Ty Moore

The antiwar movement has taken off again on a scale not seen since the war began. Rising popular anger at Bush and the war is blowing wind back into the movement's sails.

But what will it take to end the war? What strategies should antiwar activists adopt to mobilize the most powerful movement possible?

More than Demonstrations Needed

Mass protests are essential to mobilizing and strengthening the broad antiwar sentiment, to bring new layers of society into political activity, and to provide our movement a loud voice. But demonstrations alone will not be enough to force the hand of Bush or the pro-war politicians of either party.

When the vital interests of U.S. capitalism are at stake, the big-business politicians who run this country are not responsive to popular opinion. They only change course when mass movements from below threaten the basic foundations of their power.

This was clearly shown in the wake of Katrina, with anger at the war being catapulted to an all-time high. The call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops was previously supported by about a third of the U.S. population, but by mid-September 52% supported this demand (NY Times, 9/17/05). On September 24, approximately 300-500,000 people marched past the White House calling for an immediate withdrawal.

Yet on October 7, the Senate handed Bush $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a 97-0 vote. There is not one Senator who supports the call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal - i.e. who agrees with the majority of this country. This illustrates how rotten both major parties are, and how unrepresentative the current political system is.

The War at Home

If popular opinion, elections, and mass protests are insufficient to end the war, what will it take?

The history of past imperialist wars, from Vietnam to the two World Wars, shows that anti-war movements are at their most powerful when the social power of the working class and the oppressed is brought to bear. When Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and the radical wing of the civil rights movement began explicitly drawing links between the Vietnam War and domestic struggles against racism and poverty, the antiwar movement exploded and took on a new character fundamentally more threatening to the U.S. capitalist class.

Similarly, today's antiwar movement will grow in strength the more it is able to link the war to the social and economic struggles of working people against corporate America. The key task is to make connections between "the war at home and the war abroad."

The political fallout from Hurricane Katrina dramatically underlines this point. Tens of millions of workers were outraged when they discovered that New Orleans levees and disaster relief programs were de-funded to pay for war. Tens of millions bitterly speculated how many lives could have been saved if the National Guard were not supplying 35% of U.S. troops in Iraq.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll "shows that cutting spending on Iraq is Americans' top choice for financing the recovery from Katrina." (Wall Street Journal, 9/15/05)

What's astonishing is that these ideas have taken root despite the fact that no major politicians, no major media, and no mass organizations are systematically campaigning for them. Imagine the social power for change that could be mobilized in the post-Katrina situation if we had our own mass party made up of and controlled by working people, antiwar activists, community organizations, etc. The instinctive antiwar mood that has developed would have emerged far more quickly, and would be even stronger today.

The collapse in public support for the war provides a major opportunity that the anti-war movement should seize. Antiwar activists need to make a bold turn toward building deep roots and antiwar groups in working-class communities, in schools, and in workplaces.

Alongside the call for an immediate end to the war, we must also prominently take up class issues like social service cutbacks, the high cost of gas, tuition hikes, poverty, racism, and sexism. We should put forward fighting demands on these issues, arguing that the $7 billion per month spent on war should be redirected toward social needs.

The antiwar resolution passed by the AFL-CIO convention this summer can also be used as a basis to organize rank-and-file antiwar caucuses within the unions, demanding that labor throw its massive potential weight into building the antiwar movement.

Antiwar Democrats?

As the crisis in Iraq deepens and anti-war sentiment grows, more and more Democratic Party politicians are raising scathing criticisms of Bush's Iraq policy. Looking toward the 2006 elections, a number of Democrats are consciously attempting to tap into the antiwar mood for support.

In this context many leading antiwar groups are arguing that the movement should focus its efforts on lobbying Democrats - and Republicans - with the aim of eventually winning a majority in Congress to an antiwar position.

However, supporting "antiwar" Democrats means limiting our demands and our methods of struggle to what is acceptable to liberal Democrats, who, in turn, limit themselves to political parameters set by their corporate backers. But an effective antiwar movement requires a movement which mobilizes working people and threatens big business.

The 2004 elections and the collapse of most antiwar groups into the John Kerry campaign is a crystal clear example. In the primaries, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich brought much of the antiwar movement behind them with bold attacks on Bush and the war. Then, when their campaigns were crushed by the big business interests that control the Democratic Party, both Kucinich and Dean dutifully shepherded their supporters behind the pro-war, pro-corporate Kerry campaign.

The effect was to demoralize and politically set back the antiwar movement. The presidential elections opened an unprecedented opportunity to expose Bush's criminal policy in Iraq. Instead, fear of embarrassing Kerry led antiwar leaders to de-mobilize the anti-war movement and push it onto the sidelines. The demand to end the occupation was systematically played down. Kucinich, bowing to pressure, did not call for an end to the war in his much anticipated Democratic National Convention speech.

Over the last year, a number of liberal Democrats have apparently "seen the light" and are now subjecting Bush's war policy to severe criticism, with a minority even making general calls for a withdrawal. Even some Republicans have joined Maxine Waters' "Out of Iraq" caucus.

The fact that some congressional Democrats and Republicans have called for an end to the war does not contradict the capitalist character of either party. Instead, this reflects political pressure they feel from their antiwar constituents, as well as the real debate and differences within the U.S. ruling class over how to most effectively secure the interests of U.S. capitalism in Iraq.

At all levels of the political and military establishment, there are a growing number of figures who understand the profound crisis U.S. imperialism faces in Iraq. They are raising public opposition because they believe that Bush and the neo-conservative strategy is rebounding on U.S. imperialism. That is why many so-called antiwar Democrats avoid calling for an immediate withdrawal, instead limiting themselves to vague calls for Bush to set a timetable for ending the war.

While posturing as the party of peace and of working people in normal times, the Democrats have consistently carried out the imperialist projects of U.S. capitalists. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japan, and both Kennedy and Johnson, escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Carter initiated "dirty" wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Clinton enforced the genocidal sanctions on Iraq, bombed Yugoslavia, and carried out numerous other military operations to defend U.S. corporate interests abroad.

2006: An Antiwar Alternative?

The Democratic Party leaders hope to make substantial electoral gains in the 2006 elections as anger at the war and Bush's domestic agenda grows. But instead of channeling that anger toward building a mass antiwar movement from below, these campaigns will aim to divert this anger into "safe" channels under the control of the Democratic Party, so that it will not challenge the ruling class.

The antiwar movement needs to avoid the mistake it made in 2004 and instead fight to create a political voice independent of the Democratic Party. The potential exists to mobilize the massive antiwar sentiment into strong local, and even national, independent antiwar, pro-worker election campaigns.

Combining agitation around concrete local problems facing working people with a bold vision for a generalized fight-back against the war, Bush, and big business could win enthusiastic support among growing layers of young people and workers in the present period. Anti-military recruitment campaigns for school boards and demanding money for jobs and education, not war, would also gain a powerful echo.

Independent antiwar election campaigns would facilitate mass agitation in working-class areas, and help us to unite our diverse social struggles into a common political movement. They would provide a platform to explain antiwar and anti-corporate ideas to a much wider audience. Such campaigns would also represent an important step towards building a new mass party in this country that consistently fights against U.S. imperialism and for the interests of working people.

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Ty Moore is a student activist with Socialist Alternative, where this article first appeared.