#1239 Sophie Scott-Brown - The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricard Lops, and today I'm here with the return guest, Doctor Sophie Scott Brown. She's still a research fellow at the University of Saint Andrews, and today we're going to talk about her latest book, The Radical 50s, Activist Politics in Cold War Britain. So, Sophie, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to everyone.

00:24 Sophie Scott-Brown: Oh, thank you. It's great to be back.

00:27 Ricardo Lopes: So, I mean, last time in our first conversation, we talked about the history of European political thought, anarchism, and some other topics. So why did you decide to focus on the 50s in this particular book?

00:42 Sophie Scott-Brown: Yeah, OK, so, in part, the book's a little bit provocative, because obviously this idea of the radical 50s doesn't kind of chime or coincide with what most people think of the 1950s. I mean, it's quite interesting, really, it's a sort of myth that university. OBSERVED that the 50s was quite a, a kind of a dull time for kind of radical politics, for several reasons, which I'm sure we're going to get into and unpack, but just to focus for the moment on why, why did I choose 1950s. So there was a little bit of trying to be provocative, which touches on a larger question of, well, When we're doing this periodization, and remember, you know, as, as we discussed last time, narratives about the past are so powerful in shaping how we think about political possibilities in the present. So when we're characterizing these decades. As sort of radical or not radical or conformist, or, you know, sort of anything, any of those kind of descriptions, what is, what is that, I, I, I suppose I wanted to know what's really going on under those labels, what makes us label decades in such a way for the first part, what are the markers that we're looking for, and what else is sort of happening around that? What, what is happening to a bunch of assumptions and decisions that we're making about what it means to be political and how that's playing out at different times. So there was all that going on, and then actually just broadly on a historical level, it is quite an interesting or challenging decade in the sense that obviously it's the kind of peak period of that first stage of the Cold War. And that's really kind of remapping and reshaping the political landscape in a very dramatic way, but in a way that's made even more strange by the sense that it doesn't appear to be dramatic. There seems to be this, you know, an awful lot of really quite seismic events happened during this period, not least of which obviously the nuclear program, and yet, you know, the bigger and the more existential and the more kind of terrifying. Politics gets, almost the kind of converse reaction is that in, you know, in places like America, in the UK, um, in Australia, you know, there's this huge emphasis on closing that off almost as a kind of like, Dialectical response, like, the weirder and bigger it's getting out there, the more we're gonna talk about the home and talk about the nation, and all these sort of very conformist, stabilist tropes. So, I just was like, this is just such a weird decade. I want to know what was going on under the surface.

03:19 Ricardo Lopes: Uh YES, it's very interesting. Uh I'm going to ask you to characterize that decade, a little bit more, but I was just going to say that also looking back at the 50s, at least uh people on the left in uh when it comes to economics tend to be a little bit fond of that period because in the US, in the UK and so on. There was, it was basically, or there was basically a boom in terms of left-wing economics and uh the social state and Keynesian economics and redistribution and so on that lasted and at least until the early to mid 70s or somewhere around that. So, I, I mean, of course, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the 50s and 60s were perfect. I mean, the women were still Uh, very much oppressed in many ways, and there was still, uh, colonialism, or at least the colonialism in a more direct way and so on, but at least that bit was also there, right?

04:20 Sophie Scott-Brown: Right, sure, shall we, shall we, so shall we unpack some of this? Yeah, OK, great. So you're absolutely right. I mean this is part of what makes this decade so gloriously odd because there are so many different contradictions at play. Now, politically speaking, in the UK at least, uh the 50s are largely dominated by consecutive Conservative governments, but even then, that's not as straightforward as it sounds. You begin the decade with a Labour government, and as you've rightly said, after the war in Britain, and just focusing on Britain for the time being, cos that's obviously the subject of the book, but, you know, you get the implementation of the welfare state led by Clement Attlee and the Labour government. And you get the setting up or the kind of reinforcing of the, uh, NHS and there's a push towards greater social housing, and there's changes to the education system, not all at once, but gradually and piecemeal. Now, there are a few things that sort of happen straight away. It is, now the Conservatives do take this on, and there is this thing, as, as you rightly pointed out. Again, one of the dominant narratives is that this is a period of consensus, the post-war consensus. Yeah. Recently, a lot of historians have pushed back on this, and my research certainly indicates that I think, I mean, it, it's tricky actually, it's, uh, there were some broad top line agreements about some things. Certainly the Conservatives did not sail in and start dismantling any of these things, that would have been incredibly unwise. But in a way that's because this consensus will first. Firstly, what agreement there was kind of rested largely on the fact that none of these innovations were quite as innovative and certainly not as radical as they needed to be, and this is a major part of my story. So welfarism turns out to be this very mixed, uh, bag of tricks. I mean, so. You're right. For some, it is just, you know, it is the kind of rhetoric of it, and the presence of it, and it's been couched in terms of the people's peace and, and all that sort of thing. And that kind of makes a lot of people who have been quite radicalized by the war, frustrated with the decisions being made at top level. I mean, we are talking about A country that, after the victory of Britain led by Winston Churchill, kick him out and bring in a Labour government. That's, that's quite eloquent about what people felt at that time. And the 30s are not so far away, that desperate, um, unemployment and poverty created by the depression, um, systematic failings of the government to respond to that. So that's all going on. So, in a sense, no government's gonna risk. Coming back on the welfare state, in another sense, the welfare state's quite conservative. It was put together by Beveridge, and who was actually responding from a, a kind of trajectory of reforms that have been starting to come along since the early part of the century, like uh the people's Budget in 1911, Lloyd George, and that had had certain hiatuses during conflicts and depressions. But actually the welfare state belongs more to that era of reform, and critics at the time, people like GDH Cole were saying, well this is great, and uh we, you know, we obviously think this is all positive moves forward, but it's not going to be enough for the world that we're going into. And I think that's the important point. The welfare state in some ways was already out of date even as they're beginning to implement it. And with the Conservatives as well, I think as such, so there's this sense to which they're not having to do half as much. As maybe they ought to, to really seriously redistribute wealth and goods and um, head towards a more seriously egalitarian society. So they're quite happy to accept a kind of bare minimum program. And also, welfare turns out to be a really useful tool for controlling people, because suddenly you've got state controlled mechanisms that are intruding into people's private lives at a rate that's sort of not been known, certainly not known before the war and is now becoming not just kind of normalized, but. Professionalized as well, and they're generating, they become self-perpetuating or generating. So when you have the social services, suddenly you have all this infrastructure to train social workers, suddenly you have all this science about what constitutes normal behavior and what's not normal behavior, and how you then implement controls in order to maintain that. So, That is just one classic example, and there are a couple more which maybe we can touch on, of the 50s having this politics which is just very ambiguous, never straightforward, and this is, it's, it's, it's really hard to kind of ideologically classify. These are big, complex, tangled issues where none of the usual political rules or categories or theories. They, they kind of can't handle this, they can't describe it, they can't really articulate it, so it's a bit of a failure in political language at this time to, uh, similarly, something like the bomb, um, the, the bomb is, you know, kind of being. Told, you know, that this is the kind of security we need against totalitarianism, but at the same time the bomb itself constitutes this enormous existential threat, um. Yeah, so there's all these kinds of sort of contradictions of threaded right the way through the um 50s political imagination, which is just making it very difficult and this is partly why you do get this reputation for it as conformist, um, and uh apathetic. It's actually because people are paralyzed, they don't have the words literally to describe what's going on around them and. I think also, and perhaps we'll come to this later, but what's going on in socialism and the left makes this particularly difficult for people. This is, you said this was a, a positive time for left wing politics. Again, it was and it wasn't, um, at the same time. Mhm.

