Ruminations on the antiwar movement

Today’s New York Times Magazine has an article titled “Can Lobbyists Stop the War?” which is focused on the efforts of an outfit called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (A.A.E.I.), an offshoot of moveon.org. It is led by a 32 year old moveon.org veteran named Tom Matzzie, whose most recent strategy “stresses Democratic unity and driving a wedge between Republicans and President Bush.” Matzzie feels that this approach makes much more sense than demonstrating in the streets. The Times explains:

The playbook for opposing a war has changed markedly since the street-protest ethos of the anti-Vietnam movement. Tie-dyed shirts and flowers have been replaced by oxfords and BlackBerries. Politicians are as likely to be lobbied politely as berated. And instead of a freewheeling circus managed from college campuses and coffee houses, the new antiwar movement is a multimillion-dollar operation run by media-savvy professionals.

Matzzie told the paper: “Last time [it] was done in the streets. People were concerned about civil society breaking down. You have to play in politics, which is something we do very explicitly.”

Tom Matzzie: promises not to rock the boat

Matzzie is close to the Democratic Party leadership and meets with Pelosi and Reid about once a month. Last year when the Democrats caved in and gave Bush money to continue the war, Matzzie took the position that to do otherwise would be essentially “a vote for a war without end.” Obviously, Matzzie has loftier career goals in mind than lobbying politicians. This kind of double-speak would qualify him to be a press secretary for Hillary Clinton. Fellow liberals at the grass roots level were less than delighted with his position and accused him of “having been co-opted by the party leaders with whom he frequently rubs elbows.” Mattzie supposedly believes that “political and lifestyle radicalism was a gift to supporters of the Vietnam War that his allies will not give again.”

One of Matzzie’s lieutenants is a middle-aged New Yorker named Alan Charney who feels that the 1960s radicalism got in the way of the movement he had always intended to build. He claims that he “had been waiting for this moment for a long time.” As it turns out, Charney is a former national chairman of Democratic Socialists of America who organized a meeting billed as “Save the Soul of the Democratic Party!” at the DP convention in 1996. Given this, I can certainly understand why he would have found a home in the A.A.E.I.

Earlier this summer, A.A.E.I. and some senior Democrats organized a peace vigil outside the Capitol building. Some rowdy audience members began chanting slogans at the Democratic leaders onstage: “Stop the funding!” and “Stop giving them what they want!” One of them was in such an agitated state that the Democrats onstage privately discussed calling off the rally. Matzzie stepped forward and positioned his imposing frame between the loudest screamer and his masters on stage.

In deference to the need for journalistic balance, the New York Times offers its readers a glance at the “radical” alternative to Matzzie, moveon.org and A.A.E.I. This is embodied in Medea Benjamin’s Code Pink, a group of women who wear pink clothing and put pressure on Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders to cut off funding for the war. Far be it for me to question the newspaper of record, but I can’t tell any real difference between moveon.org and Code Pink. They both trust the Democratic Party to respond to the wishes of the American people, an act of credulity that can best be likened to sending your social security number to one of those email pitches on behalf of the estate of a deceased Nigerian oil millionaire.

In a September 5^th posting to CommonDreams.org, Benjamin appeared to have given up on persuading Nancy Pelosi to see things her way. After Code Pink had camped out on her doorstep to begin a hunger strike, the top Democrat screamed “Get away from my house” when she saw the activists. One supposes that the activists were seen by “mommy” Nancy Pelosi as throwing a tantrum. It will take more than camping out on her doorstep and going on a hunger strike to turn this millionaire politician around. Meanwhile, Benjamin still proffers advice to Pelosi: “Use your power as Speaker to only allow bills to the floor that include a fixed timeline for withdrawal or stipulate that funds only be used for the safe and speedy withdrawal of our troops.”

Medea Benjamin: will hold her breath until she turns blue for peace

Watching Matzzie and Benjamin grovel before these ruling class politicians makes me appreciate all the more what Osama bin Laden said in his latest communiqué:

So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats’ failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam War. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn’t be any cause for astonishment – and there isn’t any- in the Democrats’ failure to stop the war. And you’re the ones who have the saying which goes, “Money talks.”

Moving a few degrees to the left of Medea Benjamin, we end up with United for Peace and Justice, a group that ostensibly still tries to mobilize people in the streets after the fashion so despised by Tom Matzzie. It has sponsored some of the larger actions but tends to deemphasize them in election years. Like Matzzie and Benjamin, UFPJ believes that we have to persuade the Democrats to stand up to Bush more forcibly. I get at least one email a week from their chairperson Leslie Cagan urging me to get in touch with my Congressperson. With all due respect to her, I might as well pray to god to hurl lightning bolts at George W. Bush.

