Exterminism and Cold War takes as its starting point the essay 'Notes on Exterminism — the Last Stage of Civilisation' in which Edward Thompson argued that the Cold War, and the military nuclear complexes associated with it, deeply structured world reality, so that the self-reproducing [illegible] fracture of world politics. implication was that the military-nuclear complexes tended dominated both the USSR and the United States and were out of any political control. He thus hinted that to argue from origins was pointless, as was any historical or structural analysis of what the conflict between the [illegible] the USA was about, of any comparative analysis of the social and class structures of the capitalist West and post-capitalist East. According to Thompson all rationality was lost in a self-reproducing [illegible] of nuclear competition in which the original [illegible] submerged. The Cold War had just become 'about itself' rather than reflecting underlying struggles. Thus the struggle which faced humanity was the fight against 'exterminism', and all others — class struggles and the like — were subordinate to the central human struggle against the crazy military hierarchies in the USSR and the USA.
The essence of Thompson's new essay, 'Europe — the Weak Link in the Cold War', is that he has in all but words given up the concept of exterminism. He simply succumbs to the huge array of argumentation in the book — notably from Raymond Williams, Fred Halliday and Mike Davis — that his previous position was an abandonment of Marxist and historical analysis in favour of apocalyptic 'save the earth' rhetoric, and simply not good enough from someone who is after all one of the greatest Marxist historians in the world.
His new defence of the word exterminism amounts to this: there is something new in the present day world reality which can't simply be explained by concepts like 'imperialism' and 'international class struggle' — namely that the world possesses the ability, which could actually be put to use, to blow itself to smithereens. The point is however that only terms like imperialism and international class struggle explains this new reality.
Over a year before this volume appeared, I wrote a critique of Thompson's original essay (international vol 6 no 2). Since Thompson has all but abandoned the notion of exterminism the real interest in this present volume is this: to debate 'exterminism' you have to debate the meaning of world politics today.
The dozen or so essays in this book, taken together, provide a wealth of information and argument about contemporary world reality. Moreover, this debate is informed by a burning question for all socialists: the anti-nuclear movement has become a mass movement of considerable proportions. It is hard to think of any other movement since the second world war which has on more than one occasion co-ordinated demonstrations in Europe and the USA which have involved millions of people. What are the limits and possibilities of this movement?
The extent to which the peace movement can alter world reality is in part determined by that reality — where the crucial struggles are taking place and where are the weak points of the present world order, which we define as imperialism and its principle prop, world Stalinism. The two contributors who make out a systematic alternative explanation of the world order to Thompson, and the function of nuclear weapons within it, are Mike Davis and Fred Halliday. It is on their essays, and Thompson's reply that a few critical remarks are in order.
Mike Davis' 'Nuclear Imperialism and Ex[illegible] Deterrence' is a sharp and accurate critique of Thompson's original notion of exterminism and a vehement demonstration of the responsibility of US imperialism for the Cold War. Mike shows how nuclear weapons have played a rational and functional role in maintaining the imperialist world order. In particular he marshalls the factual evidence that nuclear weapons and the arms race have been used to economically pressurise the Soviet Union, and how the 'nuclear umbrella' of US imperialism is the essential back-up to the free use of its conventional forces in counter-revolutionary war. The times when the US has come closest to using nuclear weapons have been during the Korean War, the Vietnam war and during the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 — in other words against the colonial revolution.
Noam Chomsky provides more evidence of a similar kind: the Cuban missile crisis, the nuclear back-up to the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the sending of SAC bombers to Uruguay in 1947, the nuclear alert by the Western powers during Suez. All this is excellent ammunition in demonstrating the responsibility of US imperialism for the nuclear arms race.
But I would register some secondary differences with Mike's notion of the international order and the world class struggle. It is perhaps best illustrated by Thompson's reply to Davis. Thompson says: 'And as Davis crosses and re-crosses the globe in his seven-league boots ... One episode which escapes his attention altogether is Gdansk: that is the astonishing 16-month life-cycle of Solidarity'.
I think that Mike's omission of Poland is linked to a slightly one-sided emphasis of the world class struggle: 'The Cold War in its wider sense is not just an arbitrary or anachronistic feud staged essentially in Europe, but a rationally explicable and deeply rooted conflict of opposing social formations and political forces, whose principle centre of gravity has for some thirty years now been the Third World' (our emphasis).
