LETTERS
Editors: I much enjoyed your Winter 1986 issue. Could you publish a minor correction in your next issue? Barbara Reisman co-authored "The Case for Adversarial Unionism," Harvard Business Review,...
...to help mediate between the Vietminh and the French...
...Most of the people who opposed the war on this basis, you comment, came to oppose it "somewhat tardily...
...On the other hand, were the Communist regime genuinely popular and the resistance largely an American project, I probably would not oppose the intervention at all (though as a dissident in a communist state, I wouldn't be happy about that either...
...as a State Department internal memo observed, Diem would be campaigning "against the knowledge, shared even by illiterate coolies, that there would be no such independence as now exists had it not been for the Vietminh...
...Try to understand how people like 248 me were driven to exasperation and then despair during those years...
...Brief as it is, your analysis of the war is seriously flawed...
...I woud deny the legitimacy of the Soviet state...
...Barbara Reisman co-authored "The Case for Adversarial Unionism," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1985, p. 22, referred to in Robert Kuttner's "Unions, Economic Power and the State," Dissent, Winter 1986, p. 39...
...taking over from France...
...You contrast your own position on the Vietnam War with three other positions within the antiwar movement: 1. "The victory of Hanoi and the Viet Cong was desirable because it would further the 'progressive cause' (that is, communism...
...In fact, of course, the analogy is not exact, and our opposition to the Vietnam War was in one sense different from the opposition to the Afghan War in my story...
...Third, even if the Communists did have the support of "most" Vietnamese, that didn't make their cause a good one or support of them politically desirable...
...Citing the authoritarianism and the ruthlessness of the Vietnamese Communists, you find this position morally unacceptable...
...Neither of these writers is a supporter of American intervention...
...Eisenhower had estimated that if elections were held, Ho Chi Minh would win 80 percent of the vote...
...It is not right to argue that the only justified interventions are "humanitarian interventions" (the Indians, say, in Bangladesh...
...I will try to answer by taking up his analogy and talking mostly about Afghanistan...
...And given what we anticipated would be the results of a Communist victory—since confirmed, alas, in Vietnam and Cambodia— we also kept saying that the excesses of some New Leftists were preparing the ground for a largescale right-wing reaction in the U.S...
...Not every simple argument is simplistic...
...212) 246-3942...
...At times you acknowledge all this, as when you write that "Communist leadership of Vietnamese nationalism was the single decisive factor of recent Vietnamese history...
...A colonial war, yes...
...The purpose of the Talent Bank is to link the community of progressive scholars more closely to the worlds of public policymaking and political organizing...
...If you are interested in joining a "counter-offensive" that will bring progressive scholarship more directly to bear on policy making, opinion making, and organizing, let us hear from you: Institute for American Values, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 2415, New York, NY 10107...
...hence, a "pragmatic" appeal to these people might strengthen the forces of opposition...
...Only fellow travelers and fools would deny that...
...It will also serve as a publications clearinghouse and a vehicle for cooperative work and resource-sharing...
...They had no opportunity to express themselves through democratic means...
...I have no assurance that Vietnam would have found a "happy ending" even if one of these fairy-tale scripts had been followed...
...Were we wrong...
...Compared to those who planned the war and those who sought to justify it, these New Leftists, whatever their shortcomings, were models of moral clarity...
...Instead, they point us toward the same sort of complex and ambiguous political/ moral position as the one we defended, not with any great success, twenty years ago...
...and partly a battleground in the worldwide conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union"—as if it were a little bit of each...
...By contrast, we found thirty-one explicity conservative/anti-liberal institutes whose combined budgets exceeded $72 million...
...But I don't think they merit your contempt...
...Editors: An assessment of the 50 years of the CIO is the order of the day, as suggested in your Fall 1985 issue and in the article by David Brody, "The CIO After 50 Years: A Historical Reckoning...
...Finally, I want to say a word in defense of the "large number of New Leftists" who wished for the victory of the Communists...
...How would we respond to a Russian critic of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan who justified his position in the same terms...
...This reasoning ignores that the historiography of the American working class functions within a framework of a management-controlled publishing industry...
...You then present your own reasons for opposing the war: "It became highly unlikely, therefore, that the war could be 'won': or that 'our' side could seriously be said to be fighting for freedom...
...At the same time, I would also feel myself bound to acknowledge that the resistance, which would surely win were Russian troops to be withdrawn, would in all probability reestablish a society marked, as Morton says, "by tribal warfare and religious fanaticism...
...Perhaps Vietnam would be a bit different today if we had allowed the 1956 elections to take place...
...What they have argued about is whether that activity might have led to a different kind of labor movement...
...And still is, for similar views have reappeared, here and now, in the form of an admiration, certainly undue, for the government of Nicaragua and the rebels in El Salvador...
