Activists for Peace: The Social Basis of a Local Peace Movement

Abstract

Part of the disarray — or, to put a more optimistic gloss on it, the regrouping — of the British Left following the collapse of social reformism and the Butskellite consensus of the 1950s and 1960s has been a revived interest in questions of political organisation, which has brought with it a new awareness of the importance of a strategy of coalition-building. Talk of a ‘new politics’ has been in the air for some years, as in the pages of New Socialist and Marxism Today, and one or two exemplary models of the new politics in practice are held out — the GLC and other ‘local socialisms’ (Sheffield, West Midlands) — but a great deal of the discussion is at a highly general level and has little substance to it. In this chapter we intend to examine some features of the peace movement as it appears at local level, to see how far it can be said to exemplify the ‘new politics’.