10:18 Ricardo Lopes: AND also uh earlier I mentioned colonialism that it was still ongoing, but actually it's in the 50s if I remember correctly, that at least uh the British Empire went on the decline, right?

10:32 Sophie Scott-Brown: Yeah, sure, so that is the other characteristic. I mean, I work on, I work across um American and European. Uh, POLITICS, one of the biggest differences when you're comparing sort of counter, countercultural reactions in Britain and in America is this transference of power. America is in the ascendancy, but it's also redefining, it's redefining and it's not redefining what empire means. So you also mentioned, you know, that it's during this point where kind of. The ideas, you know, what constitutes domination starts to change as America starts to assume much more of a kind of potent global position. But Britain certainly is coming to terms with the breaking down of an empire, and this is, this is a difficult process. I mean, you have a Labour government, many members of the Labour government. Um, ARE firm imperialists, they support the empire, they do not support the speed of, um, sort of removal or retreat that, that is, that is like realistically on the cards. And again, this is the point where you've got the famous wind winds of Change speech by Harold Macmillan, a Conservative Prime Minister in 1957. At the same time you've got. Some of the most punitive colonial um expeditions, Britain actively supporting some of the most violent defenses of empire or empire related crises. I mean, obviously, Mau Mau is the one that immediately springs to mind, but Britain was obviously, um, but Britain's also then participating in other kind of these new neo-colonial enterprises in. FOR example, um, but you've also got a ventures, um, sort of militaristic campaigns in places like, uh, Cyprus and, um, Malaya, um, and it is actually, the whole period is, the conscription is still in place. The whole period is still, despite being the first full decade of peace, it's absolutely ridden with, um, with conflicts.

12:25 Ricardo Lopes: Uh uh NO, you know, now that I think about it, it's very interesting also because uh when we talk about global politics, we tend to focus a lot on the big players like the US, particularly in the 50s with its rise and the, the UK, France, and some others. But I mean, uh if you look across the world, actually, for example, there's a big contrast here in Portugal because we didn't really participate. IN World War Two, so we didn't have a baby boom back in the 50s and we were under a right-wing dicta dictatorship under Antonio Salazar and even when it comes to colonialism, I mean, because uh Antonio Salazar and later um um Mar and later Marcello were uh very insistent on keeping the, the African colonies. It was only after Our revolution in 1974 that we finally gave them their independence. So I, I mean, if, if you look across the world, there were at, at different countries there were different things happening. It was, it was not like, oh there was this uh boom, there was this economic boom and this uh boom in welfare in the 1950s across the world. Uh, NO, it was in particular places and not others.

13:48 Sophie Scott-Brown: It was in particular places, but I think in some ways those those places, because a lot of this is emanating from America, which obviously at this point takes such a major strategic role in how Europe recovers with the Marshall Plan and what have you. So in some ways, these ideas maybe have a bigger footprint than they might, you know. Generally have had, but you're completely right, I mean the situation, the, the sort of, I think there's still, I'd say, uh, you know, kind of the, sort of, I guess the larger question is, well, what's driving this sort of eerinesss if this kind of these disputes around welfarism and what have you are quite particular to places like Britain and in a different vein, um. America and they'd actually already started happening in places like Australia, but if elsewhere the kind of, sort of, they were having different kinds of struggles, I still think this is a period that you can speak globally, this, this kind of contradictoriness, I think has an international structure. I think that's largely driven by this Cold War and the fact that, you know, um, the, the Cold War framework where you have this sort of, Uh, bipolar kind of power play, and then, even those countries that opt for non-alignment or in Europe, led by, um, countries like France's attempt to create this kind of third, um, sort of alternative point, it's still all having to negotiate itself through these two visions of what freedom and security. In the good life is now, arguably after the, the 50s is really the last point into the early 60s that the USSR, this is maybe controversial, but it's the last point at which they are truly the most serious threat. After that, I think a lot of it is more America dining out on the kind of rhetorical value, and that actually there are other. Other players that have more economic muscles than the USSR after a certain point. But I think there is this moment where people are asking questions, particularly when you're juxtaposing these two different ideas of freedom, of liberty, of, of what the good life looks like and means, and there seems to be, even if it's only a brief window. A genuine sense that it will come down to a choice. Already you've had like in Britain um authors like George Orwell essentially saying to people, he was a devoted pacifist. Um, AND he sort of says at one point, the only reason that he switched his position and said no, we must fight this war, um, and I, you know, kind of initially he was also a great critic of America, but he was saying, you know, his view was that, you know, American liberalism is less awful than the alternative totalitarianisms. So I think anti-totalitarianism is something everyone's thinking about, including in the places where they have dictatorships, but also in those places like Portugal. Like France, like Spain, um, you know, you're having a sort of very totalitarian leaders who are having to play in a different kind of, a very different global kind of situation and are therefore don't have. The complete sort of, they're having to negotiate some of that power because they need to interact with players like the United States. So it's, it is just sort of, I think globally we can talk about this as being a, a period of real flux and shift and transition.

17:18 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, one very interesting question that you ask at a certain point in your book is, what is it to be political? I mean, uh, tell us about that and was the notion of political, of what it meant rethought during the 1950s?

