A shortened version of this piece appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Freedom Road magazine.

It's hard writing an article on 9/11 when things are ripping so fast. The anthrax crisis was fading as I finished this piece, but last night the Taliban abandoned Kabul. By the time we get this posted on the Freedom Road website, everything could change again--the US government could get lucky and find an Afghan militia leader to give up the location of al Qaeda headquarters in exchange for 15 million or so in gold bullion. Or a new terrorist attack could jack the level of panic in the US qualitatively. Or the government of Pakistan could fall. Or the stock market could tank. Or...

What we have chosen to do instead of crystal balling is to take a look at the first month of the new anti-war movement that was built in response to the political crisis which broke out on September 11. Call it a first draft of history, but one aimed at helping arm us to take up the tasks before us.

It is people, as Karl Marx pointed out, who make history but we do not make it as we please. We do it in the historical conditions we have inherited. The movement we are building today has already been shaped by the experiences of its first days. Everything we do from here on out will have to take that into account, and if we do so consciously, we will have more freedom to act.

September 11 and the Immediate Response

Any thinking about recent events has to start with people's individual response to the bombings of the world trade center and the pentagon. As time passes, we naturally tend to forget just how jolting the experience of September 11 was. The US was under attack. Rumors and media reports on the first day suggested more hijackings and announced a car bomb had gone off at the State Department. Most of all, there were the television images, first in real time and then endlessly repeated--the burning tower, the second plane flying right into the other building, first one collapsing, then the other. Some couldn't bear to look. Some couldn't stop, as the repetition became hypnotic. People had nightmares, revenge fantasies. For some on the left, practically the first thought was "Man, a whole flock of chickens have come home to roost this time," followed by, "This is gonna get ugly fast."

One sharp contrast with previous US military adventures was the speed with which the clergy responded. In Cornwall, Connecticut, a gentrifying rural community with a population of about 1,000, Congregational minister Peter Hammond, Lutheran minister Scott Cadey and Stephen Beecher of the local Catholic church held a joint meeting and service the evening of the same day the attacks took place. Peter's church was packed; people stood to listen in the warm autumn night. And the message they heard counseled against revenge and hatred. Of course not all religious figures promoted such a civilized line, but the rapid response of religious leaders came because this is their job, it's what they do--they counsel people in times of grief and stress.

One of the mantras of the media became, "Everything has changed." Well, maybe, but that was more obvious to news commentators who were trying to figure out how to adjust their standard shticks than it was to folks who had to go punch a time-clock at eight the next morning, just like they did the day before the bombing. Besides the fear, it was the contradiction between the shock of the new and the lack of visible change which kept people off balance. The drive to do something, anything, was intense. Literally tens of millions of people lined up to give blood, made donations, sent cards and letters.

The spontaneous response of the masses of people in New York in the first few days was the erection of memorial alters in the street, especially in front of firehouses, where people gathered in the evenings for candlelight vigils. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these sites around the city. This dwarfed in emotional impact and presence the push of Wednesday and Thursday to have us take up the American flag as a symbol of unity and defiance to terrorists. One major site, in Union Square, became a citywide center for anti-retaliation and anti-war sentiment after a nascent coalition called a vigil there.

It Wasn't All "Nuke 'Em Now"

Around the country public opinion was much more varied than the media portrayed. To be sure, most people just went with the government's program as it unfolded. Too many read between the lines of that program and picked up the underlying message, calling for nuking Afghanistan and Arab countries in general. But many others struggled to make sense of what had happened. A friend of mine in Milwaukee attended a 300-person town meeting called by Congressman Tom Barrett and found to his surprise that there was a solid consensus for "Slow down; don't engage in thoughtless retaliation; don't risk innocent people anywhere in the world; don't start a war."

One of the most important developments was the centrality of this idea of innocent people. In fact, the administration and media, trying by their emphasis on the innocence of those who died on September 11 to whip up outrage, wound up putting handcuffs on themselves, created a barrier to military actions which would kill innocent people in Afghanistan or anywhere else. Every report of bombed houses, blown-up Red Cross food warehouses and starving refugees provides us with the opportunity to challenge the justness of this war.

Similarly, another question, a real question, developed a surprising presence in the public dialog. As one minister from Seattle wrote a friend on the Sunday after 9/11, "My sermon today "God's Peace or Our Peace?" not only called for restraint, but also said that we have to ask the deeper question, why do people hate America?" The intense discussions which have taken place in bars and coffee shops, living rooms, and workplaces about this question have focused not on Bush's suggestion that the hijackers acted because they "hate freedom," but on the support for the attacks in the Islamic world and lack of enthusiasm in much of the globe for the US war effort. People are trying to understand what their government has done to cause this, and they are learning that there are plenty of reasons.

