Glicoms* and the Pioneer (1984)

From the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite the protestations of CND, the first ground launched cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common in December 1983, almost exactly four years since the initial deployment decision was made. The subsequent Russian walk-out from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces talks in Geneva left both sides of the nuclear debate to draw separate conclusions. Primarily because the controversy over nuclear weapons in Europe has focussed exclusively on particular weapon types — cruise and the SS-20 — rather more substantive issues have been ignored. In particular, the relationship between military technology and doctrine is conspicuous by its absence from public debate. But since the focus of attention is on Russian and American European nuclear forces it is worthwhile to look at the historical and technical origins of the present situation.

Nuclear weapons were first deployed in Europe by the United States in 1954. Russia did not follow until 1957. At one time the US had about 7,000 warheads in Europe spread over several types; nuclear bombs on aircraft, short-range missiles, nuclear artillery shells, anti-aircraft missiles and nuclear mines. However, this figure has been reduced to about 6,000 as military commanders in NATO have grave doubt about the military utility of such short-range battlefield weapons. More reductions are possible. However, the fissile material from these weapons will be reused for the planned expansion of the American strategic arsenal.

The political rationale for the deployment of 464 GLCMs and 108 Pershing II missiles was the need for a response to the Russian deployment of SS-20s. Although SS-20s were first deployed in 1977, it took NATO two years to “discover" their existence. The whole tenor of NATO’s argument suggested that the SS-20s are a new threat. However, it needs to be stressed that Russia has had the ability to attack Western European cities with medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles since 1955. (ICBM range of 5500 km + , Intermediate RBM (IRBM) 2.400 5.500 km. medium RBM (MRBM) 800-2,400 km, short RBM (SRBM) 800 km or less).

Despite the fact that the Russians were the first to launch an ICBM in 1957, their technological backwardness meant that this achievement was not translated into an extensive deployment programme. The first Russian ICBM was the SS-6, and of these only four were ever deployed. Resources were devoted instead to the creation of M/IRBM, which made sense both technologically and strategically. For instance, since the United States had nuclear capable aircraft and IRBMs in Western Europe their prompt destruction formed an essential aim for the Russian military. Furthermore, Western Europe could be held hostage against American behaviour until such times as Russia could deploy many ICBMs. At this time Russian bombers were incapable of two-way intercontinental missions.

The first MRBM deployed by Russia was the SS-3. which was basically an improved version of the German V-2 rocket, in 1955. (SS stands for surface-to-surface). Large scale deployment, however, did not start until 1959 with the appearance of the SS-4. The first SS-4s were radio-command guided, but later ones were equipped with inertial guidance systems. In 1961 the SS-5 IRBM appeared. These missiles suffered from several major drawbacks, notably their inaccuracy which accounts for the large warhead of I MT. Furthermore, the SS-4s and 5s are liquid fuelled and take between 8 to 24 hours to prepare for launching. Their vulnerability is compounded by the fact that few are placed in underground silos and are closely packed in groups of three or four to a site.The peak of deployment appears to have been reached in 1964-65 when there were about 733 SS-4s and 5s of which 595 were in soft launchers and 135 in hard launchers. These systems are currently being withdrawn and replaced by the SS-20s. In addition to these missiles the aircraft of the Russian Long Range Aviation arm are available for use against Western Europe. If that was not enough about ISO to 360 SS-11s and SS-19s ICBMs were, in the 1970s. allocated “theatre roles".

Given the technological obsolescence of the SS-4s and SS-5s there was. from the Russian point of view, a strong case to be made for the modernisation of long range theatre nuclear forces. Combine this factor with technological inertia in the Russian weapons procurement process and the SS-20 deployment decision, taken in 1976, begins to look inevitable. The SS-20 itself is the top two stages of the failed SS-16 ICBM. In contrast to its predecessors the SS-20 is mobile, but its tracked launch vehicle has an average speed of 10 mph. In addition, it carries three warheads of 150kt each and on account of its solid propellant and improved launch control technology it can be made ready to fire in an hour. Its increased range and improved accuracy permit a wider target coverage as well as affording a greater “counter-military potential" (range 5,000km compared with 2,000 for the SS-4 and 4,100 for the SS-5). Accuracy is measured by Circular error probable CEP. which is the radius of a circle within which fifty per cent of incoming warheads will land. The CEP of the SS-20 is 400km compared to 2,300 and 1,100 metres for the SS-4 and 5s.

It is the increased counter military potential of the SS-20 which causes NATO most concern; however, the SS-20 deployment does not represent any fundamental change in Russian doctrine. For example, military and C31 targets have always figured largely in their targeting plans. In any case the SS-20 is not the wonder weapon it is often made out to be. Although it is as mobile as cruise it has to be launched from pre-prepared, rather than pre-surveyed sites as is the case with cruise. Pershing II missiles can be fired from almost anywhere. The main point, however, is that the Soviet Union has had the ability to hit Western Europe with nuclear weapons for well over twenty years. NATO has rejected the claim that the SS-20 is only part of a long overdue modernisation. The continued deployment of SS-20s since 1979 (there are now about 360 SS-20s, of which between 108 to 118 are deployed in the Far Eastern Military District) has merely confirmed NATO’s view that the Russians are intent on tilting the nuclear balance in their favour. Whether this is the case or not, NATO is using it as a rationale for their own build up.

Ever since NATO announced its decision to deploy GLCMs and Pershing II missiles Russia has mounted an intense propaganda campaign against them. There are, from the Russians’ point of view, very ready reasons for this. Opposition to Pershing II in particular stems largely from estimates of its technical characteristics. Pershing I SRBMs were deployed in 1962; however, since their range is limited they cannot reach targets in Russia. On account of technical improvements, primarily warhead miniaturisation which makes more room for fuel, the range of the Pershing II is, according to NATO, 1,800km. The Russians, however, maintain that it has a range of 2,500km. This difference is crucial. Although the exact range is classified, a range of 2,500 km would allow Pershing II to strike Moscow and its command and control installations of which there are about 75. Even assuming a range of 1800 km Pershing would be able to attack vital targets in Western Russia.

In addition to being a ballistic missile which allows very short flight times from West Germany of between four and twelve minutes, Pershing has a very high accuracy. The accuracy achieved by its radar area guidance system — RADAG — makes possible a CEP of about 30 to 40 metres. In one test flight in 1978 an accuracy of 25 metres was achieved. But there are doubts about the ability of Pershing to reproduce this kind of accuracy in wartime. It has not been tested over its full range. In fact there are 12,000 separate parts in the missile and it is this technological complexity which has contributed to several test failures — four out of fourteen. One missile missed its intended target by over four miles.

