When injustice, inequality, oppression or exploitation are substantial and long-lasting, it is a fair bet that they are not accidental. People tend not just to notice such things but also, as we have seen, to try and change them. Homelessness, violence against women, global poverty, racism, climate change and so on provoke a normal human response, not just once but repeatedly. If calls for change consistently fall on deaf ears and attempts to bring about change are consistently blocked, it is not credible to imagine that somehow the powerful, the wealthy and the culturally privileged simply haven’t noticed – however comforting that belief might be.
More typically, and more realistically, oppressive power structures persist because they suit the powerful. Exploitation persists because the wealthy benefit; and cultural stigmatisation persists because those at the top of the hierarchy quite like it that way. And, of course, the wealthy, the powerful and the culturally privileged tend to overlap significantly, and to support one another when they are not (as they often are) actually the same people. Ending injustice, then, is typically an uphill battle against these groups, and the institutions and social routines they dominate, such as the state, capital, patriarchy or racism. For the substantial and long-lasting forms of injustice we are discussing here, such battles are typically themselves both hard and long, fought by the much greater numbers of the poor, the powerless and the culturally stigmatised, or at least by a significant proportion of them.
Take an obvious example: winning the vote. The history is different in different countries, but the vast majority of states were not democracies in any sense until recently but more or less absolute monarchies, imperial colonies or dictatorships of various kinds. Few kings, imperial powers or dictators have ever relinquished power voluntarily. The explosive threat posed by popular power is shown by the consistency with which the history of the vote is marked by restricted suffrage (to men only, with a property qualification, over a certain age, to a limited group of citizens and so on), by limited powers given to elected bodies (as against the monarch, the imperial centre, the military and so on) and by complicated arrangements (presidents vs. parliaments, upper vs. lower houses, courts vs. parliaments etc.) designed to restrict the possible implications of popular decisions. It was not until the mid-twentieth century in most countries that ‘democrat’ ceased to be a term of abuse, with meanings between ‘anarchy’ and ‘mob rule’.
In fact, however, the violence was typically on the other foot. In 1819, when the vote was restricted to only a small fraction of the population, a huge meeting in Manchester demanding electoral reform was met by the cavalry, the artillery and the militia. Perhaps a dozen people were killed and several hundred injured at what became known as ‘Peterloo’. A limited reform in 1832 extended voting rights to some middle class men only. Between 1838 and the 1850s Britain’s Chartist movement, one of the first mass working-class movements, organised huge numbers of supporters around six demands: a vote for all men over twenty-one, the secret ballot, no property qualification for members of parliament, payment for members (so people without private incomes could stand for parliament), equal-sized constituencies and annual parliamentary elections to ensure popular control over parliament.
Some of the Chartists’ demands, 180 years old this year, are still short of being met. Annual elections are still absent everywhere, while constituency gerrymandering remains a fine art in many jurisdictions, not least the US. Recall that a civil war was fought over slavery, and the right to vote for most black men was only technically granted after the war. This was immediately contested in practice, both by the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organisations and by a wide range of bureaucratic rules designed to disenfranchise blacks. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s faced lethal violence in the struggle to enforce the right to vote; in today’s US, attempts to restrict the black vote remain a battleground in many states.
In the Britain, the great Chartist demonstration of 1848 has been described as the nearest the country came to revolution; another two limited reforms, a radical women’s suffrage movement and mass labour organising, followed. Despite this, it was not until 1918 that all men over twenty-one were given the right to vote; women over thirty who met a property qualification were also included, with equal suffrage granted in 1928. Britain has thus only been a democracy in any real sense for ninety years – and it took ninety years of radical struggle to get to that point. In Northern Ireland, the demand for equal voting rights in regional and local government provoked violent responses from loyalist mobs, with de facto police support. By the time local government was reformed, in 1973, the regional government had been suspended and Northern Ireland was run from Westminster with military support.
With all its limitations, universal suffrage was not handed down by benevolent rulers or the product of some magical law of progress: it was fought for and won by large-scale, radical social movements against consistent and often lethal resistance from those in power.
So too in many other ways, social movements have made the world we live in – not, as Marx observed, under circumstances of their own choosing; and not all outcomes of social movements were the ones they wanted or the ones we might celebrate. Nonetheless, a sober reckoning of just how far the world we live in is the product of collective struggle is a necessary starting point for understanding our own world and the effects of our own past actions, to think through how we remake it in our present struggles, and to see more clearly what it means to be human.
Chapter 1 explored this dynamic from an individual perspective. In this chapter, I want to pull back to a far larger collective, historical and global perspective in order to look at the other side of this. The need for a bigger picture is a real human one, readily visible in any bookshop in the form of ‘key to the universe’ books which offer to explain everything in history and the present world in terms of economics, or genetics; through diseases, or ideas; as psychology, or as geopolitics. Clearly, the question ‘how can we understand our world?’ bubbles up time and time again; equally clearly, there is a strong ideological push to answer this question in ways that not only ‘sell’ a particular academic discipline but also give us the sense of seeing ‘under’ the surface of reality that other people take for granted. This chapter does not attempt to offer such a key to the universe or a special secret: it is mostly a reminder of familiar historical facts, which are so big we tend to take them for granted, and an encouragement to think about them more systematically.
For the past quarter-millennium, the world has seen one wave of social movements after another, each challenging and in some cases dramatically reshaping some aspect of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the capitalist world-system. A good place to start the story is with the ‘Atlantic Revolutions’ of the later eighteenth century that challenged the world of the triangle trade (slaves, cotton and textiles between Africa, America and Europe). The successful American and French Revolutions provided models of state organisation, as well as narratives of popular uprising, that remain immensely powerful nearly 250 years later, while Haiti saw the first successful revolution against slavery (1791–1804) and 1798 in Ireland marks a large-scale uprising close to the heart of British power. Parliamentary government, and the end of empires, have long roots in popular resistance.
The early nineteenth century saw a wave of revolutionary wars bring most of today’s Latin American nation-states into being, from Mexico to Chile, while the European movements of 1848 shook the old dynastic order to the core in the name of radical-democratic nationalism, ‘the people’ defined in national and cultural terms against states structured in terms of monarchic ruling houses. This model of what ‘a country’ is has subsequently become so widespread that it is hardly possible to escape from it anywhere on the planet today.
In 1915/1916 the opening shots were fired in a process that would see the end of the empires that then covered almost the entire Old World (with the exception of Tibet, Thailand, Japan and to some extent China). The transnational Ghadar movement brought together Bengali and Punjabi labour migrants to North America with radical Indian nationalist intellectuals in a failed attempt at achieving independence through a mutiny in the British Indian Army. The Easter Rising in my own city of Dublin started a process that led within a few years to the withdrawal of the British Empire from most of its closest neighbour. Finally, the Zimmerwald meeting in neutral Switzerland brought together the radical wing of European social democracy, those opposed to nationalist warfare and in favour of socialist internationalism: the foundations of the communist traditions that shook the twentieth-century world.
