I think it would be great is somebody would write a detailed history of Maoism/MLism and the CPUSA during the 1960's and 70's in the USA. So far the efforts have been few and far between, check out Max Elbaum and the Kasama Project. There is an interesting doctoral dissertation about the CP-USA in this period: "Working Class Internationalism: The American Communist Party and Anti-Vietnam War Activism 1961-1971". It is available online free. Interestingly, it emphasizes the propaganda of against the War in the CP's newspapers, but barely mentions CP participation in antiwar coalitions and demonstrations.
Fred Halstead's great book, and Erich Blanc's article are both polemical and neither are meant to provide complete overviews. They argue for the centrality of large demonstrations, and using one or a limited number of demands to mobilize the largest number of people possible. The don't discuss the real limitations of that tactical orientation. I graduated from high school in 1969. While in high school in San Jose, CA, my friends and I formed a little radical group. We listened to underground radio including KPFA, smoked dope, and organized carloads of kids to go to Berkeley, San Francisco and Palo Alto for demonstrations of the Black Panthers, antiwar demonstrations and rock concerts. For us, there were two enormous and distant organizations leading the struggle: the SDS and the Resistance, but we did not really have a very good idea of what either one was. The SDS blew up in the factional struggles of 1969/70, and the Weatherman faction blew themselves up (some of them literally). I entered UC Berkeley in January 1970 having missed the normal entry date of September because of a detour into hitchhiking. In May we went on strike after the illegal US invasion of Cambodia and Laos. By then the SDS was no more, the Third World students became the main leaders of the movement, eclipsing Progressive Labor which had emphasized the struggle against the ROTC on campus. That strike was part of an enormous nationwide student strike that was without doubt the single largest and most effective protest against the war. It was not led by the SWP or the Student Mobilization Committee , which the SWP led. Neither was it led by any of the various Maoists groups of the time, and the CP-USA was nowhere to be seen. It is true that all of them participated in the strike struggle in one way or another, but they did not constitute its central leadership. The Resistance was a mostly pacifist group with the look of hippies. It advocated resisting the draft by burning draft cards and escaping to Canada and other countries when drafted. It was very loosely organized but present all over the country. There were resistance coffeehouses somewhere near every major US military base, and they were especially important near the places that shipped grunts to Vietnam. Two of those places were Fort Lewis near Seattle, and the Oakland airport in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1969, on any give day of the week, there were 50,000 soldiers absent without leave (AWOL). These coffee houses connected the youth in the military with the mass student movement and the wider antiwar movement. The US military began to implode. About 600,000 men evaded the draft (8,750 convicted, 3,250 jailed, 30,000 to 100,000 who moved out of the country. From 1969 to 1972 fragging, the use of grenades by soldiers to blow up their own offices, rapidly increased. Some platoons would put together money to pay a soldier to do the job. The military says that in that 3 year period there were 904 fraggings. As for the role of the CP-USA and the various Maoist groups during this period, they mostly supported the "negotiate now" wing of the movement and followed either the Soviet Union or China's policy of the moment. This did not prevent some of them from advocating ultraleft tactics in demonstrations. I remember the Revolutionary Union, one of the precursors of the Revolutionary Communist party, goosestepping in a big antiwar demonstration chanting, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!" They got a lot of attention, but they were never going to build a mass movement with their tactics, much less lead any sort of revolution. I read Halstead's excellent book a long time ago and thought it was a powerful argument for single issue protest movements, but they are powerful only under certain conditions. Anthony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41292): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41292 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118554230/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