Pershing represents a valuable addition to US strategic capabilities. Targets would include such time-urgent places as the Launch Control Centres of the ICBM fields in Western Russia at Kozelsk, Teykovo, Yedrovo, Kostroma, Tatischevo and Yoshkavola. In fact more than half of the twenty-six ICBM fields are located west of the Urals, as are twenty-two of the thirty-two major air bases. Two of the three Soviet early-warning over-the-horizon back-scatter radar systems are within range of Pershing one near Nikolayev and the other near Kiev. Other command centre targets would include the Army HQs in the western military districts, such as the Zhitomir base of the 8th Guards Tank Army.

Even with a maximum range of 2,500 km the 108 Pershings would still be unable to destroy all time-urgent targets, as there are many east of the Urals. The Pershing deployment cannot be seen in isolation from other proposed US missile developments. in particular the Trident D-5 programme. Russian ICBM fields and C31 installations east of the Urals are strung out along the Trans-Siberian railway. Trident D-5 warheads are very accurate and if fired on depressed trajectories from submarines in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific the Russians would have very little warning time. Satellite tracking stations such as those at Irkutsk and Ussuriysk would be prime targets. Since Russia relies heavily on satellites for secure long-range communications, the destruction of such installations in addition to other command and control centres would in effect destroy the nervous system of their military power.

The Ground Launched Cruise Missile is being built by General Dynamics and is only part of a much wider cruise missile programme. Both the United States Air Force and Navy have ordered the air and sea launched versions. The land based version carries a W-84 warhead of 200kt, but its real strategic value is its accuracy. Its guidance system includes both an inertial system as well as the terrain contour matching system — TERCOM. Digital maps of the intended flight path are stored on the system’s computer. Periodical checking of the ground below with the maps stored in the computer’s memory allows the missile to correct its flight path. This, theoretically, provides an accuracy of about fifty metres.

There are, however, doubts about the ability of cruise to match these high performance requirements under combat conditions. Although successful in 84 out of 111 test flights, cruise was only tested over the Nevada desert. Whether the GI.CMs would be able to fly from Britain over snow covered terrain in Sweden on its way to Russian targets is an unknown factor. It is for this reason that the United Staters wants to test the ALCM Over North-West Canada. There have been problems with the TERCOM system as well as with the mobile launch and control vehicles. In short cruise, like the SS-20, is not the super weapon it is often made out to be.

Despite its great accuracy, the long flight times preclude the use of cruise as a first strike weapon against Russian ICBM silos. But it could be used against empty ICBM to prevent their re-use; the Russians have taken several days to re-load in training exercises. While the air, sea and ground launched cruise missiles cannot by themselves be used for a first strike, they do, nevertheless, represent a valuable addition to the US Single Integrated Operational Plan — SIOP 6.

Nonetheless both cruise and the SS-20 illustrate the significance of technological inertia. For example, the SLCM Programme started in 1972.

The cruise missile is a sadly typical case of advanced military technology — in this case the combination of computer guidance, highly efficient jet engine and miniature warhead — looking for a strategy to justify its production. (Guardian 30 August 1983).

Competition between ICBM design bureaus in Russia contributed to the SS-20 decision. For instance, the bureau of Nadiradze was established to develop solid-propellant missiles. The SS-16 was one such rocket. However it was not deployed. but its production line and long-lead time parts were allocated to the SS-20 instead. Existence of the SS-16 production line made the decision a lot easier.

This fact is overlooked by campaigns which direct themselves, almost exclusively, to specific weapon systems. At the root of the problem is the way society is organised. The arms race process, weapons research and development, production and deployment and strategic doctrine cannot be divorced from the nature of society. Lengthy vigils outside airforce bases or mass demonstrations do not take account of this and for that reason are doomed to fail.

John Walker

*Glicom is derived from the acronym to cruise. GLCM Pioneer is reputed to b a Russian name for SS-20.

Letters: Socialism and PR (1984)

Letters to the Editors from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and PR

Dear Editors

I have been reading your monthly magazine for several months now and agree with much of what you have to say. Particularly on comments made in the December issue about religious superstition and how the SPGB propose to change society by standing in democratic elections. However, I wonder how democratic our first-past-the-post system really is.

I would be obliged if you would tell me what the view is of the SPGB on proportional representation. If opposed to PR, why? If you support a PR system, which one and why?

C. Roberts

London SW17

Reply:

Socialists are not interested in the question of whether one method of electing a capitalist government is “fairer” than another; for that reason we do not support any reformist campaign in favour of PR or any other change in the electoral system. We are aiming at a socialist revolution, which will not be a matter of the Socialist Parties changing society but the democratic act of a majority of conscious socialists throughout the world. When socialist ideas have reached such a pitch it will not matter very much, which electoral system is available for their being put into effect. It is reasonable to assume that then, as now, there will be various systems in operation in different parts of the world. Socialists will use them all, as they need to. The “first-past-the-post" system in operation in places like Britain does lead to anomalies such as the election of a government on a minority of votes but the socialist revolution will not be a matter of the working class giving some political party power to run capitalism in the interests of a minority. Any electoral system which allows the assertion of socialist consciousness will do.

Editors

Animal rights

Dear Editors

I am writing in response to your comments pertaining to animal rights in the December issue of the Socialist Standard. Your apparent disregard for the other species that inhabit our planet surprised and disappointed me. The case for animal liberation is not built on sentimentality, as you infer, but on logic and justice.

All animals are living, feeling, intelligent creatures, not just our species. Setting ourselves above all other animals is absurd. What if evolution had taken a different path, making us dumb and giving a higher IQ and powers of communication to some other primate? Would you then be condoning the exploitation of “inferior” species?

The two specific issues that you mentioned, animal farming and vivisection, can easily be shown to be unnecessary, and indeed counterproductive. There are superior alternatives to both. The rhetoric of exploitation is always the same, whether the theme be race, sex, class or species. Socialism must know no boundaries. It cannot stop at the end of one race, sex or species.

It’s possible that you consider animal rights as a minor topic or a side issue. Mass exploitation and suffering can never be that! I sincerely hope that you will review and change your policy in this area.

Steve Addison

Macclesfield

Reply:

We do not regard human behaviour towards animals as a "minority topic”; it reflects the type of society in which we live, its priorities and its morals. That is why capitalism, with its production for sale and profit in the interests of minority, uses animals so pitilessly and why, as the item in the December Socialist Standard pointed out, socialism will end such practices. However we cannot deny that human beings are superior to all other species; while socialism will provide a better environment for all forms of life, only humans can conceive of it and can bring it about. Socialist society will cherish animal and wildlife but. if human interests are at stake and there is no other way then animals will be used, for food and even for medical experiments.