The wave of popular struggles that followed fatally undermined the war effort, as workers went on strike and peasants occupied the land across much of Europe, while most of the belligerent armies were crippled by mutinies and desertions. Workers’, peasants’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils (sometimes using the Russian word, soviet) flourished across the continent. The few liberal parliamentary states of the period suffered massive labour unrest, with a general strike in Seattle and the US’ Red Scare targeting labour activists, socialists and anarchists, while troops were sent onto the streets of Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast. Italy’s ‘two red years’ saw factory occupations across its northern industrial cities and a huge wave of land occupations.
Across the continent, the dynastic empires of 1914 were broken apart by a surge of radical left movements of different kinds, not only in Russia but also with the Hungarian Soviet and ‘Red Vienna’ in what had been Austro-Hungary. In Germany, a series of revolutionary conflicts brought down the Kaiser, creating and then contesting the Weimar Republic. Finally, Europe’s internal colonies rebelled, from Ireland to Finland and Poland. This wave was beaten back in various ways, with the Irish Free State and the USSR the only surviving remnants of its most revolutionary edge, both having lost significant territory and facing civil war as well as – for the USSR – intervention by a dozen Allied powers. In the bigger picture, however, the Hohenzollern, Romanov, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires were swept away, never to return.
This wave was partly contained by a new kind of violence: paramilitary forces drawing on the minority of ex-soldiers who wanted to keep on fighting, for reasons of class and ideology, because of personal trauma or psychopathology, or because they had nothing else to go back to. In Italy, the armed gangs associated with the Fascist Party were supported by business interests and big landowners to attack labour and socialist organisers and break up land occupations. In Germany, the newly established Weimar Republic made a ‘pact with the devil’ of the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps and the police and military establishments to defend it against challenges from the left; this rendered the new republic fatally dependent on forces that were ultimately hostile to it. In Ireland, the ‘Black and Tan’ police reserves, recruited on a similar basis, were successful in provoking popular hostility, burning several towns, but could not prevent partial independence.
The European ‘civil war’, over what was to replace the old order, ran through the birth of right-wing states in Italy, Hungary and Germany over the corpses of their defeated opponents. A similar struggle would happen in Spain from 1936 to 1939 as an elected left-wing government faced a military uprising under Franco. The combination of German military power and local right-wing forces in various kinds of collaborationist arrangement would expand fascist power up until the decisive battle of Stalingrad in 1942, when the Red Army started to turn the tide.
After Stalingrad, with the growth of labour conscription in occupied Europe and the opening of new fronts in Italy and eventually France, large-scale popular resistance to fascism grew. These new recruits joined the longer resistance of anarchists, communists, socialists and trade unionists against a regime bent on their annihilation, as well as (in different countries) radical democrats, right-wing nationalists opposed to German rule, Jewish partisans and others. The Yalta settlement, dividing the postwar continent between the two emerging superpowers and Britain, was superimposed on this conflict, and contested memories of collaboration, resistance and liberation remain central to debates over state legitimacy today, which can be read in military terms as a conflict between nations or in political terms as a conflict between left and right.
While fascist Spain and Portugal, which had remained neutral in the war, preserved their arrangements until the mid-1970s, welfare states in the US-dominated west and state socialisms in the Soviet-dominated east both attempted in different ways to satisfy popular demands while maintaining their superpowers’ preferred forms of state power and economic structure. Both saw processes of economic redistribution as well as a ‘social wage’ in the form of education, health, housing, welfare and so on, with political structures that supposedly enabled the mediation of hierarchically organised economic interests at a central level. These states were nonetheless contested, most dramatically by the US Civil Rights Movement from the mid-1950s on and by working-class uprisings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956).
With the end of war in Asia came a new wave of national liberation movements. These had been forged under British, French and Dutch colonial domination and reshaped in response to the expansion of Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The military collapse of European empires in 1941 combined with the growth of popular anti-colonial movements to make new states so clearly inevitable that the British Empire began negotiating its withdrawal almost immediately after the war. The French resisted in Indochina, and were defeated in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu but replaced by the Americans; the Vietnam war did not end until 1975.
The constellations of movements underlying the new states varied hugely, with different relationships between peasant struggles, urban working-class organisation and the new educated elites, and in the relative weight of nationalism, socialism and religion as political projects around which people could envisage their future struggles around modernity. The difference between the new Chinese and Indian states, widely discussed up to the 1970s, is telling in this respect.
African anti-colonial movements in the 1950s and 1960s also went through a combination of fighting their way to independence (most dramatically in Kenya and Algeria) and negotiated colonial withdrawal. Here popular movements were often weaker than in Asia, and precolonial state structures contributed less to the shape of empire and the borders which followed. Here too, long anti-colonial struggles had to be fought, notably in Angola, Rhodesia and South Africa (this last finishing only in 1994).
This second anti-colonial wave (after the end of empire in the Americas) was both long-lasting in its effects and ambiguous. Almost everywhere, these new states – whether officially communist, nationalist, religious or some combination of these – attempted ‘national-developmentalist’ strategies that combined economic growth, state power and redistribution to the constituencies of key movements. At the same time, popular movements were often so disappointed by the results of independent states in the hands of urban elites, local landowners and international business interests that a third wave of movements took place in and against these states within what in Asia and Africa was a very few years of independence – considerably more, of course, in Latin America where some of the most radical struggles took place. In some places, peasant struggles and working-class unrest had never gone away, and burst to the surface in one country after another, with outcomes ranging from the Indonesian state’s massacre of perhaps a million communists in 1965 and Mexico’s massacre of students in 1968 to the Maoist-linked peasant struggles of the Indian 1960s and 1970s, as well as conflicts over national boundaries such as the Biafran war in Nigeria. The new states’ power was increasingly contested.
Parallel to this attempt at radicalising independence, 1968 in the global North saw a decisive challenge to welfare state and state socialist attempts at compromise with popular movements. Whether in Prague, in Paris or in Derry, or in the ‘long 1968’ (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) that includes the US Civil Rights Movement and East European dissidence, feminism and the struggle against nuclear power, popular movements challenged the state and the social order both in the name of those excluded from the formal interest compromise – women, ethnic and racial minorities, new and peripheral working-class categories, countercultural groups etc. – and in the name of a challenge to top-down power, whether technocratic, redistributive or founded on ethnic domination.