...You, Irving, have often written of the dangers of ideology...
...Gains like seniority were fought for and won by workers as a necessary defense against management's system of privileges and favoritism...
...You write that it "was partly an inherited colonial war, with the U.S...
...But a battleground in a worldwide conflict...
...If contempt wasn't necessarily the right response to all this, criticism certainly was...
...2. "The war was morally wrong, since American intervention constituted an effort by a great power to impose its imperial will upon a people that had long been struggling to determine its own fate...
...But can you be sure that the condition of Vietnam today owes everything to the harshness of the Communists, nothing at all to thirty years of war...
...And again, we would find this true, but not compelling...
...Simply to oppose the intervention, without saying anything about the politics of the case, would not be to adopt a firm moral position but only to strike a pretty pose: and that is not what I would want to do...
...466...
...That is, did the rank-and-file movements of the 1930s have in mind alternatives that might have protected shop-floor power from the formal bargaining system that ultimately prevailed...
...In other words, I would oppose the Russian intervention in Afghanistan from inside Russia in the same way as Irving Howe and I opposed the American intervention in Vietnam from inside America...
...When Professor Brody does not find a rank-and-file history of industrial unionism in this account of UAW Local 222 (or in the work by other labor historians), he contends that it doesn't exist...
...More than once you refer to the brutality of the Vietnamese Communists...
...But the workers through their union won these concessions, don't ever think they were granted because of the Christian benevolence of the boss class...
...3. "Whatever the original rationale for intervening in Vietnam," the "costs" of the war were too great to justify continuing it...
...Morton's letter misses the mood of the time, the unearned despair with "Amerika," the excitement over guerrilla and terrorist violence, the willful projection of ideological certainties (naive enthusiasms too) onto the great unknown called the Third World...
...They require an analysis of the character and relative legitimacy of the local regime (or of the insurrectionary movement...
...Would Brian Morton really want anything to be different in this hypothetical story...
...The Vietnam war was wrong because military intervention is wrong: this simple argument, in my opinion, is stronger than your own...
...In what follows I will criticize your analysis of the character of the war and your remarks about some of the war's domestic opponents...
...You add that "This political analysis, merely sketched here, lent weight and cogency to the moral and pragmatic arguments against the war...
...that the war could be `won,' " and in saying that the moral argument by itself was insufficient to justify opposition to the war, you leave room for a disturbing inference...
...But claims about interventions and counter-interventions, under modern conditions, are complex political claims...
...In politics, you often want people to act together out of varying opinions and motives...
...One last comment...
...Which didn't at all keep us from advancing our own views about Vietnam...
...They did so, you write, because they believed that "only a left-authoritarian government could be both revolutionary and ruthless enough to cope with the problems of the Third World," or because they were "swept away by sentiment and indignation...
...The society they are seeking to preserve is marked by tribal warfare and religious fanaticism...
...I'll leave it for you to decide which description fits me best—for I can't help wondering whether the dreadfulness of Vietnam today is a consequence of the Communist victory alone...
...Or if we'd responded to any of the eight letters Ho Chi Minh sent to Truman in 1945 and 1946, in which he asked the U.S...
...In basing your own opposition to the war in part on the "pragmatic" argument that it was "highly unlikely...
...What would the political situation look like if no one were interfering...
...First: if many New Leftists did think as Morton says, that was partly because they had been persuaded that the Vietnamese Communists were somehow "progressive," or "different" from those in other countries, and therefore more deserving of support both at home and abroad...
...And so, whether or not I thought the guerrillas "deserved" to win, I might well hope for a Russian defeat...
...The Geneva conference of 1954 established a cease-fire between the Vietminh and the French—no State of South Vietnam was involved— and called for national elections to determine the country's future...
...In characterizing your own position, you begin with a brief analysis of the war, stressing that Hanoi and the NLF "unfortunately had succeeded in appropriating the historic energies of Vietnamese nationalism...
...By then there were a good many Americans who didn't have a principled opposition to the war but who had become weary of it, or convinced it was a losing proposition...
...I agree with you that some young Americans romanticized Hanoi and the NLF naively...
...He doubted any labor-history journal would find such material of sufficient interest to its readers to merit publication...
...The conditions became so intolerable that we had to do something to alleviate the tyranny...
...Our first response, in Dissent, has been .. . political analysis—as in Abe Brumberg's articles on Nicaraguan politics and Gabriel Zaid's on the Salvadoran guerrillas...
...or that the majority of Afghans support either the Kabul government or Soviet intervention...
...But I suspect that many of those who did thought of themselves as opposed to the American regime, that is, to liberal democracy...
...The current conservative ascendancy owes much to the fact that, since the early 1970's, the right has dramatically increased its investment in the organization, production and marketing of ideas...
...As I tried to show in Just and Unjust Wars, counter-interventions can also be justi247 fied: the French and British would surely have done the right thing, for example, had they helped the Spanish republicans...
