Defense of 2-S will not only fail, will not only demoralize the anti-war movement, but it will, in addition, convince workers they were right all along about students

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Communist Party Boston Youth Club (CP) sent the CRIMSON a letter on January 27 presenting its views on the draft. We have strong disgareements with the CP's program, indeed with its approach to building a movement. We will try, in this answer, to rebut the most important arguments the CP uses and put forward some ideas of our own.

Instead of discussing how people can fight against the war, the CP presents lists of nice-sounding wishes. People should not be drafted for unjust wars, the CP says, just as the unemployed should have jobs. If they are drafted, they should not have to fight. Apprentices ought to be exempt, VISTA workers ought to be exempt. Peace Corpsmen shouldn't have to go. The CP program sounds like an appeal for special interest groups.

The issues that must concern real Communists (because they concern everyone who wants to fight against this war) are nowhere concretely discussed: the economic and political nature of the war, its importance to the bourgeoisie and the government, its probable future, the kind of movement that needs to be built to serve the American people in opposing the war, the weaknesses and divisions which presently hold back that movement.

The anti-war movement needs a program to organize people to defeat the government's war. The CP meets the situation passively with the notion of disengagement from the "military industrial complex" (i.e., American society)--a clear impossibility for the vast majority of Americans, including students. Reduced to its essence, the CP's argument runs: if everyone were exempt, there would be no soldiers to fight the war. There is a Yiddish retort to such wishful thinking. It goes: "And if your grandmother were a trolley car...." And the question still remains: how do we unite Americans from different classes in a strong movement to get the U.S. our of Vietnam?

But the CP's exemption list disguised as a program is not without point. The CP calls for these deferments to justify its main contention: that 2-S is really a good thing, that students shouldn't oppose, shouldn't renounce but rather hold onto their deferments. And students needn't feel guilty--the CP wants exemption for everyone. In addition, the CP justifies 2-S directly on two grounds:

* 2-S prevents students from being drafted and therefore limits the government's ability to escalate the war.

* An attack on 2-S would turn students against the left and make workers laugh.

We agree that the government intends to expand the war against Vietnam into an all-Asian land war. The war has, in fact, already been expanded, inside Vietnam to the important Mekong Delta, and, outside Vietnam into Laos and Thailand. Moreover, armed struggles are developing in Indonesia and the Phillipines.

The U.S. government feels it must defeat the thrust of world revolution, centered in Asia, and especially in Vietnam and China. Moreover, Asia is, as Jules Henry wrote last April 25 in the Nation, "one of the last frontiers of American investment."

The U.S. will expand the war. The more it fights, however, the more it will stimulate armed, revolutions of the oppressed, the more it will have to fight. Simultaneously, long death lists, high prices and people learning about the clear injustice of the war can expand the anti-war movement with the war. The U.S. is not, in any case, playing for small stakes in Vietnam. It will not be forced out easily.

The government will need students to provide some of the manpower for such a war. The CP thinks they will all be technicians, with "safe" jobs. We think some will be technicians, some foot soldiers. In any case, no draftees, whether technicians or infantrymen, will be safe. For people's war, revolutionary guerrilla war, is not like trench warfare. There is no defined front. The whole country, farmland and city, is the battlefield. All the local people are possible enemy fighters. Since there is no defined front, there is no safe rear. This is true for the U.S. army (all of its personnel) in Vietnam. It would certainly be true in China.

Will 2-S, by preventing students from being drafted, make expansion of the war impossible? Class rank and draft exams were instituted precisely to facilitate selecting students for the draft each fall by determining who won't get 2-S. If these methods were abolished, the government could as a last resort use random selection as a basis for not granting deferments. It will draft students to the extent that it needs the manpower as the war expands. In the long run, there will be no way for millions of students to get out. By defending 2-S, by arguing that it offers students a real way out, the CP strengthens the false sense of security which the deferment produces. And this false hope diverts people from anti-war activity into a personal attempt to avoid the war.

Radicals don't help the American people by promising an easy escape from the war. We can't get students (or workers, for that matter) out. We can only build a movement. The job of building a movement strong enough to get the U.S. out of Vietnam and other countries is very difficult. Sentiment is already widespread and growing against the war. But people are unclear about why the U.S. is there and what to do about it. They are anxious to find niches of personal safety; they are divided in many ways against themselves. Radicals have to fight the illusion of individual outs, win large numbers of people to action that will solidify divided groups. We should organize against class rank and draft tests not because this will save people individually, a clear illusion, but because in such a fight we can unify ourselves as students, become clearer about the nature of the war, prepare ourselves to fight against the government's policies from a stronger position.