In Czechoslovakia, reformists sought ‘socialism with a human face’, in opposition to Soviet-dominated state socialism and the police state. In France, what was then the largest general strike in human history went hand in hand with students taking over the universities. In Northern Ireland, the sectarian power of Ulster Protestants was challenged by disadvantaged Catholics. Around the world, the logic of empire, war and Cold War was challenged, not least in opposition to the war in Vietnam pursued by the US and supported by its allies. More generally, these movements levelled a powerful critique at the mass-media ‘spectacle’ and the consumption-based ideal offered as a form of social pacification. They questioned the instrumental logic which saw work, science and rationality as defining of human existence.
What characterised 1968 above all else was the dramatic assertion of popular self-organisation: workers occupying factories, students occupying universities and running their own courses, actors or media staff running their own theatres or radios, communities taking over the streets of their own cities. Everywhere, it seemed, people were putting democracy into practice in their own lives. This radically reshuffled the cards of popular politics, replacing faith in top-down political parties and charismatic leaders as the normal mode of left organisation with a broad commitment to genuinely collective organisation at the grassroots, seeking democracy within movement organisations and not simply as something to be aimed for in a future state.
Nowhere did the movements of 1968 succeed in their own terms; but everywhere the impact of 1968 left the legitimacy of top-down state decision-making fatally undermined. In the west, a conservative gender and sexual order came under long and sustained attack and new generations of migrants struggled to assert themselves against official and popular racism. Technocracy was challenged around nuclear power plants and environmental destruction, by urban squatting and radical countercultures, by radical movements within education, health and mental health. The logic of Cold War was repeatedly challenged by movements against nuclear weapons, the war in Vietnam and future foreign adventures. In the east, 1968 and subsequent dissident movements raised many of the same issues in their own, difficult environments; the hostile official response helped lead towards the slow death of belief in state socialism even in those countries where it had been popular at the end of the war.
As Hilary Wainwright has noted, the impact of these movements was then used from above, in the face of the failure of welfare state and state socialist compromises, to clear the ground for the rise of neoliberalism as a strategy for capitalist development that would seek to limit redistribution by disaggregating collective action and converting what had once been social movement demands into questions of individual choice and opportunity, from commodified subcultures to women in the boardroom. The popular movements of 1989–1990 that overthrew state socialism in Eastern Europe, brought about the break-up of the Soviet Union and challenged Chinese state power head-on in Beijing and elsewhere would inherit these contradictions.
I will discuss more recent waves of movements below, but even this very brief sketch shows just how central popular movements have been in the making of the modern world. Remove this perspective and you have ‘a tale … full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, with no sensible way to explain the constant making and remaking of ‘countries’ (states and societies), their differences from one another and their interrelations. Most people on the planet live, today, in states that have been fundamentally remade by social movements within living memory. Miss this point, and we will understand little else.
Each of these waves of social movements and revolution, whatever the ultimate outcome, represents a real moment of weakness for the ‘hegemonic’ power of the ruling class in one or more regions of the capitalist world-system: its ability to maintain itself in power through securing the consent of some social groups and effectively coercing others. Thus each wave also represents a significant change in the self-making and remaking of popular power in those parts of the world: even conservative outcomes normally entail a new way of incorporating popular agency, within the medium term if not immediately, because what the crisis has signified is their inability to continue as if that agency had not changed.
This does not mean that the outcomes are necessarily good ones. What defines these moments of crisis is that the new forces are often not sure how to proceed but feel they have to take the risk of doing so. Conversely, the ruling forces are often pushed into responding at the point they realise that there is a crisis, but before it is clear that they no longer have a chance of success. Hence, things can go either way – and often go in different directions in different places. Waves like that of 1848, which was essentially defeated everywhere within a short time, or 1989, which was in a sense successful everywhere bar China, are the exception rather than the rule. However, as the example of 1848 (or indeed 1968) shows, the broader crisis often has to be resolved by taking at least some popular demands on board: things do not continue as before.
Conversely, what seems like ‘success’ at the time is often very ambiguous; not everyone involved gets the world they hoped for. It was at one time reasonable to expect that universal suffrage, national independence, welfare states or an opening to cultural diversity would mean a complete social transformation; as we have repeatedly seen, however, they do not automatically mean an end to capitalism, the state, patriarchy or racial and ethnic hierarchies. In fact, what emerges is often a new formation in which some popular demands come to the fore and strike a deal with capitalism at the expense of others.
A particularly dramatic case of this, albeit not part of a wave in the sense discussed above, is the end of apartheid in South Africa, where the insurgent African National Congress (ANC) literally met with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and agreed that the end of whites-only rule and the move to universal suffrage would not mean the nationalisation of the strategically central mining industries or a break with neoliberal capitalism. South Africa today sees a combination of ongoing electoral support for the ANC’s role in ending apartheid, with its loss of several key cities, an increasing part of the trade union movement breaking with its traditional loyalty to the party (symbolised by the state killing of independently organised miners in 2012), a much wider groundswell of community-based struggles over services and against neoliberalism and most recently a new wave of student struggles. Most of those involved understand their battle as a development and fulfilment of the real promise of the liberation struggle, a radicalisation rather than any kind of attempt at return to apartheid; and this is characteristic of such moments.
This kind of irony was already familiar to the socialist, artist (and inventor of fantasy literature) William Morris in 1886, when one of his time-travelling characters reflected, ‘[People] fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other [people] have to fight for what they meant under another name’. Popular struggles, and their effects, are not linear; but their effects are nonetheless real, and we live in the world they have shaped.
In the longer term, this sequence shows a continually greater need to take popular power on board and to find new ways of seeking consent. The traditionalist right wing, in the French revolution and after, sought simple restoration: to return the peasantry, ordinary city-dwellers, slaves and colonists to a situation of political insignificance, where their role was simply to obey both their immediate feudal or imperial overlords in a chain going up to the divine right of kings and the highest religious authorities, in return for their overlords making traditional paternalistic concessions. Restorationist fantasies always overestimated what was possible: popular bread riots and agrarian secret societies, the self-assertion of the local gentry and merchant groups, religious radicalism and slave revolts, to say nothing of native resistance in the Americas, had been recurring features of what reactionaries, those who wanted to turn back the clock to before 1789, imagined as a purely top-down form of power.
One effect of these fantasies is that it was impossible to recognise that peasants and sans-culottes might have had perfectly good reasons for rebelling, or even have been capable of doing so independently. The revolution must therefore have been caused by a secret elite – of philosophers, of Freemasons, of Jews, of Illuminati. Such conspiracy theories remain a staple of right-wing thought today, as an alternative to recognising that ordinary people may be able both to notice when they are exploited and oppressed and to do something about it.
