Strange Victories

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Analysis of the Antinuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe
Midnight Notes collective, 1979.

A pamphlet published by some activists in 1979 after the Three Mile Island accident:

"we shall look at the anti-nuclear movement as a movement of social organisation, determined by the class interest of the people involved in it, by its relationship to capital, its historical, geographical and psychological conditions."

It is mainly focused on the US, but there are some passages discussing Europe as well (e.g. Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Basque region). As a piece of analysis, the text presents various thoughts on the nature of nuclear industry, antinuclear movement, and society in general. I find these thoughts interesting and relevant, so i created a discussion page for thinking about how they could apply to the present situation, and to different places.

There's also a sequel, which i will add here when i have the time: No Future Notes: The Work/Energy Crisis and the Anti-nuclear Movement (pdf available on Midnight Notes' homepage. Their other stuff might also be of interest: http://www.midnightnotes.org). There's also a shorter collection of some excerpts, that can be printed as an A4 flyer. The excerpt flyer is also available in finnish on takku.net, and the whole pamphlet will also be available in finnish later on the site.

Below is the full original text.

Introduction of 1985 republication

By Alfredo M. Bonanno.

Strange Victories

After the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, we all know that we pay not only for our electricity, but also for financing the destruction of our health. Nuclear reactors are not only expensive and ineffective, they are a permanent danger. In 1978 alone, atomic plants had 2,835 'incidents' and they ran at only 67.2% of their capacity (New York Times, April 15, 1979). Radioactivity causes cancer, Leukemia and genetic damages. It doesn't respect county or State borders; radioactive iodine contaminates our milk and we have no means to control it. Radioactive clouds travel with the wind, and the pollution of our water and food distributes it everywhere. Electricity is only a part of our energy expenditures. We pay also for gas, heating and gasoline. In the last few months the prices for fuel started rising again, after they had risen more than 100% between 1973 and 1975. With Carter's deregulation of petroleum prices, they will go up continuously in the coming years and probably will reach European levels of 2.50 dollars per gallon of gasoline very soon.


The Government and the energy companies tell us that 'we' are in a squeeze since the 'energy shortage' forces 'us' to build nuclear plants and raise rates and prices. They tell us that the Arabs have us by a string and 'we' must 'protect' ourselves. Most people have not bought this story. Polls show that 70% of the people do not believe there is an energy shortage - simply because it is obviously false. 78% believe the companies 'just want to make more money' (New York Times, April 10, 1979). All other fuel prices are going up as well: natural gas, coal, uranium and oil. This has nothing to do with the Arabs (all our coal and most of our uranium is mined domestically) nor with shortages (US coal reserves could last for hundreds of years and there is more crude oil available than ever before). The energy prices go up because the companies have the power to raise them. They control oil wells, coal-mines and power plants, and they can blackmail us at will because we depend entirely on their supply. We have only the choice between paying or freezing to death. Higher energy prices are a continuous attack on our wages and force us therefore to work more and to work for the plans of the companies, who are not interested in supplying the people with energy, but are interested in making money and strengthening their control over us.


The nuclear power plants are the ultimate peak of this blackmail. The energy companies demand not only that we should accept higher energy prices, but also higher levels of radioactivity, cancer and fear. Not only must we work more and harder to pay the bills, but also we must lose our health and well-being. With the threat of nuclear danger, they can impose 'safety measures' on us; install a police State, order us to leave our homes, evacuate our families, respect curfews. How can we know that they tell the truth? Most people don't believe them anyway; polls showed that only 16% of the people believe what government and nuclear officials said during the Three Mile Island accident.


What can we do against this politics of fear and exploitation? First, we have to reject this crisis mentality they want to impose on us. We must know that there is enough energy, enough money (in 1978 the capitalists made record profits of 130.7 billion dollars), enough food, clothing and housing for everybody, employed or unemployed, waged or unwaged. And if problems of energy conservation arise, we must make sure that the people themselves control such measures and that they are not dictated to us by the energy-capitalists in order to make more money. Before we can speak of energy conservation, we must have more power.


Higher prices and radioactivity hit everybody everywhere: blacks, hispanics and urban whites as well as farmers, small-town residents and atomic workers around nuclear plants. This fact is crucial for the future development of the anti-nuclear movement which started in semi-rural and suburban areas. This movement was a first response of concerned people against nuclear development. This anti-nuclear movement is a social movement with its specific type of people involved, with its specific ideology, tactics and experiences. Now that the situation is changing, that 'Everybody' is hit by the nuclear issue, the experiences of the movement must be studied and - if necessary - criticised. It is important both for 'old' anti-nuclear militants and for 'new' people in urban areas who are entering mobilisations against nuclear energy to find out if and how the anti-nuclear movement can play a role in our struggle against the power of capital.


