Fighting the war drive anti-war AS WE GO TO PRESS over 100,000 anti-war protesters marched. In what the organisers and the police said was likely Washington's largest anti-war march since the Vietnam era.
The rally was addressed by Jesse Jackson, actress Susan Sarandon, singer Patti Smith and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
Other demonstrations in cities including Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tokyo and Mexico City were held to coincide with the Washington march. BOYCOTT Murde
Cecilu been relatively passive politically. The emergence of Student Stop the War shows the possibility of overcoming this. There have been many large student rallies in universities and colleges throughout Britain.
Many hundreds of students have now signed up to the Coalition. On 3l October we have the prospect of a wave of occupations against the war. Once again students are engaging with the questions of socialism and Marxism. This new mood extends : also to school students and to young people generally. The Anti-Nazi League carnival in Manchester September have not seen such a radicalisation since the 1970s. Muslim community Of real significance is the unity now realised between the labour and trade movement and the Muslim community. Thousands of young Muslims took to the streets on the 28th. This unity can tum the tide against the fascists in the areas where they have made headway and will stop them gaining a foothold elsewhere.
The campaigns in defence of asylum seekers and those in defence of civil liberties will be strengthened.
The punitive sentences handed out to the Asian youth, whose only crime has been to defend their communities, must be challenged. hardened even Anti-capitalists
Over the last three years the anti-capitalist movement has emerged to challenge the legitimacy of the system. Now we have the possibility of merging the best elements from this movement with the anti-imperialist heart of the anti-war movement.
Those in Seattle and Genoa have posed the question of another world and now together with the anti-war movement they can become the engine for the achievement of that goal.
The anti-war movement is the key to mass mobilisation against the system precisely because it sees and acts against the fundamental expression of capital in this period - permanent or infinite war. An international movement
With this movement we have the possibility of developing what Marx believed necessary - communist consciousness on an international scale. For what is dear is that this is not a British movement: to a greater or lesser degree the anti-war movement is developing interationally.
On or around 28 September anti-war demonstrations took place in New Zealand, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Cyprus, Italy and Spain. Even in France, which has been slow to react against the war, several thousands marched on 12 October.
In the heart of the beast, the US itself, the anti-war movement is now taking off. Many marches and rallies have recently taken place with 20,000 marching in New York and 10,000 in Los Angeles.
As Ron Kovic, the Vietnam war veteran who led the anti-war movement in the States in the 1960s put it in a message sent to the Stop the War office Congratulations on your victorious, and massive antiwar demonstration! You have inspired the world, and all of us here in the United States!'
We know that eventually the battle will have to be won in the US itself and central to that will be building an anti-war movement there that will dwarf that organised for Vietnam. Anything that we can do to help build for that in the US should be central to our work.
Activists from the Coalition have gone and will continue to go to the US to participate in and build the anti-war movement there. Ron Kovic will be coming to Britain on a speaking tour.
This will be real internationalism and gives us the possibility of overcoming the longstanding problem of the international isolation of the socialist movement.