Communities of color found themselves faced with a sharp but familiar contradiction. As is often the case in times of national crisis, people of color were in essence temporarily redefined as first class citizens. "WE have been attacked," proclaimed the media. "WE are all in this together." The World Trade Center was highlighted as a mini-US with the diversity of the victims emphasized. Among many, the horror of the explosion created sharply divided responses, often within the same people--on the one hand welcoming of the idea of national unity and on the other a suspicion and resentment of it. The contradiction was driven home most sharply by bias attacks and governmental profiling directed at Arab and Muslim residents of this country.

Nowhere was the shock felt more sharply than among immigrants, especially those of Muslim or Arabic background or those who looked or sounded like they might be, like other South Asians. Here the fear was immediate. Attacks, some fatal, began within hours of the explosions. Immigrants were among the first and most fervent displayers of flags, though the message could be "Please, don't hit me," as readily as it could proclaim pride in a newfound land. Within days it became clear that mass sentiment in the US had become more receptive to anti-immigrant message from right-wing forces and that a generally favorable climate for immigrants had begun to erode.

The Bourgeoisie Starts to Respond

The ruling class in this country too were shocked and shaken. This was a massive and unexpected blow to their power, if not their rule. In one swoop a score of dedicated men armed, it quickly became clear, with box-cutter knives had dealt a major blow to the symbolic and to some degree the actual centers of US military and economic might. The first imperative the government faced as the general staff of the ruling class was to punish the attack decisively and move to prevent any recurrence. As this article is posted, it is still the main factor in their policy-making.

Within days, the shape of everything that has followed so far was set. To firm up a domestic foundation for the war it was determined to start, the administration raised the banner of national unity. After a pathetic first day or so, Bush's speechwriters got him pumping the flag. The media fell in line, hailing him as precisely the wise and steady hand the country needed. The Democratic Party and bourgeois liberals swore fealty. Contrary views were whited out of the public discourse.

At the level of global strategy, splits rapidly developed between those who thought the US should more or less go it alone and those who understood the dangers for US interests in the situation, especially the risk of triggering a massive reaction among the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. A wing of armchair hawks around Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, began agitating for hugely intensifying the ongoing bombing of Iraq and the arming of Kurdish and Sunni forces there to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Another grouping associated with Secretary of State Colin Powell pushed a much more low key line of building a broad united front to concentrate first and foremost on al Qaeda and Afghanistan. They kept the upper hand, partly because the other side was obviously near-delusional.

The international alliance assembled by the US government is incredibly fragile. While European governments volunteered support and troops, their populations grew wary of war talk and became a limiting factor on the ability of the US to conduct and expand the war. For all the "You're with us or you're against us" rhetoric from Bush, individual countries are tending to go after their own interests, especially those that see major threats or big opportunities in the developing crisis. Russia demanded, as the price for its support, a US blind eye to its savage repression of the people of Chechnya. In Kashmir and Palestine, ongoing flashpoints lurched dangerously out of control.
As various strategic debates continue inside the ruling class, they should of course be followed by those resisting the war, so we can explain what's going on behind the headlines to those we are trying to organize. So far it is hard to identify specific groups within the ruling class, actual capitals which have staked out new turf. Mainly they just pursue their immediate perceived interests. The fight between the two approaches to the war has mainly been limited to the administration, the foreign policy establishment and the media.

Many on the left have been painting the situation in Afghanistan as a repeat of the Gulf War, a war for oil. Oil is, of course, an underlying factor in any politics in the Middle East. It looms large here not so much because of some possible future pipeline route for shipping Caspian oil through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean, as because the ruling royal family of the world's largest petroleum producer, Saudi Arabia, is directly threatened by Osama bin Laden. It is, however, crucial to avoid an economic determinist position that reduces everything to the geopolitics of petroleum. The US ruling class will certainly pursue its interests in petroleum and other economic advantages in the course of the coming period. But it is a narrow and mechanical analysis to say that the war on Afghanistan and the campaign to destroy al Qaeda is a fraud or merely a cover for such geopolitical machinations. As argued above, the US ruling class is compelled to punish, and to avoid a repeat of, the devastating attacks it suffered on 9/11.