Editors

Greenham women

Dear Editors,

I refer to the Article “Defeat at Greenham” in the December issue of the Socialist Standard. I feel that the way in which the achievements of the women at Greenham were equated to zero and the over-simplified and superficial analysis which led to this conclusion can only be compared with similar distorted articles in the national press. Since I expect more from such an excellent magazine as the Standard. I feel impelled to write this letter.

The SPGB publishes the Standard in order to reach out to the working class and to stimulate them into abandoning the undemocratic system of capitalism. Similarly, the women of Greenham Common, by hanging dolls and baby clothes on the fences etc. were attempting to trigger the public (most of whom are the working class) into thinking about the introduction of cruise missiles and the undemocratic control of such in order to stop it. Much media coverage has been given to the demonstration at Greenham. As a result, the questions of cruise and associated issues such as warfare and undemocratic control have been brought to the attention of the public. How then can the SPGB argue that the women’s experiences are “dismal" and “wasted" when they have pointed out some obvious shortcomings of the capitalist system to the working class? How can the SPGB argue that the women were "wrong" to use propaganda (in the form of publicity stunts) in order to overcome the state machine? Isn’t that exactly what the SPGB does by publishing the Socialist Standard? Why have the women failed to achieve their objective because the missiles have arrived and yet the subject of their arrival is still controversial? Does the SPGB stop publishing the Standard in the belief that they have failed since capitalism is still here after so many years of fighting it? Fortunately not; they continue to put an alternative to the working class in the form of socialism which I wholeheartedly support.

If these women do not advocate socialism now, I would still suggest to you that because of their efforts, the task of attaining socialism can only be eased. I agree with your view that the women “ought” to advocate socialism rather than reformism. However, I also think that the best (if not only) way to win someone over to socialism initially, is to point out to them some of the more obvious insanities of the capitalist system. I think that the Greenham Common women have done this splendidly.

I do not think that the SPGB should support reformist policies but I do think that they should be more careful, when criticising those who do. not to be condescending and unnecessarily aggressive as I feel your article was, since these people are closer to socialist thinking than most. 

J. Peet

Urmston 

Manchester

Reply:

The SPGB cannot be said to have failed since the idea of socialism has not yet been put into practice; meanwhile all the available evidence supports the case that only socialism can solve the problems caused by the capitalist social system. In contrast, the ideas of the nuclear disarmers have been put into practice. They argue that it is possible to support capitalism through voting Labour, Communist. SDP/Liberal and so on, yet oppose the inevitable effects of capitalism — in their case nuclear weapons. They also argue that the governments of capitalism can be persuaded to change policies which are vital to ruling class interests by means of demonstrations such as Greenham Common. These theories have been disproved; the missiles are at Greenham and are operational (see the Guardian, 18 January).

The nuclear disarmament movement fails, as do all such movements, because they approach the problem from the wrong end. As the item Defeat at Greenham (Socialist Standard, December 1983) pointed out, capitalism, with all its ailments, exists not by an act of will of Michael Heseltine but because the working class, including nuclear disarmers, support it. The only way to abolish all weapons of war is to get rid of the cause of war and that can come about only through a consciously socialist working class establishing socialism. Workers cannot be persuaded to understand socialism by encouraging them to support a reformed, modified capitalism in the hope that this will end their problems; this can be done only through putting a clear, consistent, uncompromising argument for socialism. Far from being condescending or aggressive, the item acknowledged the demonstrators’ . . "sincerity and concern" but pointed out that that is not enough. Socialists take no pleasure in the failure of reformist movements; we bitterly regret the waste of so much sincere endeavour.

Editors

The failure of limited protest (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many thousands of workers the merest sight of Margaret Thatcher is enough to induce emotions of disgust and anger. The sound of her fur-lined, cultivated voice, mouthing those greed-based sentiments of the profit mentality, is enough to inspire curses in the working class imagination as ferocious in their intent as they are impotent in realisation. The clones who comprise the government, dancing like maladjusted puppets to the dogma of salvation through suffering, have led many workers to regard 1979 as the beginning of an epoch of despair: the age of Thatcherism.

Of course, they are wrong. Not about the undisguised defence of privilege exhibited by the grotesque face of Toryism; about that workers are right to feel sickened. But short memories will only lead to remedies which ignore what really needs to be remedied and. despite the distortion of history perpetrated by those who pretend that capitalism caused no problems before 1979. the fact is that workers had plenty to complain about when Thatcher was still an aspirant to Number Ten and James Callaghan was its inhabitant. Before 1979 there was unemployment: it doubled under the last Labour government; before 1979 there were cuts in public expenditure: all through the mid-seventies hospitals were being closed, social service provisions contracted and "Fight the Cuts" demos taking place; before 1979 there were strikes which were treated with all the foul contempt of capitalist government: the firemen, the non-unionised workers at Grunwick. the workers in the nationalised car and steel industry; the health and social service workers in the so-called Winter of Discontent — industrial problems did not start for them with “Thatcherism". Before 1979 there were nuclear weapons being produced on a frightening scale; indeed, it was the last Labour Cabinet, including Tony Benn, which secretly introduced Polaris behind the backs of their own MPs; before 1979 there were thousands of old people dying of cold each winter; before 1979 there were soldiers sent to fire rubber bullets on the streets of Belfast; before 1979 there were parents who could not afford to feed their children properly — indeed, Frank Field, then the head of the Child Poverty Action Group, wrote a pamphlet stating that children were worse off under the Labour government than they had been under the previous Tory one — he is now a Labour MP. Hard times did not begin for the workers in 1979 simply because one set of administrators of capitalism was replaced by another. Neither is it true to say that before the recession started life for workers was easy or happy. Capitalism never started turning rough for the working class — it always has been and it always will be.

Thatcherism, the phoney catchphrase of those who protest against the symptoms instead of the disease, is a meaningless, diversionary term. The assumption behind the assault on Thatcherism is that if only a less obnoxious gang of opportunists were running capitalism — and pretty well any would be less obnoxious — the system would inflict less hardship on the wage and salary earning class. That contention resembles the old leftist belief that if only Labour governments were led by decent chaps, as opposed to the opportunist rogues who always seem to be at the top, then Labour in office would perform miracles with capitalism. Socialists, in exposing the myth that social problems are caused by incompetent or insincere leaders, cannot over-emphasise the crucial point that governments do not control capitalism: it is the system which controls the governments. In short, those running the system are faced with a very limited set of choices about how to organise it, because the economic laws of capitalist exploitation are not susceptible to significant modification.