17:37 Sophie Scott-Brown: Yeah, I think, I mean, I argue that it, that it was, um, and I think. I mean this, this was, I, I, I thought about this very carefully when I was writing the book and I was quite inspired by an Italian, uh, Italian philosopher. Her, who, um, who I mention in the book, but whose name completely escapes me now, but an Italian philosopher who spoke about, who wrote a sort of collection of essays on the unpolitical. And this is also a very common idea in a lot of anarchist milios too, about being unpolitical. And a lot of people treat this very gingerly, because they sort of associate it with concepts like the silent majority, which is where, when you say, oh, I'm not being political, but, and then you advance a view. Which you think is more acceptable because it's not political, but of course it is political. So I sort of thought, OK, well what, what am I, what, what are these people talking about and what, what do I want to talk about when I mean that the way of being political changed, um, and I think what happens is. During this period, and again, just focusing on Britain for now though, I, I would argue you could probably draw analogies. But I think more clearly than anywhere else, especially with what, with the sort of things that are happening within the labor movement, in the British labor movement, you suddenly get this sort of redrawing of the map, and it goes from being sort of. The labor movement versus sort of conservatism to being government versus people. Um, AND therefore sort of, it, there, there comes a point where, and I think this, this sort of brought home more to the people on the left, um, perhaps more strongly, that sense that you can use this system of government to achieve the ends that you want to achieve starts to wobble because now you've actually had a, a Labour government serving out a full term and, you know, and they've struggled. To do this, they're asking questions about why they um why, why they lost the election in '51 and then they continued to lose throughout the 50s, they kept losing like three successive elections and the questions are why, why, why? And within the Labour Party, there are, there are people like Anthony Crosland who are saying, right, well we need to modernize, and by modernize. WHAT he means is a very popular book, um, Schumpeter about capitalism, socialism, democracy, and basically arguing that we now have such a complex industrial democracy that we can't do the sorts of things the labor movement idealized, like, you know, grassroots community politics. No, we just need a kind of. Uh, A technocratic representative system that delivers the kind of baseline needs of most people. That's what you need, that's what you need to go for. And so there is a shift within the Labour Party, the revisionist side wants to take it in a more technocratic direction. And I think that disappoints a lot of the labor movement, which contains an absolute vast ensemble of characters, some of which are very laborist, some of which are very socialist, some of which are sort of quite anarchic, some of which are very liberal. It, it's a sort of large kind of ecumenical movement, but at this point, it becomes clear that. There's there, it becomes clear that there is, um, the, the, the sort of the, the system, if you like, the government, the bureaucracy, the civil service is, is never going to be the means by which you want to achieve these sort of larger social ends that you've been desiring and that, you know, kind of there will, you know, we now complain in Britain certainly, there's very little to choose between the parties. Most of them hold a kind of similar position and you basically elect. You know, someone that hasn't annoyed you quite so much lately. Very, very little in the way of actual ideological choice. And I think the, the kind of roots or seeds of this start during this time, this sense amongst the larger movement that we're going to have to actually think about different ways of doing politics. And then I think, so what the book looks at is people, OK, well if we can't rely on those parliamentary governmental. Um, LEGISLATIVE methods anymore. Well, it's over to us, and what does a people's politics look like, and how is it effective, and how does it avoid becoming the thing that it's most critical of? Because that's, that's probably the sort of biggest issue or tension that a lot of my activists face, which is obviously this big nub of, the big nub of the problem is how do we get things done in the world without then the kind. Of paying the price that comes with power, namely, that, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, um, so that's kind of a real central hum all the way through the book. And that's, I think, where they're most challenging, what it means to be political, that they're really having to start imagining, imagining what does politics mean when it's done outside of a political setting.

22:33 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. So let's talk more about that, about activism in the 50s then. So what kind of activist politics emerged out of this, uh, so to speak, cauldron of uh political events and political circumstances? OK.

22:51 Sophie Scott-Brown: So, um Um, it was sort of pointed out by an early reviewer, um, that actually, you know, I, I'd sort of focused on a few particular groups, and people said, well, actually, there was a lot more activism than you're, than you're acknowledging. There was a lot more, um, kind of, uh, sort of community-based politics. What, where is, where is all that in your narrative? And I sort of. Nodded, um, kind of, uh, shamefacedly and said yes, you're, you're quite right, there was, um, I chose a, I chose a specific sort of, uh, I chose my groups for quite specific reasons which I'll come to in a minute, but I think, you know, at this time it is, There are two things going on. I think there's still a long memory, especially within what I'm calling this wider labor movement, and just to clarify, the labor movement's kind of everybody involved in some description or some form of social politics. That's why I'm saying there's, uh, it's impossible just to say the Labour movement are Labour Party supporters. Quite often that wasn't. The case. The labor movement, broadly speaking, is sort of anyone whose kind of central interest is in promoting varying forms of, you know, kind of increased equality or um or uh or quality of life for, for people outside of the kind of usual, um, privilege or, uh, kind of wealth. Uh, WORLD context. So, um, So that was quite normal, that people, there was a long existing tradition of people who would do sort of socially orientated activities to solve a problem within their area. Um, AND we're seeing actually a resurgence of this sort of now, so in response to the depression, communities often were resourceful, they banded together to try and provide food, to try and support with raising children. Um, THERE'D always been a kind of community-led initiative towards looking after healthcare and sort of health insurance schemes. All these sorts of things already had roots. So in some senses what we're seeing is a continuation of that. We're seeing a generation, particularly of women, who are very accustomed to doing this, and back in the 1950s they're sort of. You know, that continues. There's always been a sort of social reformer tradition, very strongly in Britain, as I'm sure there is elsewhere. Again, a lot of these are women, and going back to the conversation about what it means to be political or unpolitical, you know, a lot of these women would say, no, I'm not political, but this is a problem and it needs dealing with, so we're gonna do it this way. Um, AND now obviously the, that side of things with the implementation of the welfare state is actually being put on a more kind of professionalized footing. So again, it gives with one hand, it gives people more power, it gives people a better platform in order to say and describe these are the problems and this is what needs to be done. On the other hand, it also makes them, gives them a little bit too much power in some, in some contexts. So, um, there's a lot going on and a lot of things happening. But I suppose the activism that I wanted to focus on was activism that was really starting to be quite self-conscious in thinking about how it was, how it offered itself as an alternative form of political practice that could be sustainable beyond just the issue it was campaigning on. Now probably the biggest sort of most kind of iconic activism of that period was anti-nuclear. Um, SO obviously I look quite closely at them, but I do so because at the same time, because of the nature of the issue and because it's something that all governments, ultimately even Labour, although Labour does prevaricate over this issue, but ultimately the Labour leadership decide they cannot possibly stand on a platform of unilateralism, and anyone who recalls the 1984 election with Michael Foote can tell you that that was. Probably a reasonable guess. Nevertheless, um, all political parties are kind of, you, whether they're left, right, or whatever, they're all, none of them are sort of, all of them are sort of supporting nuclear, so that leads a lot of these activists to say, right, well that's government for you, because all government, no matter what color, you know, they all want that ultimate weapon that will ensure their own security as a government. Um, AND this really does start recalibrating what it means to be, um, doing politics. And so at the same time as they are quite seriously part of this international global kind of protest against nuclear weapons, and they are constantly thinking through ways that they can impress this information as a public. Information campaign about this. There's how do they deal with these politicians, you know, what languages can they use to engage them with, at the same time, you know, they are trying to sort of say, right, well, ultimately this, the only way out of this is, you know, this has got to be a sort of popular campaign on a scale never before seen, so it's got to be like, A mass campaign of moral consciousness is what they are essentially trying to, trying to orchestrate. So they're doing two things simultaneously, they're trying to imagine, Well, how, you know, first of all, how can we practically try and stop testing of nuclear weapons and try to get Britain to opt out of the nuclear scheme and consequently, you know, kind of, you know, replicate that elsewhere. At the same time they're asking themselves, well, if government, basically the existence of government is always going to. Lead to these absolute existential threats. How can we imagine ways of social decision making that don't have to rely on governments and therefore can ultimately lead to a lasting and sustainable peace. So, anti-nuclear, again, in Britain and America, but they are, and also. In America's civil rights, um, these are groups who are doing a lot of incredibly innovative, practical rethinking about what it means to be political and do politics. Civil rights not so much in Britain, although, um, the social demographics are changing. You have the Windrush migration, and, you know, especially in places. Places like London towards the end of the 1950s, you've got rapidly changing demographics. So there are a lot of questions around race and racial integration and decolonization that is starting to be asked. But I think in Britain, um, the most kind of novel forms of activist experimentation come through the anti-nuclear movement. However, the new left group that I also look at, particularly the Student branch of it are also starting to ask interesting questions about how you do community politics in rapidly changing social formations in new communities, like in places like Notting Hill, which have a lot of racial diversity, but also in the creation of new towns, which were these entire new settlements that they were government funded, that were set up to try and combat kind of problems around housing and what have you. And were very much intended as sort of engineered communities. So those were the two main sort of spaces I looked at. And then I looked at the anarchist group, the Freedom Press anarchist group, because they really are the ones that start to articulate a kind of philosophical framework that can hold together all these various different ideas about activist practice.