No Economic Policy

The second crisis facing the powers that be was already unfolding before 9/11--the impending economic recession. The Federal Reserve Bank, big private banks and brokerage firms worked and conspired desperately, with little help from the administration, to keep the stock market liquid so that it would not implode when it finally reopened on September 17. They succeeded in avoiding a crash, but the ugly fact remained that the Bush administration had no real economic policy even as the economic downturn intensified.

The administration's economic spokesmen were spinning, not setting policy. Their prescription to the population was "market patriotism"--act normal, spend lots of money and go to Disney World to do your part in keeping things afloat. Even more than in normal capitalism, this absence of program meant that each corporation, each bloc of capital was forced to push to defend its own interests. The airlines got there the fustest with the mostest, lobbyists that is, and walked away from Congress with $15 billion. The insurance industry got more billions in guarantees by threatening to stop insuring anyone against terror attacks. These naked grabs for loot were being undertaken right out in the open, providing useful object lessons in how the capitalists view "national unity."

Such lessons were underlined by the brutal program espoused by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and backed more quietly by the White House. This crew of free trade, downsized government, tax cut ideologues set out to salvage their agenda in the face of broad objective pressures to increase government and spending in response to 9/11. They made it clear what they were about when Dick Armey of Texas, who had been happy to vote for billions for the airlines, said calls for extending unemployment benefits and heath insurance to airline employees and other workers laid off in the current crisis were not "commensurate with the American spirit." In other words, "United We Stand--Until Payday."

Economic policy skirmishes in Congress resembled a contest over which party could wrap itself more tightly in the flag, as right wing initiatives like the push to vote Bush fast track authority to negotiate more NAFTA-type free trade deals were pitched as a key component in the drive for homeland security. It reached its low point in the House "economic stimulus" package, billed as a booster shot for the economy. This package was so slanted toward steering billions to corporations and the rich (who are not likely to invest it in productive activity when there is over-capacity in most sectors of the economy and demand is falling) that even the Wall Street Journal was shocked.

The crisis has put big questions on the table for the bourgeoisie, and many issues are in play. What areas will be targeted in the "war on terrorism" if Afghanistan can be subdued? How is globalization to be pursued--the continued anarchic looting of the Third World versus some kind of Marshall Plan to promote economic growth and stability there? How can the irritant that Israel's occupation of Palestine poses to the Arab world be dealt with? How should the new repressive powers of the state be exercised? What can be done to cushion the economy during the coming recession? What will replace the proposed measures to legalize large numbers of immigrants that were suddenly dropped after 9/11? How much can they get away with in terms of shifting the burden of the war on terrorism to the working class? All these battles will have a major impact on the people of this country and on the antiwar movement we are trying to build.

Communities of Color

Even as the national mood shifted in a more patriotic direction, communities of color remained ambivalent about the crisis, with polls showing far more skepticism about war and the Bush administration than among white folks. This was captured in an encounter West Coast journalist Kevin Weston had:

Recently, while waiting on a train platform in Oakland a young brotha asked me for a light. Underneath his brand new blue Sean Jean suit was a T-shirt that read, "Bin Ladin Wanted Dead or Alive," in big black letters. The graphic on the shirt had a picture of the bearded rebel leader with a turban on his head and crosshairs sitting right on top of his nose.

I asked the dreadlocked, starless night, dark-skinned, youngsta, "Are you ready to ride on bin Ladin, homeboy?"

"Oh, fa shizzel," he replied in classic East Bay ebonics. "Dey was way outta pocket fa rollin' up on New York like Gs. We can't let them get away with that. Right?"

"Are you sure, folks? You ready to die for America?"

"Ah naw playa," he said, dreadlocks shaking wildly. "I mean if dey ever came over here, to Ghost Town, threatened my fam, or what not, then it's on. But going there? It's a war going on right here. I don't need to go there, feel? I deal with war every day."

Skepticism about the drive toward war took many forms, including the widespread observation that, when the shooting started, it would be young people of color who would be on the battle lines. This was based not only on a summation of the Vietnam war, but on the perceptible ramping up of military recruitment efforts in high schools, especially in inner cities where the economic slowdown had already started to hit home. Black and Latino recruiters were all over, pushing patriotism, adventure and career opportunities in the same breath.

Despite their doubts, communities of color did not move actively into large-scale opposition to the government's war moves. One significant factor was the widespread failure of leaders in these communities to step to the situation. A towering exception was Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, previously known mainly in California. She became the only member of Congress to vote against giving President Bush vast and ill-defined powers to wage war on "terrorism." By contrast, Jesse Jackson got a day of headlines by announcing that he would try and go negotiate with the Taliban. Reverend Al Sharpton was very quiet, not at all a characteristic role for him.