Governments running a system concerned above all else to ensure that rent, interest and profit are secured for the capitalist minority are bound to anger and frustrate workers. After all, workers have no real material interest in capitalist prosperity; indeed, the capitalists' privilege is obtained at the expense of our relative poverty. In Britain the richest ten percent own more than half of all the accumulated wealth and just one per cent own more between them than the poorest eighty per cent. There is a class division arising out of diametrically opposed material interests. Faced with a multitude of problems arising out of the system where production is for profit rather than need, workers become frustrated, angry and determined to do something to change things. Socialists depend on this active desire to change society: every worker who decides to do something to protest against the way things are — however misguided that action might be — is, at least, proof of the fact that workers are discontented and not brainwashed. After all, if workers were wholly contented and totally indoctrinated, there would not be any socialists.

Socialists stand in uncompromising opposition to reformism. We reject all attempts to make capitalism run efficiently from the working class point of view. That does not mean that we have nothing in common with reformist workers — in fact, we have much to agree about. They want change and so do we; they envisage the possibility of eradicating unpleasant features of society which conservatives say are inevitable, and so do we; they are anxious to alert their fellow workers to particular problems and so are we. Where is the big difference, then? Socialists are aware that the changes which reformists want are futile for three reasons: firstly, they are usually directed to just one problem of capitalism, leaving all the others intact and, even in relation to these "single issues”, the reformists are often willing to compromise (abolish nuclear bombs, but keep conventional ones, for example); secondly, the reformist is unaware of the fact that capitalism produces social problems as a matter of course, and that therefore it is as idealistic to seek to eradicate mass starvation without ending production for profit as it would be to abolish the spots without curing measles; thirdly, socialists want more than to make capitalism tolerable for the working class — we want to end capitalism and, in so doing, to abolish wage slavery as a permanent social condition for the vast majority of people.

The reformist answer to the case for revolution — it will have been going through some of our readers' minds as they looked at the three reasons we have stated for opposing reformism — is that, whatever its limitations, at least the reformists are doing something. Indeed, they are; they are voicing their frustration and that is no bad thing. But a man with a toothache who expresses his frustration by sending a petition to the optician is doing no more than diverting his energies from the practical solution which is to be found in the dentist's surgery. Of course, workers who are mugged and demand that the government publicly flogs criminals are doing something, as are women workers, who, feeling oppressed, conceive of liberation for them as the oppression of men by women. Wrong solutions to real frustration arising out of real problems will not change society.

Consider the hundreds — indeed, thousands — of social problems which could be listed; have the reformists been successful in removing them? Under both Labour and Tory governments unemployment has shot up. How many marches have there been demanding that the government ends unemployment? In the mid-1970s the Right To Work Campaign was formed in order to organise workers, especially the unemployed, for the purpose of demanding employment. The failure of that campaign — which has fallen to pieces — shows why the three socialist reasons for opposing reformism are valid: firstly, it was a single issue campaign, directed at solving one problem which was supposed to be the big problem —no attention was given to the nature of the work which workers would be employed to do, such as making bombs or doing monotonous tasks: all that was asked for was the "right to work”; secondly, the campaign confined itself to seeking change within capitalism, without recognising that there is no right to be employed in a society where production is monopolised by a class which will only pay wages or salaries if it is profitable for workers to be exploited; thirdly, the campaign limited itself to pleading to be employed, or exploited — a miserable and degrading achievement, even if it had been won. But the fact is that all the marches, petitions, slogans, speeches and demands have not created any change in the lengthening dole queues. A decade of reformist short-cuts to end unemployment — and a century of reformist politicians promising to create full employment — and there are now more unemployed workers than in 1974, or in 1884 for that matter. Reformists have organised hundreds of futile campaigns which have used up the tremendous energy of angry and demanding workers.

Since 1979 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has come back to life. Its membership has increased with a rapidity which leads many of its activists to believe that something is bound to happen. What they have not realised is that the "something" which is happening has happened before workers join CND: having been won to the cause of opposing nuclear weapons, and having signed the CND membership form, that is the end of the road for CNDers, not the beginning. As an organisation which seeks to humanise warfare within the capitalist system, CND is like a monk who enters a brothel in order to convert it into an art gallery. Either one destroys the system which creates war or one has to accept that the wars created by the system are bound to utilise the most devastating machinery of destruction available. Some reformists in CND will argue that, while agreeing with the socialist critique of CND, the very value of the campaign is that it teaches workers that its aims cannot be achieved within capitalism. According to this dishonest tactic, much advocated by leftists within many reformist organisations, the function of the “socialist reformist” is to hang around the reform campaigns, urging workers to demand the unrealisable and then, when the suckers have discovered that capitalism cannot deliver the goods, you recruit them into a leftist party. If that is why many leftist groups are active in CND, their tactic has been remarkably unsuccessful: since 1979 CND's membership has increased seventeen-fold, while the membership figures of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party and the Workers' Revolutionary Party have fallen rapidly.

It is true that many reformist actions alert workers to aspects of capitalism which need to be exposed. For example, the women of Greenham Common have won sympathy from some workers attracted to the simple, emotional appeal of women who do not want to be destroyed in a holocaust. But the Greenham reformists insisted that they would do more than that. They said that Cruise missiles would not be allowed in or out of the American base at Greenham; on both of these counts they have failed utterly. Furthermore, there are many workers who are unable to relate to the ritualistic displays exhibited by the Greenham reformists, preferring to be convinced by logical argument rather than old Welsh folk songs and wild, animalistic noises. It is unpopular to go against the tide of “radical” support for reform campaigns, such as that at Greenham Common; in doing so, socialists are always open to the accusation that we are no different from the Tories. But we must expose futile waste of energy on illusory attempts to change society, because the need to end a system which threatens to blow us all up is more important than humouring the naive sentiments of self-righteous reformists.

Even more unpopular is the socialist opposition to the charity business — another branch of the reformist strategy. In one way the charity brigade is quite open about what they are doing: they do not seek to eradicate problems, but to alleviate them and help those suffering from them. Like the other well-intentioned campaigns which socialists oppose, we are not going to attack the genuine motivations of the thousands of workers who are trying to make capitalism a little better to live in. Once again, we can have nothing but respect for the energy and concern of those who engage in charitable work, but we are bound to point them to the evidence which demonstrates that charities are not even succeeding in their minimal task of making the victims of capitalism suffer a little less. The hard facts are that there are now more homeless people than when Shelter was established, more old people dying of the cold than when Help The Aged was formed, more starving people than when Oxfam came on the scene. And what frustrates socialists is that if just one tenth of the human and financial resources which have gone into the sticking plaster campaigns had gone into the party which exists to end the social system which creates the bloody wounds, we would be much nearer to achieving socialism than we are today.