In the case of the anti-nuclear movement, there is a risk that it could be used against poor urban people. As long as the anti-nuclear movement does not clearly attack the price-policies of the energy companies and does not link the 'health' and 'money' issues, it cannot be understood by people who are struggling for daily survival. In such a situation capital can play the anti-nuclear movement against the poor or vice versa. For example, the energy companies and the State (the government) can blame the anti-nuclear movement for the higher electric bills; or they can try to impose solar energy and higher energy prices.


We are writing this paper because we are convinced that the anti-nuclear movement in general and the 'new' anti-nuclear movement in urban areas in particular could be a catalyst for struggles against the 'crisis' and capitalism's attack against the working class. Now the most urgent problem is: How can we organise against capital? In attempting to answer this question, we shall look at the anti-nuclear movement as a movement of social organisation, determined by the class interest of the people involved in it, by its relationship to capital, its historical, geographical and psychological conditions.


We shall not specifically deal with the nuclear issue as an environmental and technological problem. We know that any technology developed by capital is used as a weapon against the working class, i.e., ourselves. Further, the nuclear industry is only one of the actual fronts of new technology, together with the computer and chemical industries. Nuclear energy production is used to break the struggles of the coal-miners in the US or of the oil-workers in the Middle East and in the US. (This is the reason why coal, an abundant energy source which could be made safe with available technology, is not used instead of uranium.) There is no such thing as an independent 'technological and scientific progress' occurring outside class struggle. 'Progress' has become another word for 'more effective exploitation' and has nothing to do with our needs and wishes. The present capitalist technology has been shaped for exploitation and control over our lives. It is not a neutral means that can be used in a different class context. There will be no 'liberated assembly-line,' no 'socialist nuclear power,' no 'acceptable risks.' On the other hand, there is no reason why capital could not be able to use solar energy against us, although so far they have not.

Chapter 1. Who Is Involved in the Antinuclear Movement?

Strangely, the anti-nuclear movement did not originate in highly populated, industrialised and polluted areas where, it could be assumed, a struggle against environmental dangers would seem to be urgent. The anti-nuclear movement is not an immediate response to the attack on the quality of life which takes place in the 'industrial triangles' of the US and Europe. In West Germany, where the anti-nuclear movement first started, it emerged not in the traditionally polluted Ruhr area, but in South-west Germany in a rural zone of vineyards and small farmers (Wyhl, 1974). The same was true for France (Malville, near Lyons, is situated in an essentially rural area), Switzerland (Kaiseraugst, Goesgen, etc) and Italy (e.g. the nuclear plant of montalto di Castro in the Maremme). A similar type of area is found near Seabrook nuclear plant in New England, which is one of the few regions of the US where an older type of small or middle-sized farming and fishing exists (in the rest of the US we should rather speak of agricultural industry).


But the strange location of the anti-nuclear movement is not so puzzling at a second look: It is due to the conscious choice of the nuclear industry. The 'back-to-the-land' movement of capital is easily explained by the 'bad experiences' it had in the metropolitan, industrialised centres. Urban riots, student agitations, workers' struggles were developed and favoured by the urban environment. The capitalists realised that the cities were dangerous for their health.


Nuclear development presented possibilities for a new organisation of industrial geography, a new industrial frontier. Never before in the history of capital have the sites of industrial installations been more carefully planned than nuclear power plants. Some decisive aspects of this planning have been:


  • minimising risk in case of accidents (rural areas are less populated and pose fewer problems in case of evacuation);
  • safety-distance from dangerous, unreliable class-sectors (problems of sabotage, 'bad' influence on personnel);
  • strategic locations around metropolitann agglomerations (very useful for evacuations for different purposes, e.g. in case of social troubles);
  • political passivity or conservatism of the local populations; (in this respect capital made some of the most painful miscalculations).

1


Plant locations were chosen from the beginning to prevent protests and organised actions against or within nuclear plants. The problems of communication and organisation in rural areas compounded by the complicated class situation mixing small owners, wage-depending people or rural intelligentsia, coupled with the relatively immense financial power of the companies, were supposed to guarantee a quiet development and disarm any opposition.


