Last weekend, the Winter Soldier campaign arose from its 30+ year sleep in response to the ongoing debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. This event, originally created in the ‘70s by disillusioned Vietnam War veterans, was created as a means to garner publicity and direct public dialogue toward the atrocities of war.

Yesterday’s 5 year anniversary of Bush’s boondoggles and the resurrection of the Winter Soldier campaign serve as a stark reminder that failed, farcical wars will continue to be waged despite the lessons we should have learned after Vietnam. When we criticize our hawkish foreign policy, too often we fault the administration and Congress, but rarely ourselves. It was our parents’ generation who squandered the opportunity to create the necessary structure to prevent such actions from reoccurring and it is the fractured and superfluous anti-war actors who are squandering the chance to alter the way we deal with the new tragedy in the Middle East. What the movement needs is unity, a hierarchical structure and a common vision that threads the voices and factions together to effect change.

The anti-war movement, as I witnessed yesterday, is a motley, ad hoc movement full of different talking points, goals, and tactics. There are the pragmatists engaging in electoral politics (MoveOn), sectarian leftists attempting hollow, ideologically based coalition building (A.N.S.W.E.R) the leftist intellectuals of the Marxist brand (Platypus), the student groups (SDS), and the reactionary extremists (World Can’t Wait). This is by no means a comprehensive list (apologies to the excluded). If we can pool the resources and creativity (or limit the idiocy of some, ahem, World Can’t Wait) that each group offers, the movement could cease to be a muffled, amalgamated voice of concerned citizens, and instead aim to offer a coherent progressive politics, and a thoughtful oppositional voice.

The disintegration of the anti-war movement into discontinuous political threads and fractured, one-sided political approaches, on the one hand, and the lapse into traditional sectarian leftist demagoguery, on the other, are indicative of the historical challenge of the issues it attempts to tackle. In order to confront the war one must take into account the various factors guiding the actions of state and non-state political entrepreneurs; national, religious, and ethnic chauvinism, and the pressures imposed by the need for the expansion of capital, as manifest in the struggles over control of both new economic ventures and existing assets. There are many competing interests at stake in the success, or failure, of a stable Iraqi state. The failure of the left to offer a response adequate to the complexity of these issues is based on its failure to maintain a dialogue among various groups, and forge a broad-based, critical understanding of the issues we are trying to combat.

Creating a politics capable of galvanizing the various groups who are active in the anti-war movement may be an impossibility, but such an endeavor would necessitate a dialogue between groups that has been sorely lacking in the anti-war movement thus far. For all of the collaboration on tactical issues, such as the logistics of planning marches, the movement has not engaged in more contentious, complex, political discussions. It is these discussions that could potentially push individual groups, and the movement as a whole, forward.

An instructive example of such potential movement-building work is the intersection between Students for a Democratic Society and the various traditional leftist groups and single-issue groups of the non-student left. SDS aspires to offer a broad based, progressive political program, but up until now has not articulated concrete national stances on issues raised by its potential allies in the field of leftist politics. The union movement, such as the Change to Win Coalition of progressive labor unions, has much to gain from student engagement in community organizing and education campaigns that coincide with, and support, work-place organizing. Similarly, by engaging with union organizing, SDS, and the various student groups involved in its work, would be pushed to draw out the connections between the local, community based issues that many chapters focus on, and the larger, structural questions raised by a national union movement.

Looking at this in the larger context of the anti-war movement we can introduce the national actors who can help facilitate this dialogue using the vast resources available to them. As with most hierarchal and political systems, the well connected and well funded will have disproportionate influence. Generally, I would be opposed to promoting this notion because the influence of these groups is derived from their willingness to concede (Sierra Club), but in terms of the war, because there is such a consensus on an absolute withdrawal, this kind of pragmatism is crucial. (Acknowledging this reality will be the toughest of the processes in building our coalition — Many of these people are delusional and think that they can accomplish things outside of a structured framework; and unironically they’re somehow amnesic when it comes to listing their accomplishments-–so alienation will inevitably occur (World Can’t Wait).)

The perfect national actor to help facilitate the much needed political dialogue between the leftist sects is a group like MoveOn.org. With 3.2 million progressive members and over three times as much cash on hand, they have the tools and the clout to engage and incorporate the fringe anti-war groups without jeopardizing their legitimacy; but remember, utopian leftists, we have to approach this democratically; the political dialogue will of course be progressive, but in order to build a broad consensus, the dialogue must be pragmatic and accessible to the general electorate. While maintaining their intellectual integrity, many of these groups (Platypus) can use a national movement to introduce their theories into the mainstream system that would be ignored otherwise.

The war is the perfect issue for bringing these groups together on future projects. Political discussion and debate between groups in the anti-war movement would inevitably raise new questions and push more progressive political goals back onto the table in the wider, national political debate. A potential progressive movement should build connections between many existing groups; Iraqi Veterans Against the War, U.S. Labor Against the War, Students for a Democratic Society, the Change to Win Coalition, and the disperse local campaigns of student and community groups aimed at anti-poverty.

This self-development of the left is necessary in order for it to be able to shed light on the way in which military-recruitment parasitizes the American poor, while congress helps maintained a marginalized class of citizens (and non-citizens) by refusing to pass progressive immigration and labor reform. It is only in recognizing the interconnection of the concrete political-economic issues behind their various political issues that the anti-war movement will be able to push forward a progressive politics on the national stage.

*This article was developed in conversation with Ashleigh Campi who is an editor of The Platypus Review.