Subcultural and social innovations in the campaign for nuclear disarmament
Abstract
In times of war and rumours of peace, when ‘terrorism’ and ‘torture’ are being revisited and redefined, one of the things some of us should be doing is talking and writing about cultures of peace. In what follows, I ask questions about the place of culture in protest by considering the cluster of issues around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) from its founding in London in 1958. I look at instances of (sub)cultural innovation within the social and political spaces CND helped make available during its two high periods of activity and membership: the 1950s (campaigning against the hydrogen bomb) and the 1980s (campaigning against U.S.-controlled cruise missiles). What particularly interests me here is tracing the reticence and tensions within CND to the (sub)cultural practices with which it had varying degrees of involvement or complicity. It is not my wish to argue in any way that there was a kind of dead hand of CND stifling cultural innovation from within; rather I want to tease out ambivalences in some of its responses to the intriguing and energetic cultural practices it helped birth. CND was founded at a significant moment for emerging political cultures. Its energies and strategies contributed to the rise of the New Left, to new postcolonial identities and negotiations in Britain, and to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In what ways did it attempt to police the ‘outlaw emotions’ it helped to release?
... Integrated into twentieth - century social movements , these occasions for excess and intense participation would become implicated in direct action at least as early as the late 1950s . According to George McKay ( 2004 , p . 430 ) , amidst a carnival atmosphere and eventually propagating a ' youth lifestyle protest movement ' , the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ' s ( CND ) annual marches to Britain ' s nuclear weapons research facility at Aldermaston were significant in this regard . ...
... 430 ) , amidst a carnival atmosphere and eventually propagating a ' youth lifestyle protest movement ' , the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ' s ( CND ) annual marches to Britain ' s nuclear weapons research facility at Aldermaston were significant in this regard . While the Aldermaston March of Easter 1958 , and later CND - related events , saw a carnival of protest travel from the ' imperial centre of London to the countryside ' , around twenty years later the Greenham Common peace camp in Berkshire signified a similar passage from the city ( McKay , 2004 , p . 431 ) . ...
... Australia ' s Jabiluka ) and migrant detention centres ( the outback detention centre at Woomera ) participants affected ever newer ways of attracting sympathetic media ( rather than withdrawing from the media ) . Drawing from Bomb Culture ( 1968 ) , in which Nuttal discusses the presence of jazz and the ' spontaneous and creative interventions ' of the beats in early CND activity , McKay ( 2004 , p . 431 ) declares that the association between protest and festivity had gathered pace by the early 1960s . ...
Investigating the significance of carnivalized methods of protest in the present, this
article explores the characteristics and recent history of the protestival, the carnival of protest which
has flourished with the advent of the alter-globalization movement. Heir to the carnivalized politics
of the 1960s, and drawing from radical avant-garde movements and guerrilla theatre, the
‘protestival’ inherits much from the kinds of ‘symbolic challenges’ thought posed by post-1960s
social movements. Immediately downstream from Reclaim the Streets, demonstrating a resurgence
of autonomism, anarchism and direct democracy, and developing within the context of global
opposition to neo-liberalism and the War on Terror, the Global Day of Action would become the
template for popular direct action: in particular those events nominated ‘Carnivals Against
Capitalism’ or ‘For Global Justice’. While new social movement theorists have recognized the
significance of movement cultural politics, new approaches are needed to understand the festal and
carnivalesque character of the contemporary activism. Recently scholars have indicated that summit
sieges, autonomous convergences and other recent reflexive events constitute transnational
‘carnivalesque rituals’, politico-religious ‘pilgrimage’ destinations, or spatial reconfigurations
critical to the renewed opposition to capitalism. The ‘protestival’ provides an ambiguously nuanced
heuristic sufficient to comprehend those performative moments simultaneously transgressive and
progressive, against and for, by which the marginal may take their grievances to the physical and
symbolic centres (‘summits’) of neo-liberalism, where alternative logics and spectacles are
performed. Unpacking its expositional and revelatory logic, the article uncovers the roots of the
‘protestival’, undertaking an exploration of intentional carnival, festal hacktivism, direct theatre,
tactical frivolity and (un)masking to reveal a significant action template in the present.
