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From Socialist Worker, No. 91, 5 October 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
FRED HALSTEAD is a candidate in the American presidential election. You hear a lot about Nixon and Humphrey and the racialist Wallace, but not much about Fred Halstead.
That’s because he is a socialist. He is the presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers’ Party, the American Trotskyist organisation.
Fred Halstead has visited South Vietnam to talk with American servicemen as part of his presidential campaign. He stopped in London on his way back to the United States and I spoke to him at his hotel.
“The two key issues for our party,” he said, “are the Vietnam war, with the Bring the Boys Home Now campaign, and black control of the black community.”
The anti-war movement is a mass movement in the USA, he said, but at present it is made up chiefly of students – and they don’t have the power to stop war. Only two groups of people could do that.
One group is the workers and as yet it has been difficult for socialists to get them to react against the war on a mass scale.
The other group is the fighting men, the soldiers. The government draft (which is like the National Service we had in Britain in the 1950s) hits most at workers, including black people who have a much higher proportion in the army than their percentage of the population.
Middle-class youngsters get deferred from the army when they go to college.
“If the anti-war movement within the army developed on a large scale,” Fred Halstead said, “it could be an extremely revolutionary development and could stop the war.”
Socialists are attempting to flood the GIs and army bases with anti-war literature, to hold discussions with the men and encourage them to express their views.
Fred Halstead found a lot of anti-war sentiment among the soldiers in Saigon. Many of them were prepared to undertake activities against the war. Combat troops wear peace badges in their helmets.
The SWP’s candidate thinks the GIs’ potential is enormous. He pointed out that in 1946 huge demonstrations by GIs in China, backed by support at home, forced demobilisation.
“The army tells the GIs they have no rights,” Fred Halstead said. “This is not true. They have – and we want to tell them so. But whether or not they have rights, if enough of them do it, that’s it. It takes an army to put an army down.”
There is no law that stops GIs from demonstrating. In the US, some soldiers are leading marches and taking part in teach-ins.
In San Francisco, leaflets have been given out, announcing a march on October 12 by GIs and army veterans. The army brass is very worried and is thinking of banning the march.
On the negro question, Fred Halstead said that black people in the United States are generally more class conscious and radical than white workers.
“The black working masses have moved into the raw form of spontaneous elemental explosions in the city,” he said. “Right now mass radicalisation is occurring among the black people and among students, but this is absent in the white working class.”
The reason, he added, was because poverty, unemployment and ghetto conditions are the daily experience of black workers. But he thought that the process of winning support from the white workers would slowly be achieved.
One reason for keeping white workers out of the black movement was because of the different levels of political consciousness.
He explained the black attitude as “don’t get in our goddam way. We’re ready to fight and until you are, stay the hell out.”
Fred Halstead isn’t expecting to win the presidential election. He has no illusions about elections under a capitalist system.
He said the SWP’s objective was to publicise the fact that there is a revolutionary alternative to the two capitalist parties. The election gives them a platform on radio and television to present their ideas to a huge audience of black and white workers.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020