Midnight Run

“Strange Victories” is a famous underground pamphlet about the anti-nuclear movement, published in 1979. Strictly speaking, it´s an issue of “Midnight Notes”, a magazine or perhaps pamphlet series published by the mysterious Midnight Notes Collective, of which very little else is known. They seem to be anarchist, but avoid the typical anarchist jargon in favor of one which sounds more Marxist. Sometimes, the collective is described as “autonomist” but I admit I know very little about the autonomist current within anarchism (it´s distinct from the milieu usually known as Autonomen, although there may be some overlap). “Strange Victories” has been promoted as a pro-violence pamphlet, but while the Collective doesn’t shun violence as a means of struggle, most of the publication deals with other issues. The main point is to criticize the anti-nuclear movement (which was particularly strong during the late 1970´s and early 1980´s) for being dominated by the middle class. Instead, Midnight Notes wants an anti-nuke movement of working class people, a movement directed directly at capitalism, rather than simply against “nukes” which threaten “all of humanity”. There is also an implicit criticism in the pamphlet of Green movements overall.

Midnight Notes regard the 1970´s energy crisis as a hoax. There really was no crisis – the monopolistic energy companies raised the prices simply because they had the power to do so. Indeed, there are no shortages of energy and other resources at all. Everyone in the world can be clothed, fed and get a high standard of living, if only resources would be more equitably shared. Coal in particular is a cheap and good resource. (Today, this ideas sound awfully naïve, but there was a thriving ecologist movement already back in 1979, so I´m not sure if the Collective really has any excuses here.) Thus, the energy crisis is simply an attack by capitalism on the living standards of the working class. The nuclear power industry takes this one step further. It represents the fusion of capital and state power, and plays a generally repressive role in society with its tightly regimented labor force, police and military protecting it, fear generated by it, etc. Also, nuclear power is an attempt to break the power of unionized labor in the coal and oil sectors. As for solutions to the “crisis”, while nuclear power has to go, there is nothing in principle which could stop capitalism from using solar power against the working class, perhaps by hiking *those* prices too. Thus, workers´ management of production and distribution is the only way to deal with the “energy crisis”.

Midnight Notes then point out that despite all the above, the movement against nuclear power isn´t working class in character. Rather, it emerged in rural areas, usually in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear power plants themselves. The Collective reveals that if looked at closely, the “rural” movement is actually made up of back-to-the-land middle class people from universities and colleges. (I suppose a less sympathetic observer would call them “hippies”.) While they do enjoy the support of farmers, local small entrepreneurs and such fundamentally conservative sectors, the organized movement – in this case, the Clamshell Alliance – is fundamentally urban middle class and faux leftist. Or rather rurally transplanted urban middle class. This creates a strong tension between the anti-nuclear movement and the working class, which is usually conspicuous by its absence. 

The Midnight Notes Collective are scathing in their criticism of the “leftist” intellectual types dominating the Clamshell Alliance. Being discarded parts of the “educational”-propaganda apparatus, they have no direct relationship to capital. They can´t protest their condition in any other way than to pretend to represent “humanity as a whole”, but this really reflects a relationship to capital at its most general level. The middle class hippies are really positioning themselves as the future professional and intellectual planners of generalized capital, a form of planning which will usher in a more “rational” form of state capitalism. Even their seemingly radical back-to-the-land philosophy does service to capital by experimenting with new ways of “labor intensive” production (i.e. more exploitation, but of a “classical” sweatshop labor kind). By contrast, ordinary workers have a direct relationship to capital, and hence no other choice than to identify with their own “special interests” (really class interests). They don´t really care, except in the abstract, about whether or not nuclear power is a threat to “humanity” for the next 500,000 years (one of the talking point of the Clamshell). No, they are threatened by the energy crisis and its nuclear component *in the here and now* on the basis of their proletarian position within capitalism.

The pamphlet also criticizes the concrete structure of the Clamshell Alliance. Decision-making was based on consensus, which according to the authors really means that the privileged and well-educated take command. The “Clams” were organized in affinity groups, really a kind of cliques based on personal friendship, and hence excellent for creating social cohesion within the hippie subculture, but excluding everyone else. Pacifism is disparaged by Midnight Notes as an elitist tactic. Only people with long training in peaceful civil disobedience can effectively execute pacifist actions. The actions are presupposed on the notion that the participating privileged elements are “valuable” to society and hence can´t be touched by the police or National Guard (seen as “lower”). If all forms of violence are rejected, the only alternative to elitist peaceful disobedience is sheer legalism, perhaps backed up by strictly non-confrontational protest marches at designated places. These can mobilize the broad masses, but only as subordinates to legalist politicians. (Shortly after the pamphlet was written, an anti-nuclear political party was indeed formed, the Citizens´ Party.)

Despite their “working class” perspective, I think it´s obvious that Midnight Notes Collective were really part of the same milieu they are attacking. A “collective” is, of course, an affinity group. How do they know so much about the Clamshell Alliance and various “progressive” farms in New England? Because they have enough spare time to join or visit. Why the strange poetry and obscure references to “Alice in Wonderland”? Because they have college education. Also, note the strong hippie flavor of the criticism against nuclear power plants at the end of Section II. Nuclear power plants are said to be symbols of psychological repression, they are built to suppress “obscure wishes and desires”, and so on. Of whom? Hippies, of course. It seems Alan Watts (or was it Wilhelm Reich) was the man even in the Midnight Notes Collective…

My main problem with all this is something else, however. While I do sympathize or empathize with the ecologist movement (or sections of it), their demands were quite simply unrealistic. Without nuclear power, no nuclear weapons. Without US nuclear weapons, Nazi Germany would have won the war. That would be a “strange victory” indeed. During the Cold War, depending on which side you support, either the US, the Soviet Union or China clearly needed nuclear warheads. Unless you think anarchist “workers´ militias” work against Soviet Russian tanks…or nukes. Today, the problem is the exact opposite: no, there aren´t “enough resources” for everyone, they are shrinking, and due to climate change (the coal!), they will shrink even more in the future. Who knows, perhaps the hippies will turn out to be the real victors in this ideological confrontation. Before they get eaten by roving packs of feral dogs emerging at midnight…

O Oysters, said the Carpenter,

You´ve had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?

But answer came there none –

and this was scarcely odd, because

they´d eaten every one.