In the century and a half that followed the French Revolution, the programme of a return to the ancien régime became less and less credible as a strategy for power. Its last major hurrah in Europe, the restoration after 1848, was followed over the following two decades by one parliamentary concession after another in different countries. These were not democratic in any contemporary sense, but gave the middle classes some say in what became increasingly parliamentary monarchies, and restructured dynastic states, inherited by particular ruling houses, towards nation-states founded on a sense of ‘the people’ as defined by nation, language and culture, a claim which was more radical in some contexts and more conservative in others. This new state model would become absolutely dominant in Europe after the collapse of empires in 1918–1919.
Yet between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the continent-wide upheavals between 1916 and 1923, it became clear that this too was not enough and that the urban working classes and peasantry had definitively become political actors who could not be put back in their box and excluded from politics. This process was resisted: on left and right, the expectation was that formal political equality would mean large-scale redistribution and an egalitarian society. As we now know, the outcomes were far from this; and yet the pressure for democratic states to engage in some form of redistribution has been constant and powerful, in particular up to the 1970s. Even today, the scale of redistribution in Europe is far above where it was in 1918. Saying this is no defence of the present order: it is to recognise how far it has to take our needs on board even in a period of neoliberal austerity, and the limits beyond which it cannot risk pushing people, limits which in most cases we have not yet arrived at in a Europe where ruling classes still have some inherited sense of this practical reality and the potential strength of popular movements.
In the mid-twentieth century, the long history of urban working-class people self-organising to meet their own needs – through friendly societies and other collective responses to sickness or accidents, old age or unemployment; funeral clubs and funds to support widows and orphans; credit unions; food and land schemes; schools and adult educational projects; and above all trade unions – was in various ways incorporated into the political order. At times, as in Norway, this came about through alliances with the peasant movement after a period of intense strikes; at others, as in Germany, conservative elites introduced social insurance to try to defang a rising socialist movement. In Britain, the National Health Service came about as a response to popular pressures following the Depression and World War II, and so on. The multiple ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ (and the varied arrangements of state-socialist and national-developmentalist states) nonetheless all represented an attempt by states of different political hues to handle these powerful demands from below.
Thus, popular classes became constant actors on the European political scene. In this context, what had originally been described as Bonapartism – rallying ‘the people’ behind a charismatic national leader – became an important early model for how to square the circle between the growing political agency of the large majority of people (well before universal suffrage; the vote was limited by wealth in most countries until after World War I and by gender until even later) and the defence of capitalist and aristocratic wealth and power. As a young Sicilian aristocrat responded to the liberal-nationalist unification of Italy in Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, ‘If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change’.
Of course, not everything did remain the same: to maintain the essence of class power, many concessions, not least economic and political ones, had to be made. Welfare states, in this sense, are not simply a veneer over capitalist reality; it is in no sense a denial of the fundamental capitalist situation to say that they did meet many needs of the core organised groups (while excluding many others). Indeed, there remains a strong constituency in the global North, albeit largely unrepresented by contemporary political parties, of people who would happily return to the welfare arrangements of the ‘thirty glorious years’ after the war.
Bonapartism, and its later nineteenth-century variants such as Boulangisme in France and the Primrose League in England, had found themselves faced towards the end of the century by a far more strongly organised working class – structured in increasingly effective union federations and socialist parties, with their own press and public meetings, structures of economic solidarity discussed above, women’s and youth organisations, sports and leisure groups, cultural and educational institutions – and eventually followed suit. Fascism, as a response, involved not only the call of the nation and the leader, but also plebiscites to demonstrate popular support, mass involvement in party organisations of all kinds (not just party membership but again labour, farming, women’s and youth groups) and limited kinds of visible redistribution in the form of roads and rearmament programmes, workers’ holidays and so on. Finally, in the postwar period, the Catholic Church – which had been formally opposed to democracy since Italian unification had taken over the Papal States – made its peace and supported the formation of Christian Democratic parties, enabling mass political organisation on an explicitly religious basis. Ireland, like many other postcolonial societies, had combined both elements in the mass religious organisation and popular support for (electoral) nationalism that characterised the country from independence in the 1920s up to the 1960s.
Thus (outside of the late fascist regimes in Iberia and Greece), even the most viciously right-wing governments could not simply reduce ordinary people to political zeroes or totally ignore their economic demands. There was a constant pressure from below, a secular growth in popular movement potential which any regime that wanted to stay in power had to take into account in some way, especially if the goal was to minimise formal democracy and social equality. This is a crucial part of understanding collective agency: much of what I have described in the previous paragraph (and which can be called ‘social movements from above’) consists of the attempt to form collective political subjects which are intimately structured through their alliance with economic and state power and cultural hierarchy (religious power, racism, patriarchal sexual relations and so on) so that a substantial proportion of popular collective agency flows in a useful direction for elites.
The previous section tells a particular west European story; while a US reader might feel that the emphasis on popular struggles and welfare states is too positive here, its most direct counterparts are state socialist, first in the Soviet Union and then, after World War II, in East and Central Europe, in China and elsewhere in the majority world. Just as Western Europe and North America are significant variants of a common history, so too there were huge differences between state socialisms. Nonetheless, it is important to note that they were in some cases formed by actual revolution or (as in Czechoslovakia, Laos or Cuba) with the incorporation of revolutionary movements into a wider geopolitical situation not of their own choosing. They also involved extensive popular organisation in many different structures as well as significant redistribution. At the same time, the pressure in most of these societies for economic development meant that in practice a state managerial class and the drive for industrialisation (or, in Central Europe, competitive industrial development) still acted in exploitative ways, although the gulfs in wealth were far less than in the west.
In the rest of the global South, Asian and African anti-colonial resistance had by the interwar period become the project of an educated urban elite eager to assert itself as the future leadership of a national state (which would often be imposed on a multi-ethnic reality, with tensions both pre-existing and encouraged by imperial rule). This nationalist elite needed at least the passive support of the peasants who formed the mass of these populations and of the strategically central urban workers (indigenous populations were typically left out of this equation), whether their organisation took the form of peasant movements, labour unions and socialist parties or more religious and ethnically based shapes.
Many different kinds of ‘movement-become-state’ developed out of this experience, with China and India representing different models and producing very different results in terms of popular involvement in and consent for power and the scale and nature of redistribution and welfare provision. Nonetheless, it is broadly possible to describe most postindependence societies (state socialist and otherwise) as national-developmentalist, with elite commitment to the project of economic development for the whole country enabling some degree of redistribution even in those countries where capitalism and landholding patterns remained intact, and widespread popular support for the parties of the independence period. Latin America’s much earlier political independence, and the different paths of popular organisation in much of Asia as against Africa, again mark out strong variations within this picture.
