Anastasia (not her real name) has a son on the autistic spectrum. To access any kind of resources for him, she had to wait four years to get an official diagnosis, by which point her son was already six. The waiting lists for assessments are so long that another parent with a special needs child set up a private centre with subsidised rates so that parents can know what their children need – while they are still children. Her then partner had to take a case with the ombudsman in order to get minimal treatment from inexperienced staff, and go through a lengthy appeal process in order to be entitled to carer’s leave. They now have to fight with the school and the teacher to get them to take their son’s condition at all seriously in daily classroom work. Despite having to pursue this route, Anastasia does not feel that the official psychiatric diagnosis, or the practices in which their son’s special needs assistant have been trained, really describe or help his situation very well; and she has deep-seated questions about how and why he is on the spectrum – but also why school and society are organised in such a way that it is excruciatingly difficult for autistic people to function within them. After all, school supports will mostly cease in children’s teens or at best early adulthood; and all being well children outlive their parents. How are they to survive? With other parents, she has set up a local group which provides supports to parents and carers and helps people fill out welfare forms and campaigns for changes in the system: the local health board now refers parents with autism to them rather than changing its own practice. Because of her own health situation Anastasia is limited in her energy, but she also holds down two part-time jobs, in a community centre and an alternative school project.
Seán is a ‘nice boy from a good family’, but never really fitted into the macho world around him, partly because his parents were immigrants and partly because he was attracted to men as well as women. From an early age, he read intensively and in his teenage years became deeply affected by the suffering and injustice in the world. In his personal life, but also his work as a mental health nurse, he tries to act in ways that take all of this on board – challenging sexist and racist stereotypes among his colleagues, not eating animals, helping organise the local union branch – while also joining in more political actions when he can, from antiwar politics as a student to involvement in local food projects as an adult. In the small town where he now lives in another country, there is a real crisis situation around undocumented migrants, racist organising and Syrian refugees. Seán tries not only to help organise welcome and support structures as well as language classes for the newcomers, but also to develop anti-racist activities for local working-class youth.
Pat came from a very difficult family background and struggled to bring her sons up on a working-class estate without them falling victim to addiction or the police. She is a resourceful woman: when her sons’ friends were hanging around the alleyway behind her house smoking dope, she used her comfortable ‘mammy’ persona to invite them in for a cup of tea. As teenage lads, they didn’t quite know what to do except to come in and look embarrassed. Over the years she gradually won their confidence, not lecturing them about what they should be doing but listening as they talked about the lack of any obvious future; the way teachers, shopkeepers and respectable citizens treated them; harassment by the police; and the deaths of their friends by suicide or overdose. Slowly but surely she helped them to reflect more on the power relations underlying this situation, and as they did so they also found it easier to take charge of their own lives in many ways. She now spends a lot of time working with women’s groups from council estates like her own, helping them think more about how society is organised and how they can improve things locally. She supported her daughter in her many battles with school authorities and is delighted that she calls herself a feminist.
I could multiply these examples indefinitely, but these three snapshots give something of the sense of the down-to-earth and everyday nature of most social movement organising. In fact it is so down-to-earth that people involved often refuse the label of ‘activist’ and strongly resist the idea that they are doing anything special or different. Just like those around them, they say, they try to help when they can.
Indeed, they are likely to feel that they cannot do enough to respond to all the suffering they are conscious of, and this points to something important: few people are full-time, lifelong organisers. It is very common to dip in and out of different movements and activism (a word I use for lack of a better one) throughout people’s whole lives. This is just as well: otherwise, movements would consist of the same handful of people, with probably very little resonance in workplaces or communities. Instead, sometimes – by no means all the time – people feel strongly enough, or strongly affected enough, about a particular issue or campaign that they decide to get involved, whether or not they have done so before.
Total newcomers often bring a great blast of energy and confidence, and a refreshing lack of awareness that some areas or groups may be hostile to movements, and these can be huge strengths. As Facebook groups previously devoted to gossiping about each other start sharing videos of police violence, or as friends or neighbours turning out for a march on an issue they are outraged about take a week to produce a brilliant banner together, there is a great jolt of life for movements and longer-term organisers.