With the Communist Party and its split-off, the Committees of Correspondence–a Eurocommunist type formation– sitting in the driver’s seat of UFPJ, I wouldn’t expect anything much different.

In a June 24 article in the CP’s newspaper titled “The dubious history of a slogan,” Tim Wheeler defends a perspective in line with Mattzie and Benjamin’s, namely relying on the Democrats. Using an addled history of the Vietnam War antiwar movement, Wheeler advises against getting too rowdy with the Democrats. Like Tim Matzzie, he is ready to intercede on their behalf especially when it comes to raising “unrealistic slogans” like immediate withdrawal:

When I hear activists opposed to the Iraq war chant, “Out Now,” it brings back memories of 1971, when the slogan “Out Now” was a cause for sharp division in the movement to end the Vietnam War.

Today, as in 1971, the antiwar bloc is growing on Capitol Hill, with Democrats holding a slim majority. Even as we push for the strongest measures possible, we must be supportive of the compromises the antiwar bloc is forced to make to win a bipartisan majority against the war.

The 2008 elections are 19 months away. Having seen what happened to their pro-war colleagues in last November’s election, many Republican lawmakers are beginning to shift on the war. We may well reach a point where a veto-proof majority will approve binding legislation to end the war. The peace movement, representing the vast majority sentiment against the war, can play a big role in pushing that process forward. If we limit ourselves to reciting “Out Now,” we cannot help these lawmakers build that majority. Once again, there is the broader alternative: “Set the Date!” At this writing, a large bloc of antiwar lawmakers is saying they will vote ‘no’ on a supplemental spending bill because a timeline has been removed.

During the Vietnam antiwar movement, the Trotskyists were just as strong as the CP. They would unite periodically with the pacifists in a coalition that would mount powerful demonstrations in Washington and in major cities around the country.

The CP survived the 1960s with enough forces to be able to pull together a movement modeled on Tim Wheeler’s orientation to the Democrats. It is identical to Alan Charney’s approach but with a different pedigree, the Comintern of the 1930s as opposed to Mitterand’s Socialist International. In either case, you are dealing with naked opportunism.

In the mid 1970s, the American Trotskyist leaders became disoriented by the end of the Vietnam War and the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. They worried that the hundreds of members who were recruited in the 1960s, like me, would spread a middle-class virus in the organization and turn it into a counter-revolutionary force. As a prophylactic, they prescribed a pell-mell “turn” to the proletariat which involved getting jobs in basic industry, whether or not there were political openings. To get recalcitrant members like me to make the turn, the leaders made a point of depicting the factories of the US as about ready to rise en masse against the bosses in a general strike. In 1978, a year marked by the Carter presidency, disco and cocaine, we were told that the workers were more radical than at any time in the 20^th century. When I sat in meetings listening to such nonsense, I felt like I was in a Superman episode with the leaders I had so respected being transformed into sectarian nutters. Had Clark been exposed to purple kryptonite or something? Why was he acting so strangely?

Within a decade, the American Trotskyists had lost 80 percent of their members, who voted with their feet.

Shortly before they had committed political suicide, a much smaller group called the Workers World Party began to fill the vacuum they had created. In one crisis after another, they worked with Ramsey Clark to build “coalitions” that would oppose intervention in Panama, Iraq and elsewhere. The reason I put the word coalition in quotes is that they never really were that. A genuine coalition has tensions because they bring together significant political forces with opposing outlooks, like the CP and the Trotskyists in the 1960s. They are difficult to sustain because of contradictions, but they are the best hope for building a mass movement. ANSWER has dispensed with these contradictions by relying on “safe” member groups that would never dream of challenging Brian Becker’s decisions. As somebody who has seen Becker hold forth as if he were Lenin at Zimmerwald, I can’t say that I blame them. It would be an exercise in futility.

So here we are in 2007. ANSWER has called for a “mass march” on Washington next weekend and UFPJ has its own action planned for October 27^th. I imagine that ANSWER’s slogans will ignore Tim Wheeler’s warning not to go too far. We can be grateful for that, I suppose. Meanwhile, I expect the UFPJ action to be larger, even if it is meant more as an appeal to Congress than a threat to the existing order.

Well, as discouraging as all this is, we can take heart at one thing. We know that American capitalism will spawn new wars down the road. As with the scorpion that bit the eagle that flew it across the river, it is in its nature. We need to take a good look at what works and what does not work. Contrary to the views of a hustler like Tom Matzzie, the 1960s are still worth studying. In this war and in wars to come, we must rely on the power of people in the streets and not on the bourgeois politicians with their endless string of broken promises. We may not have the millions of dollars that pour into the coffers of moveon.org and A.A.E.I. but we have the truth on our side and that ultimately is a more powerful weapon.