30:14 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so I think that at least to some extent you've already answered one of the questions I have here that was what kinds of political questions did these groups contend with the most, but uh tell us more about each of these particular ideologies in uh in Britain in the 1950s. I mean, how did anarchist manifest back then? What characterized it?

30:40 Sophie Scott-Brown: Sure, well, I mean, each of these, um, I mean, this is sort of talk about trying to hit moving targets. Each of these kind of groups, so the new layer of the anarchists and the anti-nuclear being a particularly interesting cohort of people, ideologically speaking, um, but they're all in flux themselves, so just to focus on the anarchists a for a moment. Now, anarchism's always been, by its very nature and by its very name, a sort of a house of many mansions, and it's always had a bit of trouble. Kind of coming to terms with that element of itself. It's one of the kind of great, kind of ironical paradoxes of it. Um, IT'S a bit like philosophy, right? You ask a group of philosophers what philosophy is, and they'll all give you completely different answers. They'll all think each other's wrong. Same with anarchists. So, with all that as the background, nevertheless, you, it is. It's possible to talk about there being a fairly recognizable, kind of fairly organized anarchist movement that was quite closely wedded to the socialist movement, um, sprung from sort of utopian socialism, kind of grew up alongside Marxism, but obviously huge bifurcation at the first, um, at the first International. Uh, WITH the anarchists walking out because they cannot accept the kind of authoritarian elements that are implicit within Marxist theory, particularly around the idea of the state as a vanguard in the transition. So nevertheless, there's enough infrastructure there to talk about a reasonably coherent anarchist movement that whilst I think agreement would. BE too much of a stretch, have some common features. So, these are anarchists who generally think that the revolution that any revolution must come from the people, and the people for them tend to be the, the industrial working classes, that the strike is going to be probably one of your main kind of revolutionary revolutionary weapons. There are some Certain other pockets like insurrectionists who don't believe in that sort of level of formality, but do believe that these sort of strategic acts of intervention, often violent, you know, it may be enough to trigger sort of larger kind of reactions or a certainly disrupt kind of complacency or or or consensus. But broadly speaking, the organized movement that we have generally, maybe a bit lazily, but we generally have come to term the classical movement, believes still in a kind of worker led uprising, which will culminate in syndicalism or worker control of industry via syndicates. And sort of thinks in terms of a kind of international kind of cooperative federation of different sorts of working syndicates as a potential model. Largely imagines a communistic type societal arrangement. Um, THERE'S debates about that, some anarchists much more kind of hardline, um, communist, others much more kind of willing to explore notions like mutualism. Where there is a degree of private property, um, involved, but much more on a kind of exchange basis, um, than, than the kind of current, uh, current system that we, that we would use. So, All that is your kind of classical legacy and inheritance, but then, I mean this had been slowly kind of, sort of, along with, you know, kind of simultaneously alongside socialism. This has been sort of under pressure for a little bit. There have, there have been points, particularly in the 20s and 30s, but also sort of previously, when, if there was ever a time that the industrial working classes. You know, could have risen up, could have overthrown in, in particular places, particularly around the point of the depression and what have you, that, that, you know, that capitalism really did seem to be dead and defeated and that, you know, if history was on your side, then there was no better time than now to move, and yet somehow it had contrived to survive and to reinvent itself and to come back in this. New form as, you know, as the affluent society, marking very much a switch from a sort of scarcity mentality and a production based economic sort of drive towards the consumer society and the politics that go with that consumption. So you've got all this going on and the anarchists therefore are digging around back in the wider terrain of anarchism to try and find some ideas that are actually going to be more, uh, they're going, they're going to talk a bit more directly to the new sort of uh social, cultural and political landscapes that they're finding themselves in because um there's a huge amount of disillusionment. With socialism, I imagine that we'll get to 1956 very shortly, but, um, you know, there is, uh, sort of socialism is quite discredited in some of the claims that it's been making, even if not in the principles that it's been espousing. Plenty of the anarchists in the group I look at would still say, well, of course you need much more of an equitable distribution of. Um, SOCIAL resources and goods before you can even sort of talk meaningfully about freedom. But what you get really, is a much stronger infusion of individualist traditions, because the diagnosis is that what's gone wrong with socialism, it's become too technocratic, it's become too abstract and impersonal, it's kind of marginalized the human. And the human experience from itself, and ultimately it's offering a kind of utopia and an ideal and nobody wants because it's very inhumane and it means a loss of vibrancy and a loss of creativity, and this is what we really want. So in a way, what the anarchists are trying to do, and I often think that if you want a lens into the larger political landscape, anarchism actually gives you a very privileged one. Because it's engaging with all the same ideas as in liberalism, as in socialism, even as in conservatism. But what all it's sort of doing is trying to imagine what would happen to any of these ideas if you take the state out. And so it's sort of saying to itself, well, is the problem, is the reason that liberalism's hit this brick wall and it's sort of, you know, settled for this very kind of crass representative democracy which actually just props up power and it's all sort of kind of mired itself in bureaucracy and policy making. Um, AND actually is its problem because it keeps insisting on having a state to regulate all this. Is the problem with socialism, well, they've always thought this, they've always thought the problem with socialism was its overreliance on a state which ultimately then ends up repeating exactly the same problems it wanted to restore. Um, CONSERVATIVES actually are, well, I mean, conservatives like power. That's, that's all you need to, that's all you really need to know. Um, BUT even so, anarchists are looking into kind of conservative, it's sort of a conservatism that's been sort of largely lost. It's more of a sort of a kind of a cultural conservatism in some senses, this idea that people's identities. And their, um, values and their traditions have, things that have emerged through years and years and years spent living together and working together and loving together and all that sort of thing. These are being destroyed really quickly by technology, by the imposition of kind of technocratic governments who just decide, right, we're gonna put a community over there, and we're gonna knock down your slums, and that's, that's the end of that. You're going to live there now. So there's even a degree which they're cherry picking back into those sorts of. Um, CONSERVATIVE traditions too, so anarchy at this time, it has been called new anarchy, but again, that's something which has many different flavors included, sort of thing. But broadly speaking, the big kind of take home messages are moving away from this idea that there's going to be a revolutionary event, and that's going to be quite final and mark a break, and that after that things are going to change. Um, THERE'S more of an idea that revolution's piecemeal, that it's gradual, that it's about infusing. Um, SLOWLY or anarchizing if you like, society piece by piece, bit by bit, um, and that this is a kind of ongoing or perpetual struggle that you're going to be engaged in, that it's got to work across many fronts, that this idea that one class of people are going to confront power is nonsense, it's got to appear in many different forms. It's even starting to think about, well, you mentioned earlier, you know, um. You know, we, we've got to think about what power imbalance looks like for different people, like women, like um people of color, you know, the, the, they actually, it's not enough just to drop this all under the categories of class, that doesn't do enough work for us. So yeah, that is the main switch in anarchism. What does it look like when you take away the final kind of the final event of revolution and you have to think about politics as literally a way of life.