But whether we are first-time participants, long-time organisers, occasional participants or for that matter observers keeping our distance, as soon as you start looking you see that social movements are everywhere. Not all the time, certainly, and not equally successful. This is part of what defines ‘normality’: since movements come together in part to challenge the way things are, ‘normality’ means precisely those times and places in which the social institutions and routines that suit the powerful, the wealthy and the culturally privileged are not significantly challenged. Even in periods of utter normality, however, people still come together to fight where they have to – to protect their children, in their workplaces or communities; and other people still resist injustice, whether official support for wars and dictatorship abroad or ecological destruction at home, even when they have little hope of success.
A lot of this activity is very mundane: the support group, the leaflet, the website, the Twitter argument, the invitation to a new colleague to join the union, the small local demonstration to defend services, the email to politicians or the subscription to an NGO. Because social movements are everywhere, they are ‘nothing special’; or rather, only some of the time do we even really notice movement activity as out of the ordinary. They go beyond charity in that they have some degree of self-organisation – they are not simply created by the state, local businesses, a church or a committee of local ‘notables’ – and this is partly because they ask bigger questions about the world and go that bit further, in their ideas even if not always in their action (which is harder to achieve).
To outline a more formal way of thinking about social movements: Human beings, all of us, have needs, all sorts of them – for food and for hope, for ideas and for love, for health care and for respect, for shelter and for real work, needs for our children and for the place we live in and so on. When we meet one need, we see that there are other things we also need – or, sometimes, when one need is met, we realise that we need not just shelter but decent shelter, whether in terms of cost, quality or how the landlord treats us. Needs, in other words, are developmental, not fixed and given. This is not only true for us as individuals but also at a cultural or social level – what an older generation was not much bothered by can be really distressing to us. We are often aware of needs that aren’t fully met, while sometimes we are taken by surprise to discover how much we needed something once we get a small taste of it. This is incidentally often true of meaningful involvement in social struggle around things that really matter to us.
At one level, social inequality is about how far these needs are met; and in capitalist societies, we are offered an ‘equality of opportunity’ in which we are invited to compete to see if our needs can be met. Of course, this usually means that other people’s needs are not, or not met as much; and we may be very well aware that some of the things that are most important to us are never in practice going to be made available to us, that they are basically reserved to other categories of people.
At another level, our kinds of society – based on divisions of class, of gender and sexuality, of race and ethnicity, with states and cultures that support these divisions – are only really interested in a narrow subset of human needs. Hence, even what is offered to ‘successful’ people is often very short on some of the things that we might feel make life most worthwhile – free time, for example, real human community, a wide natural world within which to wander freely, social equality, a deeper sense of meaning, participation in the decisions that affect us or even the ability to live well without feeling that other people are suffering and dying elsewhere for our benefit. So in order to keep going, our kinds of society offer to selectively meet our needs, in ways conditional on our behaving appropriately, often at the expense of others and with certain needs ruled right out; and many of us know full well that our most urgent needs are simply not going to be met.
We are not, of course, going to stop trying to meet our needs, one way or the other. If we can meet them within the everyday routines and practices we are offered, we are quite likely to try to do so. We are also quite likely to try and meet other needs in unofficial ways when this is the easiest thing to do: an informal arrangement about when we leave work, swapping childcare or school lifts, a bit of dope to help us calm down, watching pirated movies or asking family members for help. A lot of the time, though, none of this quite does it for us. We do not get to the end of the month without borrowing money or leaving bills unopened for fear of what they might say; we hate our job; our living situation is driving us demented; our child is miserable and none of the approved channels are helping; every time we turn on the TV we get furious at the world we see out there.
So we struggle to cope in everyday life; and at times we feel we have things under control, at times we do not. Sometimes, though, we sense the possibility of pushing things further: changing how a particular institution works, at least at a small level; setting up a new project that would do things better and differently; coming together with people more like ourselves to do the things we value, even when they are illegal or frowned upon. At other times, we feel definitely under attack: we come together to try to defend services that we badly need, to stop a cut in wages or make sure permanent jobs are not turned into contract ones, to express our outrage and try to stop a war, an appalling political leader or the destruction of the planet. Movements are a creative collective response to this sort of situation.
