Must-Read Historical Article on the Vietnam Moratorium...

[Career Prole]

...which illustrates how far we still need to go to apply the social pressure which will force Washington to rethink the costs of the war.

The Vietnam Moratorium by Jeremy Brecher (1969)

True mass movements develop quickly; they contain contradictory impulses; they change rapidly in the face of events their leaders cannot control. The great mass movement called the Moratorium already shows three explicit political strands, each with its own assumptions and its own trajectory for the movement.

1) For the great majority of participants, the Moratorium is essentially an expression of sentiment, based on the hope that such an expression will somehow sway the President to change his course. They show somewhat the touching spirit of the Russian peasants who demonstrated on Bloody Sunday, 1905, in the belief that if only the Czar knew the people's misery he would save them. In this case, however, faith is put not in the magical mantle of divine authority, but in the equally magical belief that 'the government represents the people' and therefore will act upon their will.

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To the extent that the Moratorium remains within this framework it has no future, for the October 15th demonstrations alone were enough to show overwhelming popular desire to get out of Vietnam, as did the October Gallup Poll showing that a bill to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of 1970 was supported nearly two-to-one. If the Moratorium retains this view, it may grow for a month or two, but after that it will gradually fade away, leaving little effect on the actual course of events.

2) The second strand constitutes opposition politics. It is essentially a continuation of the Kennedy-McCarthy movement of 1968-even the faces are the same. It too is based on a touching faith in the electoral process, seemingly impervious to the results of experience. Its proponents have not learned the obvious lesson of the 1968 campaign that the electoral process is controlled from above, not below. They have not learned the obvious lesson of the A.B.M. struggle: that the real power over governmental action does not lie in elected bodies. They have not noticed that Nixon ran as a 'Peace candidate', as did our other Vietnam War Presidents, 'we seek no wider war' Johnson and 'let us put a truce to terror' Kennedy, before him.

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The program of this approach will be to keep the Moratorium going for a few more months, then swing it into the 1970 primaries and elections, building a base for a McCarthy-style campaign in 1972. Its main requirements are that the movement remain respectable, give visible support and loyalty to likely candidates, and continue to grow for a few months until it can be channeled into electoral action.

3) The third strand is confrontation. In its extreme form, as practiced by Weatherman, it is rejected by most of the Moratorium movement, but as the legacy of the civil rights movement and the old Mobilization Committee, its basic idea that 'power is in the streets' remains the frame of reference for most radicals in the peace movement. It assumes that each confrontation simultaneously advertises the radicals' cause and undermines the claim of the government to represent the popular will. If the government uses violence, it presumably de-legitimates itself further with the population by showing that the basis of its power is not consent but force.

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All of these tendencies are rooted in the idea that real power lies in Washington. But the Moratorium movement also contains the seeds. Despite the apparent power of the men in Washington to make the crucial decisions, it is not they who keep the country going, who do its work and fight its wars. Rather, it is the people-the same people who support two-to-one the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam. If they refuse to work-if they strike-the war must end. Indeed, the Moratorium itself was originally conceived as a general strike against the war, but was watered down by leaders who, as the New York Times put it, "liked the idea of political action but not the threat of a strike." To end the war, the Moratorium must more and more become a general strike against the war. It is here that the real power of the movement lies, not in playing politics or playing with violence.

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Such great social events as general strikes do not usually result from a single source of discontent; rather, they are a response to the piling up of one grievance on another, one action on another. So far action against the war has come primarily from middle-class and white collar people. However, those who fight against the war directly will have new allies in the coming months, for the government has deliberately put the burden of the war on those who can least afford it.

While fighting against tax reform, Nixon has demanded that the special war surtax remain. He has deliberately adopted policies which create unemployment in order to restrain war-generated inflation. This, combined with the fact that real take-home pay of workers had decreased each year since the escalation of 1965, means that strikes will increase and become more bitter. Pressure on business to cut payrolls will lead to attempts at speed-up, with a resulting increase in wildcat strikes. As Labor Secretary Shultz said recently, "there will be a lot of tension ... I imagine there will be strikes ... this is part of the process of sorting out and rearranging the sense of direction of the economy."

Strikes and resulting wage increases will make the economic consequences of the war still less manageable for Nixon. The rise of discontent will undermine the lock-step patriotism of those who today still think it disloyal to oppose the President. Thus, the effects of this strike movement will converge with those of the growing anti-war strike movement....

Jeremy Brecher was once Northwest regional organizer for SDS. He was also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and co-editor of Left Mailings, a new radical pamphlet series.

Source: Liberation Magazine Dec. 1969

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The site where I found this article is pretty fascinating in itself. :)
www.hippy.com