Category Archives: Journalism

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 30 January 1987

The left and alternative press does not, of course, consist of just the magazines and newspapers you can pick up (if you’re lucky) in major branches of W. H.
Smith and John Menzies — Tribune, the New Statesman, Marxism Today, New Socialist, the Morning Star, Spare Rib, Sanity and so on. There are also hundreds of left and alternative periodicals that never make it on to Smith’s or Menzies’ shelves.

The main reason they don’t is that the aim of the big newsagents (who dominate the wholesale trade as well as retailing) is maximising profit. They’re prepared to take left and alternative titles only if they believe they will sell enough to warrant giving them shelf space and doing all the paperwork — and they won’t take even the tiniest risk of prosecution for libel or obscenity.

You can’t really blame the big newsagents for acting like this: they’re capitalist firms, after all. But the result of their (rational) behaviour is that many excellent publications can be bought only on subscription or from left bookshops, which have been dwindling in number for a decade. And this means that such publications sell far fewer than they could, which means less revenue from sales and advertising, which means less money to spend on promotion, which means fewer sales — a vicious circle that traps much of the left press on the brink of bankruptcy and impoverishes political debate.

Which is not to say that distribution is the only problem facing the left press: even titles that are widely available are typically short of cash, paying lousy rates to contributors (if they pay at all) and stuck for advertising revenue. Then there’s the recurrent problem of bad management, and the fact that many left and alternative periodicals are too specialist for a general readership: excellent as they are, I can’t see Labour Focus on Eastern Europe or Radical Philosopy selling 40,000 copies per issue in the near future.

Finally, much of the left and alternative press is so boring and badly written that sales would not improve even with distribution to every newsagent’s shop in the country: most of the agitational papers produced by the Trotskyist sects fall into this category.

Nevertheless, distribution is a major obstacle for many left periodicals. And it’s one that could be removed easily by an enlightened government — by legislating a right to distribution, whereby any periodical registered as political with a circulation of more than, say, 3,000 would be guaranteed availability in at least one shop in every town with a population of more than, say, 20,000.

Right to distribution schemes are not a new idea: they were instituted in many continental European countries after the war as a means of ensuring that the press would remain healthily pluralistic. They mean, of course, that some right-wing publications, including racist and fascist ones, benefit — which is one reason that right to distribution has not found much favour among the British left. In my view, however, that’s a price worth paying for relaxing the censorship imposed by unmitiaged market forces and revitalising the ailing political public sphere. Any takers?

Paul Anderson, review of Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan by Olivier Roy (Cambridge, £9.95), Tribune, 16 January 1987

Olivier Roy’s Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan is not an easy read. This is partly because of the complexity of its subject – the social roots and politics of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But it is as much the result of some clumsy translation (from the French) and poor editing. The book is haphazardly structured and contains no maps, and its chronology of recent Afghan history is inadequate.

Nevertheless, the work Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan demands of the reader is worthwhile. The book can only help to de-mystify a movement that for too long has either been ignored or misunderstood in the west.

Roy puts the resistance into its many contexts: the cultural differences between town and country, the deep-rooted antagonism to the state felt by the Afghan peasantry, the importance of tribal allegiances, the arrogant incompetence and brutality of the communist reforms of the late 1970s, the complex and changing roles of Islam (not least as a system of common law) in everyday life. Against this complex background, he charts the fortunes of the different factions and parties of the resistance, examines the impact of the war on rural society, and discusses the military strengths and weaknesses of the resistance forces.

Roy’s sympathies are clearly with the resistance fighters, with whom he has spent many months. Perhaps because of this, he skips lightly over the issue of aid to the resistance from the US and its allies: for Roy, the resistance is “organised by poor people in a war waged by poor people”, and aid from outside Afghanistan has had only a negligible impact upon the equipment and training of the guerrilla fighters. He might be right – corruption, incompetence and the sheer difficulty of getting arms into Afghanistan could well have conspired to minimise the effect of US and other aid. I don’t know. But whatever the truth in this particular matter, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan deserves a wide readership. It’s a path-breaking study.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Solidarity, autumn 1985

Solidarity, spring 1984

Solidarity leader, spring 1983

“0ne, two, three, four, we don’t want a nuclear war!”, chant the CND marchers, expressing a sentiment shared by every sane human being. “Two, three, four, five, we just want to stay alive!”

There is no doubt that being alive is generally better than being dead. But there are limits to the desirability of “just staying alive”. It isn’t necessary to be an admirer of heroic martyrdom to think that death fighting for liberation might have been preferable to submitting to the barbarity of the Nazi concentration camps or Pol Pot’s Cambodia; but if there is a choice between merely “staying alive” and something more, to opt for the former shows a depressing lack of audacity.

Yet just staying alive is the desire of a large part of the CND marchers. For them there is nothing better on the horizon; the horror of nuclear war looms so large in their imaginations that all concern for the content of future life has been eclipsed by fear for the very existence of a future life. Political thought has been replaced by an almost animal lust for self-preservation.

It is of course dangerous to interpret a movement through only one of its slogans. All the same, the blinding effects of fear are all too noticeable in the resurgent peace movement – nowhere more so than in the attitude of much of that movement to the Soviet Union. Here the problem is not so much that of outright pro-Sovietism; the overt Stalinist and Trotskyist defenders of the “workers’ bomb” are a dying breed exercising little direct influence. Many of their excuses for Soviet militarism have, however, survived their decline. The peace movement is riddled with people who claim, more or less sincerely, that the USSR is the innocent, encircled victim of Yankee imperialism, that Russia is justified in arming because of the vast number of Soviet deaths in the second world war, or that the Russians are just keeping pace in the arms race.

Such claims are naive and dangerous. They ignore the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the crushing of the free workers’ movement and dissident opinion inside the USSR, and the tentacles of Soviet military aid in the Third World. They overlook the massive build-up of conventional arms in the last decade. The suffering of the Russian people in the last war is no more valid an excuse for these activities of their rulers than the Holocaust is an excuse for systematic racial discrimination and expansionism by the state of Israel.

Yet much of the peace movement remains soft on the Soviet Union. Last year a quarter of a million people turned out on the spring CND demonstration in Hyde Park; a week later a demonstration called to mark six months of martial law in Poland drew only 2,000 to Trafalgar Square, most of them Polish emigrés. Not that demonstrating is any paradigm of political activity; but the point should be clear.

There are some in the peace movement who are not completely blind to the nature of the USSR. Edward Thompson and others around European Nuclear Disarmament have made a point of emphasising the responsibility of both sides in the arms race, calling for the formation of independent peace movements both sides of the Iron Curtain. But END too have been the victims of wishful thinking – hoping that the political system of the Eastern bloc could allow an independent, reformist, pressure-group type peace movement to exist in competition with the state-run official peace committees. They have not grasped that any admission of pluralism by the Soviet-bloc states undermines the institutional and ideological foundations of those states’ power – that, in short, the eastern-bloc states cannot be politically liberalised.

Solidarity leader, autumn 1982