They used to say that there will never be riots on the streets of Britain. Then along came Brixton, Toxteth, Bristol and the other riots which erupted as an echo of working class fear and desperation. The riots were seen by some idealists as the beginning of the end for capitalism. Were they? In fact, the government's response was quite simple: stick a bit of cheap, reformist plaster over the worst slums and build a few community centres with posters on the wall reminding the wage slaves that they are human beings. The riots have led to no real improvement for the vast majority of workers, and rioting never will. How can a system which regards legalised robbery as Order ever function in a way which offers dignity to the exploited class?

What about local government? If only we can elect sincere reformists on to the councils, we are told, we can always rely on the councillors to attend to local improvements. In London a local council was elected which pledged itself to reducing fares: the response of the High Court and the House of Lords was to inform them that the object of capitalism is to make profits, not to serve needs, so the promise of cheap fares gave way to the economic law which regards efficiency as measurable solely in terms of profit and loss. Similarly, the reformist council in Liverpool made radical noises about placing social needs before monetary considerations. They were soon informed by Neil Kinnock, and others more experienced in the task of running the profit system that government responsibility means being accountable to the needs of capital, not those of wage labour. And, not leaving anything to chance, the state has laws which say that councillors who commit local authorities to spending more than is economically acceptable within capitalism can be removed from office, surcharged for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and even sent to prison. There are, without doubt, a number of very decent councillors who took on the hard work involved because they saw local government as a way of helping workers to get a better deal. When are they going to learn that under capitalism the only deal ever given to the working class leaves the cards of any worth firmly in the hands of a parasite class?

Workers have nothing to gain by engaging in protests which stop short of confronting the social system as a whole; half-loaves will not satisfy the appetite which most of us have for the best society can produce. That is not to say that socialists oppose reforms or that we deny the usefulness of reforms to certain workers — often at the expense of other workers. Our argument is not that workers would be better off without reforms, although we would certainly be better off without many of them.

Socialist understanding starts off with all the recognition of the problems and all the anger about them which reformists show. Our opposition to capitalism is not academic, but is based on material experience — the same experience which leads one worker to join CND and another to pass the begging bowl around for charity and another to work for the election of reformists on the local council. But, we ask, what is the cause of these problems? The answer staring us in the face is that we are living in a world which organises itself on the basis of producing goods and services with a view to profit. World capitalism forces workers’ needs to be secondary to the purpose of making profits so that capitalists can stay rich. It is because there is no likelihood of profit that over three million workers in Britain are currently unemployed; it is lack of profit in selling food which leads to thirty million deaths from starvation each year; it is the race for markets and profits which is the essential cause of war and the weapons which threaten us; it is because it is not profitable to provide heat for old people that thousands of them die of hypothermia; it is because it is not profitable to invest in the health service that workers must wait for years at the end of the queue for hospital beds; and it is because it is unprofitable to build decent houses for workers who can only afford cheap accommodation that slums exist. In short, production for profit is at the root of virtually every modern social problem. (Of course, there are natural problems, such as earthquakes, which neither reform nor revolution could eradicate.) The socialist response is to make the one revolutionary demand to abolish capitalism and, in so doing, to carry out the job which all the separate reformist protesters are trying to do — but to complete them all in one fell swoop.

Socialist revolution involves much, much more than simply getting rid of Maggie and putting Neil in her place. After all, they are both mere reflections of the system which teaches workers to place their faith in leaders. Socialist revolution does not mean student revolutionaries knocking off policemen's helmets or me and my mates storming the House of Commons and coming on Radio Four after The Archers to announce a proletarian dictatorship and that from now on everyone is required to be happy and spectacle charges have been abolished. Revolution, as far as socialists are concerned, is not an act of mere destruction or re-arrangement but one of constructing a fundamentally new social system, built up out of the material conditions which capitalism has created.

Socialism and nothing less is the object of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But as we have been advocating this for a very long time, are not reformists entitled to tell us that the failure of the revolutionary movement to win over a majority of workers is as much a demonstration that we are wrong as is the failure of reformists to achieve their limited aims? The answer is that socialists are not criticising reformists because they have failed to win support — on the contrary, millions of workers have been attracted to the slogans of reform; our disagreement with the reformists is based on the fact that, even with mass working class support for their aims, they have failed to change society in such a way which leaves them with no more reforms to enact. Indeed, the essential problem about the reformist strategy for change is that it envisages no prospect that the problems will be solved and reforms will not be necessary. In this sense, reformism presents the working class with a never-ending operation of gradual improvement to a fundamentally rotten structure. Socialism, on the other hand, has never been tried and has never had support from millions of workers. We are not able to force workers to be socialists, and we would not wish to do so if we could, because only conscious men and women of the working class who want socialism will be able to establish the new social system.

The failure of limited protest is, in one sense, a tragic reflection of working class political ignorance. One could, if one were interested in drawing negative conclusions, envisage the possibility that workers will go on for years and even decades, wasting their discontent and their strength on futile efforts to make capitalism run in the interest of the majority. There is no certainty that workers will turn their attention from attacking the effects to abolishing the cause. But workers do inevitably learn from history and it is to the lesson of revolutionary success which the experience of reformist failure must lead. It is. therefore, to workers who have swallowed the illusions of partial change, and have become disillusioned, that socialists present the case for fundamental social change. Instead of banning nuclear bombs, let us ban every weapon from the face of the earth, by removing the cause of their existence. Instead of pleading for better let us demand the best. And to those who, with a sneer, tell us that they have no time for such grand aims because they are engaged in bread and butter politics. we respond that they are free to demonstrate for their bread and butter but we social revolutionaries will not be content until we have the strawberries and cream.

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Defeat at Greenham (1983)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defeat at Greenham

Unless, under Heseltine's Law, any of them chooses to rush the fences and get themselves shot, the Greenham Common demonstrators are now reduced to watching despondently as the American transport 'planes drop into the base with their cargoes of cruise missiles.

The protests have been inspired by sincerity and concern for what may be left of the future of the human race but that is not enough. Their first objective was to prevent the base being set up. It was set up. Then they tried to stop the missiles coming. The missiles came. Then they declared an intention of preventing the missiles becoming operational. The missiles have been set in working order, ready to fly off and do their deadly, obliterating work.

Between the protesters and their objectives stood the forces of the state, which erected the fences and the wire and stationed the police and the soldiers who were ordered, if there should be no other way. to shoot the intruding demonstrators. The Greenham women joined together and protested on the assumption that they could defeat the state machine by hanging dolls and baby clothes on the fences, by breaking through the wire, by daubing the ’planes, by getting themselves arrested. They were wrong; the state is still there, intact in its intention to protect the base with its murderous implements.

