Ultraleftism has never ended a war
First published at Labor Politics.
With US-Israeli bombs continuing to fall on Iran and Lebanon, one might have expected American leftists to be focused on anti-war outreach in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The next No Kings protest is on March 28 and we have a great opportunity to lean on that to drive up anti-war activity.
Instead of that outward facing work, my timeline for the past few days has been full of anti-imperialist radicals in the US defending Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American author who Zohran Mamdani rightfully distanced himself from last week. Abulhawa continues to mix justified opposition to Zionism with clear antisemitism, such as defending an Australian Neo-Nazi by pointing out that the judge who sentenced him was Jewish, dabbling in Holocaust denial, and suggesting that no Jew anywhere in the world should feel safe.
The online discourse around Abulhawa is indicative of many dynamics, including — as I pointed out in a recent piece on America’s missing anti-war movement— the prevalence of counter-productive ultra-leftism among too many American anti-imperialists. Even if we leave aside the fact that bigotry should be rejected as a matter of principle, anybody with even half a foot outside of Twitter’s far-left echo chamber should see that antisemitic remarks make it much harder to build a mass movement at home to stop US militarism and aid to Israel. Yet, for too many American leftists today, practical anti-war activism doesn’t seem to expand far beyond performative radicalism, heated rhetoric, and deference politics.
This type of ultra-leftism has a long lineage in the US, as do debates over how to build mass anti-war opposition. So rather than relitigate more hot-takes, it’s helpful to take a step back and examine what type of anti-imperialist politics within the US has actually been effective.
Today’s anti-war activists can learn a lot from the tactics and strategies that put an end to the Vietnam War.
The decades-long resistance of the Vietnamese people, whose heroism is hard to overstate, was obviously a central factor in the US defeat. But Vietnamese revolutionaries were also the first to underscore that they could not win without a strong peace movement within the belly of the beast. To understand how that movement succeeded, there’s no better place to turn than Fred Halstead’s extraordinary 880-page history Out Now: A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War.
Halstead served on the steering committees of virtually every national antiwar coalition from 1965 to 1975. He was a garment cutter, a World War II navy veteran, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1968, and at six feet six and 350 pounds, one of the most physically imposing chief marshals in the history of American protest. His book is a week-by-week, meeting-by-meeting account of how tenacious organizers built a movement that helped end a war and the strategic fights they had to win along the way to do it. As we’ll see, it was independent mass action — not liberalism nor ultra-leftism — that proved most effective.
The fight over demands
From its earliest days, the Vietnam antiwar movement was consumed by a three-way fight over what to demand. On the right stood organizations like SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which wanted the movement to call for “negotiations.” Their logic was practical: all wars end with negotiations; the task was to strengthen the hand of congressional “doves” who were beginning to criticize escalation. SANE wanted to work closely with liberal Democratic politicians, to convince them that negotiations should begin. In that framework, “immediate withdrawal” slogans were a liability — they would shut off the friendly ears of Establishment figures who accepted the basic premises of the cold war.
The liberal wing of the movement thus hitched its fortunes to the Democratic Party, trusting that patient lobbying and respectable protest would eventually move the administration toward peace. But Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of rolling back US imperial influence. Even as SANE and its allies cultivated relationships with sympathetic Democrats, LBJ was dramatically escalating — pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into Vietnam and intensifying the bombing of the North.
The strategy of working through friendly channels inside the party proved fruitless: the very politicians the liberals courted either fell in line behind the president or found themselves powerless to change his course.
On the opposite end of the anti-war spectrum stood ultra-left groups like the Spartacist League, which wanted demonstrations to march under banners reading “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution.” Alongside them, the national leadership of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) increasingly argued that the antiwar movement should adopt a “multi-issue” program encompassing opposition to racism, capitalism, and imperialism as a whole — or that the movement was simply “working on the wrong issue.” In a remarkable position paper prepared for a crucial 1965 convention, SDS leaders Lee Webb and Paul Booth flatly declared: “Essentially, we think that the movement against the war in Vietnam is working on the wrong issue. And that issue is Vietnam.”
