Fre d Halstead's 'Out Now' is a good book, and as I recall, he mentions me favorably at one point. I like dFred, too. We got along, I think, because he put ending the war first, and winning polemics second.
Fred was one of a kind. He was a powerful speaker, and an educator as well as an organizer: He guided me and other Chicago SWPers through Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in 1971.
Despite my long polemic on Trotskyism and the SWP, where I tried to deal with the matter seriously,* Due to my Guardian seat in the national antiwar coalition, I still knew a number of people in the SWP that I liked. Fred was one, Peter Camejo was another. Later I worked with Peter to build the database to get 'Links' launched. (*Some people were still saying it was a waste of my time, that Trotsky had no ideology, he was just a Nazi spy, and the old Olgin booklet was enough. Obviously, I replied that their view was ridiculous and that it was a good reason for writing the piece.
There's a lot of good meat in this piece, but it is hard to move past the problems that show up in its first two paragraphs:
(1) Failure to distinguish between "ultra-leftism", plain old leftism, progressivism, and liberalism; and
(2) Seeming to measure how "ultra-left" someone is by how much tolerance they have for Palestinian expressions of anger towards the Jewish mainstream (sometimes misdirected, sometimes not) or how vocally supportive they are of Arab armed resistance. Which is ridiculous. Hamas itself is a neoliberal organization. The Iranian government is not leftist in any way, shape or form (and massacred and repressed most of Iran's actual leftists, regardless where said leftists were on the spectrum from devout Muslims to secularist non-believers). Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum, and the fastest way to end misdirected rage against Zionism would be to end Zionist crimes against humanity.
Finally, starting this article by bringing up Susan Abulhawa is an awful look. Yes, sometimes things she says are not well thought out -- surprise surprise while her family is suffering a genocide conducted by Israel -- but she doesn't have an actual violent bone in her body towards random non Zionist Jewish people. She should be given grace for that, as it would be superhuman to do better in her circumstances. Instead she goes viral *because the Mayor's wife, whom she does not know, did something vaguely connected to her* while a torrent of Islamophobia proceeds unchecked.
The sentence "Israelis should not feel safe anywhere in the world", followed immediately by a statement that "I also don't give a shit if people collapse the distinction between zionists and jews" is indeed a statement of violent intent towards "random non-Zionist Jewish people." We should not be "giving grace" for such attitudes, but opposing them fiercely. You apparently do not work in mixed organizing spaces with anti-Zionist Jews—if you did, you would understand that these statements are indefensible.
I actually work mostly with anti-zionist Jews and have Mizrahi ancestry myself. I would absolutely not tolerate such statements from anyone other than Palestinians. In my experience with Palestinians, they usually reflect ourbursts of anger and not deeply held ideology. Everyone tolerates much, much worse said about Arabs from Israelis or Americans who lost a fraction as many loved ones to lesser Arab crimes. It's like Malcolm X's Black supremacy -- on his Hajj, late in his life, was the first time he experienced being treated as an equal in a group of lighter skinned people, simply breaking bread. All it took was that moment to make him believe it was possible for Black people to live with other races. And what it should teach you is about how Malcolm X was treated until that point.
I hope people realise that for many Palestinians their only encounters with Jews are through the occupation. It’s not surprising at all to me that for many the conflation between Jews and Zionists seems unproblematic.
In my own experience, Palestinians conflate Judaism and Zionism far less than most other Arabs -- I think because by now the majority of them have also been exposed to fully anti-zionist Jewish or ex-Israeli activists who've really put their bodies on the line for the cause. Susan Abulhawa has worked closely with Jewish anti-Zionist activists. I don't know what exactly was behind these remarks of hers, but I do know what was behind the disproportionate outrage about them relative to other things, and that speech-policing Palestinians comes with real physical danger. If anything, given what they are going through, it's almost superhuman how much they refrain from public poorly worded venting.
Ok. I think that’s probably more true for Palestinians in the diaspora. Two of my friends from Gaza have told me the only Jews they ever met in day to day life before emigrating were either militant settlers or armed idf.
