Boston Progressive Labor on the Draft

Defense of 2-S will not only fail, will not only demoralize the anti-war movement, but it will, in addition, convince workers they were right all along about students

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Communist Party Boston Youth Club (CP) sent the CRIMSON a letter on January 27 presenting its views on the draft. We have strong disgareements with the CP's program, indeed with its approach to building a movement. We will try, in this answer, to rebut the most important arguments the CP uses and put forward some ideas of our own.

Instead of discussing how people can fight against the war, the CP presents lists of nice-sounding wishes. People should not be drafted for unjust wars, the CP says, just as the unemployed should have jobs. If they are drafted, they should not have to fight. Apprentices ought to be exempt, VISTA workers ought to be exempt. Peace Corpsmen shouldn't have to go. The CP program sounds like an appeal for special interest groups.

The issues that must concern real Communists (because they concern everyone who wants to fight against this war) are nowhere concretely discussed: the economic and political nature of the war, its importance to the bourgeoisie and the government, its probable future, the kind of movement that needs to be built to serve the American people in opposing the war, the weaknesses and divisions which presently hold back that movement.

The anti-war movement needs a program to organize people to defeat the government's war. The CP meets the situation passively with the notion of disengagement from the "military industrial complex" (i.e., American society)--a clear impossibility for the vast majority of Americans, including students. Reduced to its essence, the CP's argument runs: if everyone were exempt, there would be no soldiers to fight the war. There is a Yiddish retort to such wishful thinking. It goes: "And if your grandmother were a trolley car...." And the question still remains: how do we unite Americans from different classes in a strong movement to get the U.S. our of Vietnam?

But the CP's exemption list disguised as a program is not without point. The CP calls for these deferments to justify its main contention: that 2-S is really a good thing, that students shouldn't oppose, shouldn't renounce but rather hold onto their deferments. And students needn't feel guilty--the CP wants exemption for everyone. In addition, the CP justifies 2-S directly on two grounds:

* 2-S prevents students from being drafted and therefore limits the government's ability to escalate the war.

* An attack on 2-S would turn students against the left and make workers laugh.

We agree that the government intends to expand the war against Vietnam into an all-Asian land war. The war has, in fact, already been expanded, inside Vietnam to the important Mekong Delta, and, outside Vietnam into Laos and Thailand. Moreover, armed struggles are developing in Indonesia and the Phillipines.

The U.S. government feels it must defeat the thrust of world revolution, centered in Asia, and especially in Vietnam and China. Moreover, Asia is, as Jules Henry wrote last April 25 in the Nation, "one of the last frontiers of American investment."

The U.S. will expand the war. The more it fights, however, the more it will stimulate armed, revolutions of the oppressed, the more it will have to fight. Simultaneously, long death lists, high prices and people learning about the clear injustice of the war can expand the anti-war movement with the war. The U.S. is not, in any case, playing for small stakes in Vietnam. It will not be forced out easily.

The government will need students to provide some of the manpower for such a war. The CP thinks they will all be technicians, with "safe" jobs. We think some will be technicians, some foot soldiers. In any case, no draftees, whether technicians or infantrymen, will be safe. For people's war, revolutionary guerrilla war, is not like trench warfare. There is no defined front. The whole country, farmland and city, is the battlefield. All the local people are possible enemy fighters. Since there is no defined front, there is no safe rear. This is true for the U.S. army (all of its personnel) in Vietnam. It would certainly be true in China.

Will 2-S, by preventing students from being drafted, make expansion of the war impossible? Class rank and draft exams were instituted precisely to facilitate selecting students for the draft each fall by determining who won't get 2-S. If these methods were abolished, the government could as a last resort use random selection as a basis for not granting deferments. It will draft students to the extent that it needs the manpower as the war expands. In the long run, there will be no way for millions of students to get out. By defending 2-S, by arguing that it offers students a real way out, the CP strengthens the false sense of security which the deferment produces. And this false hope diverts people from anti-war activity into a personal attempt to avoid the war.

Radicals don't help the American people by promising an easy escape from the war. We can't get students (or workers, for that matter) out. We can only build a movement. The job of building a movement strong enough to get the U.S. out of Vietnam and other countries is very difficult. Sentiment is already widespread and growing against the war. But people are unclear about why the U.S. is there and what to do about it. They are anxious to find niches of personal safety; they are divided in many ways against themselves. Radicals have to fight the illusion of individual outs, win large numbers of people to action that will solidify divided groups. We should organize against class rank and draft tests not because this will save people individually, a clear illusion, but because in such a fight we can unify ourselves as students, become clearer about the nature of the war, prepare ourselves to fight against the government's policies from a stronger position.