Chapter 4 talks more about this process theoretically; here I want to underline that because we have human needs, and because our societies only meet those partially and for some of us, it is common enough to come together collectively to try to do something about this: to resist, or to push forward; to create new institutions or new forms of socialising; even at times to imagine a different and better world – or to try to stop a worse one which seems to be almost upon us.
We are not always available to do this, or only in certain ways. Social movement researchers talk about this as biographical availability. For example, my child and partner (who has an invisible disability) live elsewhere in order to meet their particular needs, and as the only person in well-paid employment I have to concentrate on making money in order to keep this whole show on the road financially, while my partner does most of the care work and only gets a respite at weekends when I am there. Under these circumstances, I will not be going to many Saturday demos for a good few years, and my involvement in other kinds of activism will be severely limited by my ability to follow through on organising commitments. So too with other kinds of caring and work responsibilities, with our own disabilities, sickness or old age or when we are particularly vulnerable to certain kinds of reprisals, like police violence or losing our job.
There may be other kinds of situational barriers to participation. We may only have encountered kinds of activism that didn’t seem to have any place for people like us, or that seemed to depend on following people we didn’t really like or respect; we might have moved into a situation where there seems no prospect of involving other people in the kinds of things we care about; or we might already be under a cloud of suspicion for being too different in one way or another. Some of these things, maybe, can be worked around – there are often ways of getting people on your side if the right situation arises or you are able to think creatively; or there may be forms of activism that can be carried out with the time and energy we actually have available. But at other times, movement participation may simply not be on the cards.
Thus many people weave in and out of movements as their lives change. The reason why there is a stereotype of the college activist is in part because this is one of the times of life in which we are most likely to encounter our peers engaging in activism and recognise it as such, but it is by no means the only one. In fact, there are many different spaces of social movement. Some, like trade union activism, are structured around where we work; others, such as community activism and some kinds of environmental or service protest, are very much structured around where we live. Some take place in our ‘leisure time’, in that they happen after work, online or at weekends in largely public spaces, and may bring together people from all sorts of social situations; some exist primarily as a job, in the sense of a Greenpeace worker, a radical journalist or a staff member in a women’s refuge. At times, as in the US mobilisation against Trump, we see people resisting across all of these spaces: resigning their jobs, or carrying them out in ways that actively frustrate administration plans; taking whole school districts out on strike, or mobilising at the airport to welcome Muslims and resist the travel ban; pushing to defend and strengthen the sanctuary status of particular cities or campuses; organising on a neighbourhood basis to resist raids for undocumented migrants; supporting each other in the workplace; and so on.
Not only are we likely to encounter movements in different spaces of our lives; our lives are likely to intersect with them in very different ways. To take a strong example, in some times and spaces – Zapatista communities in Chiapas today or some republican communities in Northern Ireland during the Troubles – most people might be in some sense involved in activism, in different ways at different times in their lives of course, but with no sense that to do so is anything other than normal. A certain level of feminist activism may work like this at the moment in some social groups, meaning that ‘my daughter just announced that she is a feminist’ is an ordinary statement which friends and family meet with rejoicing as a normal part of growing up.
A more common situation is that of a lifeworld where a particular movement is broadly accepted and taking part in it is nothing unusual or remarkable, although many people do not take part, or only in limited ways. This has been the case for lesbian and gay communities in many cities for some decades, and for politically organised working-class communities in much of the global North until fairly recently. In these situations, most people may turn out to Pride for the party, or (when working) are largely inactive union members, and know some of the songs, while being more or less supportive of actual actions and campaigns. There might be tensions around how people in some organisations treat those who aren’t, and a certain amount of joking as between those who prefer to watch the match and those who prefer to go to a meeting, but being an activist is not a problem in itself; it is a relatively well-understood way of being, and there are many supports available for learning the part.
These kinds of situations – as the examples given above suggest – are historically created; they come and go. Often, this means that there are sharp generational barriers so that (for example) the parents of young blacks who became involved in the Civil Rights Movement might have been proud of them but at the same time scared for them, and tried to dissuade them from placing themselves at risk. The parents of young ecologists in the 1980s might have had furious arguments with them about meat-eating or driving two cars. More sharply, German students in the 1960s started to ask their parents about what they had done ‘in the war’. These first generations are often shaped in lifelong ways by this break from the culture they grew up in – while their peers made other choices with far more deeply conservative meanings, in a time when the best and the brightest were rejecting the world that the more cynical or the less creative were trying to slot into.
