Subcultural and Social Innovations in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

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? It is frequently acknowledged that orthodox subculture theory has become limited. Greg Martin has recently articulated some of the theoretical issues involved, which include the identification of ‘the limits of cultural politics or struggles waged exclusively at the level of lifestyle’. Is culture simply decorative, superstructural—and is its analysis diversionary or delusional? Is a focus on culture a compensatory one, even a symptom of failure to institute social change? Martin identifies the significant doubt expressed by many theorists ‘as to the potency of symbolic challenges.... [It is their view that] the state and “proper politics” are still relevant and that social class and material issues continue to be important’. Postsubcultural studies, on the other hand, has preferred to show ways in which the rigidities of the influential Birmingham school are limiting—using then new sonic-social developments like dance culture to focus on the mediation of subculture (Sarah Thornton’s 1995 Clubcultures) or on its eclectic postmodernisation (Steve Redhead’s 1993 Rave Off). These are all valid and conceptually useful critiques and developments. However, my primary concern is that this shift risks losing some of the intriguing links between subcultures and radical political cultures. Part of the purpose of this article is to explore links between social movement organisations like CND and their relationship with cognate cultural and subcultural practices. In his work on anti-nuclear protest, Mobilizing Modernity, Ian Welsh joins a long line of sociologists pointing out that ‘social and cultural experimentation and innovation within [social movements] has been largely neglected’. But Welsh himself pays little critical attention to questions of their related political cultures, that is, their forms and expressions such as music, visual art, and fashion. Over the decades there have indeed been many general cultural and critical responses from CND members and other activists to the nuclear deconstruction of rationality. These include: