Friday 21 November 1986

CRITICISING BUREAUCRACY

Paul Anderson, review of The Political Forms of Modern Society by Claude Lefort (Polity, £8.95), Tribune, 21 November 1986

Claude Lefort is a French social theorist. In the English-speaking world he's known only as the posthumous editor of Merleau-Ponty and as the victim of one of Sartre's more intemperate polemics. The Political Forms of Modern Society, a collection of ten essays written between 1948 and 1981, shows that he deserves far greater attention here than he has enjoyed so far.

The subjects of the essays vary, but their central theme is an analysis and radical democratic critique of bureaucracy and totalitarianism. Lefort takes very seriously the political questions posed by the experience of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

His grappling with these questions has led him from a libertarian Marxist demolition of Trotskyism in the late 1940s (when he was one of the founders of the review Socialisme ou Barbarie) to a position emphasising the importance of the struggle for human rights in what he now sees as totalitarian societies.

Some would see such an evolution as a shift to the right. I don't think it is. Lefort's use of the concept of totalitarianism is not that of a 1950s cold warrior, and many (but not all) of his arguments are subtle and persuasive. He should be taken seriously by all who consider themselves on the left — regardless of whether the Soviet line in current arms negotiations is better than that of the US.

Friday 14 November 1986

CND SHOULD NOT PUT ON A BLAND SHOW

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 14 November 1986

Nearly six years after the Nato decision to station cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe, and almost three years after the first cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is meeting this weekend in Blackpool for its annual conference.

It is likely to be a rather low-key affair. But this is only partly because CND activists are tired by their years of campaigning. Far more important, the way the peace movement goes about its politics means that it is will almost certainly be a bland show of consensus, not unlike last month's Labour conference (but without the excuse that a demonstration of unity is necessary to win office).

The two key unresolved questions of peace movement politics – what the peace movement's attitude should be towards the Soviet Union, and what its stance should be in the coming general election – are unlikely to be addressed directly, let alone resolved. This isn't to say that the issues won't dominate the conference, particularly behind the scenes and on the fringe.

The question of the peace movement's attitude to the Soviet Union – a hardy perennial – has a new urgency to it in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's stream of disarmament proposals in the past year: and while few CNDers would not welcome the Soviets' proposals, there are some sharp differences of opinion about how enthusiastic the welcome should be, particularly between those close to the pro-Soviet faction of the Communist Party and supporters of the cautious, non-aligned position put forward by European Nuclear Disarmament.

The issue of CND's stance in the coming general election is one that provokes even sharper differences of opinion. Those who argue that CND should declare its support for Labour have had their hand strengthened by the way the Liberal leadership has forced a pro-nuclear defence policy on its unwilling party.

Nevertheless, those who believe that CND should refrain from backing any political party probably remain in a majority, although their reasons for taking this position vary enormously. At considerable risk of caricaturing political positions, they can be divided into two broad groups.

One, which takes a centrist political position and includes many in the CND leadership, sees the priority as winning the political "middle ground" to nuclear disarmament. Some of this group are enthusiasts for "tactical voting" for an anti-Thatcher coalition, and many play down the NATO question.

The other, which sees the peace movement as a social movement of the left, believes that CND should remain strictly independent for different reasons. This group is less interested in winning over the "middle ground", and it tends to ' consider that a Labour government is the best possible result of the election. But it wants CND to remain autonomous to be better able to exert pressure from the left in the event of a Labour government coming to power.

Many of this group see CND's job as raising awkward but vital questions, such as withdrawal from NATO, that Labour will not raise.

Why is it that CND conference isn't more of a forum for all this to be debated openly? Until this year, the main reason has been the format of the conference, which has mimicked that of a party policy-making conference almost to the point of parody – with debate limited to short speeches on carefully composited resolutions.

This year the format has been changed, to indude more "workshops" and so forth. All the same, it's difficult to believe the results will be wholly satisfactory. Going to Blackpool in November, for starters, isn't most people's idea of fun, so many CNDers will give the show a miss. Peace movement activists will have to wait for anything that equals Marxism Today's weekend conferences in politics appeal.

Of course, the CND leadership is legitimately worried that too much public airing of differences would be bad for CND's image, particularly given the enthusiasm of the gutter press for knocking CND. But this attitude is what makes CND conference a crashing bore – and is one reason it never gets any serious coverage in the media.

THE CASE FOR LEAVING NATO

Paul Anderson, review of Peace Through Non-Alignment by Ben Lowe (Socialist Society, £1.50), Tribune, 14 November 1986

For many years, the Labour leadership has made it clear that it has no intention of withdrawing Britain from Nato – and this year, the party's annual conference for the first time passed a motion endorsing British Nato membership. (Previously, conference had merely voted against anti-Nato resolutions.)

But it would be wrong to assume that Labour's attitude to Nato has been fixed for all time: although no one now believes that the party will adopt an anti-Nato position before the next general election, what happens after that will be conditioned by the turn of events.

For example, if Nato pressure were to prevent a Labour government from implementing the party's anti-nuclear defence policy, the pro-Nato stance would come under strong attack from inside and outside the party (and not just from those now demanding an immediate change to an anti-Nato position). Something very similar would happen were a Labour government unable to prevent use of US forces in Britain to attack Libya or some other Middle Eastern country.

Ben Lowe's pamphlet outlines the history of Nato and makes a clear case both for British withdrawal from Nato and for raising the profile of anti-Nato arguments.

He argues convincingly that Nato is and always has been a means for the US to exercise its domination of the west, rather than an alliance of equals to defend the "free world" from the "Soviet threat" (which Nato propaganda has always claimed is much greater than it is). Nato is irreversibly committed to nuclear arms, and would do everything in its power to prevent implementation of Labour's anti-nuclear defence policy. Hopes that Nato could be reformed from within are ill-founded, he believes.

Unsurprisingly, given its brevity, Peace Through Non-Alignment doesn't indicate the sort of "objective circumstances" that would force the question of withdrawal from Nato to the top of the British political agenda  –  which is a pity, not least because the most convincing argument against raising the profile of the anti-Nato case is that it's utopian to do so.

More important, Lowe doesn't make it clear whether he sees British withdrawal from Nato as a simple unilateralist step  –  or whether it should be just one move of many in a grand pan-European (or even global) attempt to dismantle the bloc system. (In the latter case, a British anti-Nato government might demand for example, that British withdrawal from Nato should be matched by the Soviet Union allowing Hungary to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.) But perhaps it is too soon to get specific on such points: important as they might become, the priority today must be the broad one of ending the pro-Nato consensus that has dominated British political life since the late 1940s. Lowe's pamphlet deserves to be widely discussed.

Saturday 1 November 1986

RIGHT ON, DENIS

Paul Anderson, New Socialist, November 1986

Healey is right. It is not inconceivable that US nuclear bases will survive a Labour government


On BBC's Panorama programme in Labour Party conference week Denis Healey, the party's shadow foreign secretary, said ii was "not inconceivable" that US nuclear weapons would remain in Britain after a Labour government had come to power. The reaction in Blackpool was immediate and hostile and within hours Healey had withdrawn his broadcast remarks.

Yet Denis Healey was surely right. It is not inconceivable that a Labour government, however robustly it asserts Britain's nation­al sovereignty, will fail to remove US nuclear weapons from this country. The Labour non-nuclear defence policy represents the party's largest single challenge to the establishment not only of this country, but of the western world, in its entire history; and the-removal of US nuclear bases is the most hotly-contested element of that policy.

It is one thing to be alarmed that Healey might be about to reopen the damaging divisions on defence which dished Labour's chances at the 1983 election. It is quite another to believe that "political will" is all that Labour's leaders would require to carry the policy through. Any belief of this kind wildly exaggerates the power of an elected government in Britain. In the run-up to the election it may very well seem prudent, both electorally and in inner-party terms, publicly to argue the case for Labour's defence policy, but to admit to no doubts about the awesome task of carrying it through. But if Labour is serious about actually carrying it through, it has to do more this side of the election.

"National sovereignty" might well see off Caspar Weinberger so far as winning an election is concerned, but it won't impress the non-democratic institutional forces which will be ranged against the policy. And to build up public opinion, the arguments for a non-nuclear defence policy must be set in a wider perspective than that of Neil Kinnock's (admirable) morality and petty bilateral deals on warheads with Gorbachev.

Secondly, Labour must now begin the exacting preparations for dismantling the structures of an existing defence posture which has been steadily growing for the past 40 years. Those preparations have to take account of the fact that the principal agencies responsible for carrying out Labour's policy will be implacably and self-righteously opposed to it.

Most analysis of the obstacles to that policy begins with the relentless opposition of the United States. The wilder scenarios propose that the US would deliberately set in train a strategy of "destabilisation" similar to that which brought down Allende in Chile. I believe that such scenarios are ill-founded; the US has less room for manoeuvre in western Europe than in its own "backyard". In any event, the most serious obstacles will be domestic; and the most de-stabilising factor of all is potentially the policy itself.

Public opinion is the arena which matters most. Here it is as well to be sober. A minority Labour government will be lucky to do any more than cancel Trident (the enticing prospect of an alliance with unilateralist Liberal MPs just isn't on). A "majority" Labour government after 1986-87 may have a plurality, but hardly a majority of popular support. Certainly, public support for a British deterrent and US military bases in Britain has been falling since the 1983 election, but on current trends it remains most likely that a majority of people will continue to wish to retain, or even upgrade, the British deterrent (see "One Last Chance," by Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Husbands, NS September 1984); opinion on removing the US bases has been more volatile.