Last, some movements take place on the edge of their social; these can thus be hardest to sustain at a personal level. This is very often true for culturally radical movements, from animal rights to new religious movements; for the far left in countries where it is a marginal force; and for movements structured around creating new kinds of institutions, such as organic farms, urban social centres, radical education projects or cooperatives. There are simply not many models in society for how to live like this, and often little understanding to be had from friends or family. This can easily mean that participants become particularly dependent on movement institutions in terms of how they live their lives, and face particular challenges as the movement changes or if they break with other participants.
Of course in some ways each of these situations is an extreme case. More commonly, everyday life in most contemporary cultures involves some acceptance of some kind of movement participation as reasonable and normal, whether that means community education in a working-class estate, resisting gentrification in a lively inner-city area, organising against environmentally destructive projects in ‘unspoilt’ rural areas, mobilising to defend welfare services, setting up a carpool or childcare project, multicultural initiatives to welcome refugees or volunteering on a domestic violence helpline. In fact part of the battle that movements fight is precisely around how to achieve this level of cultural acceptance without this meaning depoliticisation, becoming a lifestyle activity or purely selfish in nature.
Negative impressions of social movements are best countered by actually spending time with real activists (rather than media caricatures) and seeing what their lives are like. To take an unusual example: for many years, I have worked with people involved in the Waldorf school movement inspired by Rudolf Steiner and have come to know people involved in the Camphill residential communities for people with special needs, in biodynamic farming and in the Ruskin Mill project which uses craft as therapy for young adults with special needs – all Steiner-linked and associated with anthroposophy, the spiritual movement he founded. I am not an anthroposophist in any way and find many of the ideas proposed by Steiner hard to swallow; and there is room for serious debate around some of the practices of the different movements mentioned above, debate which some of their participants join in.
Yet what stands out for me from this experience is meeting people who dedicate their lives over many years to enormously demanding and difficult projects: sustaining alternative schools, where teachers with high levels of training and experience often earn salaries a fraction of what they could earn in the mainstream; bringing people with special needs into one’s own family, and thus acting as voluntary lifelong carers as well as friends and parents; seeing one project after another fail and having to move (often to another country) and try to start again; and facing a barrage of challenges ranging from state hostility through the financial challenges of keeping these kinds of services going, to personal attacks.
These are not easy experiences, and yet the people I know usually manage to encounter the world with a great calm, a real interest in the people they meet and a great kindness towards people with special needs, children or young adults with sometimes threatening behavioural issues. There is a real love of beauty to be found in their workplaces – often at the cost of working far past the time when anyone else would have gone home – a fascination with ideas, and a deep ethical practice.
Look below the issue, or the ideas, in other words – and here I have deliberately chosen examples which most people are unfamiliar with or hostile to – and you find that social movement participants are often people who look beyond themselves, both on an interpersonal level and intellectually; people who are more concerned with benefitting others than with serving themselves; and people with great staying power and a real love for the world and other people, even when this is sometimes expressed negatively and critically, in outrage at injustice.
The details, and the ways people live with themselves and their work, differ hugely between movements: but the basic point is as true for solidarity and development workers as for socialist activists, for people in NGOs delivering services as for unpaid community activists, for trade unionists as for anti-racist organisers, for disability rights activists as for feminists: their human qualities are often deeply impressive. Whether it is these qualities that have brought them to activism, or that activism has encouraged these qualities, is perhaps a chicken-and-egg question. I do not want to suggest for a minute that all activists are saints: anyone familiar with movements will know that there are some common failings (not least self-righteousness) and some individuals who are just hard work to deal with – though it might be worth considering what such people would be like if they were not making the efforts involved in activism…
There is a real human difference that comes with long-term dedication to something that goes beyond yourself and your immediate family (even if it starts there); that involves thinking about the world in deeper ways and not simply taking the simplest set of clichés for granted; that often involves dropping your immediate activity in order to help someone in a crisis; and that involves putting yourself at risk, or losing out financially, or risking mockery and contempt, for some bigger purpose.