What, then, of the present? In the ‘First World’, a turn to neoliberalism and against welfare states took place from the 1970s on, symbolised by the electoral victories of Thatcher and Reagan and their defeats of the miners and air traffic controllers, respectively, followed by the partial dismantling and thorough-going restructuring of much of the welfare state. The Scandinavian path to neoliberalism, like continental Western Europe’s, did not follow an identical route, and popular capacity for resistance (if rarely anything more) remained somewhat greater.
The state socialist ‘Second World’ largely collapsed under the pressure of mostly peaceful popular uprisings in 1989 and 1990. The aggressive neoliberalism that followed throve in the wasteland of collective action that followed the wholesale disappearance of previous forms of political engagement, with various forms of strongman politics and right-wing nationalism filling the void. In China, however, the People’s Liberation Army found itself reconquering Beijing by force, an experience (like internal colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang and its increasing sabre-rattling abroad) which has cast a long shadow on popular agency within ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Meanwhile, the ‘Third World’ has been suffering IMF- and World Bank-led neoliberalisation since the 1970s, a process symbolised by the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile against the democratically elected Allende and the homicidal regime that followed, but affecting different countries and regions in different periods and in different ways. National-developmentalism as an economic strategy was abandoned; health, education, welfare and subsidies were cut to the bone; ‘uncommercial’ small farmers (those feeding themselves) were driven off the land; multinational companies were given free reign while unions were smashed.
Yet even in these contexts, most dictatorships proved impossible to sustain over time, despite the death squads and the torture chambers. With the old, statist left co-opted or cowed, the right-wing dictatorships ‘transitioned’ by the 1990s into what was often a merely simulated democracy. Neoliberal rules, whether written into structural adjustment packages, EU treaties or global trade agreements, massively constrained the areas where voting made any difference. This was made clearly visible in relation to the Greek crisis, where German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble commented ‘Elections change nothing. There are rules’ and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said ‘There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties’.
This situation enables the continued undercutting of previous popular gains in terms of general redistribution, the provision of services and workplace power, as well as a new wave of ‘accumulation by dispossession’: the commodification of many things, from indigenous land to water provision, that were once owned on some more collective basis. Neoliberalism’s survival to date, but also the roots of its current crisis, has something to do with the political credit accumulated by these previous social formations.
The popular vote in many countries still goes to social-democratic, Christian-democratic or independence-era parties once associated with the construction of welfare states or other forms of clientelist redistribution. This can remain true for long periods even after these parties have abandoned such politics in favour of hard-line neoliberalism. As the South African example shows, however, this form of accumulated political credit does not last for ever.
Yet, popular resistance (or its potential) in many countries means that there is still a long way to go before reaching ground zero in terms of the neoliberal rollback of redistribution, and its effects are felt unevenly across different social groups. Thus, we see a general trend globally towards greater coercion and political fragmentation, with a key feature being the attempt to break up forms of collective political agency that could bring these different groups and issues together and speak for popular needs more broadly.
At first glance, the major waves of social movement and revolution discussed above might seem to have primarily revolved around issues of class and state, which can lead to the false conclusion that these are somehow ‘master issues’, against which others are secondary. Yet the single largest of all these waves – which created most present-day states – was organised around the issues of imperialism and colonialism, race and ethnicity, while tying these to the struggles of peasants seeking land and urban workers. Moreover, movements from above have almost always sought in various ways to base themselves on defence of the nation and of the family, whether they have couched these in primarily religious or primarily secular terms. Conservatives have consistently appealed not only to men, but also to women who identify themselves primarily with their ascribed role in different social orders.
Or put another way: it is true that while women have tended to seize opportunities to resist and escape from patriarchy, there has been a consistent strand of women’s organising which has accepted religious, conservative and racist or nationalist identities and sought self-assertion within these. However, we can equally say that if the majority of the workers’ movement has been broadly on the left, internationalist and supportive of women’s rights there has been a consistent corporatist, nationalist/racist and sexually conservative strand.
Most fundamentally, we should not imagine separate women’s, workers, nationalist or whatever movements which only concern themselves with these issues. Instead, we have different forms of political subject which are subject to constant tensions around these issues and which necessarily – implicitly if not overtly – represent one choice of direction as against another. Most broadly, movements from below can (indeed are forced to) choose between alliance with each other’s struggles or the attempt to assert one’s own interests as structured within the given social order and hence at the expense of one another. From above, the hope is to purchase consent (for nationalism or racism, for patriarchy, for capitalism) with concessions that do not threaten the social order: a good deal for elites, if it can be arranged.
It is unsurprising, then, that it is precisely in the periods between waves, when major change does not seem to be on the agenda and it is hard enough to mobilise people on one issue, that movements tend to be separated from one another and most likely to seek alliances with what they believe to be progressive elite fractions in order to pursue integration within the (usually national) social order. Or put another way: when popular organisations have been shredded (like unions) or co-opted (like centre-left parties), it is easier for would-be alternative elites (women in the boardroom, black celebrities, working-class racists) to seem like the only game in town. Conversely, one of the first signs that serious social change is on the cards is when the voices within individual movements that argue for alliances with other movements come to the fore, and the possibility of a wider transformation comes to feel like a real possibility.
Such periods also represent – as oral histories repeatedly underline – moments of personal transformation. After all, we are not only workers or welfare recipients, women or gay men, ethnic minorities or racially dominated: often, even usually, we are several of these together. Most people in the global North, for example, are employees and beneficiaries of different kinds of welfare, health and education provision. Women form a majority of almost all populations (and even more of adult populations given life expectancy), and LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex) numbers are not small. A high proportion of us are migrants, indigenous or minorities who do not form part of the dominant ethnic or racial group; some of us have disabilities or mental health issues; others choose to live more or less outside cultural norms – while all of us are threatened by climate change and ecological destruction. It is a moment of awakening to take this greater range of our own experience on board, to say nothing of listening to our families, friends, neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances about their experience – and to decide to do something about it.
In 1995, the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa sat in military detention awaiting execution. A member of the indigenous Ogoni people of the Niger Delta, he led the nonviolent resistance to Shell’s gas and oil activities in Ogoni territory, which were poisoning the water, land and air that this small fishing and farming population depended on for survival. At one point in 1993, perhaps as many as 60 per cent of the entire Ogoni population took part in protests against Shell. The then military dictatorship, with close ties to the oil industry, responded brutally. Special forces destroyed village after village, killing perhaps one to two thousand people and making tens of thousands homeless, raping women and girls and torturing detainees; as I write, Amnesty International is calling for criminal prosecutions of Shell for its complicity in this violence.
Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders were imprisoned on trumped-up charges of murder, tried by a military court and condemned to death. Throughout this process, Saro-Wiwa was writing to an Irish solidarity activist, Sister Majella McCarron, letters which were smuggled out in the basket used to bring him bread in jail. Many years after his execution, I was lucky enough to see these letters, when Majella donated them to my university on foot of our students’ long involvement with the campaign against Shell’s activities in Erris, NW Ireland; two colleagues and I edited and published the letters as a record of Saro-Wiwa’s activism.
When writing about the book to people who know nothing of Saro-Wiwa or Ogoni, though, it is hard to know how to tell the story. Was this an ecological struggle, or one against the oil industry in particular? Was it a human rights conflict, or a struggle for democracy? Is the theme one of economic inequality and ownership of natural resources? Is it a case of indigenous self-assertion against the central state, or for that matter the nonviolent tactics which Saro-Wiwa successfully argued for?
The answer, of course, is ‘all of the above’: these different issues and themes connect with one another in the reality of what is still a desperately poor, environmentally damaged, politically suppressed but well-organised population in struggle – and with the wider global issues that come together in opposition to the oil industry: poverty, climate change, corruption and power. The strength of the Ogoni struggle, however, lies in part in making these connections, and not simply trying to further one of these (most obviously, in practice, seeking better rewards for local political interests in return for tolerating Shell’s continued activities). When we join the dots, we find ourselves asking much bigger questions – and working with the much wider groups of people who do not stand to benefit from any politically easy solution.
More broadly, social movements have been central to achieving much of what we hope to take for granted today. Our common-sense awareness of just how important ‘rights’ are and how many forces would like to remove or undermine them reflects this fact. Social movements only exist through constantly enforcing the rights of political organisation (notably the freedom of speech and assembly) in practice, while freedom of expression and religion go back to earlier popular struggles against absolutism and religious power which are still ongoing in parts of the world today, not least Ireland. Everywhere, too, women’s rights, along with the right to sexual freedom and LGBTQI demands, have to be constantly fought for, defended and extended in the teeth of substantial opposition of different kinds. So too with the right to cultural diversity – whether the right to speak one’s own language or the right to live according to one’s own lights: these have been the subject of many battles large and small, from the countercultural youth movements that provoked moral panics in east and west in the postwar decades to ongoing struggles over minority and regional culture in many countries.
I have a badge somewhere that reads ‘Unions: the folks who brought you the weekend’. The weekend, along with the eight-hour day and (where we have it) the right to paid holidays and sick leave, as well as all sorts of protections against sickness and injury, unemployment and old age, were first fought for in the labour struggle or self-organised among the urban poor before states and employers were forced to the table, in some cases seeking to make concessions on their own terms rather than lose the kinds of battles they had watched in neighbouring countries. Free education and health provision too, to the extent they exist, are as much the product of social movement struggles as of the benevolence or managerial strategies of states: something that becomes clear each time our own state tries to cut one or another and we find out who is capable of effectively resisting the process.
Alongside movements ‘internal’ to capitalist society, we should pay close attention to the struggles of indigenous populations in resisting its expansion: in the Americas since the 1970s in particular, forming a fundamental part of resistance to the oil industry in Canada and the US, in the form of the long-lasting Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, or underpinning radical attempts to make different kinds of states in the Andes while resisting the ‘neo-extractivism’ which has meant greater destruction of indigenous livelihoods through mining, logging and so on in order to fund ‘progressive’ policies elsewhere.
In India, too, the enormous struggle against mega-dam projects on the Narmada River, peasant resistance to mining, drilling and logging or to land grabs for industrial megaprojects are regularly centred in indigenous populations, as is the long-running conflict between the state and Maoist guerrillas in eastern India. So too, for much resistance in a country like Indonesia – or to Shell in the Niger Delta. While following fundamentally different rhythms to other movements, recent decades have seen indigenous struggles become increasingly significant in many countries, setting ‘limits to capital’ of a different kind.
Almost all of the gains mentioned above, in most places, are unfinished battles, for a good reason: they were achieved in the teeth of other forces who bitterly opposed their introduction. Where they are currently taken for granted, this is because neither side sees a realistic opportunity of overturning the basic parameters of the present situation. For example, it is politically impossible in most countries with publicly funded education to resist the principle that it should be available to all up to a certain age, even though neoliberals are busy hollowing the principle out in practice. Similarly, while abortion is still a hotly contested issue, attempts at imposing Catholic teaching on contraception have been quietly dropped in most countries: as birth rates show, the vast majority of practising Catholics also practise birth control. However, in times of crisis like the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, or again after the crash of 2007/2008, we see determined attempts to break these rights: to create union-free workplaces, for example, or to impose bailout agreements that reduce basic social provision to meaningless levels in Greece; regular police violence against protestors and the surveillance of every aspect of activist organising; and so on.
I suggested above that the long 1968 is best seen as representing popular resistance to the top-down arrangements of western welfare states, eastern state socialisms and southern national-developmentalism. This resistance was led by social actors who were excluded from participation in central interest representation processes but also oppressed by the forms of state power, workplace control and imposed cultural homogeneity characteristic of the highpoint of these arrangements. In the 1970s, in particular, after the defeat of the first, ‘revolutionary’ moment of these struggles, it seemed that alliances between radical versions of these struggles with a global agenda were the wave of the future: the articulation of a different (‘red-green’, but also feminist and libertarian) vision of society around the massive opposition to nuclear power plants in the west, dissident visions of socialism with a human face, intellectual and political alliances such as socialist feminism, gay socialism, black feminism and so on.
In the 1980s, it would become clear that neoliberalism was more than capable of co-opting isolated elements of each of these movements – arguably it had to do so in order to shore up its own legitimacy. Thus (for example), female, gay or black professionals used radical rhetoric to advance their own interests at the expense of the large majority of people in each of these categories; ecological and countercultural movements became channelled into forms of ‘lifestyle’ consumption; or defeated, demobilised and individualised working-class populations were targeted by right-wing media and politicians as bases of support for their racist, militarist and misogynist policies. Only in the later 1990s did it become possible, in some contexts, to remake earlier, radical alliances around shared opposition to neoliberalism (a term which acquired popularity precisely for its usefulness in this context).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of Latin American dictatorships was replaced by formally democratic arrangements with little real social change. In the years that followed, however, a ‘pink tide’ of progressive or left-wing governments came to power on the back of a wide range of social movement struggles, covering three-quarters of the Latin American population by the mid-2000s. These governments varied not only in how they related to popular movements but also how far they sought a break with the international financial institutions (IMF/World Bank, World Trade Organisation, etc.) and US geopolitical hegemony more broadly. This wave is now receding in some countries and under sustained attack in others.
