DAVE HOLMES, a founding member of the Democratic Socialist Party, first became an activist In Melbourne during the campaign to end the Vietnam war. KARL MILLER asks him about his experiences of that campaign.
What were your first experiences of the movement to end the war in Vietnam?
I got interested in politics in the later '60s, and by the time of the first Moratorium in May 1970 I had considered myself a socialist for several years. But this was the first demonstration I'd been on, and certainly it had a massive impression on me. I think it did on all those who went on it, and a great many other people.
The Melbourne moratorium was bigger than anywhere else. It was probably the biggest demonstration in Australia in the post-World War II period up to that point — just a sea of people and banners. It had real drama to it. Jim Cairns, the left-wing Labor Party leader, was also the president of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC). He had said that the marchers would sit down at the intersection of Flinders and Swanston streets and stop all the traffic and the trams. Henry Bolger, the Coalition premier of the state, had said this would not be permitted so there was a certain air of tension.
On the day itself there were rumours of hundreds of police being brought in from country districts, and there could be trouble. In the event there was no trouble, and the crowd was huge.
It was an amazing feeling to be marching on the tram tracks and stopping everything. The thing that has always stuck in my mind was all the people at the windows just looking. In every office, at every window there were people. At every building site people were hanging on the scaffolding and looking. Many of them were making the "V for peace" sign, and others were just looking at this enormous crowd. It was absolutely clear that for every person who marched, there were many more who had perhaps wanted to march, who were sympathetic and had thought of marching, but were fearful.
This was really the first time in a long while that people had gone onto the streets, and the stakes were a bit higher then than now. Many people had been intimidated by threats of losing their jobs or prejudicing their positions, or they were fearful of conservative propaganda about what would happen when they got there.
There was a second Moratorium in September of that year involving about 80,000 to 100,000 people. At that demonstration I had seen someone selling the newspaper Direct Action. It was the first issue. I didn't get one then, but I got one sometime afterwards and I joined the Socialist Youth Alliance in December of 1970. From that point on, my political work was in the framework of that organisation.
What were the big debates in the movement?
I participated in the following year in various antiwar activities and attended the Richmond Town Hall meetings of activists, which were very large. Several hundred people would attend these, which were held approximately monthly. They were run in parallel with the VMC meetings, which were constituted on the basis of delegates from the affiliated organisations. But the moral authority, the political weight, was with the all-in activists' meetings.
The activists' meetings were sometimes stormy affairs. There were big debates between the more radical and the more moderate activists. The perennial question under debate was whether we should continue to have big central city marches or downgrade these relative to other, more diverse forms of action: suburban actions, tax resistance, draft resistance and so on.
Obviously, all these forms of activity had their place, but we felt that because there was a whole lot of diverse activity going on, nothing could quite take the place of the large central city mobilisations to dramatise the power and impact of the protest forces and the issue. The same debate has come up in many campaigns since and will continue to do so.
Another debate which happened repeatedly was about the actual character or political focus of the actions. Some of the more ultraleft elements had always wanted to have a very maximum set of demands, like "Smash US imperialism! Victory to the NLF! [National Liberation Front]", sentiments which I certainly would agree with, but think would have been a mistake as the banner of the mobilisations.
We always argued for making "US and Australian troops out now!" the central demand, because this was both sufficiently radical (once the imperialist troops were withdrawn, the NLF won) and it was also a demand which there could be a wide degree of unity around. More left slogans might have been seemed more radical on paper, but they certainly couldn't carry the political message to the vast majority.
What was the political atmosphere at that time?
There was a tremendous mood. For example, in the first part of 1971, Melbourne SYA branch began selling Direct Action (DA) on the streets. Vietnam featured quite heavily on the covers of the first eight issues, and we sold scores of copies very easily. I can remember standing outside Myer's in Bourke Street on a Saturday morning for a couple of hours and selling 80 or 100 papers. People identified with it; they saw the cover and they bought it. It was very exciting.
At the June 30, 1971, Moratorium the cover of DA had the very bold headline "Defend the Vietnamese revolution!". Something like 1700 copies were sold in Melbourne during that action alone.
The antiwar movement of that time is memorable, not just because of its size, but because its demands were won. Why did the movement succeed?