Of course in many cultures there are broader senses of generosity and mutual aid, hospitality and help in a crisis, sharing and neighbourly responsibilities that are not restricted to activists. These are, after all, strong parts of what might be said to constitute decent human existence. It could reasonably be argued that in the more individualised worlds which neoliberal capitalism in particular tries to create and celebrate, where we are encouraged not to feel responsible for other people’s suffering or to even see other people as people, activism keeps these positive human qualities alive, or gives them a new kind of lease of life in a hostile setting; while other people only resist by remaining decent and generous in their private lives but not beyond this.
And as we see in moments like recent outpourings of popular generosity in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, or of courage in resistance to racism, the qualities neoliberalism seeks to squash pop up again despite everything, even when as in Europe today they then struggle to find a more organised expression. Part of the human value of social movements, then, is to put these qualities on a stronger footing against the conscious organisation of greed and self-centred isolationism, hate and stupidity as political forces. Some of the best writing from movements has an aesthetic which recognises both the concrete grimness of the world and these extraordinary qualities, expressed in people’s visions of and struggles for a better world.
In this chapter, I have tried to give a sense of social movements as not being so strange, but as something we may well have participated in at some point in our lives, or even be involved in at present without thinking of it like this. I have looked at some aspects of how people live with their own movement participation, whether occasional or otherwise; and I have said something about how being in movements can affect people for the better. Movements, then, are close at hand, not as alien and distant as their opponents would like us to think; and this is a crucial political fact.
We started by exploring how people become involved in movements in order to meet their own needs and those of others; and having arrived at the human qualities of activists, I want to return to the question of how movement participation benefits us, in ways that also benefit others. Movement participation itself, of course, meets some needs, in the process of trying to meet others; and this is really important for understanding how people can keep going in the face of external defeat.
At a trivial level, it is of course not uncommon to join movements in order to make friends, because we have fallen in love with someone, or because we want to make a statement; and movements can give us something to do, a way of feeling that our lives have meaning, and a new kind of friendship and community. None of these are bad things; we could find some or many of them in other kinds of group setting, because as human beings we do actually need each other. Whether family or colleagues, neighbours or friends, it is hard to live without other people (even in the literal sense of life expectancy). It is no bad thing to meet these needs in a way that also benefits people beyond ourselves.
At a deeper level, and one which is not available in many other contexts, movements are a form of collective self-creation, and this meets some really powerful human needs. We are always, to some extent, remaking ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. All too often we are trying to remake ourselves in line with forces outside ourselves: bombarded by advertising, we try to make ourselves more attractive; under pressure at work, we try to make ourselves more competitive; struggling to make connections, we try to fit in. Social movements mean questioning some of those forces (usually not all, or not all at once).
Movements involve, it could be said, a process of education and emancipation: education in terms of thinking more deeply about different kinds of social relationship, power structure or cultural norms – and emancipation in the sense of taking practical action around this. This practical action, even in small doses, is transformative and contrasts sharply with letting our everyday actions be driven by habit while relating to the world through opinions alone. As we try to convince our neighbour to come to a meeting, or challenge our local authority, or try to make a kindergarten project work, we are exploring the practical meaning of our ideas and changing our ideas in line with our experience.
We are educating ourselves, not in isolation as one might do with an obsessive reading habit, or in a top-down way as one can do at college within an existing discipline, but in a genuinely adult way, not one set up by someone else, and where what other people do and say is central to our learning process and not fully predictable or within our control; in fact this is almost defining of the social movement experience. We are much more fully present in the learning situation, both with respect to other movement participants and with respect to opponents and the not yet committed. There is a collective, interactive and conflictual aspect to our learning.
This self-creation, in the Marxist tradition, is labelled as ‘praxis’, nominally the unity of (intellectual) theory and (political) practice – though I think it is less a fixed unity and a bit more like riding a bicycle: as we articulate our ideas, we come to try them out in the world; as things go wrong (or better than expected), we change our ideas and as all of this happens, we grow and develop, come into ourselves more fully in this relationship with other people.
Another way of putting this is to say that social movements represent the practice of what activists are increasingly calling real democracy: popular power that goes beyond ticking a box once every few years and otherwise accepting the power of authority in the state, of employers in the workplace or of ‘the way we do things’ in the rest of our lives. In movements, we learn to self-organise and take decisions democratically about the things that affect us, whether in an alternative project or in conflict with powerful opponents.
