistence on a non-exclusionist policy is tending to become the norm in the committees and organizations which make up the movement, and it is precipitating a healthy differentiation between serious antiwar militants, on one hand, and social democrats and right wing peaceniks, on the other. Our aim must be to take advantage of such opportunities to broaden the protest actions against imperialist policy and in the process to deepen the political consciousness of antiwar militants.

As in the case of student youth, the colonial revolution is making an impact upon the Freedom Now movement. An example is support from SNCC to the student March on Washington demanding an end to the war Vietnam. Awareness of issues in the colonial revolution and acts of solidarity with the colonial freedom fighters will bring the Negro vanguard to a higher level of political consciousness Through observation and experience they will perceive more clearly the interrelation between imperialist resistance to liberation movements abroad and the parallel resistance in this country to Negro demands for Freedom Now. Our task is to help develop that perception all the way to the indicated anticapitalist and pro-socialist conclusions. Those efforts will lend impetus to the present incipient revolt against Negro misleaders who acquiesce in the capitalist government’s criminal acts abroad and who preach reliance on that same government in the civil rights struggle here at home.