Greenham Common is only the latest example in capitalism’s history to illustrate the futility of challenging the state machine through anything less than a policy of socialism. The state has survived many such assaults on it, some of them more popular than the anti-nuclear movement is at present. This survival happens because — as was clearly demonstrated at the last election — the working class would have it so. Capitalism, with its state and military agencies, does not exist through the will of people like Michael Heseltine but through the support it receives from the very people who are damaged and destroyed by it.

This vital fact has yet to make any impact on members of CND many of whom, although hating the effects of capitalism, ardently support the system through organisations like the Labour Party, Communist Party and the Liberal/SDP Alliance. The Greenham demonstrators may feel more cheerful if they realise that they can learn from their dismal, wasted experience. There is a way to defeat capitalism, to end state coercion, to abolish war and all its weaponry. It is a matter of getting it right, of grasping the need for social revolution above doomed efforts to reform capitalism — and then working for it.

For that, there is no need to get shot, either.

Smug about poverty

Any smugness in the Labour Party at the news that working class conditions under the Thatcher government have worsened dramatically was, like the announcement of Mark Twain’s death, rather premature. According to a recent report by the Department of Health and Social Security, there are now 15 million people living in what is officially defined as poverty, compared to 11.5 million in 1979. It will help in understanding these figures to remember that the official poverty line is based on the level of Supplementary Benefit, which tells only part of the story.

Especially hard hit are families with a lot of children and one-parent families. The increases are largely due to the rise in unemployment, which is steadily changing workers' everyday poverty into deep deprivation, at times outright starvation. And all of this after nearly five years of Tory rule, which was going to usher in a new age of monetarist prosperity. Should the Labour Party, then, feel smug and justified? Did the voters make a big mistake in preferring Thatcher to a Labour government?

The facts say otherwise. Under the last Labour government — which was a great disappointment to the whole poverty lobby — unemployment doubled to 1½ million. Unemployment benefit became worth less in relation to average earnings and when it ran out, after 12 months, the new system of means-tested Supplementary Benefit which Labour introduced ensured that the claimants were worse off than before. Meanwhile, according to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, under Labour the richest ten per cent had their share of wealth increased from 57.5 to 60 per cent.

And that was only the beginning; Labour's policies in response to the gathering slump paved the way for Thatcher and Howe and Lawson. It was the Tories' bad luck to come into power at such a time in world capitalism (although it does not yet seem to have done them much harm) and they have sturdily carried on where Labour left off.

So there is really nothing to choose, except in terms of trivial detail, between the two of them. The mistake the working class made in 1979 and again this year was not in choosing between Labour and Tory but in failing to make the election a choice between the parties of capitalism and a new social system.

Full board

In deepest Cambridgeshire, a recently formed company is applying for planning permission to build a large fallout shelter — which does not mean, Reagan and Andropov will be pleased to hear, that such formalities will be needed before the bombs and missiles are loosed off.

A place in the shelter — the company-calls itself Phoenix and wants to build all over the country — will cost about £2000 for each person. This price covers what is known in the holiday trade as Full Board; the shelters will have water for 14 days and food for six months. Like any good seaside guest house, they will also provide a car park for the patrons, although there are probably no plans to issue tickets for reclaiming the vehicles after the nuclear holocaust.

But when the holiday is over, or the food and water run out, the guests will have to emerge into a landscape which will not necessarily persuade them that they did the right thing by so carefully staying alive. And being well fed and watered, they may be seen as an unexpected food source by any demented people who have survived on the surface.

The prospect of nuclear war is its own particular madness. Is it really possible, at a time when human life is blighted by so much impoverishment, that so vast an amount of energy, knowledge and resources can be given to wiping us out? Even worse — that the enterprise can be given so high a priority in the allocation of resources?

And the answer, of course, is yes it is perfectly possible, even consistent, once we accept the basic premise of the social system we live under, whose priority is to protect the interests of the world ruling class. Beside that the welfare of the rest — who are the useful, working, productive majority — is of little account. It is to protect the interests of the ruling class that wars are fought and arsenals of incredible power are laid down. In the event of their being used, the best that the majority can hope for is to buy a place in a fragile shelter. In death, as in life, the ruling class assert their privilege.

Exhibition Review: The Peace Museum, Bradford (2017)

Exhibition Review from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are plenty of museums that cover wars, the armed forces and military history, but rather few that deal with peace and peace movements. The only accredited one in Britain is Bradford Peace Museum, founded in 1994, which has connections with the International Network of Museums for Peace (museumsforpeace.org) and the Division of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. In 1997 the local council declared Bradford a ‘City of Peace’, though it is hard to see what that achieves.

It’s not a large museum, but there is plenty of interesting material, covering the period from World War One down to the present day. There are original documents, banners, posters and other objects relating to the two world wars, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, in the main, as well as material on migrants to Bradford, including recent refugees and asylum seekers. Aldermaston Marches and activities at Greenham Common illustrate some of the efforts of peace movements. In the last two years of World War One there was an active, if nowadays little-remembered, anti-war movement among women in Bradford.

A copy of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty is accompanied by a quote from Ferdinand Foch, who was Supreme Allied Commander during the war: ‘This is not peace, it’s an armistice for twenty years.’ He meant that Germany had not been punished sufficiently, but even talk of an armistice was a bit optimistic, considering all the fighting that took place between the two world wars.

There is a mention of a claim made (it is not said by who) in 2003, that there were two superpowers, the USA and worldwide public opinion, which is just wishful thinking. A quote is shown from Norman Angell (who wrote a best-selling book The Great Illusion in 1910, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934 and was for a short period a Bradford MP): ‘The obstacles to peace are in the minds and hearts of men.’ Unfortunately this naive remark underlines the fact that the museum exhibits do not include any attempt to explain why wars break out, or references to the role of capitalism. 

Paul Bennett

Greenham reconsidered (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The women at Greenham Common have surprised cynics by their determination not to give in to any attempts to remove them. They have come to be admired by many as a symbol of peace in the shadow of a military base, a courageous flicker of human feeling, around the perimeter of a wire fence enclosing some of the most barbaric weapons of destruction.

Sincerity and determination are not always very useful things in themselves. It depends what aim they are turned towards. Thatcher is sincerely determined to run British capitalism without any concession to workers’ demands or to easing misery and discontent. The women of the peace camps, on the other hand, have the far more worthy aim of opposing a collective human suicide. Who could disagree with this? But having arrived at a general aim, such as disarming the world and ending war. it is then necessary to decide what is the best way of achieving it.