In some instances this silence may have been some kind of misguided attempt to maximize the leverage provided by the ruling class's need for national unity in order to win gains for oppressed nationality communities. The plan of House Republicans and the administration to provide economic stimulus for the recession-haunted economy (which might be summarized as emptying dump-trucks of cash on corporations and the wealthy and hoping that helps) should have made it clear that this hope is a non-starter.

Fear is a less charitable possible explanation. No one missed the vicious media and political assaults directed at Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. Her sin was mildly suggesting that a $10 million donation from a Saudi capitalist that had been turned down by NY mayor Rudy Giuliani be redirected to the Black community. Attacks on her and Barbara Lee have sparked some of the largest direct mobilizations among African Americans so far, with big rallies in Oakland and Atlanta as folks stepped up to defend those with the heart to speak out.

We Build a Movement

In the first days after the attacks, phone and email networks hummed as activists sought consolation and consultation. The first planning meetings were held, the first tentative vigils began.

In smaller locales, with movements where all the progressives and activists already know each other, it was easier to gather folks together, but that familiarity also created something of an invisible barrier to attracting new people. Some places saw vigils which began with the same handful of people who had done it during the Gulf War a decade ago. In larger cities with broader and more diverse movements, the opposite situation predominated. Sometimes several sets of people assembled mass meetings which each had the potential to become an ongoing coalition, and lots of new people came around. The difficulty was in creating balanced and representative groups and methods for struggling out differences and reaching unity without horrific six-hour-long meetings which would drive away all but the hardiest veteran activists.

Similarly, the Internet was both a help and a hindrance to building the anti-war movement. It was a help because it kept people plugged in from day one, let them know that they weren't alone and kept them up to speed on debates and plans in the nascent antiwar movement. At the same time, that very sense of community tended to help people avoid the necessity to do outreach. After all, if you receive emails from six or eight different people alerting you to the upcoming peace rally, it feels like everybody must know about it, so the need to wheat-paste posters or table in the community doesn't seem as urgent.

Who generally acted and made up the base of the movement are folks who are self-defined lefties, activists, veterans of earlier movements like the anti-Vietnam war movement and the Central American solidarity movement and what have you. Many of these folks have good organizing skills but the first month of the crisis saw relatively little outreach. The movement concentrated on getting itself organized. In doing so it drew on several important social forces:

The church. The clergy who had responded so impressively during the first days didn't so much build the movement per se as help lay the groundwork for it. In Atlanta, for instance, the Sunday after 9/11 saw an after-church march and rally for peace, organized on the southwest side by an African American lawyer; over 1000 people from 13 churches attended, but there has been no follow-up. Around the country, there was a spate of ecumenical services with Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy, introductory lessons in Islam, continued counseling, sermons against hatred and revenge, etc. (A major lesson about this is that the secular left has to learn a lot more about faith-based communities in general and in their local particularities. For instance one barrier to cooperation around this kind of turning point is, as observers of the Black church like Michael Eric Dyson point out, that sermons are not shared but jealously guarded--they are the minister's stock-in-trade and to give them away would be to give up one's competitive advantage in the religious marketplace.)

The peace movement. The exception to the last point was the traditional peace churches, ones which have long served as social justice centers. They are a part of the long-standing peace movement which helped drive resistance to war in many localities, especially those where it has had strong ongoing work around issues like Star Wars or where the pronounced weaknesses of left and socialist groups left them unable to play a leading role. Groups like the American Friends Service Committee and the War Resisters League and local formations like the Washington DC Peace Center played a key role in kicking off actions and forming local and national coalitions.

The peace movement's influence went beyond organizing and coalition building. As the developing anti-war movement grappled to determine the approach it would take to 9/11 and the onset of war, the ideological stand that dominated by default was that of the peace movement. Pacifist slogans like the famous Gandhi paraphrase, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," became the central watchwords on leaflets and at demonstrations. The strength of this was that it gave the movement a consistent and reasonable line to build action and organization on. The problems in this approach were threefold. First, everyone involved isn't a pacifist and there wasn't deep discussion as to why this should be the unity of the movement. Second, it left less room for those from the left and from the movement for global justice to raise analyses that pointed to imperialism as the enemy and a causal factor of the crisis. Finally, pacifism is simply not a strong current in the working class majority in this country and pacifist appeals can have a very hard time finding a hearing in the class.

This is one reason why the participation of veterans and veterans organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which has a close association with the peace movement, is so important. Their experiences have give them a right to speak which is recognized by almost everyone, and is impossible to contest, especially by those politicians and pundits, sometimes called "chicken hawks," who never served in the military but are eager to fight to the last soldier.