39:36 Ricardo Lopes: You know, while you were speaking, many things came to my mind, but when you touched on that bit about the people being disillusioned with socialism back in the 50s, it's, and earlier you also mentioned how some of these uh political circumstances express themselves in the social sciences as well because it came to mind that back in the late uh 40s, it was not in the 50s but late 40s, it was And BF Skinner published Walden 2, and it seems that back then there were some people, some of them who identified as socialists, others perhaps even as technocrats who were very fond of behaviorism because it was like, oh, we just have to condition people in a particular way, and they will become altruists, they will become this or that, but at the same time there's that negative spin that, OK, now there's a full. Absolute control over people in a particular society and then people who are at the top can use it whatever way they want. And then there was also uh cybernetics was also associated with socialism in a way which even uh interestingly enough, uh manifested itself in uh uh in Chile back in the 70s because he had that project, that, that cybernetics project supposedly to Uh, uh, ever distributed decision making system and, and all of that. So, I mean, yeah, it's, uh, to be uh plainly honest, it, there was a, I, I'm not sure about today, but at least back then the 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on, there was a um at least a branch of socialism or socialist technocracy, let's say that was very much uh Non, or I try to eliminate as much as possible the human element from political decision making.

41:37 Sophie Scott-Brown: Hm, no, I think, again, you touch on some really important points there, so socialism, well, like, social, I think all, I mean this is such a period of ideological flux, like I said, because. Um, THE kind of total restructuring of global power and, you know, and also just this, this kind of shift in, in emanating from, from America, but this idea that, you know, now we've got to think of what politics means, um, in a consumer-led or a consumer driven economy. Oh, absolutely true. This is not the case everywhere. Nevertheless, because it's, this is the case in these kind of countries, there is a knock-on effect for, for absolutely everyone else. But coming back to your social science point, and I think this was a really key one for me in the book, because a lot of the, my activists, I mean, this is. There's a very vexed relationship with science in many senses, and it's one of the fault lines that kind of start to appear within the new anarchy or the new left around these attitudes or feelings about science, and it's one that marks out different generations from each other as well. So, because, you know, as you're saying, there, there's this sort of huge investment actually, led from governments, certainly in America, and to a slightly less degree, but nevertheless, in Britain. In the social sciences, I mean, partly, it's, there's a real sort of drive to increase psychological research, and this is for a number of reasons. Initially, after the war, there's some questions around, you know, they're genuinely sort of wanting to understand how it was that whole populations could have been sort of kind of enslaved, like, you know, how did Nazism happen? But obviously with the kind of pressing side question of, well, you know, what happens to the individual personality under totalitarian regimes, how are people kind of, how do people think in the USSR know thy enemy sort of thing. So there's a huge amount of investment in all that sort of thing. Yeah,

43:37 Ricardo Lopes: and there were all of these sort of conformity experiments, very famous conformity experiments from the 50s and 60s. Yeah.

43:46 Sophie Scott-Brown: Yeah, absolutely, sort of ones where you're like, oh my God. HOW, you know, you wouldn't get ethics clearance on that today, sort of thing. Um, SO yeah, there were some truly scary, uh, ones that went sort of right throughout into the sort of 60s and, and the 70s about sort of herd behavior, essentially. Um, BUT then, you know, there's, there's also, practically speaking, like, like we've discussed, the implementation of the welfare state, actually sort of, in part, it kind of, because suddenly you have, sort of, things like education, healthcare. Social care being treated much more efficiently by the government. I mean, it's all kind of knock-on effect, really. So then the government, because they're spending and investing money, need to be sure they're doing this efficiently, or it's meeting the kind of goals that they need it to, in order to justify that, or to justify why it costs more. So therefore, you need people who have competencies. So how do you ensure that you standardize what their job is, um, how do you do that? Well, you invent qualifications for it. Um, AND if you invent qualifications, you're gonna need people to teach them, if you're gonna need people to teach them, you've gotta have people researching it. And so it goes on, and it creates a kind of ecology around itself. And exactly as we've been talking about, for a lot of my guys that I look at the activists, it's a really mixed blessing in some ways. They treat science as a wonderful tool. I mean, the activists, for example, around the anti-nuclear, because, like I said, they've constantly got one eye on how. Activism can actually be sort of reconstituted, reimagined as a sort of permanent form of popular politics. Not all of them are anarchists in the sense that they imagine this popular politics will displace, you know, kind of the state or even that they want it to, but they think there's got to be a much stronger popular politics in order to regulate the state from excess or to keep it all the checks and balances in place, so. They are really interested in those kind of, you know, the, the kind of million pound question on how do you get groups of people to kind of come together very quickly, cooperate effectively, communicate well, how do you deal with conflicts in those intense situations where you're on protest actions together. Now one of the people I look at was a woman called Pat Arrowsmith, and there are actually one of the most wonderful, joyful things about this book is that when you look into the nitty gritty of people actually trying to think and organize politics differently, well, fantastic. Once you get past the, the kind of writers and speakers, which were predominantly men, you find there were some women doing some incredibly rich theorizing and organizational work, and Pat Arrowsmith is one of them, she's quite fascinating. She goes over to America to study social sciences and at some point, she's working with a group of experimental psychologists who do this, um, form of science called group dynamics, and they're working in Chicago, which has been an absolute, historically speaking, an absolute hotbed center for kind of, uh, kind of organizational theory and social, social kind of, um, Uh, social organizing and grassroots kind of practice, and she works over there on sort of projects around race relations, how you integrate very conflicted, diverse neighborhoods and you try and generate this sense of community, um, through people with really polarized views of each other and, and of the world generally. And she comes back over there and she's trying to apply a lot of these ideas into their practice. And I mean, to be honest, this is the, again, the other wonderful thing and the other confusing thing for people is most of the activists I look at, right, the spoiler alert, uh, Ricardo, they fail, they, they, they, they don't get what they want, they don't get nuclear weapons banned, they don't get a new socialist society, they don't get rid of the state. Um, AND so there is that temptation, it's like a lot of the historiography around each of these groups starts with that, like, hm, they're, they're minor, they failed, they didn't do anything, they didn't become a, So in amongst the anti-nuclear groups, uh, there'll be a bit more buzz around CND, not necessarily because the CND, that's the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not necessarily because they got what they wanted, but because they endured, they sustained as an institution, whereas the groups I looked at. Which were closely related to CND and active in its setting up, but they were on the um edges and the periphery. And they um and they weren't uh, they, they sort of, they didn't, they didn't survive the period, they disband and disperse and go off and do other things later, which I argue is actually again another characteristic of this new politics they're forming. But certainly that group where you're looking at how do you, I mean there's a wonderful notion from Sheldon Wallen called fugitive democracy. How do you get groups of people together really quickly and get them kind of. Without, you know, kind of, without imposing on them or without being able to rely on a kind of shared doctrine or anything like that, how do you get, how do you enable them to all have their individual views and stakes, um, and, and kind of contribution to the process, but still get them to cooperate and do so effectively, and that's the sort of, it's definitely something that they're looking to things like psychology for, sociology, anthropology. Anarchists have always been obsessed with things like psychology and anthropology, and that is a huge argument within the movement about just how far that goes. There are some who are very clear and categoric, science is a tool. Um, IF you start saying anarchism is scientific, then you're just falling into the same trap. I mean, in some ways they see it as very, um, hypocritical that you would talk about freedom all the time, but then just say, well, actually freedom means conforming to the laws of nature. Well, who's determining the laws of nature and who says nature's in charge, sort of thing. So, there's a, it's a really vexed, vex, vexed issue. And then the new left are actually, for the most part, because again, the student cohort I look at, which was called, they were the universities and Left Review Group. And because they're actually, most of their activism is actually practical research, they're going into these new communities or these divided communities in London. And half the time, they're not, they think they're going to campaign for something, but then they find the situation so complex and confusing that they just end up kind of saying, well, we don't know, we don't know what's going on. But they end up amassing a lot of information about how these new cultures and communities. Especially around youth and race, um, about what, how they're emerging. And so one of the key figures that I look at Stuart Hall, who of course then goes on to be in Britain, one of the foremost commentators about youth culture and about, um, racism and black culture in Britain. And this all has roots in the things he was doing as one of the student leaders in the kind of, in the kind of new left. So they are actually doing something even a little bit different. They're kind of, they're seeing the real limits to the kind of science you're behaving, you're, you're describing, which is head counting and behavior means this, and if you pull this lever, the body will do this. And they're saying so much of this depends on these ideas about what it is to be human, what normal means, what good is, what bad is. You know, all these questions you're asking science to, I'm not saying the science is not truthful, it is, but it's only asking certain questions and those questions don't reflect the experiences of young people in sort of East London, or they don't reflect the experiences of. Um, PEOPLE from the West Indies who are building a life in Notting Hill, so they are starting to pull apart at the limits of that very empirical, behaviorist science. They're starting to ask questions about what cultural attitudes and views. How they shape and um frame what we, what constitutes our knowledge, and they're starting to invent different kinds of scientific inquiry themselves.

