The Law at Greenham Common

LISA FURCHTGOTT Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/48/4/789/918026 by guest on 01 October 2021 Tents Amid the Fragments: The Law at Greenham Common Abstract The years-long women’s antinuclear protest in south-central Britain was a cause celebrated by E.P. Thompson, who after 1979 underwent a transformation from Midlands-ensconced historian and teacher to prominent anti-Bomb and anti-bloc activist. Greenham Common, however, represented no simple embodiment of his program. Many among the camp’s occupants lent effort in struggles elsewhere, especially the decade’s major strikes among miners and office cleaners. Women’s participation in these ventures—as much as the police persecution of the camp, which brought about its repeated dismantling—begs the question of whether Thompson’s “exterminism” denied a unifying materialist logic to the British security state, as the women in their tents did not. In this sense Greenham Common both evokes and departs from the trajectories of socialist-feminists in the United States at midcentury: in the face of their own persecution, some embraced pacifist or otherwise fragmentary politics, and others only grew more devoted to refining overarching analyses centering on the enmeshing of gender and exploitation. The camp thus urges us to consider how workers’ organization as explored in Thompson’s historical texts has weathered and shaped feminist projects, rather than see the two as distinct and conflicting lines of inquiry. Two turns unsettled the British left in 1979, around the switch to a new Conservative administration: one more quiet than the other, but not disconnect- ed. The historian E.P. Thompson shifted the focus of his essays for journals such as The New Statesman and New Society from the internal security state to the in- stallment of U.S. missiles on British ground.1 And three scholars produced a feminist critique of socialist groups in Great Britain, Beyond the Fragments. Even bearing the imprint of a tiny London community-center press, the latter pamphlet was a “striking success,” prompting a conference at Leeds the following year; at- tendants numbered more than fifteen hundred.2 Thompson, for his part, soon setting aside his academic work, was stirred to serve as spokesman for a revived European anti-nuclear movement. He helped charter the group European Nuclear Disarmament (END), and over the next decade would write and speak tirelessly on the subject, keeping no low profile: early in 1984 he squared off against Reagan’s defense secretary in a televised Oxford Union debate. Journal of Social History vol. 48 no. 4 (2015), pp. 789–802 doi:10.1093/jsh/shv043 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 790 Journal of Social History Summer 2015 The thread between the two reconfigurations—the renewal of anti-nuclear protest as a massively popular cause on the left, and scathingly articulated feminist dissatisfaction with a remote, calcified, and indeed male socialist-party leadership— was not simply their personnel: a former student of Thompson’s, Sheila Rowbotham, was one of the authors of Beyond of the Fragments. (Merlin, the press to compile Thompson’s late-1970s essays, published a fresh edition of Fragments when demand overwhelmed its first printer.) The sinew was also ideological. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/48/4/789/918026 by guest on 01 October 2021 Thompson’s new devotion to the abolition of nuclear weapons was underwritten by a commitment to left libertarianism, of the sort he had developed most point- edly in his imprecations against British state security in the two years prior. Exterminism, the concept that would ground his pacifist writings over the 1980s, asserted that the Cold War was simply “about itself,” kept going from within state bureaucracies by a force as irresistible as it was opaque. The time had come to trash schemas proposing rational links between weapons manufacture and territo- rial acquisition or surplus reinvestment. There could be determined no “extermin- ist mode of production.” Rather, what drove weapons procurement was best grasped as an “evil,” a “contamination,” or an “addiction,” a moral flaw that could not be explained any more precisely.3 And even if this psychic warp justified and protected itself by means of a “permanent war economy and a permanent enemy hypothesis,” as Thompson would allow in END’s Journal of European Nuclear Disarmament in 1984, it was the latter of the two, the ideological leg, that would prove more brittle in the face of the peace movement. Only empathy “beyond the blocs”—together with the real pressure citizens’ movements might exert on their respective states—would bring about its collapse.4 Workplace struggle, or funda- mentally economic struggle of any sort, would go nowhere. Likewise, much of Beyond the Fragments rejected work as a unifying basis of solidarity. Paid labor excluded too