I didn't take your second point in the same way, or consider the reference to Abulhawa as necessarily denying her grace. I think it was purely intended from a pragmatic, what best serves the goals of building a mass movement and what slogans, associations, etc can be counterproductive (i.e. treating your point on what goes viral as a reality that has to be worked around)
I have been following your posts about the antiwar movement and they are excellent. Congrats. I have been studying the anti-Vietnam War movement for over twenty years as a historian and I have been extremely interested in how the antiwar movement went from the fringes of intellectual/student/pacifist/leftist opposition in early 1965 to a mass movement by 1968. To this end, I recently edited a collection of Staughton Lynd's writings, speeches and statements against the war and the book is really about how the movement grew through the lens of one of the movement's chief protagonists. Right now I am engaged in a 8 other projects which are taking forever because of deep archival work. My dissertation was on the use of the Nuremberg Principles by the antiwar movement, draftees and soldiers in their resistance to the war from 1963-1968 and I have been slowly bringing it up to the present. If you are interested, I have made most of this work available online here: https://cyu-fr.academia.edu/LukeStewart. I am thinking about starting a blog like this to just starting putting the work out there and I am sharing this all with you because hopefully this is of interest and will help with some of your thinking. Keep going as it is very important what you are doing. Sincerely, Luke Stewart
The antiwar movement as I experienced it in Madison WI from 1965 through 1975 was a very broad movement encompassing liberals, radical pacifists, CP and ex-CP activists, SWP, YSA, PLP, RU, Sparts, anarchists, local trade union leftists, many hovering around SDS, all or almost all participating in mass action events on and off the UW campus. The eclecticism of the movement was both a weakness and a strength, making meetings incredibly long and contentious, but bringing masses to the streets to be brutally attacked and radicalized by the pigs. The same could be said of the 1968 Chicago convention demonstration, bringing together David Dellinger, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Alan Ginsberg, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and Clean for Gene McCarthy supporters. I don’t think it’s a good idea to read anyone out of the movement, whether liberals, ultra leftists or Trots, and I don’t see the problem with “Stop the Bombing”, “Bring the Troops Home Now” or “Negotiations Now”, although I prefer the second. I was active in SDS, part of a NCM party-building effort, and helped form the UW campus “United Front” that held the last anti-war mass action on April 15, 1975 as the NVA and NLF marched into Saigon and it became Ho Chi Minh City. The practical movement is everything, but it grows from many different sources to become a mighty stream.
The framing here is revealing. "Ultraleftism" hasn't ended a war — but neither has the centrist approach this piece advocates. What ended the Vietnam War was a combination of factors that included mass disruption, military resistance from within, and an imperial cost-benefit calculus that became untenable. The "independent mass action" this piece celebrates was, at the time, denounced by moderates as exactly the kind of provocative, alienating, excessively radical activity that Blanc warns against in his companion piece.
The deeper issue: while this article relitigates the 1960s, the state is setting legal precedents right now that will determine what an anti-war movement can even look like. Eight protesters were just convicted on federal terrorism charges at Prairieland for wearing black. Two sisters got material support convictions for owning a printer. The question isn't whether ultraleftism ends wars. The question is whether the centrist left's framework — which actively sorts protesters into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" categories — is producing the ideological cover the state needs to criminalize dissent. I wrote about this at length: https://substack.com/@veraphallax/note/p-191317553
I have not read Halstead's book, and very much like Eric's recognition of how ultraleftism can hold back movements, as can focusing on "party building" not movement building. True, organization building is important as part of movement building. But sometimes they are movement-linked organizational capacity building like local Moblilze offices building infrastructure for No Kings.
Going back to this account, it fails to recognize that there were three, not two, slogans and strategies. Not just Support the NLF and Out Now (Immediate Withdraw) but Stop the Bombing! The Vietnamese favored that demand especially in 1968 and 1969, and the New Mobilization Committee (New Mobe) took that up by and large. Also, the stress on "negotitiations" was not some liberal demand, the Vietnamese desperately wanted them, and in fact it was not the movement but such negotiations, the Paris Peace Treaty process which did end the war, at a time by the way when the antiwar movement has beyond its peak, largely due to the end of the draft in my view.
The SWP called a demo in DC to protest that negotiation process on grounds the Vietnamese were selling out the Vietnamese people.