51:47 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm, um, SO I, I guess that we've already ended up, uh, talking about the goals that these different groups have and their sort of approach to democracy. Uh, HOW about education itself? I mean, what did they have to say about it, the, the anarchists, the socialists, and so on?

52:07 Sophie Scott-Brown: Mm, um, well, in some ways I think that it's the new left group, the universities and left, um, group, they, they think most. Uh, CONCRETELY about education, because many of them are students. So many of them, I mean, so that initial group, I mean, just to give you a flavor of, of who we're talking about here. So the, the first British New Left is a very. Amorphous movement, it can really barely be called a movement because it's got so many different people, and what kind of holds it together as an idea is that they're all responding to a few things. Problems within socialism, which have been long running, but particularly, you know, within the sort of more extreme radical. Forms of it, like Marxism. These have been long running problems. There have been growing tensions, but what brings it to a head are the events of 1956, um, where, uh, first of all, you have Khrushchev's secret speech detailing, um, some of the atrocities committed under Stalin. And then, just in case anyone thought that any lessons have been learned. Um, THE Soviet Union violently suppresses the Hung Hung an uprising in Hungary by sending in tanks. Um, AND this, it, it doesn't, I mean, so there's been a lot of literature saying how terribly shocked everyone was. Um, EVERYONE, I think it was shocking because it had to be because Khrushchev made it so public and suddenly, you know, there was total discreditation of certainly Stalin. Um, IT was the fact that then the party, the National Party branches, um, kind of just buried their heads in the sand over this. They would not allow any kind of reasonable, kind of democratic discussion about whether or not the national branch. Branches should hold the Moscow line on things. Um, SO there was all these problems already. Then, as we've already discussed, those who aren't Marxists, um, are still finding that, well, they're quite disillusioned with what Labour was like as a party in power. And that's quite far away from the sort of broader labor, labor movement goals that they had, and it certainly was nowhere near as ambitious as many of them would have liked to have seen. They are nervous about the kind of, the new road to socialism that's being put forward by people like Crosland, which is, again, the kind of British version of this much more technocratic approach to kind of government, as sort of government as management. And in the background, there's that famous. This book by James, uh, germs, James Burnham, um, which is the Managerial Revolution. Everyone's just a little bit worried that that's just another form of total, a kind of liberal form of totalitarianism. So ultimately this Cold War choice between freedom and totalitarianism is just not going to exist. It's going to be a choice between this dictator or that dictator of different forms, as, as we've been, as we've been describing. Um, SO, there is kind of, All that going on. So there's a big question about, well, what is socialism now anyway, and what does it stand for and what are its goals. And then there's just some basic questions as I've been describing to you about the changes that are happening in the 1950s, youth culture, the coming of affluence, um, the shifts in culture that that brings, the changing social dynamics within Britain post migration and all that sort of thing. Um, SO you've got a group of people that are not satisfied with their existing political language, and you've got a lot of, and you've got, and they've also got a lot of questions that their existing ideas of politics aren't able to cover or accommodate. So that's how the new left gets born. And one sort of strand or strain of it is obviously this sort of comes out of the universities. Um, IT'S often credited, like, the kind of impetus to sort of set up a focal point for this large, kind of expansive movement of people. And that came from Rafael Samuel, who was a recent graduate from Oxford, and there was a group of 4 of them, which was Rafael Samuel. Uh, Stuart Hall, as we've already mentioned, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and then, um, there was another, uh, who was, uh, uh, sort of, I. His name actually escapes me, but he was a, a sort of a literary stu a literature student who joined them. He was Gabriel was his first name, and uh so they, they set up the universities in Left Review magazine, so obviously they're very rooted in the student world, they're recent graduates themselves, and they instantly, in order to kind of get their venture off the ground. Um, AND they eventually, they never see this as creating a new socialism, which by the way, is a game that everybody is playing right now. There are so many new journals, new magazines, new attempts to redefine what social politics is. It's mushrooming absolutely all over the place, like I said earlier in the interview, when I got asked, well, why focus on these when there was just so much activism going on right now. Because frankly it was, it was almost overwhelming how much was sort of popping up all over the place. And quite often these enterprises would cooperate together or interact or, or support each other in a way that they sort of didn't do in other, in other decades. It was slightly less collegial in some senses, and a lot of that has to do because they all shared the same kind of student networks. Now, um, so straight away, the, uh, university left Review group know to work through the universities and they set up sort of branches of their clubs in collaboration with existing university labor or socialist clubs. And that's a, that's an easy win for them, that gets them an easy audience. Straight away. And there's also this kind of, it's not just the students, it's this kind of whole new tier of young dons or young lecturers and young researchers, particularly those who are in these kind of newly minted social science subjects, like sociology, sociology, absolutely. You know, hugely increases in presence and size. I mean, it kind of borderline wasn't a thing, um, in the sort of late 40s and then by the 50s, the number of courses in it just goes through the, goes through the roof. And then everyone's still sort of struggling to kind of really define what they mean by it anyway. Um, AND you have a lot of these people who are being trained by these older generations, and the war really does accelerate things here. Any, I mean, EP Thompson, who was another member of the New Left, used to say the distance between, you know, those people that were actually fought in the war, and even, and the, the sort of next generation, we're talking in reality, somewhere between 5 to 10 years, nothing. And yet mentally, in terms of attitudes, it's an absolute world apart. So you've got this younger generation who just are going through their education and are just dissatisfied with it, do not feel that it's supplying them with the tech uh languages or the kind of categories that they need to kind of articulate what's going on in Britain at that point. So. Um, IN some ways, the left, uh, the new left clubs are a way to do that and to reimagine that, and to reimagine a form of political education, and they're doing this a lot by practical, uh, research. As I said to you, they're not sitting around because, you know, reading groups and study groups have been an absolute mainstay in left wing culture always and forever. Um, NEVER a more kind of better read, smarter group of people will you ever, ever meet. Um, BUT what I think marks out this group is that they are doing what we would now call kind of action research or practical research. They're literally going out into communities, and it's interesting, Rafael Samuel becomes a really sort of lead pioneering figure in oral history, um, in the 1970s, 1 of the co-founders of the kind of oral history journal and things like that, as well as it being a major feature of the history workshop movement. Which he is obviously the kind of driving force behind, but this is all kind of starting right here in the 1950s. They're going out and they're just asking people, and, and, you know, in the archives are full of their old questionnaires and things like that. They're quite crude in many ways, I think, you know, that the scientific quality of some of their questions would be, um. Would be sort of under doubt, shall we say, but their instinct is, well, we're, we're having to reinvent how to do research. As at the same time that we're trying to find new knowledge because the ways we have of asking people questions aren't getting us the things that we need to know in order to respond to the problems that we have. One of the interesting dynamics, I didn't feature this in the book, but I sort of wish I had. Part of the young new Left group is Philip Abrahams, whose father is Marc Abrahams, and Mark, Mark Abrahams is like the doyen of the market research survey. He literally invents sort of market research studies. He's an absolute key figure for the Labour Party. Um, HE'S one of the sort of authors of Must Labour Lose, which is a very famous pamphlet where he basically says, well, nowadays all the young people are future orientated, they find you too old fashioned, you need to be more modern and modernistic, and the next thing we know, we've got Harold Wilson declaring that Labour's going to pursue the white heat of technology. Now his son Philip Abrahams is part of the New Left cohort, and a lot of his articles at this time are incredibly critical about this approach to sort of, um, question, ask, uh, research, ques, asking questions, and you're seeing the embryos of what we would now call that much more. Uh, CULTURALLY sensitive awareness, how our attitudes and values, um, fundamentally shape what can even constitute a fact to us, let alone, um, you know, the kind of different sort of forms of realities that we accept or register. So that's certainly all happening in the, in the new left, sure.