Since the turn of the century, historians have focused on the diverse representations of the past, recognizing that traditional spaces (e.g., museums, statuary, and public commemorations) no longer have a monopoly on the public dissemination of history. This article explores representations of the past from an unusual place: punk rock music and the Canadian band Propagandhi (1986–present). It asks: Can we read history through punk rock? If so, what do we learn? Punks’ treatment of the past should be integrated into how we evaluate public consumption of history. While Propagandhi does not create new knowledge, their music acts as an alternative historical epistemology that tracks alongside professional historians. This article explains how punks have integrated historical material similar to the aesthetics used in punk zines, fashions, and record designs. It then analyzes Propagandhi’s focus on hypocrisy in punk communities through a historical framework, their perception of the early modern European epistemological origins of animal abuse, and their performance of a social history that magnifies the experiences of marginalized peoples.
‘I’m going to camp out on the land … try and get my soul free’. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on ‘Woodstock’. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection. The Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies, musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape — and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.
This article explores the links and tensions in Britain between a musical subculture at its height of creative energy – anarcho-punk – and the anti-nuclear movement, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It identifies and interrogates the anti-nuclear elements of anarcho-punk, looking at its leading band, Crass. At the center is an exploration of the sounds of Crass’ music and singing voices – termed Crassonics – in the context of anti-nuclearism: if the bomb changed music and art, what did the new music sound like?
With a growing and especially fragmented body of literature on social innovations, the demand for categorizing the field increases. This study analyzes the current use of the concept social innovation. Following a systematic conceptual literature review methodology, the authors reviewed articles and books. The elements were then grouped in coherent categories. The authors found seven categories of social innovation that are linked to a distinct understanding of the concept. After presenting the categories and major themes which are discussed within each category, the different categories are set in context with each other. Subsequently, the authors discuss how the most prominent conceptualizations meet the criteria of concept clarity. Finally, the authors point to some aspects that are necessary in the future in order to strengthen the clarity of the social innovation concept.
McKay takes us on a vivid journey through the endlessly creative counterworld of punks, ravers, travellers, tribes, squatters and direct-action protesters of every kind.
"The secret history of the last two decades.' Jon Savage
Importantly this book explodes the myth of a past golden age of public acceptance of nuclear power. Paying close attention to social, political and policy aspects throughout this book considers: the nuclear moment from a global collaborative project at Los Alamos to fragmented, butterly competing national projects; the atomic science movement's use of symbolic sources to win national ascendancy; the implications of secrecy and the establishment of quasi-commercial organisations within the nuclear industry. During the 1950s in the UK significant public expressions of concern over radiation release, civil liberties, reactor safety were all present at a local level finding expression through planning inquiries and local newspapers. Ultimately the failure to engage publics leads to direct action campaigns mounted by social movements throughout the 1970s. Issues of risk and trust for contemporary policy making are assessed in the context of this history
In this article it is argued that combining theories of social movements and subcultures provides a way of 'conceptualizing cultural politics'. The focus is on debates that have taken place over the conceptualization of subcultures and social movements as well as the status and viability of cultural politics. Contemporary subcultural theorists are critical of the rigid concepts used by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) but, it is argued, they provide few feasible alternatives. They also have little to say about the supposed contemporary significance of cultural politics. New social movement (NSM) theorists, on the other hand, have generated conceptual frameworks that recognize the complexity of collective phenomena and have developed an approach which enables us to engage with the controversy over cultural politics. However, they concentrate too narrowly on struggles waged at the level of lifestyle, culture and civil society. The article shows how, like the CCCS, critics of NSM theory rightly question the potency of symbolic challenges and stress the persistent role of material issues and the continued part that conventional political actors, such as the state, play in contemporary social conflicts. Finally, the case of New Age Travellers is used to illuminate these debates in subcultural and social movement studies and to show how elements of each approach can be employed fruitfully in empirical research.