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Edward P. Thompson's activities and writings were diverse spanning literature, history, fiction and poetry, biography, adult education, socialist and libertarian politics, and peace-movement activism. This book explores the various aspects of his intellectual and political work, and its legacy to later generations of radical thinkers and activists in Britain and internationally. Thompson taught exclusively literature classes for the first three years at the University of Leeds, and aimed to attain and maintain a university standard of adult education. The book examines the way in which The Making of the English Working Class grew out of Thompson's day-to-day work at Leeds. Although Thompson's fusion of Marxism with social history constituted the central attraction of his work, he himself bore a degree of responsibility for subsequent dismissals of the Marxist dimension in his work. The book examines Thompson's career-long commitment to literature and to the craft of writing, and makes clear some significant continuities and contrasts within Thompson's specifically literary output. Thompson's concept of socialist humanism retained a resonance and distinctiveness for the twenty-first century, which was a defining characteristic of the early New Left after 1956. The content of Thompson's analyses provides us with one of the richest account of the flesh and blood of emancipation, and the experience, suffering, failure and courage of the working class. The book also looks at his peace movement from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and 1960s to the European Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s.
This is the second book in a two-volume study tracing the evolution of the Labour Party's foreign policy throughout the twentieth century to the present date. It is a comprehensive study of the history of the Labour Party's worldview and foreign policy. The study argues that Labour's foreign policy perspective should be seen not as the development of a socialist foreign policy, but as an application of the ideas of liberal internationalism. Volume Two provides a critical analysis of Labour's foreign policy since 1951. It examines Labour's attempts to rethink foreign policy, focusing on intra-party debates, the problems that Labour faced when in power, and the conflicting pressures from party demands and external pressures. The book examines attitudes to rearmament in the 1950s, the party's response to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam War, the bitter divisions over nuclear disarmament and the radicalisation of foreign and defence policy in the 1980s. It also examines Labour's desire to provide moral leadership to the rest of the world. The last two chapters focus on the Blair and Brown years, with Blair's response to the Kosovo crisis and to 9/11, and his role in the ‘war on terror’. Whereas Blair's approach to foreign affairs was to place emphasis on the efficacy of the use of military force, Brown's instead placed faith in the use of economic measures.
For decades, nuclear weapons have been portrayed as essential to the security of the few states that possess them, and as a very ‘normal’ part of national and international security. These states have engaged in enormous programmes of acquisition and development, have disregarded the humanitarian implications of these weapons, and sought to persuade their publics that national security was dependent on the promise of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. The term ‘nuclearism’ has been used to describe this era, and several elements of nuclearism are explored here to identify how these states have been able to sustain their possession of nuclear arsenals. By perpetuating a discourse of ‘security’ which avoided international humanitarian law, by limiting decisions on nuclear policy to small groups of elites, by investing vast amounts of resources in their nuclear programs, and by using the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileged status as nuclear states, despite their promises to disarm, the great powers have been able to sustain a highly unequal – and dangerous – global nuclear order. This order is now under challenge, as the Humanitarian Initiative explored the implications of nuclear weapons’ use. Its sobering findings led non-nuclear states, supported by civil society actors, to create the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, making these weapons illegal, for all states. The Humanitarian Initiative has posed a challenge to all the elements of nuclearism, and has resulted in a significant rejection of the existing nuclear order. The treaty will not result in quick disarmament, and it faces several hurdles. It is, however, a notable achievement, delegitimizing nuclear weapons, and contributing to the goal of a nuclear-free world.
radical politics of the New Left, and the spontaneous, radical mass movement of the idealistic younger generation, articulated through CND. As he put it, in a passionate article in the NR, ‘The “bureaucracy” will hold the machine; but the New Left will hold the passes between it and the younger generation.’14 The key political demands of the New Left, as far as Thompson was concerned, were also intimately related to the CND campaign. But unilateral nuclear disarmament was not, on its own, enough. To have a real effect upon the dangerous escalation of the Cold War, the
3 Protest and survive The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party and civil defence in the 1980s Jacquelyn Arnold Against the backdrop of increasing public anxiety surrounding the British ownership and potential use of nuclear weapons following three British nuclear tests in 1957, a group emerged to coordinate the anti-nuclear movement in Britain. The genesis and development of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) ran parallel with both the emergence of civil defence as a political concern in Britain and the question of unilateral nuclear
mobilisation of opposition to the deployment of INF was clearly called for. That the first measure of nuclear disarmament came about through state negotiation is therefore by no means an embarrassment to the ‘exterminist’ thesis, or its falsification. Or it is not unless it is assumed 133 Fieldhouse_Thompson_272.indd 133 23/10/2013 15:34 Policy, theory and peace campaigns that either the thesis was a profession of nihilism (when, in fact, as everyone knows it was a summons to humanist resistance), or else that it implied that the ‘people’ themselves would physically
until his highprofile resignation in 1956 – he was instrumental in establishing the ‘first’ New Left. He was, throughout his adult life, a peace campaigner and activist and he attained national pre-eminence in the 1980s through his leading role in the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement. Finally, his writing – both his academic, historical work1 and his political and polemical essays and articles2 – is of an outstanding intellectual quality. Despite the range of these achievements – and he was in addition a literary critic (and a teacher of history and English
movements reveal the range of politics and identities in the city at that time, their complex relationship to nationalist and unionist groups and to the state authorities, and how the city centre was a stage that dramatised these shifting identities, politics and multiple relationships. The Northern Ireland Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ‘Tools of communists’ The Northern Ireland Committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (NICND) was formed in 1958. 15 The organisation broadly took its
et al. 2012 : 222). In other words, the nuclear weapon states, and especially the United States and Russia, have an obligation to change geopolitical circumstances by reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers which threaten entire regions and, potentially, the whole world. As Dunworth ( 2015 ) observes, for these states, taking effective measures for nuclear disarmament is not merely a
. The energies of the clubs had already been focused by the establishment of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. Along with many of those assembled at St Pancras, Thompson had taken part in the huge marches from London to the nuclear research station at Aldermaston in 1958 and 1959. By the time of the St Pancras meeting, the New Left had even entered electoral politics: the Fife Socialist League, an affiliate of the National Clubs Committee, had run miners’ leader Lawrence Daly as a candidate in the seat of West Fife in the 1959 general election. Daly