The fundamental elements that determined the outcome of the war were in the first place the amazing and heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people. Despite all the wreckage of their country and the tremendous human and material losses, they continued to fight, as they'd fought basically ever since World War II. This was the rock which the US military machine, the most powerful in the world, just could not crack.
On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the tremendous opposition in the West, in the US in the first instance, then in Europe and countries like Australia, they might have been tempted to go for broke, to try atomic weapons and wreak a holocaust in order to win.
The generals always complained that they weren't able to fight with their full might, that they had to fight with one hand tied behind their back. And that's true. Military might rarely determines struggles of this type. They are political struggles, where morale in both camps is a key factor. In fact the antiwar movement stayed the hand of the US war machine and made it politically impossible for them to continue. The army was demoralised, the people were moving towards civil strife. The spectre of insurrection even hung over the US at the height of the protests. These were the fundamental things.
Australia was just a junior partner in this war, but the antiwar movement had a similar effect here — politically destructive effects on the bourgeois set-up and system of rule, and on popular psychology and consciousness.
Many supporters of the ALP see the success of that campaign as indicating the radical potential of the ALP. What role do you think the ALP played then?
Melbourne had three gigantic mobilisations of from 80,000 to more than 100,000 people. The largest action in Sydney was about 25,000. I think you would have to ascribe this difference to the different character of the Labor Party in the two states.
In Victoria, with the big split with the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), the extreme right forces had left the Labor Party. In NSW, however, they had largely stayed in. Keating and his gang are the end product of this horrible phenomenon of the NSW right-wing "mates".
The fact that, in Victoria, the left dominated the party was a very big factor in the development of the Moratorium campaign. There were so many Labor Party branches willing to support and build their local Moratorium committee, and Jim Cairns, who was a left figure in the ALP, was the president of the Melbourne Moratorium Committee.
Having said that, there were big debates within the Moratorium movement and there was a left and a right in the usual way. There was also an ultra-radical or ultraleft wing.
The course we argued for had its opponents among the more conservative elements, of which the Labor Party leaders formed a big part, as did the leaders of the Communist Party (CPA). Our positions were also opposed by the more ultraleft elements such as the Maoists. The real power in the Moratorium movement was the alliance between Labor Party leaders and the leaders of the CPA. They dominated the delegated committee meetings.
At the end of 1972, Whitlam led the Labor Party to victory in the federal elections, ending 23 years of Coalition rule. Vietnam was a very big factor in that. It's ironic because Whitlam was a right-winger, although he is one of these products of the myth-making of the Laborites since. He had not been in the vanguard of the Vietnam protests. He only associated himself with it later when he saw what it could do for him. He did withdraw the troops, but this was something for which the basic conditions had already been set.
It's only true in a formal sense that the Labor Party ended Australia's involvement in Vietnam. In reality it was the antiwar movement which built tremendous protests over many years. For the ALP not to act would have relegated them to the political wilderness. In any case, of course, their US ally was withdrawing troops.
What are the political lessons of that campaign for activists today ?
The war and the protests against it in this country radicalised a whole generation, even several generations of people. A great many young people came to radical political conclusions — anti-imperialist conclusions, radical anti-establishment conclusions and ultimately socialist and revolutionary conclusions. I was one of those who underwent that evolution.
It is interesting that the CPA, which had dominated the radical movement in this country for the whole post-war period, was challenged, not only by ourselves, but by a number of left-wing groups which developed in this period. And whatever the worth of many of these organisations (some of them turned out to be bizarre sects), it was undoubtedly an important phenomenon in that they reflected that hundreds of thousands of young people understood there was something radically wrong with society and wanted to change it.
Many of these people also saw that the only consistent alternative was socialism and that the only way you were going to achieve that was from a revolutionary path. However modest the day-to-day struggles might be, this had to be the goal.
Despite the vicissitudes of particular groups, and whatever the vicissitudes of the socialist movement as a whole, 25 years later I don't think they were wrong. That impulse was absolutely correct. This horrible war and the struggle against it illuminated that this society is rotten at its very core and is responsible for so much suffering in this country and in the Third World.
Ever since the end of that war, conservatives have waged a campaign against Vietnam, a campaign of economic and political pressure, and an ideological campaign to denigrate them. But whatever the events in Vietnam today, the historical justice of that struggle is absolutely unassailable. The struggle against the Vietnam war was one of the real high points of post-war politics in this country.