These very conflicts are where we find out just how much we can assert control over our own lives. In May 2004, I was one of the media spokespeople for a ‘weekend for an alternative Europe’, protesting as Ireland hosted an EU summit. We argued that the EU was becoming defined by the deaths of migrants struggling to enter a new ‘Fortress Europe’; that it was increasingly a military actor, overriding Irish neutrality; that EU policies were transferring the weight of taxation from the rich to the poor and privatising public services and more generally that the EU was enshrining neoliberal economics and top-down decision-making.
In response to these, we wanted to make the experiment of seeing if it was possible, in an EU then still celebrated as a bastion of democracy, to have our voices literally heard by EU leaders: could we come close enough that they could hear our protest? It turned out that the threat of being embarrassed in front of the EU worried the Irish government enough that it called out the military as well as the police. Scare stories leaked to the media accused us of having arms dumps and planning gas attacks (obviously, we didn’t); attempts were made to frighten city-centre shopkeepers into rolling down the shutters for the weekend; the media were informed that our march had been called off; and the riot squad were drafted in to prevent us assembling. All this for a peaceful march whose biggest risk was that banging pots and pans (a form of protest borrowed from Argentina) might be noisy enough that the leaders’ banquet would be disturbed.
But rights and liberties are not granted from on high; they are taken from below. It is not up to the government, or the police, to decide whether or not we can protest; it is up to us as human beings to assert the right to assemble and the right to protest, in practice. In the event, it turned out that so many other people cared about these rights that the march was several times the size it might otherwise have been, and we got well within shouting (or rather pot-banging) distance of the banquet before being turned back by water cannon and baton charges. It was possible to express our dissent, in other words, if we were well-organised.
It was a long evening for me; I later calculated that I had walked fourteen kilometres in a few hours, going backwards and forwards trying to keep the march from being separated into sections that could be broken up by the police. The most powerful experience of the event, for me, was being part of a large insurgent crowd calling ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ The streets do not belong to the police, even if they beat us off them; they do not belong to the government, to close any time it is politically inconvenient that people protest; they belong to the people. But for the streets to become our streets in practice, we have to take them back, together. In a similar way, decades previously, feminists organised ‘Take Back the Night’ marches against sexual violence in public spaces. The practice of democracy consists of these moments of popular self-assertion, finding out if we agree that certain things (banning marches, sexual violence) are unacceptable, seeing the nature of the opposition (the state, patriarchy), and acting on that together, to reshape our world.
In a world where what psychologist Oliver James has called affluenza, the disease of isolated individual consumption, has become rampant, and where Asperger syndrome has become so widespread that it has been removed even from the conservative psychiatric DSM-5 manual, such reconnection is an urgent need for many of us. Movements enable this reconnection not simply within the protected space of a stable, routine and predictable institution but through meeting one another as comrades in the struggle or as opponents, as allies to be convinced or as uncommitted people to engage with – and in asking real questions about the situation we are in, whose interests it serves, how it has come to be and what it might take to change it.
In this sense, movements also offer the possibility of growing into a level of adulthood which is rare in the present world, a full and first-person engagement with our social reality not simply through coping or cynicism but through collective and creative action. There is a sort of childishness in a depoliticised way of life which simply accepts all the human-created structures of the world around us as given and unchangeable, and restricts itself to grumbling about this and cheerleading for that. In most human societies, for most of our species’ existence, making our own world – in the very practical sense of constructing shelter, making clothes and tools, creating art and social rituals and, since the Neolithic, farming – has been a central part of the human experience.
Marxists have long observed that capitalism alienates us more and more from this experience. It is noticeable how important things like gardening, making music, cooking, home improvements, organising social events and other attempts to create at least part of our own world are to so many people – even at the same time as these things are alienated again and turned into opportunities for consumption, improvement of house values, spectator sports or status displays. Social movement action is about stepping back into the real space of making our world on the widest scale; when we are invited to a gay wedding, see our children organise for women’s rights with no fear or self-consciousness, enjoy the weekend, watch politicians back off from an unpopular measure, meet South Africans who have grown up after apartheid or see new kinds of school appear on the horizon, there is a sharp reminder of how much we have actually changed our world through collective struggle.