BY PIP HINMAN
The September 11 terrorist attacks have given the capitalist rulers of the US and other imperialist powers an opening to win initial support from big sections of the working class for a war to crush all those in the Third World who are regarded as hostile to "Western interests".
The US already has overwhelming military superiority over all other states. But its weakness is political. Millions of people around the world see it for the exploitative and oppressor state that it is. US imperialism even faced increasing legitimacy problems in its own population before September 11, as the rise of the anti-corporate globalisation movement demonstrated.
An important part of this war is the racist onslaught that imperialism has unleashed against Arabs and other people of Middle Eastern appearance. Anti-Arab racism is being given a new lease of life through theories of the cultural superiority of "Western civilisation". The intention behind this is to destroy any solidarity between the working class in the imperialist countries and the oppressed masses in the oil-rich Middle East.
This war is also aimed at any dissenting voices in the imperialist countries. The movement against corporate globalisation and the different sectors which have mounted resistance to capitalist attacks on working people's living standards are threatened with the argument: "If you are not with us then you are with the terrorists".
It's also a war to take back some of the hard-won civil liberties in the imperialist countries. In Australia, the cutting edge of this attack on civil liberties is the institutionalisation of discrimination against Middle Eastern refugees. This racist offensive pre-dated September 11 in all imperialist countries, but the new war hysteria has been used to step up these attacks.
In this context, how can we build the biggest and broadest mass anti-war movement to defeat this new imperialist offensive?
Lessons from past
Lessons can be drawn from the campaign against the war in Vietnam. The key lesson is that the only winning strategy to defeat ruling class offensives — whether it's a drive to war, or attacks on our democratic rights, or attacks on our living standards — is mass action.
Fundamental social and economic change will only ever be won in this rotten capitalist system when the mass of people — workers and other oppressed sectors — in the process of organising and acting collectively develop the self-confidence to act in their own class interests and defeat the system which is the source of their problems. This fact has to guide all the tactical decisions made in the anti-war movement.
The campaign against the Vietnam War in Australia developed in similar ways to the movement in the US. Of course Australia was a junior partner, and tagged along behind the US. But the Australian ruling class had its own aims and ambitions and interests in south-east Asia.
"The size of the movement and demonstrations that sprang up in protest were proportionately as big or bigger than the actions in the US", John Percy told an anti-war teach-in held in Sydney on October 27. Percy became active in the movement against the Vietnam War in 1965 and is today national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party.
"The hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life across Australia who participated in actions against the war helped make a difference. They helped force the withdrawal of Australian troops, they helped save many Vietnamese lives, and they aided the final liberation of Vietnam."
Besides stunts and civil disobedience actions — which served to build the rallies bigger — the most effective demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were the moratoriums organised in 1970-71 through the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign that mobilised on several occasions up to 100,000 people in Melbourne.
"The strength of the moratoriums were the big organising meetings of activists that made the main decisions. In Melbourne, 500 people regularly filled Richmond Town Hall", Percy added.
"It's essential to put demands on the government that, if met, will materially assist our side", Percy continued. "The current demands — end the war/stop the bombing, no Australian support or participation in the war/bring the troops home; no racist scapegoating; and no attacks on democratic rights — cut directly against the imperialist war drive. They are not too soft and they don't let imperialism off the hook as did the favourite demand of the conservatives in the anti-Vietnam War movement, 'Negotiate!'.
"Of course before each major action, the anti-war committee should discuss the key demands, but for the rallies and groups to grow, they have to be as appealing as possible without watering down the demands on the government."
Refugees and the war drive
John Howard, supported by Kim Beazley, has enthusiastically joined Bush and Blair in the racist warmongering against the Third World. Howard and Beazley are relying on racist hysteria (whipped up around the relatively few refugees who reach Australia's northern shores in leaky boats) along with the horror at the September 11 terror attacks, to help justify their support for the war on Afghanistan today.
But it would be a mistake to insist that people opposed to the war must also already understand why refugees should be welcome to Australia. Of course, that shouldn't prevent activists from arguing the connections in speeches, at teach-ins, at forums, in propaganda at rallies, etc.
There is a distinct anti-war movement and a refugee rights movement, and forcing the two movements into a single organising committee would be detrimental for both. While these two issues are obviously connected, many opponents of the government's attacks on refugees are also supporters of the war.
Each of these movements needs to mobilise the largest possible number of people in support of its demands. Opinion polls indicate there is far more opposition to the war — around 40% of the population — than oppose the government's policy toward asylum seekers. The anti-war movement needs to reach out to and mobilise as many as possible of these people in anti-war protests, irrespective of their views on any other issues.
Large sections of the Australian working class are imbued with racist attitudes. But we also know that there are many workers who already oppose the war on Afghanistan. How will we break down the racism of many workers towards the refugees?
One the most important ways is to involve more workers and their organisations in the anti-war organising groups and their activities. Such mobilisations — objectively in solidarity with the victims of this racist war — will do more to undermine racist attitudes in the working class than any amount of propagandising on its own.
Another key lesson from the last big anti-war movement, Percy said, was activist democracy. "We argued for the meetings to be open, involving as many as possible in the decision-making. Leadership should not be the monopoly of one particular group or political tendency", said Percy.
"Non-exclusion had to be the principle of such a united front. Nobody, no group, was to be excluded from the action and the organising of it on the basis of their political views, as long as they were against the war, and wanted to build the protest action. We argued that there should be no exclusion of the left, no red-baiting. We argued against any attempt to exclude other left-wing groups, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc., but also welcomed the participation of Liberals, e.g., as long as they were against the war."
"Activist democracy was critical to the success of the movement", Percy emphasised.
In the new anti-war movement any attempts to bureaucratically control committees — such as displacing activist democracy with a permanent stack by delegates from non-active institutions — or by using race guilt-tripping or red-baiting to silence or exclude genuine activists, has to be resisted, Percy concluded.
[Pip Hinman is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party and the lead Socialist Alliance candidate for Senate in NSW.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 7, 2001.
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