Meanwhile, all around the world in 69 and 69 people were demanding Stop the Bombing! When I was in Mexico City in December 1969, the students and workers were on strike at the Autonomous University, with huges banners but the protests were also focused on Stop the Bombing of North Vietnam then underway.
I was in the Spring 67 Central Park rally, the Fall 1967 march on the Capitol and Pentagon (went with the Peace Torch Marathon), missed the 1968 Chicago protest and the massive million person 1969 march and then took a vanload to the May 1972 MayDay protest (not the one the prevoius year that turned violent).
But the backbone of the movement was organized by a coalition of pacifists, religious activists, liberal and radical university faculty, ex-CP and current-CP members, and New Left generation students who were n-o-t ultraleftist in tactics and strategy.
Great points Michael! I agree I skipped over the impact and role of CP and ex-CPers and other non-ultra radicals in the movement, tbh I just didn't know that history or have those sources on hand quick enough to write this piece!
You are recommending that our 21st-century movement take advice from Fred Halstead? Seriously? I was a high school student activist in NYC in 1967. Like many of my friends and comrades, my young life had been completely upended by the Vietnam War. The war coincided with, and fed, a cultural revolution that was turning us from anti-Communist cold warriors into anti-capitalist guerillas. At the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, where we teens went to mimeograph our underground papers and anti-war, anti-draft, and anti-dress code flyers, the Trots, as we called them, tried to organize us, but could barely communicate with us, much less inspire us. To my generation, the Trots were gray, dogmatic anachronisms, single-issue "old leftists," still fighting ancient ideological battles with the remnants of the CP and the myriad breakaway factions that inhabited that Union Square office. (Fred Halstead cast his oversized shadow over the Parade Committee on occasion, half-jokingly warning us to “Trot on over or we’ll trot on over you!”) We hitched our wagons to the stars, those who had an energizingly broad vision, not the sluggish Trots. They were the old but forward-looking non-sectarian pacifists, some veteran Catholic Worker socialists, and a bunch of fearless, foul-mouthed young radicals. These were the ones who could change the direction of a meeting, galvanize a rally, and also did the grunt work of getting tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of New Yorkers out into the streets. Finally, in the fall of 1968, after being radicalized that summer by the Chicago police and a racist teachers’ strike, we transformed the single-issue “out now” HS Mobe against the War into the multi-issue NY High School Student Union -- over the objections of the Trots. We made common cause with the Black and Latin student organizations fighting their racist school administrations all across the five boroughs, and successfully shut down nearly the entire school system in the spring of 1969 with a far-reaching anti-authoritarian, anti-war, and anti-racist 10-point program. We were neither ultraleftists nor liberals.
I think what's missing here - or at least what's underplayed - is that the fight against the war should fit naturally into the broader fight against the consolidation of fascism. (Yet see my list at https://marckagan.substack.com/p/which-unions-have-spoken-out-against of unions which nominally support No Kings yet have failed to speak out against the war.)
A leftist working in this movement can do two things at once: work to support and build the size of existing movement - QUANTITY - while also agitating within the movement for escalation, for disruption, for a socialist vision of the future - QUALITY.
It would have been useful if Eric had used the history of Vietnam War organizing to help navigate today’s movement led by Indivisible, et. al. The current mass movement has been built by top down Democratic Party operatives who will turn the anti-Trump/MAGA movement into phone bankers for “progressive” and not-so-progressive candidates. DSA’s and the WFP’s strategy of building a “progressive wing” in the DP to move the party to the left dovetails with the Indivisible liberals.
It is the the benefit of Indivisible/ WFP/ DSA to keep slogans vague and open to interpretation thereby allowing a broader definition of who is a progressive. Leftist should stay involved in the mass movement while attempting to fight to make Indivisible a democratic organization, provide more rigor to slogans such as demanding “Abolish ICE!”, and have a strong orientation of building the resistance among workers, POC, immigrants, and vets.