In the middle stood the radical pacifists around A.J. Muste and Dave Dellinger; the Trotskyists of the SWP and the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA); and the independent committees to end the war in Vietnam that formed much of the backbone of the new movement. These groups — nonexclusionary, action-oriented, open to anyone willing to work against the war — argued for “immediate withdrawal,” later crystallized into the slogan “Out Now.” Halstead recounts that the local antiwar committees discovered through direct experience that it was far easier to reach ordinary people with a demand for getting the U.S. out of Vietnam entirely than with the complicated and equivocal appeals favored by the negotiations wing. “Bring the Troops Home Now” was concrete and unambiguous. It left the government no room to equivocate. Johnson claimed to favor negotiations too. But Johnson could not say “Bring all the troops home now.”
The principled case went deeper. Halstead noted that demands for negotiations, when directed by Americans at the American government, implicitly recognized some U.S. right to be in Vietnam — something to negotiate over. The U.S. simply had no right whatever to be militarily involved in Vietnam, and the only honest demand was to get out.
At one heated meeting, a negotiations supporter shouted: “Bullshit. How do you even withdraw without negotiations?” To which several people on the other side shouted in unison: “On ships and planes, the same way you got in.”
Halstead’s three-way schema — liberalism, ultra-leftism, mass action — is useful. But it doesn’t fully capture an important current that cut across all three categories: Black opposition to the war, which emerged after decades of deep on-the-ground organizing for civil rights and via the inspiration of anti-colonial struggles abroad. SNCC’s 1966 statement against the war was one of the earliest and sharpest organizational breaks with Cold War consensus. Muhammad Ali’s refusal to serve — “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” — electrified millions. And Martin Luther King’s 1967 Riverside Church address, in which he called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” was a seismic event that broke the tacit agreement among civil rights leaders to stay silent on foreign policy.
Black anti-war activism was often multi-issue and effective. It connected Vietnam to the draft’s racial inequities, to the diversion of resources from domestic needs, to the broader structure of racial oppression. But this type of multi-issue politics could not always be easily exported into different social contexts in the US.
How revolutionary slogans shrank the mass movement
Ultra-leftism was no more effective at ending the war than liberalism. But it came wrapped in revolutionary rhetoric that made it particularly seductive to the young radicals the movement depended on.
Foreshadowing today’s debates over how to relate to anti-imperial resistance in Palestine and Iran, Halstead explained why the demand for “Victory to the Vietnamese Revolution” was not helpful. He “saw no useful purpose for them in a demonstration appealing to Americans with demands directed at the U.S. government. We were, after all, not speaking to Vietnamese.” He continued: “Both from the point of view of those simply opposed to the war, and those who, like myself, were partisans of the Vietnamese revolution, our central task as Americans was to put maximum pressure on the U.S. to get out of Vietnam. That would help the Vietnamese revolution more than anything else we could possibly do.”
The “multi-issue” argument was even more damaging, because it was wielded by SDS, which had the largest base among radicalized students. One SWP leader characterized the multi-issue debate as “largely a sham battle that covered up rather than elucidated the issues at stake.” His reasoning was simple: “All the radical organizations are multi-issue and none believe that society can be changed... by a program or pattern of activity around a single issue. Thus any member of SDS, YSA, Du Bois, M-2-M, has a multi-issue approach to the war.” But the committees to end the war in Vietnam were united fronts, not revolutionary parties. “Any attempt to add further planks to their program would destroy them. Those who make them up agree on this basic point and no other.”
The problem with SDS’s multi-issue approach was not that connecting the war to other struggles was inherently wrong. Black radical movements were doing exactly that with great effect — and socialist organizations like the SWP and the Black Panthers were recruiting people to precisely such a comprehensive vision of how society’s ills were intertwined.
But when SNCC or King connected Vietnam to racial injustice, they were articulating what masses of Black Americans already felt. The connections were drawn from below, from the concrete realities of communities that were disproportionately drafted, disproportionately killed, and systematically denied the freedoms they were supposedly fighting to defend abroad. That kind of multi-issue consciousness deepened and broadened the movement. SDS, by contrast, was doing something very different: asking coalitions of people who agreed on one thing — that the war had to stop — to first adopt a comprehensive analysis of imperialism, capitalism, and racism as a package before they could march together. Far from deepening the movement, that just erected barriers to entry.
In New York, SDS literally voted to dissolve the citywide committee to end the war in Vietnam rather than allow it to continue as a focused antiwar coalition. A bloc of forces led by SDS supporters carried a vote to shut down the coordinating committee and replace it with a regional SDS group operating under SDS’s multi-issue program. An SDS leader chaired the meeting — though, as Halstead notes, it was apparently the first meeting of the committee he had ever attended. The YSA had opposed this move, and a general assembly was scheduled days later where the focused antiwar approach would likely have carried. So SDS simply killed the organization before the vote could happen.
