“Dirty War: Claudia Jones and Opposition to the Indochina War”

Abstract

Claudia Jones was an advocate of “positive peace.” Positive peace, as it was explained by Johan Goltung, is “the absence of structural violence” which involves the “egalitarian distribution of power and resources.” Positive peace is not just the absence of war and violence (defined as negative peace), but it also includes justice for all people and “the elimination of the root causes of war, violence, and injustice” and a concerted and unified effort to create and uphold a just society. For Jones, this could only be achieved under socialism. She argued that capitalism fomented war, colonialism, and imperialism and it used state violence to secure control over resources and cheap labor. The advent of the Cold War increased the anxiety of individuals like Jones who feared that it made hot war a likely eventuality. Jones argued that the US commitment to containment meant policing the poor and the “darker side of the color line.” She theorized a notion of peace that proposed the destruction of capitalism and the structures it relied on to maintain power; this included racism, sexism, and the prevention of labor organization. Jones was also an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist and she recognized that US containment policy was merely a re-branding of both. Though Jones died before the US escalated conflict in Vietnam, she watched events in Indochina with trepidation and she argued that the US was heading toward war there.