This article has 2 main weaknesses imo: 1) the shockingly thin conective tissue between the body and the conclusion, and 2) the fact that drawing parallels between the Vietnam era and today is increasingly irrelevant. Very little about these 2 eras are the same, and that fact does the heaviest lifting re:weakness 1
No Kings does not resemble accounts of the Black Panthers or SPA anti war rallies which Blanc rightfully praises! No need to draw comparisons where there are none :(
No Kings rallies dont even allow the Palestinian flag let alone a speaker. Your "ideas" are simply deluded and not based in reality anti war socialists have been facing who have been taking anti war message to the streets and neighborhoods
However someone who wanted to disassemble Anti War Working Group in NYC DSA because they weren't in line with electoral expedience is not someone anyone should take seriously except as a clown
Bootlicking the democrats in the year of our 2026 is certainly a choice white leftists are making
Since you asked they didnt allow this in Philly in 2025. Additionally as this "piece" was written before the 2026 No Kings, I cant say what happened this year
So how do we organize opposition under a fascist or neo-authoritarian regime?
There is no anti-war, pro-peace and love counterculture now. We have accepted violence - private paramilitary "clubs" and mass shootings - as a way of life. No justice for citizens killed by federal shock troops. State and local law enforcement do not commit to upholding their sworn oath to the Constitution.
Nope, we are way past polemics (and the problem is not the victims of genocide).
We shut Trumpism down now or die trying. Then, we hunt down and prosecute each and every perpetrator sycophant to the ends of the earth.
Wonderful essay. In UOYDSA, we have since 2023 taught Camejo's "Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action" as a standard reading (we call it "LUMA"). I think this article will become LUMA 2!
One question I have, maybe a little arcane: do you know much about the role of the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) in this phase of the antiwar movement? I'm well-versed in the history of the Berkeley FSM and the role played by Hal Draper, and it was my understanding that ISC was an advocate of a similar mass-politics orientation as the SWP here. I know that the ISC functioned as a minority faction within SDS up to the June 1969 convention, but I don't know much about what else they were doing during these years. (I'm looking forward to reading Andrew Higgins's new history on the IS.)
Fre d Halstead's 'Out Now' is a good book, and as I recall, he mentions me favorably at one point. I like dFred, too. We got along, I think, because he put ending the war first, and winning polemics second.
Fred was one of a kind. He was a powerful speaker, and an educator as well as an organizer: He guided me and other Chicago SWPers through Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in 1971.
Despite my long polemic on Trotskyism and the SWP, where I tried to deal with the matter seriously,* Due to my Guardian seat in the national antiwar coalition, I still knew a number of people in the SWP that I liked. Fred was one, Peter Camejo was another. Later I worked with Peter to build the database to get 'Links' launched. (*Some people were still saying it was a waste of my time, that Trotsky had no ideology, he was just a Nazi spy, and the old Olgin booklet was enough. Obviously, I replied that their view was ridiculous and that it was a good reason for writing the piece.
Link for your polemic?
There's a lot of good meat in this piece, but it is hard to move past the problems that show up in its first two paragraphs:
(1) Failure to distinguish between "ultra-leftism", plain old leftism, progressivism, and liberalism; and
(2) Seeming to measure how "ultra-left" someone is by how much tolerance they have for Palestinian expressions of anger towards the Jewish mainstream (sometimes misdirected, sometimes not) or how vocally supportive they are of Arab armed resistance. Which is ridiculous. Hamas itself is a neoliberal organization. The Iranian government is not leftist in any way, shape or form (and massacred and repressed most of Iran's actual leftists, regardless where said leftists were on the spectrum from devout Muslims to secularist non-believers). Antisemitism exists across the political spectrum, and the fastest way to end misdirected rage against Zionism would be to end Zionist crimes against humanity.
Finally, starting this article by bringing up Susan Abulhawa is an awful look. Yes, sometimes things she says are not well thought out -- surprise surprise while her family is suffering a genocide conducted by Israel -- but she doesn't have an actual violent bone in her body towards random non Zionist Jewish people. She should be given grace for that, as it would be superhuman to do better in her circumstances. Instead she goes viral *because the Mayor's wife, whom she does not know, did something vaguely connected to her* while a torrent of Islamophobia proceeds unchecked.
The sentence "Israelis should not feel safe anywhere in the world", followed immediately by a statement that "I also don't give a shit if people collapse the distinction between zionists and jews" is indeed a statement of violent intent towards "random non-Zionist Jewish people." We should not be "giving grace" for such attitudes, but opposing them fiercely. You apparently do not work in mixed organizing spaces with anti-Zionist Jews—if you did, you would understand that these statements are indefensible.