Movements’ capture of the state was always very limited in some contexts where centre-left governments took power (Brazil, Chile, Argentina); after a period of success the Right has been able to use existing structures to roll back these changes in various ways. In more radical situations, a closer link between popular movements and radical parties led to partially transformed states in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. These too have come under increasing pressure, in part because of the weaknesses of Chavez’ strongman politics but more substantially because ‘neo-extractivism’, the reliance on intensified extraction of raw materials, has not changed their fundamental dependence on a global scale (Venezuela’s oil is worth far less than it once was) and (in Bolivia and Ecuador) has pitted indigenous movements defending their land against state willingness to force through extraction and infrastructure projects. With all these limitations, the variety and creativity of these movements and experiments is a fundamental resource for radical movements globally.
In the US, global justice alliances of environmentalists, trade unionists and radicals came together in the 1999 Seattle protest that defeated the World Trade Organisation but were effectively broken by the nationalist rallying cry of the ‘war on terror’ from 2001, returning in limited form in the later 2000s and in greater force in indigenous resistance to pipelines, Black Lives Matter and the many forms of resistance to Trump. In Western Europe, the earlier wave of struggle up to the police killing of Carlo Giuliani at the Genoa protest in 2001 fed into an enormous antiwar movement in 2003 and then into anti-austerity struggles as different as Iceland’s saucepan revolution, the Spanish and Greek indignad@s of 2011, the more statist Portuguese left or Nuit Debout in France. In the Arab world, the wave of popular uprisings that threatened or toppled tyrants in 2011 also drew on earlier opposition to the ‘war on terror’ and ongoing tensions around Palestine. The decentralised and feminist revolution in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) is still developing despite the Turkish invasion.
Elsewhere, there are huge popular struggles both in Chinese industry and in the countryside, along with bitter resistance from indigenous and other movements in much of India, in both cases struggling to articulate themselves nationally let alone make powerful international connections. In other countries, the struggles in countries like Turkey from Gezi Park on, in South Africa for many years or more recently in Brazil are very much linked to a wider global ‘movement of movements’, even when they do not use this term. The implication here is that we should not so much think of a single, identical movement happening in many different places as of many different movements, learning to work together in different ways, around a shared opposition to neoliberalism but without losing any of their own diversity.
Indeed, there is an extent to which movement-to-movement networking globally has displaced the Internationals of political parties and trade unions which defined the mid-twentieth century left. Even if international audiences find issues easier to understand when framed in terms of states and policies, they do so primarily as social movement participants rather than (as in previous decades) members of left parties. To take one example, the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America, often presented as the radical hope for the US left, is currently estimated at a mere eighteen thousand people. More positively, what the ‘movement of movements’ has meant is a constant and necessary attention to the complex reality of different struggles in different places, a grounding of the attempt to develop a wider challenge to neoliberalism in the lived reality of people’s concrete lives. This also means refusing the ways in which neoliberalism, and the global domination of Anglophone media, encourage a flattening homogenisation of this real specificity into a single, simplifying, image.
What Alf Nilsen and I have called the twilight of neoliberalism was heralded by the anti-capitalist and alterglobalist ‘movement of movements’ that has challenged neoliberal legitimacy in many ways since around the turn of the millennium and with renewed vigour since the economic crash of 2007–2008. There is now a constant search for new political forms that could stabilise the situation. We are seeing a shift towards nationalist authoritarianism in states as different as India and Turkey (where Modi and Erdoğan have some mass basis in right-wing religious parties and their associated organisations), Russia (where Putin’s power has strong Bonapartist tendencies given the enormous difficulty of popular organisation across the huge differences in society) or Egypt (where the religious-conservative takeover of the 2011 revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood has given way to a reassertion of military dictatorship with Western support). The politics of Law and Justice in Poland or Viktor Órban in Hungary, or those of Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain, represent other variants again on this general pattern, all responding to the crisis of consent of an older neoliberalism with the apparently obvious answer of racist and nationalist authoritarianism.
How successful any of these experiments will be in the medium term is another question, and one which needs answering very differently in different countries. What can be confidently stated is that a crucial question in each context is the organisation of popular consent, in other words social movements, from above and below. Simply voting for Trump or Brexit, for example, does not add up to any kind of more active mobilisation, and struggles to find a sustainable organisational form; right-wing trolling does not quite fill the void. In the US, resistance to the right has been a fertile source of organisational innovation, while in Britain Momentum in the Labour Party is proving surprisingly successful at mobilising. In both countries, however, progressive forces have an uphill battle because of the previous third of a century’s destruction or institutional co-optation of the historical organisations of popular power and activism. The tendency to interpret issues in purely parliamentary terms is one effect of this history.
What all of this means, of course, as in any crisis, is that collective agency matters. Who will win in the crisis cannot be discovered by reading the tea leaves of political economy, or by peering into the abyss that is right-wing politics and seeing what its worst exponents hope for. It can only be discovered collectively and in practice, in our attempts to resist and build alternatives – and their success or failure at including different social groups, building alliances and constructing a credible vision that ordinary people feel happy to get involved with. Alongside the upsurge of activism in the US, we could mention popular mobilisation around climate justice, the outpouring of hospitality and solidarity in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, the solidarity with Greece in the summer of 2015 or global feminist organising around sexual harassment. None of these have as yet found stable and sustainable organisational forms, but in different ways they all show that there is a ‘real potential’, in the sense outlined in chapter 4, for something different, ‘from below and on the left’ as the Zapatistas say, to emerge as a political actor pointing the way towards a better future.
It is important, in all of this, to avoid the kind of criticism which assumes that mentioning social movements is to claim that they have already won – and that pointing out their limitations or defeats is a sufficient dismissal. Popular movements, in most times and places, face opponents who are far more powerful, wealthier and culturally dominant. Their own successes are rarely as simple as electoral ones; and, as we can see with the Greek referendum of 2015, such victories do not always mean what we think. Because movements’ opponents have not gone away, and neoliberalism remains in power – even if, as I argue, holed below the waterline in terms of its popular legitimacy – we are talking about a dramatic conflict between actors, not some sort of cultural transformation in which a single organisation or event can change everything. That is not how empires, religious power, older forms of capitalism or patriarchy have come to an end; and it is historically illiterate to expect social change in the present to be any less complex and contested, or any more transparent to its participants than in the past.