Later, SDS’s trajectory carried it further and further from mass politics. By 1968, meetings that were supposed to build radical community bases had “sifted down to a handful of SDSers sitting in a room escalating their rhetoric.” The faction that became the Weathermen adopted the slogan “Dare to struggle, dare to win” and tried via spectacular bombings to substitute the will of a tiny minority for the patient work of building a mass movement. And as Dellinger himself later admitted, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protest clashes with armed forces “helped create a movement mystique of revolutionary derring-do and heroic street encounters as goals in themselves. This polarized the movement around the question of street violence and gradually led to a tragic separation between the organized movement and large sections of the antiwar public.”
When it came to demands, SWP leader Peter Camejo, in his famous 1970 speech “Liberalism, Ultraleftism, or Mass Action,” identified a core problem with turning away from a clear focus on Vietnam. Calling for “Stop Imperialism” instead of “Bring the Troops Home Now” was an abstraction. “Even Nixon can say, ‘I’m against imperialism too — that’s what Britain and France and Holland did in the 18th and 19th centuries.’ But Nixon can’t say, ‘Bring all the troops home now.’”
In other words, the ultra-left demand and the liberal demand converged in their practical effect. Both let the government off the hook. “Negotiations” was too weak to pin the war-makers down. “Smash Imperialism” was too abstract. Only concrete, immediate, non-negotiable demands generated maximum pressure to actually constrain the ruling class.
Mass action and the question of leverage
The SWP’s position on tactics was often caricatured as a fetish for big marches. But it was something more interesting — and more strategic — than that. What the SWP argued for was a strategy of independent mass action: activating and involving the broadest numbers of Americans in the fight.
Halstead wrote in 1965: “It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure in the country, including the trade unions and the soldiers in the army.”
Much of SWPers focus was thus on reaching and winning over ordinary Americans to oppose a war that remained popular as late as 1967. And as anti-war sentiment grew, this persuasion work increasingly was combined with deep organizing work to make it visible.
Here are some examples of what this looked like on the ground.
In San Francisco in 1967, over two thousand activists distributed more than 400,000 leaflets for Proposition P—a binding referendum on immediate withdrawal—at “every conceivable public place in the city, including those where GIs gathered.” A special project organized by Catholic students, unionists, teachers, and nuns put 40,000 leaflets into the hands of parishioners at Catholic churches across the city.
Across the US, the YSA-led Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) built genuine organizational infrastructure—weekly chapter meetings with majority-rule decision-making, open steering committees, citywide representatives, regional conferences that drew six hundred activists at a time in Boston alone—and published not only its own Student Mobilizer but a GI Press Service designed so underground military newspapers could lift whole articles and cartoons.
At Fort Jackson, South Carolina, a drafted YSA organizer named Joe Miles started by playing Malcolm X tapes in the barracks for fifteen Black and Puerto Rican GIs; within weeks, eighty soldiers were attending meetings of “GIs United Against the War in Vietnam,” and the organizers had made a conscious, debated decision to reach across racial lines and invite white soldiers.
By the October 1969 Moratorium, millions of ordinary Americans were canvassing door to door, picketing, and leafleting in actions that reached every state, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands—while the SMC had active chapters on over three hundred campuses. The movement built real united-front coalitions on the principle of nonexclusion—welcoming everyone from SANE liberals to Trotskyists to Catholic priests to Black nationalists—and it tested its message at the ballot box, where antiwar referenda won 63 percent in Detroit, a majority in San Francisco, and 66 percent in Madison, with the strongest support coming from working-class precincts. A protest bubble this was not.
When appropriate, the SWP and SMC’s advocacy of independent mass action also took the form of militant actions like student strikes or, even more ambitiously, the establishment of “anti-war universities” aimed “not to shut down the universities but to take over their facilities and use them to spread the antiwar activism to other sectors of the population.” During the May 1970 student strike, for example, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus students commandeered printing facilities and phone lines, the Art and Architecture Institute ran twenty-four hours a day producing posters that blanketed Chicago, and teams were dispatched daily with tailored leaflets to GIs at nearby bases, workers at factory gates, and high school students in surrounding neighborhoods. Students, like many Black Americans, were ready for more militant action than most of the rest of the population.
