Jonathan Neale’s A People’s History of the Vietnam War, published in 2004 by the New Press within Howard Zinn’s A People’s History series, tells the story of the Vietnam War (or the “American War” as the Vietnamese refer to it) from the perspective of common people struggling to shape the outcome of events unfolding on an international stage – American foot soldiers who increasingly opposed American military policy on the ground in Vietnam, local Vietnamese activists and guerrillas fighting to build a just society, and the American civilians who mobilized to bring the war to a halt.

Neale takes the people’s perspective and focuses on three groups: American foot soldiers in Vietnam, the guerrilla army led by Hồ Chí Minh, and the peace movement in the US. He analyses the class character of each of these groups and how they situated themselves throughout the two decades of war. He talks about the petite bourgeois roots of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam; the post Second World War generation of students who came from working class families, and the soldiers who realize they are fighting the war of their own class enemy.

Neale also ends up presenting a surprisingly rich and complex social movement ecology. Which is the part I want to highlight.

This social movement is hard to name. The context was a proxy war between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp. It was also an imperialist invasion. It was taking place in a colonial framework. So the social movement was a peace movement, an anti-imperialist movement and an anti-colonial movement (and these three denominations had antagonistic meanings and implications at the time).

The movement ecosystem is full of insights even when we omit other international allies (which would expand and complexify the context and the movement).

Reading social movements as ecosystems is not a romantic or teleological practice. Ecosystems are full of antagonisms, indirect impacts and influences, and contingent and ambiguous outcomes. A People’s History of the Vietnam War can serve as a wonderful account of this. Here are a few takeaways:

• The three sub-movements organized mostly independently, without any direct contact and communication with each other whatsoever. (The student movement in the US converged partially with the veterans but this happened at a later stage, after the organizations had already established themselves.) The power of the movement came from building narratives and strategies that complemented each other, despite lack of coordination.
• Indirect impacts were plenty. The American soldiers in Vietnam had no access to Vietnamese communist propaganda. They did have “access” to actual Vietnamese people and the guerrillas, who with their persistence and determination made the soldiers question themselves and look for alternative narratives. Those alternative narratives were provided by the peace movement back in the US, who had virtually no contact to the Vietnamese guerrilla movement.
• Another virtuous cycle reveals itself with the question of cause-effect: did the US lose the war because of the guerrilla movement, or did the guerrilas win because of the peace movement? Each sub-movement was objectively playing for the hands of the others, cracking the ruling class alliance and creating ungovernable situations in all three contexts: the foot soldiers stopped collaborating so the war itself was becoming dysfunctional (hence an increase in aereal bombings), there were mass protests in the US and discontent was growing in South Vietnam. It is not clear which is the primary cause of what development, but it is clear that all were contributing to each other.
• Different groups and different organizations intervened in different social contexts. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which gathered 25 thousand members at its peak, served as an entry point to more conservative publics in the US. The peace movement, in many aspects, was a follow-up to the civil rights movement that had integrated anti-racist class solidarity within the working class. The guerrillas in Vietnam inspired all the oppressed peoples across the world (an iconic example of this intersection being Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing the Vietnam draft and his famous statement).

Looking at our movement(s) as an ecosystem helps us to identify these relationships and connections.

More intentional coordination can enable better opportunities, but in some cases it might not be viable nor desirable: inherently antagonistic groups might work more effectively when they don’t directly collaborate, and in certain cases an insistence on political convergence might implode a movement. The movement-as-party framework in All In includes being comfortable in such discomfort. In a sense, the goal in movement-level strategy is to optimize (not maximize) connections and interventions among different movement actors.

Jonathan Neale’s A People’s History of the Vietnam War gives us a glimpse of such possibilities in one of the most impactful revolutionary movements in world history.

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Sinan Eden is a co-author of All In.

N.B. These “interaction” articles are book readings with specific angles. We have no intention of summarizing or reviewing the books. Rather, we are exploring interactions between the books’ content (main arguments or minor observations) and the movement-level strategy and organization framework presented in All In.

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