Public meeting
'NO TO PIT CLOSURES' 12 April 7.30pm Albert Hall Institute, Nottingham Speakers include: Ken Coates (Notts Euro candidate) and Gordon Skinner ' Gedting NIM.
Orgaaiet p: 140 Irades Consci am Nott East LP ported by Socialist Action.
hevery level mo tns cn we call lol union rights.
for Labour at workplace level Launching sponsors:
Tony Banks MP Tony Benn MP & David Blunkett N Ken Coates Vladimir Derer Jack Dromey (TGWU) Peter Hain Harriet Harman MP Eric Heffer MP Ken Livingstone Mick Martin (TGWU) Michael Meacher MP Bill Morris (TGWU)
Alan Sapper (ACTT)
Sagl!N! The Labour Co-ordinating Committee has launched the following charter for a campaign to win the ballots on the political levy. The campaign is supIt is vital that we defend the partnership between Labour and the unions and indeed strengthen it at 1. Active opposition to the Tory assaults on trade A campaign of activity and education to win the argument for trade union affiliation to the Labour 5. The promotion of socialist policies and support The strengthening of local union/constituency Labour Party links and the formation where ap propriate of Labour Party workplace branches
WHERE emonstrations in astern Europe?' is a Bost CND activists are only too amiliar with. The simple answer, & course, is that they do exist - in Moscow, Prague and East Berlin - but that they have great difficuly in making their voices heard in ace of the repression against them. Diga Medvedkova of the Soviet Trust' group has just gone on rial; the Hungarian roup has been forced to dissolve self; members of Charter 77 have een detained for intitiating proagainst the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Czechodovakia; and East German peace ampaginers entenced and expelled to the West.
But this simple answer, true so far s it goes, would be misleading in one rucial respect. ine casu beace movements which are independent of the party and the state, are not imply extensions of CND beyond the Iron Curtain'. similarities, such as eu cold war and the prominent role of the Church in some of them and the adoption of certain bloc-transcending' dogans.
But in another way they are very much the product of the internal contradictions of East Soviet society anderstood in terms of some spurious East-West symmetry.
3y Günter Minnerup By far the largest independent peace movement in the Soviet bloc, and the one which most closely resembles those of the West, is that in and around the Protestant churches in East Germany.
Almost every major town and city in the German (and many minor ones) has its group of predominantly young people meeting both within the structures of the churches work circles of friends to discuss questions of war and peace. on. books about, and experiences with, militarism, musical and theatrical performances, and peace services.
Many of these groups do not remain content within the confines church seek reaching a broader audience: culating petitions, demons tranve vigils, open workshops, art exhibitions) c: daubing slogans on walls. Such activities tend to get them into conflict with the local police as well as, all too eften, the church hierarchy - which is nervous • of 'provocative threatening its relations with party and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov the peace Russia question 'Dialogue' have been arrested, There are of course opposition to the arms race, the symbols cannot Democratic Republic and in informal They exchange views organise poetry readings, ways by cir(candlelight where excesses' public Solidarity ment, kind NevCI openly.
Socialist Action 6 April 1984 The sharpest conflict so far took place in the industria..
especially cautious church pushed the 'Jena Peace Community' into particularly bold public activity: marches under their own banners, demonstrations in the city centre, expressions of in Most members have now been arrested and expelled to West Germany.
In East Berlin, where the church is more supportive, open air workshops attracting thousands of participants have so far been possible without provoking a repressive reaction on this scale. But there have been some arrests, in Weimar, Leipzig, Cottbus and KarlMarx-Stadt.
Greens Much of what goes on in these East German groups would be very familiar to any CND activist: the serious discussions of international politics and the technology of the arms race. cern not only with peace and disarmabut also with Ten suc In the GDR, where West German television and radio can be easily received and where most people have some link with relatives and friends, the influence of Western peace. and movements and especially of the West German Greens play a major role.
The 'German Cuestion' far below the surface: the demand for a withdrawal of all foreign troops from both German states and the creation of a nuclear-free zone in Germany, with all that this would imply for the status quo in that divided country, is occastonally What is the movement? Although Jena ches, local supervision. sympathy with of East German youth dent peace escalon their the conecology expression of East students formist itself is tion.
SED.
articulated quite significance of this closely in 1976. associated with the Protestant churis certainly not a religious revival movement. The churches simply provide a space which is relatively free otherwise all-pervasive ideological regimentation The pacifist implications of some Christian teaching articulate the widespread antimilitarism among A religious motivation is the only one accepted for conscientious objectors to military service, who serve in unarmed but uniformed construction Such former objectors often provide the backbone of the indepengroups Conscription, together with the compulsory military in schools introduced against a wave of protests in 1978 are main practical concerns rather than nuclear missiles as such (although that may change now that the Soviet Union is deploying them, for the first time, on East German territory).