And, yes, SWP activists — who by all accounts were central leaders of the peace movement nationwide — also spent a lot of time advocating for and building peaceful mass marches. They were right to do so: generally, this proved to be the tactic best suited for drawing the maximum numbers into visible opposition. Millions poured into the streets, particularly in 1969 and 1970.
It’s worth noting that big demonstrations in the 1960s had a different impact than they do today. Partly that’s because it took a lot more outreach and logistical work to organize them in a pre-digital era. Getting big numbers in the streets thus built and demonstrated a degree of organized power that they don’t necessarily do today. They also tended to attract more media attention.
The SWP’s orientation towards mass outreach and big peaceful protests often put them in sharp conflict with those who favored subordinating mass action to small-group confrontations, acts of individual resistance, and direct action by committed minorities. Dellinger dismissed mass mobilizations for immediate withdrawal as united fronts organized around the “lowest common denominator.” Halstead responded that getting the U.S. out of Vietnam was the movement’s central purpose and the reason for its existence. There was nothing “lowest” about it. The SWP championed mass demonstrations because of what they could set in motion — specifically, because visible mass opposition in the civilian population made it easier and safer for people with actual structural leverage to act.
GIs could express their own opposition to the war more readily when millions of civilians were already marching. Workers could begin to question the war when antiwar sentiment was no longer confined to campus radicals.
Halstead insisted on “pointing the antiwar movement toward the great mass of ordinary working class Americans, including those in the military.”
The SWP did not view GI activity as a substitute for building the civilian movement. On the contrary: “Without a mass antiwar movement in the civilian population the GI movement could never get beyond occasional isolated individual acts.” But the reciprocal factor was powerful: “Any antiwar stand earned by GIs cut, like nothing else could, through the ‘support our boys’ demagogy of the hawks. Conversely, the more massive the civilian movement, the easier it was for the GIs to express their own opposition to the war.”
That strategic bet paid off.
How the mass movement broke the army
By 1968, several hundred antiwar GI newspapers had appeared — Vietnam GI, published by a veteran who accumulated a mailing list of thousands of GIs in Vietnam itself; Fatigue Press at Fort Hood; the Bond, distributed at bases across the country.
GI coffeehouses sprang up near bases. At Fort Lewis, near Seattle, a team of civilian activists tried a new approach one evening — instead of leafleting, they simply walked onto the base and started conversations. “Most of us started with, ‘I’m here to talk about the war in Vietnam,’” one organizer reported. “The GIs were friendly and quite eager to talk. After 20 minutes, almost every table was the scene of discussion and debate.” When MPs ejected the civilians, GIs followed them outside, indignant, offering to invite them back in as personal guests. “Each antiwar person went in a different direction with several soldiers and kept on talking about the antiwar movement for about an hour, while the MPs were frantically trying to keep up with all of us.”
In San Francisco on October 12, 1968, five hundred active-duty GIs marched alongside 15,000 civilians for immediate withdrawal. A Military Airlift Command general tried to get permission to discharge one of the organizers, and sent a message to the Pentagon warning that the demonstration could have “severe impact on military discipline throughout the services.” GIs somewhere along the transmission chain copied the message and leaked it to an antiwar newspaper. It was reprinted and distributed at military bases across the Bay Area.
Then came the collapse. By 1971, what had started as scattered individual acts of conscience had become a crisis of the entire American military. Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., a marine corps historian, published an astonishing assessment in the June 1971 Armed Forces Journal: “The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.”
Heinl reported that conditions had “only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle Mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.”
“Search and destroy” missions had acquired a new name among the troops: “search and evade.” It was common for patrols to light fires to signal their position to opposing forces, so neither side would stumble into a fight. A process called “working it out” spread throughout Vietnam: a unit or a GI would refuse an order, everybody would sit down and talk, the order would be modified. Officers and sergeants who refused to participate in these discussions risked being “fragged” — having a fragmentation grenade tossed into their bunk.
In the morale-plagued Americal Division, Heinl reported, fraggings were running one a week in early 1971. The division was disbanded before the year was out. “Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Heinl wrote. Literature circulating among GIs on the West Coast quipped: “Don’t desert. Go to Vietnam and kill your commanding officer.” Author Arthur Hadley, visiting Vietnam during this period, reported that a majority of the battalion commanders he interviewed had been personally threatened with murder.
