Dave Webb, member of Scientists for Global Responsibility and a Professor of Engineering and Director of the Praxis Centre at Leeds Metropolitan University and Chair of Yorkshire CND, who has given expert evidence the European Parliament, invited Steve Schofield to contribute to his blog.
We cling onto the belief that representative democracy reflects majority opinion and consensus-building around acceptable compromises. But this is the big lie. Democracy is a sham, a distraction from the real meaning of power and power relationships. The UK is run by, and for, an elite, military-industrial-complex (MIC) supporting US imperialism and Western capitalism. Its over-riding objective is to dominate access to non-renewable resources around the world and secure profits for major corporations.
Democracy is tolerated by the elite in so far as it supports the illusion of representative government. Protest can then be channelled into acceptable forms of ineffective lobbying rather than direct action that strikes at the heart of real power. For the Peace Movement, including organisations like CND and the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, the nature of protest and its capacity to bring about radical change is, or at least should be, crucial issues.
Instead, far too much effort continues to be focused on Parliamentary lobbying with hardly any practical or intellectual support for direct action. Reports and briefings are churned out to influence the Westminster village, under the mistaken belief that consensus-building through mainstream parties and politicians actually works.
Trident represents the supreme example of this folly. The confection served up by the MIC is that no final decisions have been made because the ‘main gate’ has been delayed until after the next General Election. Parliament, therefore, has the final say and lobbying could still influence the outcome, even at this stage. In reality, not only has the programme for replacement submarines and missile systems been firmly on course since 2005/06, it has been accelerated. All the major elements including hull sections for the first submarine will have reached the stage of early construction by 2013, billions will have been spent, and there will be no other option than to continue.
This is ideological conflict at its starkest. An elite determined on a particular course of action and willing to manipulate a sham democratic process to provide the illusion of accountability, pitted against a grass-roots organisation committed to disarmament and which, in response, is mobilising people on an equally determined course of direct action. Except that it isn’t.
A similar critique could be applied to the Department of Peace Studies, founded in the 1970s as an radical alternative to the mainstream mediocrity of international relations departments. Instead of an overtly Western, ‘realist’ approach, the Department pioneered work on issues like comprehensive disarmament, common security through an equitable and sustainable distribution of resources between developed and developing nations, and structural violence that highlighted the underlying issues of poverty and resource exploitation as the sources of conflict
The Tory government (and it is a Tory government) is embarking on an ideologically-driven and anti-democratic programme to dismantle public services under the guise of deficit-reduction, while spending £40 billion a year on armaments. Peace Studies could have been at the vanguard of the opposition campaign. For example, ideas of structural violence could have been used to expose the terrible damage inflicted on the lives of ordinary working-class people, including increased deprivation, unemployment, ill-health and homelessness, while linking disarmament to economic justice. But, apart from the efforts of individual Peace Studies students who have been active in the local Peoples Coalition Against the Cuts campaign, the Department has been virtually invisible and the silence has been deafening.
Both national CND and Peace Studies have lost their original radicalism and have been channelled into mainstream irrelevance. All the boxes can be ticked around academic excellence, institutional respectability, access to senior politicians, etc. Commissions of retired grandees are set up and their deliberations treated with due reverence. Reports are published and given serious weight in the corridors of power. But it doesn’t change a thing.
What’s needed are both organisational and intellectual hubs for radical change that are completely comfortable with the idea of direct action and major disruption to the power nexus. Research will still be important on issues like the arms trade, nuclear weapons policy, arms conversion, amongst many others. But it should take place outside formal academia, with its spurious framework of intellectual objectivity, so that it can be clearly, and unapologetically aligned with political radicalism. Parliamentary lobbying should be closed down and all organisational and research efforts focused on supporting and mobilising grass-roots, direct action.
These are critical times when the Military Industrial Complex will lock the UK into generational choices on nuclear weapons and an extension of imperialist power projection. It’s time to restore radicalism to a central position in the struggle for disarmament. It’s time for the Peace Movement to stand up and be counted.
Steve Schofield
March 2011
http://yorkshirecnd.org.uk/blogs/posts-by-dave-webb/power-and-protest
