Ultraleftism Has Never Ended a War

The Three Poles of Anti-War Politics

The Vietnam antiwar movement was consumed by a three-way fight over what to demand. On the right stood organizations like SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which wanted the movement to call for "negotiations." Their logic was practical: all wars end with negotiations; the task was to strengthen the hand of congressional "doves" who were beginning to criticize escalation. SANE wanted to work closely with liberal Democratic politicians, to convince them that negotiations should begin. In that framework, "immediate withdrawal" slogans were a liability — they would shut off the friendly ears of Establishment figures who accepted the basic premises of the cold war.

The liberal wing of the movement thus hitched its fortunes to the Democratic Party, trusting that patient lobbying and respectable protest would eventually move the administration toward peace. But Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of rolling back US imperial influence. Even as SANE and its allies cultivated relationships with sympathetic Democrats, LBJ was dramatically escalating — pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into Vietnam and intensifying the bombing of the north.

The strategy of working through friendly channels inside the party proved fruitless: the very politicians the liberals courted either fell in line behind the president or found themselves powerless to change his course.

On the opposite end of the antiwar spectrum stood ultra-left groups like the Spartacist League, which wanted demonstrations to march under banners reading "Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution." Alongside them, the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) increasingly argued that the antiwar movement should adopt a "multi-issue" program encompassing opposition to racism, capitalism, and imperialism as a whole — or that the movement was simply "working on the wrong issue."

In a remarkable position paper prepared for a crucial 1965 convention, SDS leaders Lee Webb and Paul Booth flatly declared: "Essentially, we think that the movement against the war in Vietnam is working on the wrong issue. And that issue is Vietnam."

The Middle Path

In the middle stood the radical pacifists around A.J. Muste and Dave Dellinger; the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA); and the independent committees to end the war in Vietnam that formed much of the backbone of the new movement. These groups — nonexclusionary, action-oriented, open to anyone willing to work against the war — argued for "immediate withdrawal," later crystallized into the slogan "Out Now."

Fred Halstead's extraordinary 880-page history Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War recounts that the local antiwar committees discovered through direct experience that it was far easier to reach ordinary people with a demand for getting the U.S. out of Vietnam entirely than with the complicated and equivocal appeals favored by the negotiations wing. "Bring the Troops Home Now" was concrete and unambiguous. It left the government no room to equivocate.

Johnson claimed to favor negotiations too. But Johnson could not say "Bring all the troops home now."

The principled case went deeper. Halstead noted that demands for negotiations, when directed by Americans at the American government, implicitly recognized some U.S. right to be in Vietnam — something to negotiate over. The U.S. simply had no right whatever to be militarily involved in Vietnam, and the only honest demand was to get out.

At one heated meeting, a negotiations supporter shouted: "Bullshit. How do you even withdraw without negotiations?" To which several people on the other side shouted in unison: "On ships and planes, the same way you got in."

Black Anti-War Opposition

Halstead's three-way schema — liberalism, ultra-leftism, mass action — is useful. But it doesn't fully capture an important current that cut across all three categories: Black opposition to the war, which emerged after decades of deep on-the-ground organizing for civil rights and via the inspiration of anti-colonial struggles abroad.

SNCC's 1967 statement against the war was one of the earliest and sharpest organizational breaks with Cold War consensus. Muhammad Ali's refusal to serve — "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong" — electrified millions. And Martin Luther King's 1967 Riverside Church address, in which he called the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," was a seismic event that broke the tacit agreement among civil rights leaders to stay silent on foreign policy.

Black anti-war activism was often multi-issue and effective. It connected Vietnam to the draft's racial inequities, to the diversion of resources from domestic needs, to the broader structure of racial oppression. But this type of multi-issue politics could not always be easily exported into different social contexts in the U.S.

How Revolutionary Slogans Shrunk the Movement

Ultraleftism was no more effective at ending the war than liberalism. But it came wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric that made it particularly seductive to the young radicals the movement depended on.

Foreshadowing today's debates over how to relate to anti-imperial resistance in Palestine and Iran, Halstead explained why the demand for "Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution" was not helpful. He "saw no useful purpose for them in a demonstration appealing to Americans with demands directed at the U.S. government. We were, after all, not speaking to Vietnamese." He continued: "Both from the point of view of those simply opposed to the war, and those who, like myself, were partisans of the Vietnamese revolution, our central task as Americans was to put maximum pressure on the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. That would help the Vietnamese revolution more than anything else we could possibly do."