Worker Hostility

To link the anti-war fight with support for 2-S would be deadly. For the key division the student movement must overcome is that between itself and the bulk of the population, the working people, without whom no war can be fought, without whom nothing moves. Many workers are hostile to the anti-war movement. They often see us as a buch of cowards pretending moral opposition to disguise plain fear. Defense of 2-S will not only fail to prevent student conscription, and will therefore demoral-be the movement; it will, in addition, convince workers they were right all along about students. Instead, while fighting against campus divisions in the form of class rank and draft tests, students must ally themselves with truck drivers, factory workers, long-shoremen, department store clerks. On the one hand we should support their strikes with manpower and by raising funds on campus, support their fights to defeat anti-strike legislation, aid their attempts to organize unions, help them combat war-inflated food prices with boycotts, etc., and, on the other hand, leaflet their work places, especially when a relationship already exists, putting forward our views on Vietnam, explaining frankly that we are doing this because we think we've both got an interest in defeating the government's war policies.

This dual approach of supporting workers' struggles and trying to win them to actively opposing the war we call worker-student alliance; whatever it's called, we think it's the only way the anti-war movement can grow, in the long run, into a movement with the ability, that is, the power, to defeat the government's attempt to defeat revolutions all over the world. To make this alliance students must oppose 2-S. This doesn't mean demanding that the government abolish deferments. The government is likely to do that itself this Spring.

Each method of drafting students and workers has advantages and disadvantages from the government's point of view. In either case, it will draft as many students and workers as it needs to fight the war. For us to urge the abolition of 2-S would be to imply that the draft for Vietnam could somehow be made just. Opposing 2-S means that radicals should give up their deferments and agitate, during various anti-war struggles, to convince their fellow-students that the deferment is dead against their long term interest. Of course people won't be convinced of this idea right away. But the effort will help build the anti-war movement (the long-term need of most students and all workers) in two ways. First, workers will not take seriously anti-war students who favor 2-S, radicals who are trying to get off. At best they will see us as missionaries. Probably, they will view us in fact as fat-cat hypocrites out to manipulate them. Why should they support hypocritical radicals when it's less risky to stick with the established, familiar hypocrites, the Johnsons, Kennedys, et al. Second, unless they are convinced that 2-S provides no sure personal escape, students' campus struggles (e.g., vs. ranking) will turn into fights to proteet themselves at the expense of the rest of the population--and the rest of the population will react accordingly. Indeed, students with a distorted view of 2-S will care little about allying with workers against the war. And how, when push meets shove, can anyone with a bit of social consciousnses justify the obvious class privilege (illusory though it may be) of student deferment?

The CP letter is a program which would weaken the anti-war movement. Aside from this, the letter's approach to people is plain rotten. Students won't like you if you argue against their (illusion of) security. Students are "spoon fed with the delusions and placebos of this system" all their lives. In other words, if a man has a class privilege (in this case one that is quite shaky) don't struggle with him to give it up. Play up to it. Uphold the narrowest, in fact short-sighted, selfishness against the collective good. It sounds like Ayan Rand.

Moreover, argues the CP, how can workers "be expected to unite with a rash unthinking student who says he hates war but throws away his chance to get out of it!" Surely people will be shocked if we do something decent, if we think past our own all-important selves. People would certainly be amazed if a group called the Commu- nist Party, claiming to be the vanguard of the workers, rejected the clear class privilege (though illusory, though temporary) of 2-S. They would be amazed if such a group did not urge other radcials also to defend 2-S. After all, as Brecht says: When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming. And shouldn't revolutionaries act just like the exploiting class they would, allegedly, overthrow? Let us not act in the interest of the collective! Selfish opportunism is what capitalism trains people to expect. Don't scare the j"spoon fed" masses with some newfangled morality.

Speaking of its program, the CP states that "... these reforms are (like all reforms) obfuscations of the ultimate goal..." This is very revealing. In fact, revolutionaries must demand reforms which do exactly the opposite--they must organize struggles which clarify the situation by defeating deadly illusions, which unite people around their own self-interest and increase their ability to fight back.

The CP thinks the anti-war movement will follow its program. Frankly, we doubt it.  Progressive Labor  Jared Israel, Harvard  Ellen Klein, Radcliffe  Emily Perkins, Boston U.  Bob Schwartz, Boston U.  Debby Levensohn, Boston U.