The Politics Of Peace

E.P. Thompson has the double distinction of being the leading labour historian in the English language and the best-known English-speaking peace activist. Scholar and political activist, he has always insisted that social commitment and scholarly pursuits are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.

Thompson's voluminous history of British workers between 1790 and 1832, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), is regarded as a classic attempt to bring to life the voices of those whom history usually leaves silent. Unlike much previous labour history, its concentration was on the ideas, aspirations, and activities of ordinary workers rather than on the activities of trade unions.

In the 1970s Thompson, a founder of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), became a key spokesperson of the European Nuclear Disarmament movement (END). Both as a peace activist and as a labour historian, he has stressed the conflict between the interests of ordinary people and of the elites which govern them and, in many cases, purport to represent them.

Aurora: Your earlier work was oriented to the male working class. Has the work of feminist historians changed some of your perspectives on the overall experience of working-class life in Britain, in the nineteenth century in particular?

Thompson: Well, I've been told that my work is so oriented. However, I've many times opened Making of the English Working Class at random, and I've always found women on the page. The problem is that the actual organization of many institutions is male dominated; therefore, to write the history of them you write a male-dominated history. The actual process by which the first working-class organizations were formed is one in which you did have a male-dominated position. It is really a question of whether you are going to write a history of becoming or a history of being. If you are writing a history of becoming, then the sources themselves tend to select the male presence. If you are writing a history of social being, then I think the presence of women must be much more widely examined and recorded, which much of my eighteenth-century work now is doing.

Aurora: In your opinion, how did being part of an imperial power affect the sensibilities of working-class people in Britain?

Thompson: Increasingly, I think one of the classic moments was the night of relief when the news release of participation in the Boer War came through, and the big cities went absolutely wild. You could see then by 1900 or 1901 that a large section of the working people had become locked into the imperialist perspective or imperialist ideology. Similar episodes of strong nationalist feeling appeared for a few weeks during the Falklands war. I think this has been a limitation throughout the twentieth century, and it took some time before it became effective in the nineteenth century. I think it was resisted for some time.

Aurora: That leads to an obvious question in terms of the peace movement. The working class of various European countries has appeared more nationalist than class conscious on many occasions, and, on the surface at least, things haven't improved that much. Or is that an unfair assessment?

Thompson: Every damn political leader in the Americas, in North America, and in western Europe talks about peace, whatever their policies and however war-like they are. Even President Reagan is always talking about peace, and clearly the necessity of not appearing to be a warmonger is present in his presentation all the time. Mrs. Thatcher went on a photo opportunity trip to the Soviet Union to be shown on television arm-in-arm with Gorbachev preliminary to calling the election. It was a very calculated piece of business. I think it is incorrect to overstate the nationalist or militaristic disposition of the western working class at the moment.

Aurora: Labour parties are now active in the peace movement. To what extent is this a result of the takeover in many constituencies by the middle-class professionals of various social democratic parties?

Thompson: I don't know about that. Some of the largest and most influential trade unions in this country have always supported a campaign for nuclear disarmament, and more of them support it now than ever before. How far the support of the executive carries the membership is another question. Obviously, it doesn't automatically carry the active support of all the membership, but one should certainly not read this as a middle-class take-over.

Aurora: Since the Second World War there has been a consensus that a bigger pie would provide the answer to a lot of class-related problems and that redistribution was no longer really the issue. More recently environmental degradation, the division of wealth between developed countries and the Third World, and demands for recognition of rights by aboriginal peoples have put in question this consensus. Do you think the unions are capable of facing these issues, or are we stuck in a time warp that makes the solutions of 1945 still look relevant today?

Thompson: I think the issue of the Cold War remains politically central despite all of these other issues that you have raised. This notion of a permanent enemy which justifies the state in all its prerogatives hinders attack on real problems. The enemy has to be there, just as the medieval church had to have a devil, and this becomes a very limiting factor upon all development. In that sense we are still within the parameter, within the mindscape, which was invented when the Cold War started 40 years ago. We still have to break out of that.

Aurora: Do you think Thatcherism and Reaganism and the assorted right-wing ideas that they represent are passing phenomena, and how do you account for the strong degree of working-class attraction to the ideas of the New Right?

Thompson: What is frightening about these phenomena is their excessive right-wing populism. They have control or overwhelming influence on the major national media, and they can actually construct their own ideological picture of reality, which they can, so long as there is a sector which is economically viable within the economy, impose upon the majority of the people. So they are able to govern in that way.

