Star Herleen

Richard Taylor, Colin Pritchard, in The Protest Makers, 1980 THE MOVEMENT'S ACHIEVEMENTS AND REASONS FOR FAILURE The Pacifists' relatively weak emphasis on structural and political analysis was demonstrated in their views of the Movement's achievements and the reasons they gave for its failure. On the one hand, they were much more optimistic than the rest of the sample that the Campaign had achieved some of its aims(particularly “alerting the general public to the nuclear issues”), whilst on the other, they appeared indifferent to the suggestion that the Movement needed an adequate political outlet other than the Labour Party. Similarly, they put relatively little stress upon the need to win over the Labour Party, while they were completely divided about just how much the Committee of 100 had helped or hindered the campaign. This mirrors earlier observations about the Pacifists’ orientations: their activism was largely moral in impetus and they were uninterested in Labour Movement politics. It is difficult, though, to explain how these results match up to the Pacifists’ 36% agreement with Marxism: perhaps, as Michael Randle has argued, whilst the radical pacifists were wholly opposed to Stalinist Communism (as they were to Labour ‘machine polities’), they were attracted to the idealistic, humanistic aspects of Marxism (especially in the manner in which these found expression in the New Left).