The student movement. As has so often been the case, campus activists, already battle-tested in recent struggles around issues like sweatshops and globalization, were among the first to move. In the first weeks actions against war took place on hundreds of campuses, with impressive turnouts at longstanding centers of activism like Berkeley and Madison. Soon spontaneous efforts at regional and national coordination arose at schools like Wesleyan in Connecticut, as activists realized the need to communicate and coordinate.

One of the biggest problems for student organizing has been the absence of a coordinated national movement to relate to. Even powerful local events can seem isolated and insignificant if they are not tied into motion in other sections of society. And folks who came up in the sweatshop campaigns or global justice movement are not used to being in such an unpopular position. At worst they had been attacked as cute, fuzzy-headed idealists. Suddenly they are traitors. Solidarity, feeling part of a broader movement, is an objective need.

The global justice movement. The struggle against the war owes the new movement for global justice an enormous debt, two enormous debts in fact. In the scant two years between Seattle and the current crisis, this burgeoning young movement had created a change of political climate here in which questions about what US foreign policy is and who it really serves have been raised more sharply than they have been since the Vietnam era. The idea that the attacks might have some relationship to US government and corporate misdeeds got a much wider hearing than it would have but for this movement. The second debt is the large force of experienced young activists (quite a few of them anarchists) who saw the direct connection between the issues their movement has been built around and the attacks the US was preparing to launch against Afghanistan and other targets. These folks became a core in city after city for the first vigils and the first mass meetings called to plan responses to the administration's declaration of the "war against terrorism."

For the three days following the explosions, organizers scrambled to see if the mass mobilization in Washington DC planned for the last week in September (S30) could be salvaged, perhaps by reconfiguring it with a strong memorial component. Not a chance. The AFL-CIO, which had committed its name and some actual resources to the effort, pulled out. The IMF/World Bank meeting which was the occasion for the mobilization wound up being canceled anyway, but that only masked what amounted to a fault line in the united front which had existed since Seattle. As the top union leadership called for support for the "war on terrorism" that Bush had declared, the young folks who had been the shock troops of the movement moved en masse into the struggle against war preparations. (The NGO component of the front tended to fade into the woodwork, reluctant to do anything which might put antsy funders off. The retreat was lead by the Sierra Club.) One of the most important features of the new movement for global justice in this country has been the fact that it is a real united front, an objective alliance of diverse class forces, including a significant chunk of the organized working class. That united front is fraying under stress now. The breach may not be permanent, but it will not simply vanish of itself, even if the war somehow ends quickly.

The Movements of Oppressed Nationalities. There has been important motion in communities of color. One instance where activists mobilized early and directly against the war is the Vieques movement. Vieques activists have played an advanced role in the current crisis, which is extremely important because this struggle has led in the revival of Puerto Rican national sentiment in the US (as well as on the island) in recent years. It has a direct and organic connection to the developing anti-war movement, because it has targeted the US military and because the war on Afghanistan has made training on Vieques more necessary to the armed forces.

In contrast to the low profile of name leaders, left organizations have played an important role in providing an anti-war voice in their communities. The Black Radical Congress just weeks after the hijackings refocused their national campaign around the theme: No to War, Racism and Repression! Yes to Peace, Reparations and Justice! Members of BRC local organizing committees have played an active role in building antiwar coalitions from NYC to Sacramento.

Similarly, local groups made up of young activists of color took the initiative in many places. STORM in the Bay Area quickly called a vigil for September 13 which drew over 600 people, mainly oppressed nationality. The Brown Collective in Philadelphia held weekly public vigils. Third World Within, a coalition based in NYC, took part in broad mobilizations and also planned its own activities. These forces faced the dual task of struggling against white chauvinist tendencies within the broader movement and mobilizing in their own communities, where they didn't necessarily have the kind of deep roots which ordinarily take decades of work to establish.

More on the Role of the Left

The Socialist Left. In many places it was the socialist left which set about building anti-war coalitions and activities. Often independent veterans of many years standing took the lead, either as individuals or as part of local action/education centers. They were joined by socialist organizations--at least after they had fine-tuned and issued their official positions on 9/11 ("Gosh, Milly, it's too bad about your sister on the 89th floor, but read this email I just got where the League of Bolshevik Revolutionaries/ML starts by condemning the hijackings and offering their condolences."). This was true not only in New York and the Bay Area, but also in places like San Diego where Activist San Diego, a computer network and organizing center, pulled together actions and forums from day one and provided activists who appeared on local media, debating hawks, challenging the ruling consensus and speaking for anti-war forces.