Military service and the education system are also, of course, the main points of contact between young people and the authority of the state. than just a single-issue peace movement these groups and their activities are an of a broader German youth 'workers' and farmers' state'.
The peace activists tend not to be who nave privileges to lose and are generally con- but young workers whose first clashes with authority may have been quite unrelated to the peace quesMost of the members of the "Jena Peace Community, for instance, saw themselves as to the left of the ruling Some had links with the long-established 'dissident' current in the town which had already been involved in protests against expulsion ol communist songwriter Wolf Biermann East German and others Europe).
Rather The slogan shares' alienation their the Soviet Union -many labour without fear of wars.
tional support.
There is nothing pro-Western in these activities. Those who persistently seek to embarass CND by asking ahout the demonstrators on the other side of the Berlin Wall would get little solace from a conversation with any of the peace Canvalen recently expelled from the GDR (and. incidentally, little more from Charter elsewhere Eastern They do not demand surrender to imperialism, but a surrender to the people; not the reintroduction of the capitalist market, but an end to the political monopoly of the bureaucracy of the East German peace movement 'Swords into Plough— a biblical quote, but taken from a sculpture donated to the UN by does not translate into naive unilateralism, but into the desire for a world-wide order in which humanity can reap the fruits of its fundamentally democratic and socialist in content. It is the duty of all socialists and peace activists in the West to give this movement their full and uncondiLabour Party und CND, and un editor Günter Minnerup is a member of the of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe. which provides in depth coveruge of the Eust European peace und dissident Red Square
P THOMPSON's notion about Exterminism' - that there is a war rive that has nothing to do with te logic of capitalism but has a homentum of its own — has rightbeen attacked uarters on the left. But much of his attack focussed on the aciological roots of the arms race. Too little attention has been paid to ite foreign policy aims of Vest's military build-up, in other words what kinds NATO is trying. vithin the USSR itself.
Too often people fail to realise hat weapons like cruise and Perhing are not just for use in a war. They are already in use at this very moment, as foreign policy ruments for changing realities inside the USSR. The growth of the US miltary budget over the last three years is exerting side the USSR and Eastern Europe. profound political influence intrying to push these societies directions that correspond American interests.
And as ideas spread in and around the peace movement about 'alternative defence policies' less reliant on nuclear weapons, ine Americans even tactical ment in Europe.
ments OYCL defence the changes DrIng aDoul policy aims we Europe. instaggering aims towards the in would to main goals of this policy.
are resoulVietnam, The ding with new strategies of their own, such as AirLand Battle which could in the future replace battlefield nukes and nukes with conventional weapons that would achieve these same foreign policy goals, perhaps even betexisting nuclear deploy- In For the Labour left to be able to fight the Reagan and Thatcher governpolicy must therefore raise its own discussion away nately simply from military hardware to dealing with the left's foreign policy aims towards the USSR. And by foreign do not JUSI phrases like 'restoring detente' or 'improving relations with the USSR. We mean also changing the internal course of events inside the USSR and Eastern more For many decades, bourgeois circles in the West have had a settled set of USOK. long-term goals for changing Soviet society, and for preventing other changes in it that harm capitalist world. We can briefly list some of the The first and most obvious aim has been to undermine those features of the Soviet state that makes it inclined to support revolutions in the third world the aid it has given to Cuba, Angola, Nicaraoua and So doesn't take much imagination to see that what needs to be broken in the USSR for this purpose is the planned ing character of the Soviet economy and te ideological commitment wal cor responds to such a fully nationalised West has therefore sought to point, the West can then influence internal Soviet developments by either increasing the military pressure or offering to ease it in exchange for the changes in Soviet behaviour that the West wants.
the economic field, Americans have organised all the main capitalist states for economic warfare against the USSR - through such institutions as Cocom. It can thus alteroffer attractive economic packages that would stimulate Soviet economic growth while making USSR dependent on Western capital, or it can close off economic links, trying to hit the bottlenecks in the Soviet economy especially hard.
Thus, at the present time, the US administration using massive military build-up and economic warfare to ensure that the USSR becomes tiental authoritarian repressive and to hit the living conditions of working people in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
There is remarkably little discussion what active aims it should have for changing the USSR. Too often discussion gets bogged down in interminable debates on how good or bad life is in the USSR or on how 'friendly/unfriendly' should towards it. But a serious policy discussion must start with a different question: what features of Soviet society do we wall u strengthen, what do want to undermine. and how do we achieve these objectives?
On any sober assessment, the USSR is an extremely authoritarian state lackMany authentically democratic mechanisms of popular control over the government. It must be a prime ob. the the we Leon Trossky, theorist of the degeneration of the Soviet state
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PiT CE beyond the Berlin Wall
HONE Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia 1968