The latest issue of New Politics is just out. It has a number of interesting-looking articles, including Anthony Arnove and Barry Finger debating whether the anti-war left in Europe and America should support the Iraqi resistance or take a lead instead from the existing positions of the Iraqi unions. (There are many more critical ways of reading the Finger position - but you know what I mean!)

I guess it's cheeky of me to plug it, but there's also an article from me about Edward Thompson's life as an 'activist historian'. The idea came from a long-dropped idea for a book, something I wanted to write 5 or 6 years ago, looking at the space where radical history and politics interact. 

The paper largely endorses the positions Thompson took with respect to the peace movement and his re-working of class from The Making. If people are interested in a more critical evaluation of Thompson, I also have something in the next issue of Science and Society, which looks at the more problematic area of Thompson's training in the British Communist Party, his party's historical populism, the ways in which he was shaped by that milieu, and also the ways in which he tried to transcend it.

Both pieces, as I've said, were influenced by the book I was writing alongside them. One reason why that book - on activist history - stalled is that it was designed to connect to the Seattle moment, which seemed to me to be exactly the sort of politics in which theory and practice coalesced naturally. It was a movement which tried to unite people, and it was a movement that saw its enemies as systemic. 

Five years later, there are of course still protests - Make Poverty History, the anti-war movement. It's less clear to me that these have the optimism or universality of the earlier period. I also find it harder to articulate the ways in which they unite theory and practice.

In terms of understanding Thompson's 'pacifism' and history, I am persuaded by Kate Soper's argument that the unifying factor was a socialist humanism (with the emphasis really on humanism).  

In terms of understanding the 'pacifism' of 15 February 2003, it seems to me that the unifying factor was rather an avoidance of theory, or at least a refusal to debate the sort of questions (like Arnove's and Finger's) that would have torn the movement apart. 

Of course you could argue that the anti-war movement was of a continuity with the previous anti-capitalist politics; or that the former was motivated by a vague anti-imperialism, or by a dislike of the domestic neo-liberalism of Blair and Bush projected to the global sphere. I'd agree with all those arguments, which seem to capture some of the main dynamics.

But none alone quite explains it for me. The anti-capitalism of 1999-2001 was a movement of hundreds of thousands, which produced analyses that seemed capable of hegemonising the whole campaign (No Logo, Empire). The anti-war politics of 2001-3 was a much bigger movement - taking in millions. Perhaps for that very reason, no big book or theory seems to speak to its core experiences in the same, direct fashion.