I actually work mostly with anti-zionist Jews and have Mizrahi ancestry myself. I would absolutely not tolerate such statements from anyone other than Palestinians. In my experience with Palestinians, they usually reflect ourbursts of anger and not deeply held ideology. Everyone tolerates much, much worse said about Arabs from Israelis or Americans who lost a fraction as many loved ones to lesser Arab crimes. It's like Malcolm X's Black supremacy -- on his Hajj, late in his life, was the first time he experienced being treated as an equal in a group of lighter skinned people, simply breaking bread. All it took was that moment to make him believe it was possible for Black people to live with other races. And what it should teach you is about how Malcolm X was treated until that point.
I hope people realise that for many Palestinians their only encounters with Jews are through the occupation. It’s not surprising at all to me that for many the conflation between Jews and Zionists seems unproblematic.
In my own experience, Palestinians conflate Judaism and Zionism far less than most other Arabs -- I think because by now the majority of them have also been exposed to fully anti-zionist Jewish or ex-Israeli activists who've really put their bodies on the line for the cause. Susan Abulhawa has worked closely with Jewish anti-Zionist activists. I don't know what exactly was behind these remarks of hers, but I do know what was behind the disproportionate outrage about them relative to other things, and that speech-policing Palestinians comes with real physical danger. If anything, given what they are going through, it's almost superhuman how much they refrain from public poorly worded venting.
Ok. I think that’s probably more true for Palestinians in the diaspora. Two of my friends from Gaza have told me the only Jews they ever met in day to day life before emigrating were either militant settlers or armed idf.
I didn't take your second point in the same way, or consider the reference to Abulhawa as necessarily denying her grace. I think it was purely intended from a pragmatic, what best serves the goals of building a mass movement and what slogans, associations, etc can be counterproductive (i.e. treating your point on what goes viral as a reality that has to be worked around)
I have been following your posts about the antiwar movement and they are excellent. Congrats. I have been studying the anti-Vietnam War movement for over twenty years as a historian and I have been extremely interested in how the antiwar movement went from the fringes of intellectual/student/pacifist/leftist opposition in early 1965 to a mass movement by 1968. To this end, I recently edited a collection of Staughton Lynd's writings, speeches and statements against the war and the book is really about how the movement grew through the lens of one of the movement's chief protagonists. Right now I am engaged in a 8 other projects which are taking forever because of deep archival work. My dissertation was on the use of the Nuremberg Principles by the antiwar movement, draftees and soldiers in their resistance to the war from 1963-1968 and I have been slowly bringing it up to the present. If you are interested, I have made most of this work available online here: https://cyu-fr.academia.edu/LukeStewart. I am thinking about starting a blog like this to just starting putting the work out there and I am sharing this all with you because hopefully this is of interest and will help with some of your thinking. Keep going as it is very important what you are doing. Sincerely, Luke Stewart
Thanks Luke, look forward to reading more of your work on this!
The antiwar movement as I experienced it in Madison WI from 1965 through 1975 was a very broad movement encompassing liberals, radical pacifists, CP and ex-CP activists, SWP, YSA, PLP, RU, Sparts, anarchists, local trade union leftists, many hovering around SDS, all or almost all participating in mass action events on and off the UW campus. The eclecticism of the movement was both a weakness and a strength, making meetings incredibly long and contentious, but bringing masses to the streets to be brutally attacked and radicalized by the pigs. The same could be said of the 1968 Chicago convention demonstration, bringing together David Dellinger, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, Alan Ginsberg, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and Clean for Gene McCarthy supporters. I don’t think it’s a good idea to read anyone out of the movement, whether liberals, ultra leftists or Trots, and I don’t see the problem with “Stop the Bombing”, “Bring the Troops Home Now” or “Negotiations Now”, although I prefer the second. I was active in SDS, part of a NCM party-building effort, and helped form the UW campus “United Front” that held the last anti-war mass action on April 15, 1975 as the NVA and NLF marched into Saigon and it became Ho Chi Minh City. The practical movement is everything, but it grows from many different sources to become a mighty stream.