Now there's some good evidence to back up this claim. After all the real revolutions we've seen in the last thirty years have been in the Third World — at least the successful ones. But the operative role that the notion of the colonial revolution as the determining factor in world politics plays in Davis' thinking is explicit: 'Whatever the errors of its "immaturity" the New Left should not be disparaged for having emphasised the dependence of the hopes of socialism in the Northern hemisphere upon the desperate and courageous battles being waged on the other side of the world.'
But if the hopes for socialism depend on the colonial revolution, then the consequences for socialists and the peace movement are clear. Everything must be thrown into solidarity with the colonial revolution. Socialists should intervene in the peace movement on the central question of whether it will or will not support the colonial revolution. Even smashing up the anti-nuclear movement in the course of such a struggle would be absolutely justifiable.
The struggle of ten million Polish workers was the broadest mobilisation of proletarian self-activity and democratic self-organisation since Catalonia in 1936, or possibly even since the Russian Revolution itself. In our view the hopes for socialism in the Northern hemisphere, the hopes for socialism world-wide depend also on the struggle of the workers in the industrial countries. Several years ago, during the height of the Portuguese revolution, Ernest Mandel put forward the thesis that the European proletariat could play a decisive role in unlocking the world crisis. In this optic, the crucial problem for socialism is the relative passivity of the American and Russian working classes which the impact of revolution in Europe could change. Mandel's error, if error it was, was to limit his notion of the 'European' working class to Spain, Portugal, Italy and France. Poland (and Romania tomorrow) have shown us that the East European working class can play a crucial role as well. The workers in other advanced capitalist countries and some of the more industrialised colonial countries (Brazil, Argentina etc) also have a crucial weight. But if the hopes for world socialism depend on the colonial revolution alone then we are indeed in real trouble. The bastions of world imperialism and Stalinism cannot be finally stormed without the US and Soviet working classes.
Fred Halliday's more comprehensive essay has its own problems. Fred is a 'Deutscherite' — a term he probably won't object to as editor of some of Isaac Deutscher's writings and as an avid pupil, like all of us, of that great Marxist's writings. In practice this means, despite the complexity and subtlety of his analysis, that the principle source of world conflict for Fred is the conflict 'between the capitalist and post-capitalist worlds'. Despite his stern criticism of some aspects of the Soviet Union, and the way it uses its influence to reproduce its own bureaucratic structure in Third World countries, ultimately he sees the Soviet Union as a force for progress. The Brezhnev epoch is regarded as a time of general progress for the Soviet Union, and as a shift to the left in its world role.
Much of what Halliday says in his outline of the history of the Cold War we can agree with. But to argue that the central fracture in world politics is between the capitalist and post-capitalist worlds is to run the risk of abandoning the traditional revolutionary Marxist view of the struggle between the two major classes on a world scale in favour of struggle between two camps — the capitalist and the socialist. Such a view posits the existence of two fundamental camps, imperialist and anti-imperialist, with the latter having its heart the Soviet Union. The problem 'campism' is that it fails to grasp the essential mode of domination of the imperialist system, namely that its two principle props are world Stalinism and the colonial and semi-colonial bourgeoisies, which as Trotsky argued 'in the final analysis' defend the existing world order and are profoundly conservative social forces. Despite the objections to Halliday's account of world reality, his account of the role that the European peace movement can play is eloquent and convincing.
This brings us right back to the role of the peace movement. Lucio Magri is right to stress that the movement could be diffused and co-opted unless it is given concrete goals to fight for. Nonetheless, the peace movement has become a tremendous political force, a great embarrassment for the 'Western alliance'. Neither the bourgeoisies in the USA nor in Europe have any illusions about the target of the peace movement. The slogan of a 'nuclear free Europe' can only be directed against the NATO alliance and the USA — they are the people responsible for the 'nuclearisation' of Europe, not the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union. Marxists have every reason to build the existing peace movement to exert the maximum possible pressure to disrupt NATO.
Of course we must build solidarity with the colonial revolution, above all with the struggle in El Salvador. The longer the peace movement exists, the deeper its understanding of the role of imperialism will become. But any temptation to intervene in CND and its equivalents around an ultimatistic line of insisting above all else as support for the Central American revolution must be bitterly resisted. Any sectarianism to the existing peace movement would be a disaster.
So, finally back to Edward Thompson. Is Europe the weak link in the Cold War? Well, it could be. For the European working class has the ability to make a strategic, world-historic breakthrough against Stalinism and imperialism.