The Tories have shown over the past month how they mean to attack Labour's policy. At its core their argument is that Labour will undo the Atlantic Alliance, the very base of the collective defence system which has kept the peace in Europe for 40 years.

Now elections are about many issues, and defence is just one (though very significant) issue. But should Labour win the next election, the same argument will be mobilised against the government's efforts to carry out its defence policy; it will then have far more resonance as a single issue, and the Tories may well have the backing not only of Washington, but of western European capitals too.

That Panorama programme revealed, too, that you don't need to believe in a malign media bias to see how the media will be inclined to put their weight, albeit unconsciously, behind this kind of argument too. The programme was conspi­cuously "balanced" between the political parties. But its basic premises were, so to speak, "cold war Atlanticist". This is hardly surprising. The idea of the Atlantic Alliance, the "special relationship", is part of the postwar consensus, and Britain's key role in determining the cold war is as much a legacy of the Attlee government as the NHS.

It is common ground that the military themselves are divided over the merits of Trident, cruise and Polaris. The costly Trident, in particular, is unpopular with certain service chiefs, and with the Treasury too. Taken separate­ly, then, there is no consensus among the top brass at the Ministry of Defence and in the services. But Labour's policies as a package, and especially the removal of US nuclear bases, would in their view strike a damaging, perhaps fatal, blow to Britain's integral involvement in US/Nato command structures. There is a genuine fear in the political and military establishment that such policies could be decisive in persuading the US to pull out of Europe altogether.

In 1981, according to Dunleavy/ Husbands, the military establishment drew up contingency plans for resisting Labour's defence proposals. If they failed to stop Labour ministers by private advice and semi-public campaigning, the service chiefs would resign en bloc and organise a service-wide boycott of the posts. This in itself could be expected to create a huge political crisis; but if Labour persisted with their policies, they envisaged as a last resort a petition to the Queen urging her to dissolve parliament. Official sources have denied that such plans ever existed; but true or false, they serve as an illustration of the military establishment's capacity to put a determined government's legitimacy under severe strain.

Our own political and military establishment would be joined in its opposition by the United States and other allied governments, and by the Nato chiefs themselves. Labour would be accused of breaking treaties going back to the 1954 Brussels agreement and further. They, too, would begin by exerting pressure quietly to persuade Labour to abandon the whole package and to extract significant concessions. At some stage they would go public with their warnings of the dire consequences of any intransigence on Labour's part.

But Labour would have important bargaining positions too. The commitment to play a continuing role in Nato with conventional arms, and Britain's intelligence gathering operations (as Neil Kinnock made clear in his speech at Blackpool), are contributions to the alliance which our allies would not lightly sacrifice.

The United States is a special case. It would be rash to predict how extreme the reaction from Reagan might be. But the US no longer exerts the economic power over Britain that enabled Eisenhower to force Britain and France ignominiously to abandon the Suez adventure in 1956. The British economy is now relatively stronger and no longer so dependent on American markets.

We could perhaps expect pressure on US multinationals to refuse to deal with British producers (to some extent the US already does so), and popular "Buy American" campaigns or voluntary tourist boycotts. But direct trade controls aimed at British goods would be problema­tic and fairly unlikely. The offensive is far more likely to be diplomatic and propagandist in character; and, as New Zealand has so far shown, if Labour can build its house solidly enough, all Washington's huffing and puffing won't necessarily blow it down.

It is as well to face the facts, even if they look gloomy. Labour's only hope of making a non-nuclear defence policy stick quite plainly rests on its ability to convince the British public that it is the safest and sanest option. To do so, Labour must widen the terms of debate, as the internationalists argue, and rescue it from the unspoken cold war assumptions which still largely underlie debate on defence in this country. It is no good trying a low-key strategy: defence is too salient an issue in the public mind for that. It is not clear why Labour's campaign on defence and international issues, planned for this autumn, has not happened. If the assumption was that the issues should be downplayed, it was a mistaken assumption.

Finally, much will depend on how exactly a future Labour government seeks to implement the policy. It would be fatal to negotiate behind the scenes with the military top brass, Nato, western allies and other interests, and conceal any reverses, as Labour governments have done in the past. A future Labour government must openly discuss the obstacles which confront its advance, and expose the processes of pressure and influence to public scrutiny. It mus^t establish its own democratic credentials from the start, and ensure that all attempts to obstruct or crush the policy are manifestly challenges either to the democratic process or national sovereignty.

Paul Anderson is deputy editor of END Journal. He writes here in bis personal capacity.