many, and although the insistence that all do- mestic work deserved its equivalent price could inspire theoretical calisthenics, it hardly seemed likely to “crack the extensive polarization” between home and workplace, either within sclerotic left organizations or in everyday life. Nor did it necessarily point to a way of exploding the wage relationship itself. Such creativity was more apt to flow from smaller, autonomous organizations, especially those modeling new ways of being rather than gearing up for the fight. Centralized socialist parties need not self-destruct, the book argued; but they should share space on the front lines, or even volunteer to retreat. Most critical was that relations of production, however diffuse or informal, be deposed as the primary terrain of struggle. Thompson was cited as a formative influence, in his criticism of “unre- constructed Leninist and vanguardist strategies” and in his call for “an ‘affirmative politics’ which could avoid the passions, hatreds and paranoia flourishing within the contemporary left.’”5 Notwithstanding feminist criticism of Thompson’s work over the decade to follow—centering around Joan Scott’s assessment of a too-static, too-literal deployment of gender in The Making of the English Working Class6—his late-1970s writings dovetailed perfectly with what was to be an explicitly feminist wing of the disarmament movement. These writings, along with Beyond the Fragments, cogently formu- lated its operating principles of anti-hierarchy, localism, and prefiguration. And the admiration was mutually felt: Thompson’s professions of enthusiasm for feminist pacifism in fact proved an easy hunting ground for his critics. The historian Alan Brinkley, panning Thompson’s 1985 essay compilation The Heavy Dancers for the E.P. Thompson: The Law at Greenham Common 791 London Review of Books, typically accused him of “wishing nuclear weapons away on a wave of commitment and good feeling.” One of the more exasperatingly naïve and romantic moments in the book, for Brinkley, was its lauding of the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp—a separatist encampment pitched around the perimeter of the United States-administered Cruise missile base installed in south- central England in the early 1980s—as “life-affirming,” not just a symbol but an example of “international sisterhood, peace, and love,” and somehow, in this, in- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article/48/4/789/918026 by guest on 01 October 2021 strumental.7 For some, both Thompson’s END and the Greenham women came to symbolize the dreamy futility of anti-disarmament, itself consciously part and symbol of a decentralized, anarchic left. But the two forms of protest were hardly identical in practice. The peace camp, or factions within it in any case, maintained a deep involvement in workplace conflicts the nation over; its materialist commitments are not difficult to recover. END, by contrast, kept its distance from such skirmishes. Greenham was thus set apart by its confrontation with a police force whose strength and reach had been consolidated over a decade of pitched industrial conflict. The women’s encounters with the law, on their campgrounds and elsewhere, threw into relief the cohesive force of the police, its application of lessons learned—or brutality legalized—on the picket line to other means of protest. For Thompson, however, the growth of British “authoritarian statism” could not be chalked up to some- thing so obvious as labor agitation. Its foundations were more mystified: they evoked nothing so much as exterminism, or were in fact bound up in it. Effective opposition would array itself against nuclear weapons, no longer symptoms but generators of state aggression—even that directed within. Greenham appeared to suit its action to the word. Well-policed and often-uprooted, however, the camp made clear the contradictions in Thompson’s analysis, and made urgent the question of what—beyond work, beyond the trade-union movement whose power had precipitated the construction of repressive machinery equal to it—was to unify its various actors, in a way that END could not. Greenham’s beginnings lay in in a 1979 NATO agreement to house around 150 deployment-ready Cruise missiles on British soil, to nullify, it was hoped, the disadvantage of distance borne by the U.S. should Soviet warheads launch at Western Europe. In the early fall of 1981, some three dozen protestors, men and women, marched from Cardiff to the Berkshire town of Newbury, renowned for its thoroughbred breeding and racing scene, to protest the eventual arrival of the missiles. Sporadic protests enacted next to Greenham Common—in fact a US Air Force base constructed on land that had once been the town’s common— became permanent after several months, when the decision was made to set up camp at points along the base’s fenced perimeter.

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