The European peace movement has suffered a downturn since its heyday in 1983. GUNTER MINNERUP argues that it now faces a crisis of political leadership and perspective. In Britain, the CND leadership has professionalised the politics of moral protest, but the membership must choose between the political programme of Labour's defence document or withdrawal from NATO and total
THE DECEMBER 1979 decision to 'modernise' NATO's nuclear arsenal in Western Europe through the deployment of cruise and Pershing Il missiles spawned the largest and most important political mass movement on an international scale since the second world war: the peace movement. The largest because no other single issue has mobilised so many demonstrators virtually simultaneously on the streets of Western Europe's capital cities and caused so many people to involve themselves in sustained political activity in countless towns and villages from Comiso to Reykjavik, from Ankara to Aberdeen (not to mention both the official and unofficial peace activists in the states of the Warsaw Pact). The most important because it represents the first real challenge to the Pax Americana which has held Western Europe in its grip over the past four decades. A challenge with lasting and probably irreversible effects on the political landscape of Europe: above all, the beginnings of the break-up of the proAtlanticist consensus in "public opinion' and the decisive shifts in the foreign and strategic policies of West European social democracy, particularly in Britain and West Germany where the Labour Party and the SPD are no longer the uncritical pillars of the NATO establishment they were only a decade ago.
There is no doubt, however, that today this peace movement finds itself in a deep crisis. Its failure to prevent the installation of cruise and Pershing has spread some demoralisation in its ranks, and while it has clearly not simply gone away as Heseltine and others have predicted, the downturn in the level of activity and mobilisation since autumn 1983 is unmistakeable. The British and West German elections of that year seem to have turned the political tide against it. But that is not all. A temporary lull after a tactical set-back was only to be expected nd would give little cause for concern if all one 14 ohn Harris
opposition to all nuclear strategies. had to do was to continue campaigning and wait for new issues and another turn of the tide to revitalise things again. As we shall argue, however, the crisis of the peace movement goes deeper than that. It is a crisis of political perspective and political leadership.
The very concepts of having political perspectives and a political leadership are, of course, anathema to many sections of the peace movement. Peace is seen as primarily a moral issue, and mistrust of politics and politicians is deep-seated. Much of the rapid growth of the movement and many of its successes, moreover, were clearly owed to the persuasive morality of its basic case as against the glaring immorality of the nuclear overkill merchants, and the spontaneity and informality of activities and organisations which often caught the authorities and their propaganda machine on the hop. Apart from being large, it is also an extremely broad movement in which political controversies are often seen as intrusive threats to its unity. "...the less open discussion of politics by the many the greater the danger of
their political manipulation by the
few..."
Yet by its very nature the peace movement is a political movement, and experience shows that the less open discussion of politics by the many the greater the danger of their political manipulation by the few. As long as the main task appeared to be the articulation of a voice of protest against the new cold from Washington and NATO headquarters, and to assemble the broadest possible coalition of forces in opposition to the planned deployment of cruise and Pershing, this may not have seemed to matter a great deal. But the
NUCLEAR FREE Greenham Common, US air base CND CroSS missiles are in place now (most of them, anyway) and will not be removed again through mere protest, however loud; and the success of the peace movement in forcing nuclear disarmament onto the agenda of mainstream politics and wrenching impor tant political parties away from the Atlanticist consensus has complicated the strategic and tactical choices confronting it.
The British peace movement, organised as it is under the umbrella of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, can face these problems in a better shape than many of its continental counterparts. The internal structures of CND offer a forum for democratic debate and decision-making and thus a measure of control of the rank-and-file over the leadership. Yet anybody familiar with the workings of CND Council, for example, knows that its degree of politicisation barely exceeds that of one of the sleepier Labour Party wards or trade union branches. Local groups are rarely better in this respect, and if they send any delegates at all to CND conference, their choice is all too often a question of who has the time and inclination to spend a long weekend in Sheffield. Among those delegates, complaints about the stagemanaged nature of the event and the practical meaninglessness of conference decisions are commonplace.
This state of affairs is the result of a number of factors — the widespread mistrust of organised politics already mentioned, the
International, No. I. November/December 985
2418 atthe roads general decline in activism since 1983, the withdrawal of many left-wing militants from CND during the miners' strike — and by no means merely of the bureaucratic machinations of a leadership clique. But it does provide this leadership with the opportunity to use CND's organisation as an instrument for foisting its political project upon the peace movement.
What is this project? It is the professionalisation of the politics of moral protest into an efficient propaganda machine which can extend CND's influence into the so-called middle ground' of public opinion and play an active pressurising and lobbying role in the formulation of non-nuclear defence policies. The political perspective is that of the eventual fall of the Tory government and its replacement by a Kinnock cabinet (with or without Alliance ministers) committed to returning cruise, cancelling Trident, and a new era of detente and arms control. Its political programme is that of Labour's defence document, outlining a conventional military role for Britain within the NATO alliance.