For Black soldiers, opposition to the war was inseparable from opposition to the racism they faced in uniform and had faced their entire lives. Unsurprisingly, working-class Black troops were disproportionately assigned to combat units and suffered casualty rates far exceeding their share of the population. They faced pervasive racism within the military itself — Confederate flags in barracks, racial slurs from officers, discriminatory enforcement of discipline. And Black GIs, many of whom were inspired by the Black Power movement, were often the driving force behind organized resistance; Heinl’s own assessment documented widespread racial conflict as a major dimension of the military’s collapse.
By 1971, the American ground-combat force in Vietnam had become, in Halstead’s summary, “a net liability” to the war effort, “and this reality, above all, forced Nixon to continue the withdrawals in spite of the failure of ‘Vietnamization.’”
That didn’t happen because small groups of activists confronted the police or because revolutionary students chanted about Ho Chi Minh. It happened because millions of ordinary civilians made it clear, through mass mobilizations organized around the simplest possible demand — Out Now — that the war had no popular mandate. That civilian movement gave permission and cover to GIs to express what they already felt. And what GIs felt, once expressed and organized, made the war machine grind to a halt.
What this means now
Liberalism, ultra-leftism, and mass action continue to be the main strategic alternatives facing the anti-war movement.
Like LBJ in the 1960s, Democratic leaders continue their longstanding commitment to US imperialism. An impulse to work with the Democratic establishment and to raise only demands acceptable to it helps explain the weakness of our peace movement and why, until recently, so many liberal and progressive organizations refused to fight for an end to military funding for Israel. The continued refusal of Schumer and Jeffries to take a hard stance against the illegitimacy of this war in Iran is deplorable. Fortunately, the Democratic base is increasingly irate at the old guard. And we should expect huge numbers — and lots of anti-war sentiment — at the upcoming No Kings rallies.
On the other hand, the impulse to justify or amplify rhetoric destined to alienate most anti-war Americans speaks to the influence of ultra-leftism among many individuals who otherwise could be focusing on effective outwards-facing organizing. Similarly, the impulse to load every coalition and protest with every demand — to insist that every anti-war mobilization also be an anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist formation before anyone can walk in the door — is the same approach that led SDS to dissolve the New York antiwar committee rather than let it remain a focused single-issue coalition.
We shouldn’t confuse the role of a socialist organization like the SWP, or the Black Panthers, with the role of a broader mass movement around specific widely and deeply felt demands.
Like many other activists committed to a mass action approach, SWP cadre understood the war as a racist product of imperialism. They wanted to overthrow capitalism. But they recognized that the most effective way to act on that understanding was to build the largest possible movement around the most concrete, non-negotiable demand — and to orient that movement toward the people with real social leverage. Demands and tactics that might be appropriate for Gaza today or Harlem in the late 1960s shouldn’t be exported into very different contexts.
Far from downplaying the importance of fighting against racism and capitalism, SWPers and the anti-war movement they helped lead showed that it was through the empowering and radicalizing experience of mass action that most Americans would become open to more anti-systemic ideas. Education and propaganda could go only so far as long as most working-class Americans were resigned to conditions at home and abroad. As Camejo underscored, “Our aim, in fact, is to move people around broader and broader issues, but we’ve got to deal with reality … People don’t suddenly understand everything at once.”
Independent mass politics has lost none of its relevance today. But this doesn’t mean we can just copy and paste the tactics of the 1960s into a very different military and social context. The absence of a draft, the increased US reliance on air wars, and the atomization of American life pose new challenges. So too does the fact that Trump is escalating attacks on so many different fronts at once: in today’s conditions, there might be more space for combining widely and deeply felt demands into multi-issue joint actions like No Kings and May Day. We’ll need to think rigorously and experiment in practice to identify chokepoints and to find the best way to concretize a mass action approach to stop Trump’s imperial and domestic assaults.
But the task remains to build the kind of mass movement that can reach into the places where power actually operates and make it impossible for business as usual to continue. That requires concrete demands that millions of people can stand behind, a relentless focus on outward-facing organizing, and the creation of open democratic coalitions that don’t screen for ideological purity.
You don’t help end a war by raising the most radical slogan or by whispering in a senator’s ear. Instead, you build something so large, so broad, and so persistent that the people whose hands are on the machinery start to refuse.