1:02:20 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, that's really fascinating. So, I, I have one last topic I would like to ask you about. I, I mean, particularly I myself earlier have already touched a little bit on some of the issues that people in the 60s particularly cared about compared to the 50s. So in what ways would you say the 50s differ from the radicalism of the 60s?

1:02:45 Sophie Scott-Brown: Sure, I, I think in some ways it's a really good way to kind of summarize the whole drift of the book because we're so accustomed, like again, we started this conversation by talking about um. Uh, HOW, you know, periods get kind of identities, and these identity markers sort of live with us and shape, you know, so nowadays if you want to kind of, if you're feeling things, and, and when I wrote this book, I actually very much had in mind our current moment, and this kind of, you know, almost like this sort of wordlessness we have to even try and describe all the things that are seemingly starting to just kind of go wrong around us, this kind of. Total inadequacy of language, um, to sort of, kind of grasp what's happening. And I think a lot of people will be tempted to say, well, are these kind of flat, you know, sort of kind of eerie, um, confused times, let's look to the 60s, right, because we all know the stories that there was sort of slowly but surely the kind of youth revolution really started to get into swing. Number of universities increased. Incidentally, again we're still talking about a tiny elite, um, you know, but nevertheless, a slightly larger elite than before. And we associate, you know, the end of the 60s, that, you know, fairly amazing reaction against Vietnam and America, which was sort of, you know, and then that rippling off. It's amazing how things can have sort of symbolic power like that. In our own age, recent times, it's been Gaza. Whilst I'm not, obviously Gaza is a very serious issue, um, and it is sort of Anyone in their right mind condemns what is very obviously genocide or genocidal policies, but, um, you know, sort of for a lot of young people, Gaza was just part of this web of other things that are going, you know, that are just. Happening because power is out of control and in massive excess, and the, you know, people are increasingly just so far away from having any sort of control over what's being done to them, what they're being asked to do with their lives, you know, everything from kind of technology. Anyway, that's the sort of, kind of, you know, point that I'm trying to make, that sometimes one issue can just set off what's um, what's a sort of a kind of chain reaction that's been waiting to happen. And certainly you see this in the 60s and it comes with some really iconic images. And also the other thing is it uses the language of radicalism. Radicalism was cool, it was the right thing to be doing. You, I mean, I mentioned earlier. Harold Wilson gives a speech in 1964. He is the rear, he is the sort of Labour's back in power, he's the new Prime Minister, and he commits the country to modernization, the swinging 1960s. He literally is legitimizing or licensing. I mean, this sounds dreadful, it sounds like I'm basically saying all these radical students were just toeing a party line. In a sense, they kind of were, you know, there was a licensed change for change. There wasn't in the 50s, there was the opposite, so if you were going to suggest different ways of thinking or describing or talking. About politics in the 1950s, you were actually being much more radical because you were completely out on a limb in doing so. So you had to be really quite shrewd and clever about how you were going to do this. There was very little point, and you see this again quite spectacularly amongst the anti-nuclear activists, right? They, there's all these sort of almost quite touching, and they're funny to read, sort of, uh, kind of. Information circulars to the people that they're working with, just saying, now, no duffel coats, no beards, you know, we've got to look completely respectable, completely normal, apparently in the 1950s, a duffel coat was a sure sign of, of delinquency, who knew? Paddington Bearby warned. Um, BUT they are really sort of, you know, I think this is, and this, the, this aesthetic they've got of trying to kind of smuggle the radical under the surface is, I think, you know, kind of one of the major differences. So they're having to work that much harder to make, um, outrageous ideas seem completely reasonable and familiar. It's an amazing kind of propaganda. I say trick, I do not mean this kind of badly. What they're trying to do is code radical ideas into ways that come across very palatable and familiar to, to members of the public who might otherwise be instantly disengaged if they think that these people were just delinquents or young hooligans or hoodwinks or whatever. So that's one. Um, AND then in another sense, we obviously associate the 60s, slightly inaccurately, but with the idea of the, the, the personal is political. This actually comes more with the women's movement, sort of from the late 60s in America and then, and then on into the 70s, but already there's this nub of this idea that, you know, politics is not just what happens amongst these people in suits in a sort of parliamentary chamber or whatever, that it's the nuts and bolts of what's going on. Um, I think in the 60s this starts to harden a little bit more into what we would now be more familiar with calling identity politics, and this starts to sort of, especially when you've got some of the divisions amongst the radical groups like the Black Panthers saying, well, we can't do democracy with you guys because you don't recognize, you know, the black experience and the specific kind of domination that involves, and you're just repeating it. So there is much more of a kind of identity politics. Style of personal politics emerging there. In the 1950s, it's still much more based on this notion of the individual as a moral agent, as a being that's actually got to make a private choice about what's right, and then act on it. So this is again, this legacy coming through peace, and this notion, like, from conscientious objectors, and, you know, inspired by a figure like Gandhi, who I absolutely have to mention very briefly, because he's so influential on this, this idea that. Uh, SO the question becoming how does then one individual and their private objection become a social movement? Well, it's because you perform this in public and you show that this one individual act of solidarity for a solidarity with life against death as the anarchists used to put it. That actually that, you know, should start off a ripple effect in anyone who can empathize or sympathize with that core um sense of being human. Now obviously, and rightly so, lots of questions to be asked about that kind of humanism and who it includes, who it excludes, but nevertheless I think it's a more, Um, I think it's a more interesting frame because it makes us ask, well, how do you do that? So much of our conventional political imagination keeps relying on this very pugilistic idea of politics. We get a group together, we unify them, we all share the same political identity, perhaps that's class, perhaps that's race, whatever, and then we get the numbers and we defeat the opposition. But what happens if you can't do that? What happens, um, you know, because obviously the big problem there is that can be reductive. You might well be working class, but you might also be a woman and all the other sort of intersectional elements that people talk about much more openly now. So there's the, there's the residual challenge which I think the people I looked at in the 50s were starting to grapple with, and which I think is still with us now. If we all want to be individuals and rich and complex and combining multiple different kinds of identities, well, that's great, but how do we organize that into a powerful social force?