...One can hardly expect that a Soviet withdrawal will bring about a "happy ending...
...but the "evenhandedness" of formulations like these, which seems to suggest that both sides were equally to blame for the war, is seriously misleading...
...Labor historians have never argued that rank-and-file activity did not exist or play a significant role in industrialunion development...
...I'm not saying that you should have supported either side...
...Then scholars like David Brody claim such material doesn't exist, and that the progressive working class doesn't exist...
...We wanted to get the war ended...
...Postscript: A day or two after I wrote the foregoing, I began to experience the slight headaches that are a sure sign that an article one had thought completed needs more work...
...and after a hard, bloody, sacrificial struggle [it] was recognized as the true bargaining agent for us—the UAW...
...I can think of one...
...I don't much want, in 1986, to refight the Vietnamese war, but Brian Morton's thoughtful letter both deserves and requires an answer...
...Nor was the conflict a "civil war" in any but the most marginal sense...
...So the workers formed a union...
...As for "contempt" for the New Left: well, I was a greater sinner than Walzer in this respect and will have to speak for myself...
...Of course we can all imagine situations in which intervention might be justified—examples of what you, Michael, have called "humanitarian intervention...
...Editors: I'm writing to register my disagreement with your article "Were We Wrong About Vietnam...
...I would not repress this knowledge and pretend, on the basis, perhaps, of a heroic journey to the guerrilla strongholds, that the new Afghanistan would be a liberal or social democratic paradise...
...Surveying what he calls the "New Left historians," Brody maintains that they didn't demonstrate "the existence of any rank-and-file conception of an alternative...
...They saw their own country murdering over a million people, and they sympathized with our victims and with those who opposed us...
...The Afghan tribesmen, by many accounts, are ex246 tremely brutal...
...The large-scale industry, which made the CIO possible, is by no means extinct in the U.S...
...The war was a conflict between the superpowers only in the sense in which Afghanistan is today...
...Certainly, if we look through back issues of Dissent for criticisms of the Soviet invasion, we won't find any that are based on such cautious reasoning...
...After the conference, Ngo Dinh Diem, newly installed as prime minister of South Vietnam, made it clear that there would be no elections...
...Neither is the industrial unionism that it makes necessary and possi(Continued on p. 256) 249 ble...
...backers, it plainly had their approval...
...It would be enough if I insisted that they could not rightly be opposed by force...
...You comment that there is "much truth in this position," but you nevertheless find it insufficient, primarily because nonintervention, though an "important moral principle," is probably not an "absolute principle...
...Journals and publishers refuse to publish the history of rank-and-file struggles...
...What kind of popular support does it have...
...Bert Boone, "Union Recognition," an article in Searchlight, February 11, 1959, p. 1 Primary-source documents like this are ignored by historical journals, and their existence is thereby denied...
...You consider no other explanation...
...The following letter was sent to the editors of Dissent by a friend who works part-time for the magazine...
...Why, especially toward the end of the Vietnam War, did people like Michael Walzer and me stress that the war could not be won by the U.S...
...The general rule that intervention is wrong holds good in this case...
...to the liberal conception of industrial-union history" (p...
...intervention: "If the methods used by the United States were what troubled opponents of the war, then what would these opponents make of the methods used by the other side...
...I suspect that Brian Morton shares this position...
...As for her belief that rank-and-file history has been suppressed, it seems to me that the citations in my essay to journals and publishers—mainstream as well as radical—provide a sufficient answer...
...Hauben brandishes in fact only bears out the conclusion that at the time this was not a concern of the Flint strikers—witness the demands for seniority and grievance procedures, which are at the heart of our contractual system...
...Irving Howe and I did not hope for an American defeat in Vietnam...
...It's not hard to think of quite a few repellent regimes in our century that have had the support of "most" or many of their people...
...Obviously the Soviet Union supplied economic and military aid to Hanoi, but its involvement was minimal compared with that of the U.S...
...You had no job assurance, no seniority, no grievance procedure, and a lot of other objectionable employment conditions to contend with that only made a human wreck of you...
...You allow the reader to infer that you think the war might have been worthy of support if we had been more likely to win it...
...Last year, for example, we identified thirteen liberal/progressive multi-issue think tanks with combined budgets totaling under $15.7 million...
...And if this is so, the fact that nonintervention is not an "absolute principle" is irrelevant...
...But it would be easy to show that the invasion of Vietnam, like the invasion of Afghanistan, was not one of these rare cases...
...We felt the antiwar movement was being derailed by those who wanted to make the struggle against the war an equivalent to victory for Hanoi, which would destroy the chance of winning the support of many Americans who had become skeptical about the war...