The framing here is revealing. "Ultraleftism" hasn't ended a war — but neither has the centrist approach this piece advocates. What ended the Vietnam War was a combination of factors that included mass disruption, military resistance from within, and an imperial cost-benefit calculus that became untenable. The "independent mass action" this piece celebrates was, at the time, denounced by moderates as exactly the kind of provocative, alienating, excessively radical activity that Blanc warns against in his companion piece.
The deeper issue: while this article relitigates the 1960s, the state is setting legal precedents right now that will determine what an anti-war movement can even look like. Eight protesters were just convicted on federal terrorism charges at Prairieland for wearing black. Two sisters got material support convictions for owning a printer. The question isn't whether ultraleftism ends wars. The question is whether the centrist left's framework — which actively sorts protesters into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" categories — is producing the ideological cover the state needs to criminalize dissent. I wrote about this at length: https://substack.com/@veraphallax/note/p-191317553
Gratifying to see that the antiwar work of Halstead, Camejo, and the SWP is getting renewed attention and application in this critical moment.
I have not read Halstead's book, and very much like Eric's recognition of how ultraleftism can hold back movements, as can focusing on "party building" not movement building. True, organization building is important as part of movement building. But sometimes they are movement-linked organizational capacity building like local Moblilze offices building infrastructure for No Kings.
Going back to this account, it fails to recognize that there were three, not two, slogans and strategies. Not just Support the NLF and Out Now (Immediate Withdraw) but Stop the Bombing! The Vietnamese favored that demand especially in 1968 and 1969, and the New Mobilization Committee (New Mobe) took that up by and large. Also, the stress on "negotitiations" was not some liberal demand, the Vietnamese desperately wanted them, and in fact it was not the movement but such negotiations, the Paris Peace Treaty process which did end the war, at a time by the way when the antiwar movement has beyond its peak, largely due to the end of the draft in my view.
The SWP called a demo in DC to protest that negotiation process on grounds the Vietnamese were selling out the Vietnamese people.
Meanwhile, all around the world in 69 and 69 people were demanding Stop the Bombing! When I was in Mexico City in December 1969, the students and workers were on strike at the Autonomous University, with huges banners but the protests were also focused on Stop the Bombing of North Vietnam then underway.
I was in the Spring 67 Central Park rally, the Fall 1967 march on the Capitol and Pentagon (went with the Peace Torch Marathon), missed the 1968 Chicago protest and the massive million person 1969 march and then took a vanload to the May 1972 MayDay protest (not the one the prevoius year that turned violent).
But the backbone of the movement was organized by a coalition of pacifists, religious activists, liberal and radical university faculty, ex-CP and current-CP members, and New Left generation students who were n-o-t ultraleftist in tactics and strategy.
Great points Michael! I agree I skipped over the impact and role of CP and ex-CPers and other non-ultra radicals in the movement, tbh I just didn't know that history or have those sources on hand quick enough to write this piece!
You are recommending that our 21st-century movement take advice from Fred Halstead? Seriously? I was a high school student activist in NYC in 1967. Like many of my friends and comrades, my young life had been completely upended by the Vietnam War. The war coincided with, and fed, a cultural revolution that was turning us from anti-Communist cold warriors into anti-capitalist guerillas. At the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, where we teens went to mimeograph our underground papers and anti-war, anti-draft, and anti-dress code flyers, the Trots, as we called them, tried to organize us, but could barely communicate with us, much less inspire us. To my generation, the Trots were gray, dogmatic anachronisms, single-issue "old leftists," still fighting ancient ideological battles with the remnants of the CP and the myriad breakaway factions that inhabited that Union Square office. (Fred Halstead cast his oversized shadow over the Parade Committee on occasion, half-jokingly warning us to “Trot on over or we’ll trot on over you!”) We hitched our wagons to the stars, those who had an energizingly broad vision, not the sluggish Trots. They were the old but forward-looking non-sectarian pacifists, some veteran Catholic Worker socialists, and a bunch of fearless, foul-mouthed young radicals. These were the ones who could change the direction of a meeting, galvanize a rally, and also did the grunt work of getting tens, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, of New Yorkers out into the streets. Finally, in the fall of 1968, after being radicalized that summer by the Chicago police and a racist teachers’ strike, we transformed the single-issue “out now” HS Mobe against the War into the multi-issue NY High School Student Union -- over the objections of the Trots. We made common cause with the Black and Latin student organizations fighting their racist school administrations all across the five boroughs, and successfully shut down nearly the entire school system in the spring of 1969 with a far-reaching anti-authoritarian, anti-war, and anti-racist 10-point program. We were neither ultraleftists nor liberals.