We in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization issued two sets of talking points within the first ten days in the hope of helping folks think about what was going on and get their bearings in a confusing and fluid situation. We followed this up with a third paper which focused more on the tasks of building the movement as the administration lurched into war. All are available on our website.

FRSO is known for pushing hard for the socialist left to undertake a process of "left refoundation." The 9/11 crisis has been very instructive about this focus. Certainly, the overwhelming lesson is the absolute need of revolutionary socialists to develop organization national in scope and large and coordinated enough to help provide a framework for the development and nurturance of a movement suddenly called into being by a crisis like this.

At the same time, even though plenty of people would acknowledge this need, it must be admitted that in practice most of the existing groups simply did not deem it worth their time to try and meet and forge a common front in this crisis. This did happen at a city level in places like Boston and Atlanta where serious and productive intergroup contacts were built on previous left refoundation efforts, but at a national level only limited bilateral interaction took place. There are of course a lot of good reasons for this. Folks were hella busy and did make enormous contributions to the building of the movement; even in smaller and tighter organizations like FRSO, people did not automatically start out sharing the same evaluation of the crisis; and so on. The fact remains that a seemingly obvious step--a meeting with representatives of national and important local socialist groups--was never called.

In one of the least surprising developments of a topsy-turvy period, the Workers World Party chose to go it alone. Solid anti-imperialist and solidarity work has been their trademark for decades. They are good at it and quick out of the starting blocks. While other anti-globalization forces were trying to figure what the attack meant for the late September week of mass actions planned for Washington, DC, Workers World moved fast. Operating through the usual International Action Center and through the catchily-named new International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), they converted a September 29 globalization action for which they already held the permit into the first big anti-war march, which wound up drawing about 10,000 to Washington. What they did not do was reach out to other forces in the peace movement and nascent anti-war movement and try to draw folks into an open process of planning and coalition building.

Workers World went on to undercut those of us arguing for merger or at least cooperation between anti-war coalitions by unilaterally calling for nationwide demonstrations on October 27 without consulting with other coalitions and groupings working against the war. This presented the movement with a typical WWP fait accompli--come to our demo on our terms, or be responsible for splitting the movement. Nevertheless, it remains the duty of those who want to see the strongest possible movement against the war to struggle both with Workers World and with others who cite WWP's repeated past practice as a basis for refusing to consider cooperating with them.

Missing in Action

The unions. While a few labor unions and activists issued cautionary statements in the aftermath of the explosions, the main trend was calls for military action. Their spirit was captured in John Sweeney's statement on October 8, right after the start of US bombing: "We support the aggressive, considered military action ordered by President Bush this weekend, and we stand with all Americans behind the men and women who are now in harm's way." (This last sentiment was not, unfortunately, intended to apply to the men and women who had actually been put in harm's way--Afghan men and women.)

The AFL-CIO leadership has a hard way to go. This is not the Vietnam era when President Johnson could follow a "guns and butter" policy to buy off opposition to the war with increased prosperity for a significant section of the working class. Today, organized labor can take one of three basic stances: A. We support the war and should be rewarded for our contributions. B. The war that we are concerned about is the war on working people here at home. C. The war and the policies tied up with it mean nothing but bad news for working people. To adopt the third stand would initially isolate them from the majority of their members. So far the AFL-CIO leadership has tried various combinations of the first and second stances, with little luck. As they scramble to shore up the levees against the worst of the rising flood of reactionary legislative initiatives, they are still being tarred as "unpatriotic" for opposing the administration's plans at all.

If one big question about the war is "Who will pay?" the ruling class has already made it clear what their idea is. And there's worse to come as the recession deepens and conditions for working people continue to skid downward. Almost unnoticed, in NYC in early October the first 200 families were cut off welfare forever, their time-limited benefits expired. Meanwhile, a city-sponsored job fair was so overcrowded and offered so few prospective jobs that even reactionary news outlets mumbled nervously about social unrest. Ultimately, workers will have to take a stand that "We're Not Paying" for the war, but that can only come when the war itself is seen as not worth supporting.

This is why the initial steps taken by activists around the country to build a force of unionists willing to stand publicly against the war is such an important starting point. The San Francisco Central Labor Council once again did itself proud with a statement against war, as did Washington State Jobs with Justice. In NYC, thirteen local presidents joined hundreds of other workers in signing the statement of Labor Against War, a quickly assembled response network which also held press conferences and attended the October 7 demonstration there with a huge banner. Such initiatives set the stage for the long fight we face in winning the labor movement to the ranks of the anti-war movement. More than that, they set up a pole for the next stage in the battle for the soul of the trade union movement.