While this plan worked in some cases, it did not in others. Protests developed despite these difficult conditions. Pay-offs to local governments and some advantages to local businesses could not always effectively divide the local population. However, the anti-nuclear protest of local communities usually did not go beyond legal actions (voting in town meetings, lawsuits, petitions, media action, etc.), although there are some significant exceptions, mostly due to the farmers' radicalism (tractor blockades in Germany, cutting of power lines in Minnesota, and other episodes). For them the construction was not a mere 'danger for mankind during the next 500,000 years,' but a direct attack on their income.2 Confronted with the allied power of the companies and the government, these legal actions led mostly to a dead-end. Only the emergence of an additional factor decided whether the struggle would move to a higher level or the nuclear industry had won that round. Only where this 'factor' was present can we speak of an anti-nuclear movement.

An Additional Factor

This 'additional factor' was introduced by an important change in the class structure of some rural areas which occurred in the early seventies, a period when the planning and location of the nuclear plants had already been completed. (In the US, this process takes about 12 years; while in Europe it used to be faster, but most plants now completed had obviously been planned in the sixties.) The change we are speaking of is the resettlement of urban intellectual workers (wage-depending professional, teachers, artists, journalists, social-workers, students, government workers, etc.) in rural zones, a move largely stimulated by the various sixties movements. As a 'back-to-the-land' movement, it chose rural areas which were not too isolated and too far from the cities, for it needed continuous contacts with the educational and cultural industries.


In the US this 'additional factor' decisively emerged in two regions: in New England and in California.3 These are, not surprisingly, the areas where anti-nuclear movements have developed most continuity and mass-character. The choice of these areas is directly linked to the specific interests of this intellectual proletariat (we use the term proletariat in the original marxist sense: all the people who live on a wage and cannot live on their capital without working - 'independently of whether the wage is high or low'.) On the level of production these areas are the major national or regional centres of the education industry in which workers receive 'skills' and qualifications which result in a higher valuation of their labour power. They provide a variety of full-time, part-time, seasonal and temporary jobs themselves and in related businesses, such as bureaucracy, social assistance, book-stores, printing-shops, building-maintenance, drug-dealing, culture, art, sports, psychiatry, restaurants and small shops, etc. A look at the rate of private and public education expenditures per inhabitant in these areas can give some evidence.


The most typical case for us is Massachusetts, with expenditures far above the 2nd ranking New York, and forming the centre of the New England area, while New Hampshire and Connecticut follow close behind in the national ranks. Moreover, rural New England has a good network of highways leading to nearby major cities like New York and Boston, the educational and cultural centre of the US. Thus, rural New England has attracted a lot of intellectual workers in search of a quiet country life. To a lesser degree, this is also true of California around San Francisco, and other areas. Rural New England and California offered not only possibilities of external jobs, but also conditions for cheap reproduction of this type of worker. By the term reproduction we mean all the work that has to be done in order to keep us in shape so that we are able to work: eating, clothing, relaxation, medical care, emotional 'services', discipline, education, entertainment, cleaning, procreation, etc. Sometimes what we call 'life' is, in reality, only reproduction for capitalist exploitation. Cheap reproduction is particularly urgent for the intellectual workers as they hold only temporary jobs or part-time jobs or live on welfare and food-stamps.


In New England, subsistence farming, collective reproduction (communal living) and mutual use of the skills of the highly qualified intellectual labour-force via the substitution of capital-intensive re-production (hospitals, microwave ovens) by labour-intensive reproduction techniques (macro-biotics, yoga, bio-genetics, meditation, massage, walks and fresh air) were favoured by the agricultural structure, the climate (which imposes a certain discipline), the vicinity of metropolitan areas and low real estate prices.


This constellation allowed a certain refusal of full-time intellectual work and the loosening of capitalist control over it. Under this aspect, the retreat to the countryside and the alternative lifestyle are forms of struggle by intellectual workers against capital. Capital has always had problems in controlling its intellectual labour force mainly because the profit returns are indirect and slow, particularly for disciplines like philosophy, literature and art. This loose tie between intellectual work and capital does not imply that it stands outside of capital, even if it is temporarily devoted to apple-picking, woodworking or cow-milking, and if it is geographically separated from the centres of formal capitalist command (like universities, publishing houses, etc.). There is no such thing as 'outside of capital' in a capitalist society: from a long-term perspective, the 'back-to-the-land' intellectuals are just testing out new capitalist possibilities of dealing with certain problems of cheap production.


One of the requirements for the cheap reproduction of the 'back-to-the-land' intellectual labour-force is a relatively intact natural surrounding. Nature, if intact, is cheap or even free. Nature as a means of reproduction is important for these intellectual workers because the specialisation and one-sidedness of their work generates psychological instability and requires periods of complete relaxation without jarring sensorial stimuli (noise, media, social contacts). Nature is the most efficient compensation for intellectual stress since it represents the unity of body and mind against the capitalist division of labour. Extensive consumption of nature has traditionally been an element of the re-production of intellectual workers. (It started with Rousseau, then came the Romantics, Thoreau, the early tourists, Tolstoi, artists' colonies in the Alps, etc). The ecological movement responds directly to the class interests of the intellectual sector of the proletariat and the struggle against nuclear power plants is a mere extension of this struggle.

