investigation, education, publicity, lobbying, law suits, meetings and promotion of alternatives. Although actions such as strikes and occupations have not been as prominent as on some other environmental issues, a full range of nonviolent actions can readily be used to oppose pesticides and promote alternatives.[7] A nonviolent campaign against pesticides can be assessed using the check list.
1. Does the campaign help to
• undermine the violent underpinnings of capitalism, or
• undermine the legitimacy of capitalism, or
• build a nonviolent alternative to capitalism?
The answer to this question, applied to antipesticide campaigns, is likely to be “no.” A campaign certainly can challenge the legitimacy of pesticide manufacturers, but this does not necessarily undermine capitalism’s legitimacy generally.
Of course, challenges to pesticides can be extremely valuable even if they do not challenge the capitalist system in any fundamental way.
2. Is the campaign participatory?
This depends on the campaign. Antipesticide campaigns can be participatory — for example involving most members of a local community affected by pesticides — but some lobbying efforts have very low participation.
3. Are the campaign’s goals built in to its methods?
Typical goals of antipesticide campaigns are to reduce pesticide use to much lower levels and to promote alternatives. Campaigns against pesticides cannot easily build goals into methods, except in the trivial sense that activists do not use pesticides in their campaigning. On the other hand, promotion of alternatives, such as organic farming practices to reduce pest levels, toleration of higher crop losses and use of biological controls, all have great potential for incorporating ends in means.
4. Is the campaign resistant to cooption?
The most effective form of cooption in the pesticide area is government regulation. Regulations on pesticide toxicity, use or distribution appear to deal with problems but easily fail due to lax limits, poor enforcement and negligible penalties for violations. Furthermore, regulations seldom provide much encouragement for alternatives. Therefore, campaigning that is oriented to improving regulation is enmeshed in an official system that doesn’t work very well.
The route of promoting alternatives directly also can be coopted, though with much more beneficial results. The practice of organic farming involves elimination of synthetic pesticides. Organic farming can be taken in a collective direction, in which self-reliance, sharing and community solidarity are key elements, and in which control over the process is kept in the hands of the farmers. However, it can also be taken in a commercial direction, in which case organic produce becomes simply another means to make money. Companies can get involved by producing naturally occurring pesticides. Thus organic farming has the potential to be a significant challenge to capitalist agriculture but also can be coopted into the capitalist marketplace. Campaigns around pesticides can push in either direction.
In summary, campaigns against the excessive use of pesticides do not have a great potential for challenging capitalism, through they can be very valuable within themselves. The most anticapitalist direction for antipesticide campaigns is through promoting alternatives, especially in the noncommercial aspects of organic farming movement.
Nuclear power
Nuclear power is the production of electricity by harnessing the process of nuclear fission, using uranium as the fuel. Proponents claim that it is a clean and cheap method of power generation. Critics cite numerous disadvantages, including the hazards of long-lived radioactive wastes, the risk of nuclear reactor accidents, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by more governments (since nuclear power technology and expertise is linked to the capacity to produce nuclear weapons), high costs, the mining of uranium on indigenous people’s lands, and reductions in civil liberties due to the need to protect against criminal and terrorist use of nuclear materials.
The first nuclear power plants were built in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, nuclear power was well on its way to becoming a major power source, with hundreds of large plants constructed, especially in the United States and Soviet Union.
Unlike pesticides, which have been manufactured primarily by corporations, nuclear power has been a creature of states.[8] Some of the very earliest plants in Britain and the Soviet Union were designed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, with electricity as a by-product. Military research and development, plus government sponsorship, were crucial in getting the nuclear option going. In most countries, nuclear power has been totally owned and controlled by the state, with corporations only involved in a minor fashion. Partly this has been because of links to actual or potential military uses of nuclear materials. As well, in many countries the electricity sector has been government-run. Finally, the huge costs and the risks of catastrophic accidents have discouraged private investment.
Only in the US were corporations involved in a big way in early decades. Even there, the government eased the way through research and development, subsidies (such as through government-funded uranium enrichment facilities) and legal limits on insurance pay-outs in case of nuclear accidents. However, it is possible that nuclear power could have gone down the route of other technologies, such as telecommunications, that were first developed by states, in the risky and expensive trial periods, and later turned over to corporations once commercial viability was more assured. Thus, much of the British nuclear industry was privatised in the 1990s, with the government maintaining ownership of a portion that could not be made profitable.
The movement against nuclear power had its first stirrings in the late 1960s and expanded enormously in the 1970s. It has been a grassroots movement, involving a range of sectors of the population such as farmers in Japan, suburbanites in the US and trade unionists in Australia.[9] Often the focus has been against nuclear power plants that are proposed or under construction, with opposition drawn from local communities. There has also been substantial opposition even among those far from any immediate risk. In Australia the main antinuclear goal has been to stop uranium mining that is remote from most of the population, and the movement has been as strong as anywhere else.
The movement against nuclear power has used a variety of methods of nonviolent action, including meetings, rallies, vigils, blockades, strikes and site occupations. Nonviolent action theory and training has played a large role in the movement, while in turn the movement has served as a means for spreading and developing