The working class movement is, of course, far broader than the trade union movement. One of the most active sectors of the class in recent years has been immigrant workers, and immigrant workers organizations have in several instances taken active part in the anti-war movement, even as they try and figure out what the changing climate around immigration means for their members and communities. In NYC for instance, the Taxi Workers Alliance, has been dealing with drastically falling incomes and racist attacks on the city's largely South Asian and Muslim drivers since 9/11. Its leaders still took the time to work patiently with drivers nervous about taking any public stand to develop a position in support of peace and democratic rights.

Tackling Problems under Fire

As we set about building a movement, we faced a two-pronged attack from the ruling class. The main thrust was simply to ignore the growth of anti-war sentiment. Weeks went by before many media outlets even acknowledged the existence of anti-war sentiment and organizing. When it was reported, it was generally dismissive, with a tone of "can you believe that there are actually people so clueless, so stuck in the '60s, that they want to demonstrate against this very popular war?"
The other prong was considerably more sinister--repression. The tone here was set by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer who cautioned Americans about the "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Professors who spoke out against the war were attacked by the media and university administrations around the country. Demonstration permits were denied. Travelers were turned back at the Canadian border because they opposed the war here. And of course Congress passed by huge margins the "USA Patriot Act," the most sweeping curtailment of civil liberties since the McCarthy era.

For many who opposed the drive to war, the scariest thing was not government repression but simply the reported depth of patriotism and support for retaliation among the residents of this country. All those flags! All those patriotic songs! All those right-wing talk-show hosts raving away! The fear many activists felt about stepping out on front street with an anti-war message had an affect on much of what happened in the first month of the movement. Some people initially chose to sidestep the issue of the drive to war and focus on defense of the Arab American community and other victims of bias crimes. This was an important issue, to be sure, but the array of forces around it was far broader, with administration officials (mindful of the need to polish the US image in the Muslim world) vigorously denouncing bias attacks.

A big question surfaced in every effort to call demonstrations and build coalitions: What should the movement say to get a hearing among the people? The main dispute generally came down around the question of Osama bin Laden. A lot of folks insisted that if we didn't highlight a call for bin Laden's capture and punishment, we would be seen as supporting the 9/11 attacks. Others of us argued against making this position a bottom line. One problem is wording such a call. If the main thing is to capture bin Laden and bring him to justice, how hard can you object if it winds up being the US that does the capturing? (In principle all people and states that commit crimes against humanity should be held accountable before the world's peoples, through fair international bodies not controlled by US imperialism or any dominant powers. But there is no way of making that happen right now and we can't afford to get sidetracked into debating what should happen to bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban leadership rather than showing why the war must be stopped.)

Further, emphasizing calls to capture and try the perpetrators of the hijackings undercut one of the most powerful arguments against retaliation, the danger entering into a long ongoing cycle of violent retribution with Islamic fundamentalism. Lastly many, especially young activists of color, argued against calls for justice which dealt only with Osama bin Laden, asking questions about who determines what's justice and what justice people of color ever get in this white-supremacist, capitalist-dominated world, including in its purported "international bodies."

A similar debate raged in many places about whether it was necessary to denounce terrorism in our literature and slogans. On the face of it this would seem to be a no-brainer. Most leftists including Marxists and Leninists are resolutely opposed to terrorist strategies. The problem in adopting an anti-terrorist stand is that we do not get to define what terrorism is--the media do. Variations on three approaches were argued: Criticize terror to win broader support and constrain US tactics; Use the issue of terrorism to do education on US crimes around the globe and, some argued, expose them as the real terrorists; Accept that this is not our turf and refuse to concede the point to them. People active in movements and organizations in solidarity with the peoples of countries like the Philippines, Colombia or Palestine were extremely concerned that the decades-long, global "war on terrorism" promised by Bush would soon mean stepped-up US involvement in military campaigns against left guerrilla fighters. It's hard enough to get even the most criminal U.S. actions defined as fitting into the term, terrorism. It is even tougher to get Palestinian organizations, the IRA, the Black Bloc, and similar groups defined out. If we lock ourselves into militant opposition to "terrorism," then we can more easily be jacked up at any time to speak against actions and forces we don't oppose and get denounced as hypocrites when we don't do so.