The practical consequences of this orientation are increasingly clear for all to see. They include a general shift away from direct mass action towards more 'respectable' lobbying, a wooing of the churches and other "acceptable' allies, a watering down of CND's unilateralist case in favour of gradualist concepts such as the Freeze or International, No. I. November/December 1985
the new 'British defence charter' (a project which, while enthusiastically pursued by the CND leadership, it is evidently too scared to submit to a democratic debate and possible defeat inside movement), and an obsessive preoccupation with opinion polls and the PR aspects of presenting its case. Above all, however, the scramble for respectability and the desire for a deal with Kinnock and possibly Steel demand that a large taboo be placed over any discussion of, let alone campaigning against, Britain's membership of NATO. *...nothing less than the construction of a coherent political alternative to the project of the CND leadership..."
Here we have the crunch issue in the political choice confronting the peace movement today. The alternatives are clear: either the road to the salvation of humanity from the threat of nuclear holocaust lies through gradual detente on the basis of the status quo, through reform of NATO into a non-nuclear alliance or greater strategic independence for Western Europe within it, in which case the subordination of the peace movement to the "political realism' of the reformist leaderships is only logical; or it lies through a determined assault on that status quo with Britain's unilateral abandonment not only of all nuclear weapons, but also of all nuclear warfighting strategies and alliances and therefore withdrawal from NATO the principal immediate target. In the latter case, the peace movement will have to be prepared for conflict with Kinnock, Healey and Steel, will occasionally have to alienate the bishops, and begin to map out a campaigning strategy aimed at winning over the majority to what is now still a minority position.
Socialists in the peace movement have always maintained that nuclear disarmament and NATO membership were incompatible. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is not an alliance of equals but an instrument of United States hegemony over the 'free world' in which the West European tail cannot wag the North American dog. It is, moreover, embedded into a network of economic, ideological and cultural unks which provide imperialism with plenty of leverage over any British government seeking to alter the military rules — links which can only be broken if capitalism is replaced by socialism. But for too long socialists have been content to go along uncritically with the prevailing politics of protest in the peace movement, hoping that a commitment to direct action would somehow resolve its political ambiguities.
Cruise and Pershing, however, were little more than focal points for what really fuelled the mass mobilisations of the carly 1980s: the widespread anxieties and fears over the eruption of a new cold war, the popular perception of a changed political climate in which the outbreak of nuclear war, with or without the new missiles, suddenly appeared a real possibility again.
The revolt against the NATO 'dual track' realisation that the weapons they had learnt to live with might actually be used. Their natural response was to demand a return to the re-assuring days of peaceful coexistence', to insist that the cold war genie be forced back into the bottle of arms control diplomacy. To this broad layer of peace activists, -the attractions of the package presently being cobbled together between the CND leadership and Kinnock/Healey/Steel are obvious.
For the socialist left to successfully counter this project, more is needed than routine nuclear pacifism and a commitment to direct action. The requirement is for nothing less than the construction of a coherent political alternative to the project of the CND leadership and to the perspective of Kinnock's defence document, centred around a campaign for British withdrawal from NATO. This means the active and organised involvement of the left in CND structures and activities, and the building of links with the left in the Labour Party and the trade unions on the basis of common opposition to Kinnock's pro-NATO policies. The initiative taken by Tony Benn and Eric Heffer in presenting a discussion document on NATO membership to the Labour Party NEC, the small but significant progress that was made in this year's defence debate at the Bournemouth conference, and the healthy hostility of many peace movement activists towards any accommodation with NATO provide a basis to proceed from and build upon. The time to do so is now. Upper Heyford, US air base
15
Building a marxist movement in Britain Britain faces its most severe economic and social trade unions in the struggles ahead. It the Tories
crisis, but a Marxist movement committed to the fight for socialism has yet to be built. It is the duty of Marxists, says PAUL LAWSON, to link up with the left in the Labour Party and the THE MINERS' STRIKE, the struggle over the cities culminating with the crisis in Liverpool, and the urban riots of dispossessed youth, are all symptoms of an economic and social crisis qualitatively worse than in any other major capitalist country, with the possible exception of Italy.
Despite the depth of the crisis, the building of a Marxist movement committed to the revolutionary reconstruction of society is not very far advanced. Among the pretenders to the role of 'revolutionary leadership' the situation is one of either stalemate or disarray. Whatever the actual size of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), its political influence is less than it was 10 years ago, its sectarian stance towards the Labour left having cut it off from any kind of breakthrough.
The Militant tendency, despite its 'eadership of Liverpool City Council and the Labour Party Young Socialists, has grown at the expense of increasingly rightist politics and ritualistic propaganda practice. This has separated it from the rest of the Labour left and mass social movements and stymied the potential of the LPYS.
The demoralising effeets of long-term unemployment, the defeat of the miners' strike, and the failure of the bulk of the trade union and Labour Party leaderships to mount a counter-attack against the tide of anti-working class austerity, have produced a shift to the right inside the labour movement.
But despite all the defeats, immense reserves of working class combativity still exist. There are tens of thousands of militants, battling away in the Labour Party and the trade unions, in the women's movement, in the mining communities, in the black liberation movement, in the anti-nuclear movement and on many other fronts. Many can be won to build a Marxist movement which will fight for a working class solution to the 16 crisis.
are voted out at the next election, the organisation and political clarity of the hard left of the labour movement will be at a premium.
A spontaneist faith in the resilience of the mass movement will, however, solve nothing. History is top heavy with examples in which the working class movement was immensely strong but utterly defeated because there existed no Marxist leadership capable of fusing the diverse fronts of struggle into a powerful struggle for socialism!
The