...For example, when a prominent labor historian was asked for advice on getting such material published, he wrote that he was not familiar with any scholarly journal that would publish an article documenting the history recorded in a local union newspaper...
...You write that "The consequences of the Communist victory, as some of us did suggest a decade ago, have been dreadful...
...I hope to be around to see how he writes about it twenty years hence...
...But the Spirit of '37 lives on—in the contradictions of speed-up, long hours of work for some and unemployment for others, which accompany technological advancement under capitalism...
...470...
...the moral argument against the war is valid...
...And we were in the difficult position of urging a relatively complex argument at a moment when most Americans, pro- and antiwar, wanted blinding simplicities...
...You suggest that this weakens somewhat the moral case against U.S...
...To make my objection clear, I'll use an obvious parallel...
...The Searchlight extract which Ms...
...or that 'our' side can seriously be said to be fighting for freedom...
...Brody bases many of his conclusions about the future of industrial unionism on Peter Friedlander's oral history study of UAW Local 222—"a minor auto-parts plant" (p...
...For if I were a Russian dissident, I would not only oppose the war but also the regime...
...If the Vietnamese have proved nothing else in the last 40 years, they've proved how attached they are to their independence...
...Her name was misspelled there...
...q 256...
...or that the majority of Vietnamese supported either the Saigon government or American intervention...
...Dissent, Fall 1985...
...But anticommunism can be an ideology like any other, and more than once it leads you to put your thumb on the scale...
...q Editors: The Institute for American Values, a newly formed public policy organization based in New York, is putting together a "Talent Bank" of progressive scholars from around the country...
...The heroic 50-year history of the CIO has been shrouded in darkness...
...A dangerous argument...
...How dependent is it on outside assistance...
...It is highly unlikely that the war can be `won...
...We would be much more satisfied by an objection much more succinct: that no nation has the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of another by military force...
...except through human and political costs that would be too great...
...Brian Morton says that many New Leftists supported the Vietnamese Communists not because they wanted a victory for communism but because they "believed that since most of the Vietnamese people supported the Communists, the Communists deserved to win the war...
...RONDA HAUBEN Dearborn, Michigan DAVID BRODY Replies Ms...
...Given my abhorrence of warfare and fanaticism, I don't think I could bring myself to say that the guerrillas "deserved" to win...
...Again, the situation in Afghanistan is comparable...
...There were significant forces in South Vietnam that opposed the Vietminh—but most of them also opposed the Saigon government...
...So, if I were a Russian dissident opposed to the Afghan intervention, I would feel myself bound to argue that the Communist regime in Kabul did not have popular support, that it would quickly collapse were it not for the Russian presence—and also that the resistance was, by contrast, genuinely popular and not dependent for its very existence on American supplies (or military advisers or trainers) or on Pakistani sanctuaries...
...But does this stop any of us from urging, in the bluntest and simplest terms, that the Soviet Union withdraw from Afghanistan...
...If confronted with this view, the cautious critic of the Soviet invasion could respond with the same point that you made in response to Argument Number Two, the moral argument: he could suggest that nonintervention, though an important principle, may not be an "absolute" principle...
...There is substantial documentation of the shop-floor struggles necessary to build the UAW, but mention of these struggles is barred from any but local publication in shop newspapers of local unions...
...Hence he argues that a progressive rank and file doesn't exist, or at least didn't play any significant role in the development of industrial unionism...
...For example, the Flint sit-down strikers went on to take up the fight for cost-ofliving, pensions, against dues increases, for a shopsteward system, freedom of the press, and autonomy and democracy in their local and international union...
...unsatisfying...
...What did seem clear—quite another matter— was that the Communists had the most ardent and devoted cadres...
...I think that many of these New Leftists simply believed that since most of the Vietnamese people supported the Communists, the Communists deserved to win the war...
...It is also commendably clear—more so than your own...
...These struggles are carefully documented in the local Flint labor press of the period...
...A pioneer of the Flint sit-down strike, writing in the 1950s, recalled the reasons for the 1937 strike: The GM workers had been under tyrannical domination of company policy for so long that we were desperate...
...Hauben seems to have misread my essay...
...And later you write that "Those of us who opposed American intervention yet did not want a Communist victory were in the difficult position of having no happy ending to offer...
...Because we wanted—not just to convince people that our analysis of Vietnam was "correct" but—to help bring the war to a quick end...
...But your language keeps slipping back to an assumption of symmetry, as when you describe the war as a "struggle between a totalitarian government (Hanoi) . and an authoritarian government (Saigon)," or when you say that "We were right in refusing to give credence either to Saigon or Hanoi, in refusing to support the imperial backers of both...
...We would not find this untrue, but we would find it...
...Whether or not this decision had been dictated by his U.S...
...partly a civil war between two Vietnamese camps...
...Second, we don't really know, nor did the New Leftists, what "most" of the Vietnamese people felt...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