===Movement in New England

=

The history of the Green Mountain Post Films is a good illustration for this process in New England. It's story began in 1967 in Washington, DC, when Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo founded Liberation News Service as an essential means of exchanging news in the fast-growing anti-war movement. By 1968 LNS suffered an irreconcilable split between 'orthodox Marxist-Leninists' and a 'less doctrinaire' faction led by Bloom and Mungo. Mungo and friends decided to leave New York City, then home of LNS, and resettle at a farm in Packers Corner, Vermont; and, soon after, Bloom and his band found a farm in Montague, West-Massachusetts, some 15 miles away.


A weekly news service dispatch came out of the Montague barn for a few months, but it trickled off under the pressure of a New England winter. The abrupt switch to farm life temporarily forced media and politics into the background. The two communities were busy struggling to survive. Then, in November, 1969, Marshall Bloom killed himself, supposedly due to the isolation. His death served to strengthen the farm-people's resolve to keep working in the media. Over the years the two farms produced a considerable amount of books and articles. After the Vietnam war, political concerns were largely subsumed by the demands of rural self-sufficiency. It takes years to get an organic farm going; fortunately, haying, the maple trees' gift of sap, and authors' fees provided some cash.


Then in December 1973, the Northeast Utilities Company announced plans to build a twin-tower nuclear plant three miles from the farm in Montague. One of the first reactions was Sam Lovejoy, a long-term farm resident, cutting down a 500-foot weather observation tower which was to precede the proposed plant. He then hitched a ride to the Montague police station and handed in a statement on the necessity of civil disobedience in times of environmental emergency. He went on trial and won.


The two farms have provided scores of informal ideologists and leaders of the anti-nuclear movement in the New England area: Harvey Wasserman, Anna Gyorgy and others. They produced several films and also distributed a film on the Wyhl anti-nuclear movement which had a strong influence on the movement against the nuclear plants in New England, particularly at Seabrook. (cf New Age, Special Report, 1978 and Ray Mungo, Famous Long Ago).


The crisis after 1973 has intensified also the attacks of capital against the intellectual proletariat which had conquered certain levels of power in the sixties (represented mainly by the high educational budgets and the expansions of the universities and research institutions) and had been able to defend itself against tight command structures. The counter-attack of capital was mainly oriented toward regaining control over the productivity of the intellectual labour force. By cuts of educational and university budgets (engineered with the 'fiscal crisis'), food-price inflation and destruction of the rural retreats (where reproduction is cheap), capital has tried in the last few years to regain control. This process of devaluation put the underemployed intellectual proletariat in a tight squeeze.


By 1976, when the first wave of attacks was over, it was clear that the job-perspectives for intellectual workers would be dim for decades and that they could not expect to get out individually or by intensified retraining (revaluation). in 1976 the Clamshell Alliance was founded, the first sentence of the founding statement being:


"RECOGNIZING: 1) That the survival of humankind depends upon preservation of our natural environment." it is obvious that the 'survival of mankind' is intimately linked to the survival of this intellectual proletariat, and the preservation of 'our' natural environment can be taken literally. (intellectuals have always had the precious talent of presenting their own class interests as those of 'humankind' - as though their own class interests were something dirty).


The 'choice' of the anti-nuclear issue as terrain of struggle is to be explained not only by the specific history of the two farms in New England or other similar developments. For underemployed or temporarily employed workers it is very difficult to organise on the job. The jobs are unstable, the possibilities of mass struggle are minimal (the worker-boss ratio being low or, in the case of self-managed or 'alternative' jobs, reaching 1/1), and sabotage is ineffective in the case of intellectual work and in the absence of expensive capital goods. All this pushed the struggle immediately on the level of the 'general' circulation of capital, on the level of 'society', of 'humankind'. As it is not possible for them to attack any specific capital from the inside, the struggle has to be launched from the outside.


The antinuclear protests of local residents presented such a possibility of intervention from the outside. A unifying factor from outside could intervene in a deadlock situation of conflicting interests of small storekeepers, farmers, workers connected with the nuclear plan, professional petty-bourgeois, etc. The anti-nuclear militants of the 'second movement' could keep together this strange class mixture and at the same time use it as 'hostage' against an isolation of their own struggle. So it was possible to forge that 'misalliance' between former urban radicals and rural conservatives. This alliance was, however, never without problems, and the division between 'locals' and anti-nuclear militants remained clear on the level of real actions, with the locals, for example, supporting occupations or demonstrations mainly passively.