Of course, like all radicals I expect and hope this will be a passing phenomenon but, by God, it's lasted a long time. It's complicated in this country by our particular electoral system. Thatcherism does not actually represent a majority of the electorate, but it affects the majority through the peculiar workings of the electoral system [first-past-the-post].

Aurora: You mentioned the Cold War and the reactionary impact it has on politics in the West, but obviously the discrepancy between the rhetoric and reality of life in the Soviet bloc has caused some disillusionment about notions of a workers' state. How do you assess the changes that have been occurring under Gorbachev?

Thompson: In the first place you cannot run an organized society according to a model of centralized bureaucracy and security forces' control of society. Today Gorbachev has been addressing the Central Committee frankly, saying that they are heading for advanced economic crisis unless certain reforms are put through. In this sense there is a long overdue attempt to affect reform from above which is in the Russian tradition; certain types of reforms are initiated from above which is not in our tradition in the West. One hopes that the reforms will be successful and will open the door to more self-activating processes. Until you have more openness of information you can't expect the working people of the Soviet Union to communicate with each other and form their own definition of reality.

Aurora: There does seem to be a fairly positive reaction in the West among ordinary people to the changes that are going on in the Soviet Union. I noticed, for example, one poll that was reported in the Guardian indicated that there were more people in most European countries who trusted Gorbachev than trusted Reagan. Do you think that some of the Cold War ideology is starting to unravel?

Thompson: Well, I think it is. It is just taking so bloody long to unravel. I think it is particularly becoming unravelled among the young generation. You are finding much more traffic between East and West, much more commonality. Ecological concerns and feminism are now spreading very fast in the Warsaw Pact countries, though not quite the same kind of feminism. All these things are shaking the ghost of the past. The ghost of the past is still hanging on to dear death, polluting the skies above us still.

Aurora: The peace movement in the West has played an important role in changing the perspectives of a lot of people. How do you see the peace movement evolving over the next number of years? Has it reached a point where it just repeats itself, or are there ways in which the peace movement can reach out to more people?

Thompson: It is past the stage of telling people that nuclear war would be a bad thing. People know that by now. I think it has also exhausted the stage of excessive obsessional interest in nuclear weapons. Every part of Britain and probably every part of Canada has experts on nuclear Weapons who could answer back to the establishment. That is a very good thing. Nevertheless, the peace movement got hung up with nuclear weapons rather than with the actual politics of the Cold War which has moved very much forward on the agenda. People now are asking why there has to be a Cold War, and so both the old ghosts of Stalinism and the old very lively ghost of Atlantisism are under question.

The peace movement is actually part of the structure of making peace. We have to hang on to it because it is not just talk about internationalism; it is actually the beginnings of the creation of international people-to-people links. These links and exchanges and communications have been part of the peace movement theme, and they still remain extremely important.

We are reaching a new stage of proliferation of nuclear weapons. For. example, in India and Pakistan now the nuclear weapons issue has a quite new immediacy and importance, and as the people there begin to understand this they may begin to understand that our peace movements were not just Eurocentric and Americacentric, they were also capable of being the carriers of an international strategy of nonalignment. That international strategy of nonalignment on this continent is really part of the immediate politics and diplomacy. The question of detaching or gradually phasing out the alignment of smaller nations through leaving NATO and the Warsaw Pact, creating a nonaligned area or a bridge between the two blocs, is on the agenda and is part of the politics of our time.

Books by E.P. Thompson

Zero Option. Merlin Press, 1982.

Beyond the Cold War. Pantheon, 1982.

Writing by Candlelight. Monthly Review, 1981.

The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. Monthly Review, 1980.

Whigs and Hunters. Pantheon, 1976.

The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin, 1968.

Dr. Alvin Finkel is a professor of history at Athabasca University and shares Thompson's interests in labour history and the peace movement.

An Aurora Update

E.P. Thompson died in 1993. Well known for writing about social history, E.P. Thompson's work also included non historical work such as poetry, a major study of William Blake and voluminous political writings.

His wife, Dorothy compiled a collection of his writings over the span of his career in The Essential E.P. Thompson, New Press, 2001. See an excerpt from the first chapter.

The University of Warwick Library, UK, established "The Edward Thompson Memorial Bursary" in honour of E.P. Thompson who was one of its distinguished founders and a past President.

Books by E.P. Thompson

An Aurora Update

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