[The following article appeared in the April 6 issue of the London weekly Socialist Action, under the above headline. The author is the editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, also published in London.]
E.P. Thompson's notion about "Exterminism" - that there is a war drive that has nothing to do with the logic of capitalism but has a momentum of its own — has rightly been attacked from many quarters on the left. But much of this attack has focussed on the sociological roots of the arms race. Too little attention has been paid to the foreign policy aims of the West's military build-up, in other words, what kinds of changes NATO is trying to bring about within the USSR itself.
Too often people fail to realise that weapons like cruise and Pershing are not just for use in a war. They are already in use at this very moment, as foreign policy instruments for changing realities inside the USSR. The staggering growth of the U.S. military budget over the last three years is exerting a profound political influence inside the USSR and Eastern Europe, trying to push these societies in directions that correspond to American interests.
And as ideas spread in and around the peace movement about "alternative defence policies" less reliant on nuclear weapons, the Americans are responding with new strategies of their own, such as AirLand Battle which could in the future replace battlefield nukes and even tactical nukes with coventional weapons that would achieve these same foreign policy goals, perhaps even better than the existing nuclear deployment in Europe.
For the Labour left to be able to fight the Reagan and Thatcher governments over defence policy it must therefore raise its own discussion away simply from military hardware to dealing with the left's foreign policy aims towards the USSR. And by foreign policy aims we do not just mean phrases like "restoring detente" or "improving relations with the USSR." We mean also changing the internal course of events inside the USSR and Eastern Europe.
For many decades, bourgeois circles in the West have had a settled set of aims towards the USSR, long-term goals for changing Soviet society, and for preventing other changes in it that would greatly harm the capitalist world. We can briefly list some of the main goals of this policy.
The first and most obvious aim has been to undermine those features of the Soviet state that make it inclined to support revolutions in the third world — the aid it has given to Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and so on. It doesn't take much imagination to see that what needs to be broken in the USSR for this purpose is the planned character of the Soviet economy and the ideological commitment that corresponds to such a fully nationalised economy:
The West has therefore sought to bring pressures to bear on the USSR — both carrots and sticks — that would lead to the opening up of the Soviet economy to Western capital, that would marketise the USSR, destroy the monopoly of foreign trade, and tie the Soviet economy to the West.
The second great NATO aim has been to prevent any positive political development within the USSR or any big advances in the social position of the Soviet working class, changes that would make the Soviet Union more attractive to workers in other parts of the world. It thus exerts pressures designed to limit Soviet social spending and to strengthen the authoritarian institutions of the Soviet state.
The main tools of this NATO foreign policy are military and economic. Since the end of the war, the USSR has been ringed by many hundreds of American bases and has been permanently threatened by huge military arsenals. Form this starting 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.
In the economic field, the Americans have organised all the main capitalist states for economic warfare against the USSR - through such institutions as Cocom [Coordinating Committee on Export Controls]. It can thus alternately offer attractive economic packages that would stimulate Soviet economic growth while making the 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 U.S. administration is using a massive military build-up and economic warfare to ensure that the USSR becomes more internally authoritarian and repressive and to hit the living conditions of working people in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
There is remarkably little discussion on the left about 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" we should be towards it. But a serious policy discussion must start with a different question: what features of Soviet society do we want to strengthen, what do we want to undermine, and how do we achieve these objectives?
On any sober assessment, the USSR is an extremely authoritarian state lacking any authentically democratic mechanisms of popular control over the government. It must be a prime objective of the left to seek political changes that enable the working people of the USSR to strengthen their control over the affairs of state. We want to achieve this not only as a matter of principle but because of the enormous practical impact of such changes on world politics.
It is surely an ABC of politics for socialists that such democratic development is a matter of political pressure and struggle by the working people of the USSR and the working class everywhere can best exert its power in politics when it is in the strongest possible economic and social position.
This means that the left must want to strengthen to the maximum the social and economic rights that working people in the USSR possess: full employment and economic security, cheap food, nominal rents, nominal transport prices, nominal fuel bills, plentiful and cheap cultural facilities, an ambitious housing programme, rising wages, egalitarianism in income distribution.
The point is not how fully all these points are at present implemented or how high living standards are at present. The point is that we want to strengthen these things.
Again, this is not only a matter of general principle: the more these social rights are strengthened in the USSR, the greater difficulty the bourgeoisies in Western Europe will have in obliterating what welfare rights exist in the capitalist world.
And finally, the left must want Soviet aid to those in the Third World trying to break out of the bloody stranglehold of imperialism to be increased and not diminished. And this too depends upon pressing ahead with policies designed to strengthen the positive domestic features of the Soviet Union.
So how can the left achieve these aims? In the first place by fighting tooth and nail against the NATO military pressure against the USSR, the main means of buttressing the authoritarian structures of Soviet domestic policy and policy towards Eastern Europe. In the second place the left must break up the machinery for economic warfare against the USSR and work out a programme for massive, planned trade between Britain and the Soviet Union. There is enormous scope for a huge increase in trade, provided that it is organised on a long-term basis. Thirdly, the left must maintain its ideological debate and struggle against authoritarian-bureaucratic models of socialism.
Such a programme could meet with very wide support within the working classes of Western Europe and should be taken up within the peace movement. And those trying to construct so-called "constructive,
," "nonprovocative" defence strategies for NATO should be forced to answer the basic question: what political aims do they want NATO to pursue towards the USSR? When the discussion moves onto this ground, the absurdity of notions fashionable in the Labour Party now about turning NATO into a "progressive" alliance can be easily exposed.