The development of this movement was facilitated by the fact that a large number of the New England "subsisters" had had experiences in the anti-war movement, i.e., in mobilisation techniques, media work, information finding, legal work, etc. Further, once the movement was started it developed its own dynamic reproductive functions for the militants as it provided social contacts and interesting events for old politicos who began getting bored in the relative isolation of the country life. Additionally, the movement became a source of income and created jobs for intellectual workers (writing and selling articles, books, buttons, T-shirts, making conferences, figuring out 'alternative energy sources', etc.). In this regard, it was a direct answer to the problem of survival for at least a particular section of "humankind".

===Outside the Movement

=

Perhaps the class structure of the anti-nuclear movement becomes even more clear when we look at those Sectors of the working class who are not present in it: factory workers, blacks and urban minority people, atomic workers (with Some important exceptions), construction workers and young urban clerical and Service workers. All these urban or industrial class-sectors are usually exposed to substantially higher levels of pollution and environmental stress and are, even when living in large cities, not safer in the case of radioactive fallout when a nuclear accident occurs, as the accident at Three Mile Island has demonstrated. But these sectors have a qualitatively different relationship to capital, more stable in the case of the factory workers (unions, family, mass organisation on the job) or without any assets in the case of the poor (their labour-power is not very valuable or is even worthless for capital because little money has been invested in their reproduction). Even more different are the types of reproduction, including all "cultural" differences, straight lifestyle, etc. The indifference of these sectors toward the anti-nuclear movement (or better: issue) is not based on a "lack of education and information", as anti-nuclear militants often bitterly complain. Even very uneducated class-sectors have always been able to grasp the essential knowledge about their problems, if the knowledge were in their interest and presented possibilities of struggle. There is of course no such thing as a "theoretical class interest": the uneducated Iranian masses have been able to beat the CIA-trained Shah regime which was backed by the most educated capital in the world, U.S. capital; scores of poor people have the skills to cheat welfare; workers can deal with their union bureaucrats; etc. Moreover, recent polls show that practically everybody distrusts the energy lies of the government and the companies. The problem is not education, but Organisation and finding ways of effective and direct struggle.


So far, the anti-nuclear movement has presented no promising way of acting for the urban working or unemployed people. "Nuclear danger" alone can trigger activity only if there is an immediate material interest involved. It is pointless to be afraid of something if you can't do anything against it... (That's why nuclear disarmament movements provoke so little reaction, even with a global, horrible catastrophe being possible at any second.) There is no "objective danger" and death is not immediately a political category. Power is.


===The European Movement

=

The formation and class composition of the European anti-nuclear movements follow in general the American pattern. The main difference consists in that in Europe the new intellectual, work-refusing working class has not been geographically concentrated in certain regions. European capital has not been able to organise the division of labour, especially between physical and intellectual work, along well-defined geographical lines. The movement started in Germany where the 'subsistence intellectuals' had reached relatively high levels of autonomy (the instalment of the social democratic government in the late 60's marked the impact of the movement and presented large material concessions to students, intellectuals, etc) which were then brutally attacked in the crisis (ideologically covered by Red Army Faction (RAF, `Baader-Meinhof' )-hunting hysteria. The process of alliance of the 'first anti-nuclear movement' with the 'second movement' was very similar to the one in New England. It represented a 'little political miracle', for the 'alternative' people were officially stigmatised as 'terrorists' and the populations of the nuclear sites were traditionally right-wing.


The lack of geographical division in Europe favoured the class-specific expansion of the movement. Unlike the US, whole sectors of urban young or unemployed workers joined it, not particularly because of the anti-nuclear issue, but for its quality as a general social movement expressing insubordination, rebellion, the possibility of violent struggle, etc. As the whole plethora of the 'new' or 'radical' left quickly filled its ranks, huge demonstrations of dozens of thousands of people like those in Brokdorf, Kaiseraugst, Malville, Kalkar, etc, were possible. In Europe, everything is geographically and politically near', communications are easy and fast, there is a continuity of 'demonstration culture', while the existence of socially 'homogenised' political parties (particularly socialist and communist) immediately link all types of issues to the general political power game. This can be seen by the fact that the nuclear issue has been used by different political parties to overthrow the governments: In Sweden the conservatives used it against the ruling social democrats and won; in France the socialists use it against a liberalist government; in Switzerland the antinuclear issue was first used by the extreme right, then the extreme left, at last also by the social democrats. This further proves that the anti-nuclear issue by itself fails to provide a definition of the class-content of the movement.