CLEVELAND—The moderate sector of the anti-war movement met here over the weekend of June 19-21 to make plans for the next few months amidst raging factional battles. The over 1,400 delegates from across the country who attended the three day conference produced nothing that was not expected.
The major plans approved came from a joint proposal by Jim Lafferty of the Detroit Coalition to End the War and Jerry Gordon, Lafferty’s Cleveland counterpart. Demonstrations are to be called for Hiroshima Day demanding that nuclear weapons not be used in Indochina; support is urged for the Chicano Moratoriums against the war on the West Coast and continuing to bring in labor support for the anti-war movement.
With this anti-war conference this movement seems irrevocably split on whether to keep the movement single-issue oriented or to bring in demands around the black struggle and repression. The conference seems committed to the former position and has begun the process of setting itself up as a separate organization. The New Mobilization Committee which has sponsored the major national actions in the past few years, met separately in Milwaukee on June 27 and supports the former approach.
The meeting was rift with factional infighting with members of the Progressive Labor Party and the Workers League pushing for the anti-war movement to declare a break with the two-party system and call for the formation of a labor party. The two groups also wanted all union bureaucrats expelled from the conference. Their proposals were defeated.
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See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.