Next Saturday’s important Stop the War Coalition demonstration, and the dozens of other demonstrations worldwide this weekend, take place almost exactly 38 years to the day after the May 17 1968 demonstration, which established the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign as the foremost mobilising focus against the Vietnam war.

National Liberation Front
flags in Trafalgar Square,
17/3/68

The fighting outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square that afternoon caused a sensation in the press, and was the key lead-in to the huge VSC demonstration which took place in October that year.

The context of the 1968 was very different to the one which will take place on Saturday. The European workers movement was just beginning to flex its muscles, and the political radicalisation around Vietnam and student struggles acted, in part, as a detonator and encouragement to those struggles. The French general strike, the huge movement in Italy from 1969-73 and the 1974-5 Portuguese revolution were still ahead of us at that time.

Rapidly, after 1968, the focus of the attention shifted to workers struggles and away from anti-imperialist solidarity. The truth was that the January 1968 Tet offensive had politically broken the Americans in Vietnam, and after the election of Nixon in November ’68, it became evident that ultimately the Americans would withdraw.

Victory was finally achieved in Vietnam on 1 May 1976. For a time American imperialism seemed politically outflanked and directionless. When, in 1976, the Soviet Union flew thousands of Cuban troops to Angola to defeat the South African and domestic reactionary forces trying to overthrow the nationalist government, the US stood by with folded arms.

Berlin Vietnam demo February 68. German student
leader Rudi Dutschke (clenched fist, briefcase) marches
at the head of the French JCR contingent. To his left
with glasses) Alain Krivine.

Again, when the 1977-8 anti-Shah revolution in Iran brought down America’s ally and 78 US hostages were taken by the Iranians, in 1979 America’s intended raid on Tehran to release them ended in fiasco in the Iranian desert.

And in 1979, when the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the pro-American dictator Somoza in Nicaragua, the US seemed startled and outflanked.

The United States at the same time, suffering financially from the effects of the Vietnam-fuelled inflation and decline of the dollar, began to fret about the challenge posed by Europe, especially in the light of the apparent wish of the Germans for an economic opening towards the eastern bloc. “The US in decline” became a frequent theme of popular journalism and quack ‘futureologists’.

The fightback, the worldwide imperialist counter-offensive, began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. This counter-offensive has not stopped in a quarter of a century. It began with backing the death squads in El Salvador to drown a revolution in (mainly civilian) blood, and the building of the ‘Contra’ rebels in Nicaragua.

It moved on to the installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. But most of all, of course, this counter-offensive was part of a joint project with the Thatcherites in the UK, against the domestic working class. The imprisonment of the PATCO air traffic controllers by Reagan, and the defeats of the miners and the News International printers, later the dockers and many more – led directly into an attempt to (counter-) revolutionise the work process – neoliberalism.

Since the American invasion of Iraq in 1981 there have been differences of emphasis in the American political elite, but no real fundamental differences over broad strategy.

What started as an attempt to shore up US capitalism and its role in the world, the ‘new militarism’ under Reagan, has become a sustained and decades-long project – the ‘new imperialism’. This of course has led to unbridled and pathological violence and torture.

Since 1968 US imperialism has become more openly defiant of human rights, more vicious and more dangerous. But the anti-war movement has changed immensely too. Today it is much, much bigger and more influential than the anti-Vietnam movement 38 years ago. That despite the complicating factors of ethnic violence and incipient civil war in Iraq itself. In every way, the polarisation has deepened and the stakes have been raised.

With new threats of further military strikes on the horizon, particularly against Iran, the time has come redouble efforts at mobilising behind the Stop the War Coalition.

Tens of thousands will march next weekend
in the United States and worldwide. View list
of demonstrations here.