The "multi-issue" argument was even more damaging, because it was wielded by SDS, which had the largest base among radicalized students. One SWP leader characterized the multi-issue debate as "largely a sham battle that covered up rather than elucidated the issues at stake." His reasoning was simple: "All the radical organizations are multi-issue and none believe that society can be changed... by a program or pattern of activity around a single issue. Thus any member of SDS, YSA, Du Bois, M-2-M, has a multi-issue approach to the war."

But the committees to end the war in Vietnam were united fronts, not revolutionary parties. "Any attempt to add further planks to their program would destroy them. Those who make them up agree on this basic point and no other."

The problem with SDS's multi-issue approach was not that connecting the war to other struggles was inherently wrong. Black radical movements were doing exactly that with great effect — and socialist organizations like the SWP and the Black Panthers were recruiting people to precisely such a comprehensive vision of how society's ills were intertwined.

But when SNCC or King connected Vietnam to racial injustice, they were articulating what masses of Black Americans already felt. The connections were drawn from below, from the concrete realities of communities that were disproportionately drafted, disproportionately killed, and systematically denied the freedoms they were supposedly fighting to defend abroad. That kind of multi-issue consciousness deepened and broadened the movement.

SDS, by contrast, was doing something very different: asking coalitions of people who agreed on one thing — that the war had to stop — to first adopt a comprehensive analysis of imperialism, capitalism, and racism as a package before they could march together. Far from deepening the movement, that just erected barriers to entry.

In New York, SDS literally voted to dissolve the citywide committee to end the war in Vietnam rather than allow it to continue as a focused antiwar coalition. A bloc of forces led by SDS supporters carried a vote to shut down the coordinating committee and replace it with a regional SDS group operating under SDS's multi-issue program. An SDS leader chaired the meeting — though, as Halstead notes, it was apparently the first meeting of the committee he had ever attended.

The YSA had opposed this move, and a general assembly was scheduled days later where the focused antiwar approach would likely have carried. So SDS simply killed the organization before the vote could happen.

Later, SDS's trajectory carried it further and further from mass politics. By 1968, meetings that were supposed to build radical community bases had "sifted down to a handful of SDSers sitting in a room escalating their rhetoric." The faction that became the Weathermen adopted the slogan "Dare to struggle, dare to win" and tried via spectacular bombings to substitute the will of a tiny minority for the patient work of building a mass movement.

And as Dellinger himself later admitted, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protest clashes with armed forces "helped create a movement mystique of revolutionary derring-do and heroic street encounters as goals in themselves. This polarized the movement around the question of street violence and gradually led to a tragic separation between the organized movement and large sections of the antiwar public."

When it came to demands, SWP leader Peter Camejo, in his famous 1970 speech "Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action," identified a core problem with turning away from a clear focus on Vietnam. Calling for "Stop Imperialism" instead of "Bring the Troops Home Now" was an abstraction. "Even Nixon can say, 'I'm against imperialism too — that's what Britain and France and Holland did in the 18th and 19th centuries.'" But Nixon can't say, "Bring all the troops home now."

In other words, the ultra-left demand and the liberal demand converged in their practical effect. Both let the government off the hook. "Negotiations" was too weak to pin the war-makers down. "Smash Imperialism" was too abstract. Only concrete, immediate, non-negotiable demands generated maximum pressure to actually constrain the ruling class.

Mass Action and the Question of Leverage

The SWP's position on tactics was often caricatured as a fetish for big marches. But it was something more interesting — and more strategic — than that. What the SWP argued for was a strategy of independent mass action: activating and involving the broadest numbers of Americans in the fight.

Halstead wrote in 1965: "It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure in the country, including the trade unions and the soldiers in the army."

Much of SWP work focused thus on reaching and winning over ordinary Americans to oppose a war that remained popular as late as 1967. And as anti-war sentiment grew, this persuasion work increasingly was combined with deep organizing work to make it visible.

Critics might note that drawing direct lessons from Vietnam to contemporary contexts requires caution. The geopolitical landscape of the 1960s differs substantially from today's Israel-Iran conflicts, and the dynamics of public opinion, media, and grassroots organizing have transformed in ways that resist simple translation. Still, Blanc's core analytical point — that mass movements succeed when they focus on concrete, achievable demands rather than revolutionary abstraction — remains instructive.

Lessons for Today's Anti-War Movement

The decades-long resistance of the Vietnamese people, whose heroism is hard to overstate, was obviously a central factor in the U.S. defeat. But Vietnamese revolutionaries were also the first to underscore that they could not win without a strong peace movement within the belly of the beast.