Dealing with the Color Line from the Start

The debate over calling for justice overlapped another important contradiction facing the organizers of the new antiwar movement. This was the necessity of building a movement with organizers of color who can mobilize the antiwar potential of oppressed nationality communities. The summed-up experience of the last quarter century and more has been that it is a really bad method of work to start a coalition or organization, get its policies and structures set and then reach out to invite activists of color to participate. Thus, the concerns of groups of young people and in particular of Palestinians and other Arab immigrants had to be taken into account very carefully. True, some participants represented themselves more than they did the communities they came from, but it was equally true that many white folk were more than ready to generalize about the best approaches to organizing against the oncoming war based on minimal social practice.

Overall, the problem of involving people of color from the earliest stages has in fact been taken more seriously in this movement than before. The factors contributing to this include the repeated experience of veteran organizers of all nationalities, the collective summations embodied in revolutionary socialist groups with strong oppressed nationality membership and leadership, the disputes over and campaigns against white chauvinism which have taken place in the global justice movement and last but not least the determination and outspokenness of the people of color who entered these coalitions themselves.

These advances have not been won easily. In St. Louis, a major push turned out forty-five white antiwar and peace activists to an October 4 community discussion held at the Rowan Center. For many, it was their first visit ever to the longtime headquarters of the Organization for Black Struggle, a community landmark. Among other positive outcomes, several anti-war activists took part in the annual October 22 march against police violence. In Atlanta, a couple young white radicals recently tried to block the Georgia Coalition for Peace from endorsing a rally for Representative Cynthia McKinney because she had not voted with Barbara Lee in Congress. Had they not been roundly defeated, it might well have driven out the Coalition's African American members, and probably a bunch of active white participants as well. Most importantly, whatever progress has been made so far is no reason to become complacent. Activists of color will retain deep suspicions about the merits of hooking up too closely with a predominantly white peace movement and the objective need for separate organizing based in oppressed nationality communities will continue and grow. The efforts made so far will have to be maintained and increased as the movement grows.

Another problem for those building the antiwar organizations and coalitions was figuring out how to develop structures that could integrate the new consensus-driven methods many of the younger folks are used to with the experience-based assumptions on how to proceed which veterans of earlier antiwar movements are basing their contributions on. And none of this was made easier by the massive size of many meetings or by the usual dose of long-winded speeches from members of small paper-selling vanguard groups who attended with no intention of doing practical work to carry out the decisions arrived at.

Stepping Out

Three final problems challenged the movement in its early days. How should we deal with the growing economic crisis, how should we deal with the rapidly cooling climate for immigrants and how should we deal with the government's drive toward increased repression? In all three cases antiwar actions and literature mentioned these problems and used them as a basis for agitation against war, but no real program was developed which addressed these issues and tied them into the struggle against the coming war. The question of repression was left to a diverse alliance of left liberals like the ACLU, right wing forces suspicious big brother and the libertarians of cyberspace, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Meanwhile all of this was very draining on people. The result was that although the movement included many fine, experienced organizers, for the most part, their energies were turned inward toward dealing with principles of unity and organizational structures. The greater task of reaching out to broad sections of the residents of this traumatized country was only haltingly begun. A good example is the dearth of useful literature aimed at giving people a basic understanding of the situation different from what the administration and media were promoting. Thus, for example, a short, sharp speech entitled "The Top Five Lies About the War" given at a rally in Pittsburgh by grad student John Lacny was snatched off the internet by activists all over the country and converted into fliers.

Interestingly though, activist after activist found that once you stepped out of the movement ghetto, things were not as bad as folks had feared. Sure, outreach was somewhat easier in more liberal and poorer neighborhoods in big cities. Sure, some folks rabidly denounced us, and the old wheeze "If you don't like it here, why don't you move to Afghanistan" was heard again in the land. Still, there was a surprising amount of interest in and openness to our arguments and frequent thank-yous were directed at leafletters and tablers. Drivers passing street-corner vigils waved and honked, returning the old Vietnam era peace sign more often than they flipped the bird or turned thumbs down. Activists going out on such ventures for the first time came back charged up--ready to keep building the struggle and calling for new tools to help them do it.

By the first day of bombing, October 7, less than a month after 9/11, we had an anti-war movement in place in this country. There were many problems. The organized coalitions embodying this movement were still in formation, still handicapped by the under-representation of activists of color, still operating basically on a local level, and still divided over some of the questions of line and approach cited above. The situation still shifts every day. The work is hard and the prospects daunting. Most important, we have to turn outward, talking to our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers. But we have laid a good foundation. The building will continue.

November 15, 2001