1:10:41 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I mean that last sentence, I was also actually going to comment that what this makes me think about, I mean, all of what we discussed here today and the other things you talk about in your book is that uh how interesting it is that uh on the left, particularly and even in more radical political movements like anarchism, socialism, communist. AND so on, we can have so many different perspectives and sometimes people who converge like in at least 90% of their ideas then get pulled apart when it comes to the other 10% and it's really unfortunate because we can have very productive discussions when it comes to, for example, OK, what should be private, what should be political, uh look. Look at individuals in terms of their, uh, on how they're positioned in terms of their socio-cultural, political, historical context, and so on and how we can, uh, mobilize to improve, uh, the life of, uh, I mean, the vast majority of the population and so on and so forth and sometimes we, we just get, uh, fixated on those, uh, tiny, sometimes it's just a matter of. Of details, sometimes it's just more of a matter of how people want to label themselves. I mean, fixing on those more superficial things instead of noticing that, I mean, maybe with some disagreements here and there, some concessions here and there, we could really organize much better on the left or any other kind of political movement, I guess.

1:12:21 Sophie Scott-Brown: Mm, I think that's incredibly. Um, INSIGHTFUL of you, that is true. I mean, one of the standing jokes about the left is that, um, one of its sort of greatest weaknesses or tendencies is to factionalism and as a result to fragmentation. And in a sense, what I see, kind of, some of the figures in my book looking at, they, they don't solve this, but they start to sort of think, right, well, what if fragmentation, what, what, what if you could make that a virtue? What if you could make that actually, a kind of, you know, Because what makes fragmentation bad, in some ways, it's not bad to disagree, even if it's something you're gonna, you know, kind of, the hill you die on, as it were, you know, um, even if in, in, in, you know, kind of, to other people that might look completely bizarre, why on earth you were going to bat over that particular issue, sort of thing. But in some ways I, you know, again, I suppose there's a kind of desire to imagine what it would look like, and there is a, there is a label for this. I'll get to it, um, what it would look like if we kind of learnt to be fine with, um, fragmentation and even to make it work for us. And actually, at the end of the book, I don't do this in as much detail, and possibly it's something for later, but looking at something like the Committee of 100, this is exactly the process that happens to them. The Committee of 100 sort of come out of the Direct Action Committee, who are the anti-nuclear activists I've been talking about. And the Committee of 100 start off very much like CND, and they want these big centralized campaigns with huge numbers. But then actually what happens is, you know, and it's a virtue, right? If people get involved in things, they get passionate, but they want to put their slant and their experience, which is right, it's how it should be. But that's quite hard when you're trying to organize, you know, completely joined up movement, you've got everyone wanting to do things just slightly differently. So the activists started. To see what they were doing as a kind of school, and to be pleased when people wanted to break off and do their own venture. Now, OK, so again, you've got this problem with, well, what's more effective? If you've got all these small little pockets of actions that keep popping up all over the place, it's what I like to call the kind of whack a mole approach to revolution. It just keeps popping up here, there and everywhere. Um, IS that effective, or actually do we need that big kind of mass of people marching down Whitehall saying we don't want nuclear weapons, sort of thing. Um, AND in some ways, what's interesting about the Committee of 100 is even after 1963, when the Non-Proliferation, um, Treaty gets passed between America and. And USSR and Britain, um, and the kind of heat goes out, doesn't go away, but goes out of the nuclear issue. The Committee of 100 you see them pop up. If you were to do like a kind of sort of family tree of activism, whatever, they pop up in all the other different issues. They become leaders, they become organizers, they take what they learned there, and they pop up all over the place. And it's because they've had that taste of doing something, of shaping it, of, of working. With other people, and then moving on to something else. That makes them actually, it's, it's almost like trying to reinvent these new kind of political characters and roles, um, who are very, I use terms like picasque, you know, the idea that these sort of people just pop up in different episodes in a slightly different role, and organize something, and then go away again. And it's, um, I think it's an interesting idea. But essentially what we're talking about, Ricardo, is radical democracy, which has always been a hard one, isn't it? It sort of says everything and nothing. Because it's like radical democracy is of course much more granular, it's not representative, it's coming right down to democracy as a whole way of life that's happening in your workplace, it's happening in your community, that's happening just in the whole way you think and interact with the world. And, but then there's a tension, isn't there? By that, do we mean that kind of republican model where we want to build consensus all the time? Or are we talking about that more agonistic model where what we really want to do is argue and defend our differences all the time? Well, of course it's both, but in what order and how, and, you know, all manner of questions that erupt after that. I did not solve that question in this book, but I, um, I, I offer it out to everyone else.

1:16:43 Ricardo Lopes: Well, maybe in the next one then.

1:16:46 Sophie Scott-Brown: So, yeah,

1:16:48 Ricardo Lopes: so the book is again The Radical 50s Activist Politics in Cold War Britain. I'm of course leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. Uh AND Sophie, where can people find your work on the internet?

1:17:01 Sophie Scott-Brown: Well, I mean, this book, it's, um, it's quite expensive. So, uh, if you are, if you are a student, you may be able to get your, um, friendly university or school or college librarian to order it for the library. There should be an e-book copy, so you could possibly access chapters that way. Um, BUT obviously, if you wanted it, uh, ordered for your library, that's, that's all good for me. There is a Spanish translation that will come out, and hopefully be a little bit more accessible, and that will come out in the new year. So for any of your, um, Spanish speaking, uh, listeners, look out for that. It's, um, being published by Virus Editorial, which is very exciting. Um, BUT other than that, I, my various different forms of work, which is on, um, kind of intellectual history, uh, political theory and philosophy, they are available in various forms as articles, as blogs, um, and you can sort of find all these, uh, by doing a, a sort of quick, uh, Google Scholar search or something along those lines. And, uh, I'm sure it will all pop up by some handy algorithm.

1:18:06 Ricardo Lopes: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show again. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you. Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingberrd, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forst Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognun, Machael Jonathan Labran, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel Pancortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, John Wisman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Gelbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannes Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlomon Negro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.