The multi-lateralists, who believe that the best way to achieve peace is to prepare for war, claim that “deterrence” has worked. True, there has not been a global nuclear holocaust yet, but this of course does not prove that there will never be. The multi-lateralists always fail to mention that since 1945 not a single day has passed without a major war between two or more nations being fought somewhere in the world. Millions of people have died in those wars. Even during the past four years, in the Iraq-Iran war alone, nearly half a million people have been killed. With its smug faith in arms negotiations and treaties which have gone on for many years and produced no reduction in arms at all, the theory of multi-lateralism is not just conservative, it is insane. It regards the wars of the world as the unavoidable outcome of a mysterious disease called “human nature” and wants to see the game of human annihilation played to the rules of cricket or croquet.

Sadly, the often quoted, unilateralist “alternative” to all this is not as different as CND would have us believe. Still thinking within the rigid framework of capitalist society, divided as it is into competing nations, the unilateralists want the British ruling class to show their true colours, play the gentleman, and agree to defend their profits, their markets and lucrative trade routes with more moderate, “conventional” weapons of destruction. For example. a CND leaflet called Questions And Answers About Non-Nuclear Defence asks the question: "Could Britain defend itself without nuclear weapons?” and gives the answer: "Yes . . . There are various options available for a real defence policy”, suggesting that Britain could "take up new ideas about purely defensive military policies and weapons using new technologies”. It would be interesting to know just how peaceful and harmless defensive militarism would be; as for new technologies, there is of course a great deal of research being carried out into “non-nuclear defence" using nerve gas and other chemical and biological weapons.

The problem, then, with the popular alternative to the multi-lateralist bomb squad, is that CND accepts the international rivalry of capitalism which produces war as surely as night follows day. They embody the same nationalism which is used to persuade workers to go periodically to settle their employers' trade wars on the battlefield. CND have issued a statement complaining about the government's acceptance of a second assignment of cruise missiles . . . on the day after British women have been rounded up for peacefully protesting against cruise missiles" and a woman from the peace camp. Lyn Jones, was quoted as saying ". . . the British people do not want these cruise missiles" (Guardian, 6 April 1984). As long as workers believe that there is such a thing as “the British people", who don't want cruise missiles, "the American people", who, presumably, according to Lyn Jones, can keep "their" cruise missiles. and “the Russians", who have got "their" SS-20s. then we will remain cannon fodder. The workers of the world have no country: a mortgage, a rent-book, a UB40. these things look the same everywhere even if their labels are different, and they produce the same misery. Ninety per cent of the people of the world share a global common interest, economically and socially. It is the ten per cent who invest in our labour, in whose interest it has been to divide the planet into areas of control called "nations".

What, then, of the women at Greenham? They have had the support of CND, but their protest was not organised by that body. They have failed to prevent the arrival of cruise missiles. They have failed to prevent cruise being made operational. . What has their presence at Greenham achieved? There are two things they claim to have achieved. Firstly, to increase public awareness of the real horror of the nuclear threat and the urgent need to do something about it. Second, to build up strong bonds of solidarity and confidence among those who seek peace, and between women in particular. In other words, to create an alternative culture, in which the values of present-day society, of violence and aggression, are rejected and people are instead creative and care for one another.

It is much harder to measure what success has been had in relation to these two secondary aims. Even before Greenham, there was a growing awareness for many years of the threat of nuclear war, as the number of nuclear weapons in the world spiralled. But spreading information about the nature of a threat to millions of lives cannot be separated from ideas about how that threat is to be dealt with. The Greenham Common women have opposed the idea of working-class political organisation, men and women together, to dispossess the world's capitalist class of their ownership of the means of life. Instead, there has been a tendency to sneer at such ideas and to favour spontaneous acts of peacefulness within a society rooted in property and violence, with the control of the state left in the hands of the agents of capital.

This brings us to the second aim, of promoting an alternative culture of co-operation. Like the Welsh hippy communes of the sixties, this is an idealist and utopian hope that a world-wide system of competition and profit can be escaped from, without the political and democratic action of a socialist majority. The Greenham women have been divided as to what place, if any, men are to have in this alternative culture. Only a minority fell for the dangerous biological determinism, which says that it is men who are genetically programmed for violence and women for peace. Most of the women a Greenham are united, though, in the feeling that men have been conditioned into aggression and violence and should therefore generally be excluded from the birth of this new culture of peace.

This is just the kind of irrational judgement which justifies war. Was it not women who waved white feathers at the men [who] would not fight in the 1914-18 war, to taunt them for their refusal to kill for "our country"? Was it not women who proudly kissed their sons and husbands into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in the Falklands war? The fact is both women and men are taught, in different ways, to support the capitalist system the world over. This conditioning will only be destroyed by men and women workers joining together to face a common enemy, rather than allowing conflicts between workers to blind them to what is really happening. What makes men flock like sheep to their death in wars is not really strength or aggression but the most pathetic weakness. After all, militarism is based on the strict obeying of orders, which is hardly a model of self-assertion.

These two aims, then, of alerting public awareness and building a counter-culture of peaceful solidarity have not been at all successful in removing the threat of annihilation from the human race. But, in any case, these were not the original aims of the Peace Camp: the object of preventing the arrival and preparation for use of cruise missiles has failed miserably, and is being gradually forgotten. Any movement must be judged, in the end, by the success or failure of its strategy. By that standard. Greenham has been a total fiasco. It would be patronising in the extreme for us to continue any longer to pat them on the head, and admire their sincerity. If their strategy for getting rid of nuclear weapons is not effective, then to encourage the continuation of that strategy is nothing less than collective suicide.

Unfortunately, as with CND in general, there is a smug self-righteousness about the women at Greenham, which treats all criticism of their policy with the same pious smirk. Having been branded by the media as the "Peace Women" they seem to feel that anyone who dares to question their approach must be a warmonger, defending male attitudes of aggression and oppressive forms of political organisation. Perhaps they don’t know, or don't care, that socialists alone have opposed every single war this century, not just before they began, but during and after them too, even where this meant incarceration in prison for many of our members during both World Wars. We do not sneer at the opposition to war of millions of our fellow workers. But how is this opposition to be turned into a practical movement, which will be effective in ending all war?

