Student anti-war movement exposes fraud of US two-party system

and, with the despatch of more troops to Vietnam, it grew in scope and intensity. Letters, petitions and resolutions continued to pour into the White House.

Senator Robert Kennedy admitted that for every one letter he received favouring war in Vietnam there were three for withdrawal and eight for negotiation.

Then on April 17 20,000 students and civil rights workers inundated Washington in a march organised by the Students for a Democratic Society. In its official appeal the SDS openly proclaimed its This would make Ceylon a support for the Vietnamese people:

On the question of the notorious Indo-Ceylon Pact, Sympathy which envisages the repatriation of 500,000 Indian "The current war is workers, the opposition being waged on behalf of amendment reads, in part:

La succession of unpopular •.. but regret that your South Vietnamese dicExcellency's government has tatorships, not on behalf failed to give a categorical of freedom. ... The war assurance that it will impleis fundamentally a civil ment the Indo-Ceylon war waged by South Vietnamese against their By raising racial and religi- government. ... The people and the guerrillas are inseparable Never, not even at the height of the Korean war, had Washington witnessed a demonstration of such proIn this campaign they have portions which openly proclaimed sympathy with the 'enemy'.

Compare this with the fantastic ticker-tape welcome given to General MacArthur in New York when he was fired as United Nations commander during the Korean War, or contrast it with the questioning 'loyalty' of the American youth is beginning to articulate its hatred and distrust of a rotten system.

Concealed

More and more it sees the hitherto carefully concealed connection between imperialist repression abroad and the denial of civil rights at home, between the insatiable machine of militarism on one side and the growing power of the corporations on the other, between the dynamic rise of automation and the growing pool of misery and unemployment which has accompanied it.

Paul Potter, organiser of the march, put it simply and directly when he said at the rally:

"The people of Vietnam and the people on this demonstration are united in much more than a common concern that the Berkley, California, university campus: A section of a massive crowd at a Free Spech meeting earler war be ended. In both countries there are people struggling to build a movement that has the power to change their conditions. The system that frustrates these movements is the same.

All our lives, all our destinies, our hope to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system?

Disenchantment It was against this background of generalised hate and disaffection on the campus that Johnson and his advisers took the decision to continue bombing North Vietnam, send additional marines to Da Nang and blockade the coast.

The disenchantment of the students with Johnson has become complete. The best proof of this is the booing and hissing of Averell Harriman this year. at a recent students' meeting and now the humiliating nonappearance of McGeorge Bundy at the celebrated debate in Washington between the intellectual critics of the government and the administration.

Inescapable

Whatever reasons Bundy will advance for his absence from Washington the American youth will draw the inescapable conclusion that government policy is bankrupt and indefensible.

Some people in Britain try to argue that such a situation would never have arisen if Kennedy were alive, for he, they say, was a master of subtlety and nuance.

Johnson, they allege, has muffed the technique of decision taking. Such people err.

What matters in this instance is not the individual character of the president but the over-riding and all-pervasive interests of the capitalist class.

Kennedy's reaction to the Cuban missiles was no less visceral and no more sudden than Johnson's reaction to Pleiku and Da Nang.

There are neither hawks' nor 'doves' but hard-hearted businessmen and their military bureaucratic advisers who take the fateful decisions in such situations.

What is of interest to Marxists, however, is the fact that the continuation of the present trend against war and racialist oppression at home, and the inflexible course of the government, must lead inexorably to a complete loss of confidencé, not only in Johnson, but in the Democratic Party and the two-party system as a whole.

'Lesser evil'

In the last Presidential elections many or most of these students and professors voted for Johnson in the mistaken belief that he was a 'lesser evil to Goldwater. Now the whole fraud of the tivo-party system has hit them between the eyes and it will be a long, long time before they forget it.

In other words the most effective answer to the Vietnam war is the construction of a new party representing the interests of labour, minorities and student-youth—a third, Labour Party. colonial countries, without the development of a revolutionary leadership, which unites the struggles of the workers of all countries.

The difficulties of capitalist policy only reveal how favourable is the present situation for such a genuinely revolutionary leadership.