The war was stopped by the Vietnamese communists you Zionist clown
I think what's missing here - or at least what's underplayed - is that the fight against the war should fit naturally into the broader fight against the consolidation of fascism. (Yet see my list at https://marckagan.substack.com/p/which-unions-have-spoken-out-against of unions which nominally support No Kings yet have failed to speak out against the war.)
A leftist working in this movement can do two things at once: work to support and build the size of existing movement - QUANTITY - while also agitating within the movement for escalation, for disruption, for a socialist vision of the future - QUALITY.
It would have been useful if Eric had used the history of Vietnam War organizing to help navigate today’s movement led by Indivisible, et. al. The current mass movement has been built by top down Democratic Party operatives who will turn the anti-Trump/MAGA movement into phone bankers for “progressive” and not-so-progressive candidates. DSA’s and the WFP’s strategy of building a “progressive wing” in the DP to move the party to the left dovetails with the Indivisible liberals.
It is the the benefit of Indivisible/ WFP/ DSA to keep slogans vague and open to interpretation thereby allowing a broader definition of who is a progressive. Leftist should stay involved in the mass movement while attempting to fight to make Indivisible a democratic organization, provide more rigor to slogans such as demanding “Abolish ICE!”, and have a strong orientation of building the resistance among workers, POC, immigrants, and vets.
This article has 2 main weaknesses imo: 1) the shockingly thin conective tissue between the body and the conclusion, and 2) the fact that drawing parallels between the Vietnam era and today is increasingly irrelevant. Very little about these 2 eras are the same, and that fact does the heaviest lifting re:weakness 1
Why is everyone bringing up No Kings like it is a powerful movement capable of moving us towards socialism (or even social democracy)?
Have any of you actually been to these rallies?
No Kings does not resemble accounts of the Black Panthers or SPA anti war rallies which Blanc rightfully praises! No need to draw comparisons where there are none :(
No Kings rallies dont even allow the Palestinian flag let alone a speaker. Your "ideas" are simply deluded and not based in reality anti war socialists have been facing who have been taking anti war message to the streets and neighborhoods
However someone who wanted to disassemble Anti War Working Group in NYC DSA because they weren't in line with electoral expedience is not someone anyone should take seriously except as a clown
“No Kings protests don’t allow Palestinian flags” lol just completely making shit up
Bootlicking the democrats in the year of our 2026 is certainly a choice white leftists are making
Since you asked they didnt allow this in Philly in 2025. Additionally as this "piece" was written before the 2026 No Kings, I cant say what happened this year
You should stop using Twitter
Neither have polemics.
So how do we organize opposition under a fascist or neo-authoritarian regime?
There is no anti-war, pro-peace and love counterculture now. We have accepted violence - private paramilitary "clubs" and mass shootings - as a way of life. No justice for citizens killed by federal shock troops. State and local law enforcement do not commit to upholding their sworn oath to the Constitution.
Nope, we are way past polemics (and the problem is not the victims of genocide).
We shut Trumpism down now or die trying. Then, we hunt down and prosecute each and every perpetrator sycophant to the ends of the earth.
Wonderful essay. In UOYDSA, we have since 2023 taught Camejo's "Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action" as a standard reading (we call it "LUMA"). I think this article will become LUMA 2!
One question I have, maybe a little arcane: do you know much about the role of the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC) in this phase of the antiwar movement? I'm well-versed in the history of the Berkeley FSM and the role played by Hal Draper, and it was my understanding that ISC was an advocate of a similar mass-politics orientation as the SWP here. I know that the ISC functioned as a minority faction within SDS up to the June 1969 convention, but I don't know much about what else they were doing during these years. (I'm looking forward to reading Andrew Higgins's new history on the IS.)