The Greenham Common and other peace camps have degenerated into tourist attractions, because they present no real threat to the forces of mass destruction around which they are gathered. The weapons of war will only be dismantled when the cause of war the way society is presently organised — is removed. Nothing short of a social revolution will prevent humanity staggering from one mass grave to another

Clifford Slapper

Uncommon at Greenham (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August 1981 a group of women, children and men left Cardiff to march over a hundred miles to Greenham Common to protest against the planned siting of American Cruise missiles there. Some women decided to stay on and set up a peace camp from which men were excluded but which attracted the support of many other women from all over the country as well as abroad. The mere existence of the camp was not enough to wake people up to the horrific reality of nuclear weapons and a number of demonstrations were organised to get attention from the media and the public. In one of these the base was blockaded and completely encircled by hundreds of women linking arms; in another, women climbed over the barbed wire fencing, got inside the base and climbed on top of a missile silo where they remained singing and dancing until the police dragged them away. They also decorated the fence with pictures of children and loved ones and went to London where they lay down in the streets to symbolise the fate of those who would die in a nuclear attack.

Although these actions were undertaken in the name of “peace and life", and more particularly in the name of children's lives, it is difficult to accept that the women involved had fully thought through the implications of such words. If so, why demonstrate just at Greenham Common and not in front of the Israeli embassy, or the Lebanese one, or indeed almost any other to draw attention to all the people being killed in wars waged or supported by governments; why not decorate Asian and African embassies with pictures of the little children starving to death in those countries at the rate of about 30 every minute of every day? Indeed, if peace and life are the prime concern, why oppose just nuclear weapons and not all weapons? In fact, the word “peace" has been used by the Greenham women in a vague, undefined manner which has enabled thousands of people to identify with the movement while making purely personal interpretations of the word, ranging from the withdrawal of Cruise missiles from Britain to an unconditional rejection of all wars. The unifying principle that has spurred these women into action and kept them going in the face of all kinds of difficulties has not therefore been identity of aim. but rather identity of emotion. What we have here is strong emotion — shared, controlled and organised.

Nuclear weapons release strong emotions in people, and particularly in women, partly because the possibility of total annihilation is an entirely new concept. Schools and history books have taught us that wars and massacres are a normal, acceptable part of “civilised” life and children are kept too busy learning by heart the dates of the great battles to have time to ask questions. But the idea of a nuclear holocaust is new and has shock value.

In the book Greenham Women Everywhere, by Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, a whole chapter is devoted to letters and personal statements by women describing how they are haunted by nightmares and frightening visions of destruction. desolation and loss. Fear, as well as a discovery that many others shared their fears, was the spur that led woman after woman to join a group, to go on a march, to support the peace camp at Greenham. Once together they found they shared feelings of anger and confusion and that none of them was ashamed to weep or express emotion. They were put off by the local CND meetings, with the dry, impersonal atmosphere of the committees and the formal, unemotional approach which, to them, was typical of the way men organise things. The women found that when they got together, when they marched, sang or danced, held hands or linked arms, something quite different happened. Their negative feelings of anxiety, fear and helplessness were magically turned into "feelings of strength", "feelings of calm and centredness”. On one occasion, standing together in silence after a demonstration, they were "ecstatic, overtaken by the brilliant feeling that we’d actually done it”.

Emotion is also the key factor when the Greenham women attempt to communicate with the rest of the world, as they try to get others not so much to understand their ideas but to share their feelings. This is particularly hard work with the people with whom they have most contact, the police, but it is also hard work with most of the rest of us who have been brought up to resist and suppress our emotions or at least to regard them as the weakest, most unreliable part of ourselves.

This applies particularly to men and is indeed the reason why they were excluded from Greenham. It was not, as some people believe, because the majority of women there felt that men were biologically violent and aggressive and therefore incapable of wanting peace. They did not think this. They did, however, think that men. because of their social conditioning, would find it difficult to join in the kind of activity they had chosen for themselves and to really accept non-violence as a strategy even in the face of police brutality. And from the women’s point of view the exclusion of men worked. From acting on their own and in their own way, the women there have derived tremendous feelings of strength as well as a new sense of identity as women. From the point of view of getting practical results, the emotional approach has not been more successful than the more formal one of organisations dominated by men: the first Cruise missiles were flown in just over a month ago, right on schedule. Men have achieved a form of personal satisfaction in fighting for lost causes, a sense of solidarity with other men. feelings of importance and possibly careers in politics. Now women have created their own version of solidarity, their own feelings of strength, their own niche in the continuing social struggle.

If feelings of strength are to be of any use, however, they must surely have some real impact on the world or else they are little more than self-indulgence. So the Greenham women may feel strong, but the nature of their actions shows that they are not. They protest and they demand their "rights", but in doing so they are recognising the power of a superior authority to whom their protests and demands are addressed. Indeed they are saying to this authority that it need have no fears, that it is not in any way being threatened, only pleaded with. The Greenham women do not have the sort of strength that says "I have had enough of the way things have been run, I shall now take matters into my own hands". No. They are still not much different from the beggar who relies on the rich, powerful person to treat him with pity. Beggars have never been choosers, nor will they ever be. As long as workers beg, as they do when they protest or make demands, nothing will change. Only when we take things into our own hands will they go the way we want.

Is this to say that emotion is to be rejected as futile and irrational? Not in the least. Emotion is an essential part of human experience: it is thanks to our emotions that we can empathise with others and support one another when we unite to achieve a common goal. The experiences of the Greenham Common women clearly testify to this, it would be foolish, however, to imagine that a simple venting of our emotions will achieve any more than does a more impersonal approach. The reason formal organisations never seem to get anywhere is not because they lack emotion. but because they lack understanding. If your car does not start in the morning, you do not beg it tearfully to understand your plight, nor do you present it with a formal letter giving all the logical reasons why it should work. Both approaches, in this case, would appear equally irrational as a car is obviously not capable of taking an interest in you, your motives or your feelings. It has its own laws and unless you understand them, you will not get it to start. A social system, although made up of human beings, is in fact more like a car, or any other machine, than it is like a human being. Many of the human beings caught up in this machine become themselves, at times, mere automatons: "The police, the armies and the courts are all ‘only obeying orders’", writes Gwyn Kirk. They cannot respond to individual people or specific situations, and nor can the system itself. It is a huge, complex machine with its own laws and unless you understand them neither emotional action nor activity through formal organisations will make it do what you want.

What we want to change is immense. It’s not just getting rid of nuclear weapons, it’s getting rid of the whole structure that created the possibility of nuclear weapons in the first place. If we don’t use imagination nothing will change. Without change we will destroy the planet. It’s as simple as that.

(Lesley Boulton, June 1982)

The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence. creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects.

With these words Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk conclude their book on the Greenham women. What they say here they want is also what socialists want; and when enough of us want it we will be able to combine those two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own society, our own world, in the interest of all mankind. Only then will "peace and life” be possible.

Christine Moss