Instead, I want to tell a different sort of story. Following the largely defensive ‘IMF riots’ of the 1980s, the Zapatista revolution in southeast Mexico inspired a new wave of radical alliance formation around outright opposition to neoliberalism and a refusal to participate within existing structures shaped around it. The Peoples’ Global Action network gave birth to a series of dramatic summit protests around the world in which ‘we met one another in the streets’. This was perhaps the clearest single organisational genealogy within a much wider coming-together of movements that underpinned popular uprisings in South America, from the Bolivian water war to the Argentinian revolutionary moment of 2001; antiwar resistance in the North connecting with a new wave of popular struggle in the Arab world; Northern indignad@s and Occupy movements, bringing together mass popular participation in the attempt to create real democracy and resist neoliberalism; the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, where in a country like Egypt workers, students, nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, football fans, defecting elements of the state and middle-class liberals came together; and more isolated struggles elsewhere, from South Africa to Indonesia.
In Seattle, computer activists outraged by mainstream media misrepresentation of protests created Indymedia as a tool for what would now be called citizen journalism, directly reporting on the events from many different sources. Remaining live after the protest, Indymedia multiplied worldwide and became a horizontal space for ‘peer-to-peer’ discussion, which not only foreshadowed today’s Web 2.0, with its social media and commenting back on articles, but also in many cases fed into it both personally and technically. In Brazil, an alliance of Latin American and west European activists and intellectuals created the World Social Forum as a critical mirror to the elite World Economic Forum at Davos. The social forum movement, bringing together movements in a space of discussion rather than action, also went worldwide, with continental, national and sometimes city-based social forum events or ongoing movements.
All of this enabled the development and articulation of shared modes of organising and acting, which expressed existing tendencies in the remaking of popular culture in the twenty-first century but also earlier traditions of social movement practice which had survived underground (literally in some cases) and the articulation of the best practice among activists in the new, emerging movements. This is a very complex process, and it is important to avoid the simple celebration of newness, the flattening effects of journalistic clichés and lofty dismissals by those nostalgic for earlier modes of organising. What constitutes a ‘movement of movements’ in this context, though, is both the existence of many parallel histories or traditions and the many and varied kinds of connection they seek to build with one another, across great differences.
In different social groups and different continents, movement processes work very differently, as researchers regularly show. Indeed, part of what has happened in the antiwar movement, in Latin American struggles over the state, in European anti-austerity movements or the uprisings of 2011, is that different actors have sought to pull the process in different directions; and any attempt to homogenise the situation misses this basic fact. Movements grow out of specific, complex situations and respond to these in thoughtful, internally contested ways: they cannot be easily and simply equated to one another. Instead, what we see is the slow and difficult process of collective learning across time, conversations including new popular actors as they make themselves in struggle, tension between different strategies and approaches: not a simple ‘onwards and upwards’ but a difficult practical challenge of learning, communication and collaboration across great distances.
The account I have given thus far draws not only on academic research but also on what Gramsci called ‘good sense’, the struggle to make sense of our own experience and history from below. Good sense, for Gramsci, clashes with ‘common sense’, the clichés repeated in school and the media, in the pub and in family gatherings – ways of shaping our understanding, or expressing our discontent with the world, that do not challenge the existing order. Articulating more fully and openly what we do know, and thinking it through together, are crucial parts of the process of disaggregating popular consent for the way things are, and bringing about another kind of world.
Part of that process, in fact a central part, is ‘learning from each other’s struggles’: coming to have a better sense of the experience of different social groups, in other parts of the world, and for that matter our longer histories, so that we do not simply wind up with a more radicalised version of our personal starting point but with a broader sense of ‘we’, one more adequate to the struggles we face, the alliances we need to make, the opponents we have to overcome and the wider world we are operating within.
Where, in all of this, is research on social movements and revolutions? In my own work, I have been strongly critical of ‘actually existing’ social movement studies, and this book does not follow the freakonomists and evolutionary psychologists in proposing ourselves as some new master science. Unlike economics, which now exists as a kind of orthodox theology for neoliberalism, with high status among policymakers and very little space for intellectual diversity, or pseudoscientific cults which really operate as the intellectual wing of racism and sexism, social movements research is such a varied field that it can hardly play this role, even if it wanted to.
There are certainly some more tightly defined approaches within it, such as the US-based orthodoxy which has its own canon within which one must operate in order to be published in its own spaces. Thankfully, social movements are so widespread that reflection and commentary on them can hardly be contained within such a small space. Within history, a long-standing tradition of Marxist and other social historians, along with subaltern studies research in Asia, contemporary feminists and oral historians, has explored some of the world’s most dramatic popular struggles. Exploration of ‘resistance’, in the sense used by Foucault or the very different North American sense of non-violence as an almost codified form of action, has its own spaces which coexist with anarchist and Marxist studies of everyday workplace and peasant conflict at a very low level.
The study of revolutions (often divorced from that of social movements) is split between American universities, where it has historical roots in Cold War foreign policy aimed at defeating them; traditions in the global South where what is at stake is the history of one’s own state formation; the European study of our ambiguous revolutionary experiences; and anarchist and Marxist analysis of how different revolutions failed or succeeded. Within feminism, Black Studies, LGBTQI research, indigenous studies, urban studies and even parts of natural science, attention to popular movements relevant to these issues fluctuates across time, discipline and countries. There is also a long-standing tradition in cultural studies (which came out of an attention to informal and symbolic modes of popular resistance), the academic study of religion, literary studies, political philosophy and many other fields of thinking one’s own subject of research through social movements and collective agency in different forms. Elsewhere, too, it is hard to think seriously about educational theory, industrial relations, civil society, solidarity economy or welfare policy without discussing popular movements.
Social movements research, then, at its broadest is a conversation crossing many different ways of reflecting on how human beings struggle together, and it is all the richer for this. In fact one of its major contributions is precisely when it can show these interlinkages and connect up (for example) a subculture, an innovation in education, a particular kind of policy, popular memory of a revolution, a literary movement or everyday peasant culture with some experience or experiences of social movement. In this way, social movements research helps us to deepen our understanding of the world as it already is and to transform that understanding through seeing it as the products of our own collective agency – or as capable of being challenged and transformed collectively today where earlier struggles had failed.
Good research in the field resists the journalistic clichés that try to squeeze collective action into the sort of story that journalists know how to research – one organised around key individuals, style moments, formal politics or an influential book. Instead, researchers spend long periods of time in the field (or, for historical movements, reading their leaflets, magazines, posters, internal discussions and autobiographical accounts), getting a real feel for how it works when people come together, outside the everyday routines that mainstream media is comfortable with, to create a kind of thing they have sometimes never experienced before, against opponents with more power, resources and status and whose responses are uncertain.
Such research does not wind up, usually, producing the kind of ‘movements good/movements bad’ opinion beloved of social media, instant journalism and a certain kind of left. It certainly draws attention to movements that in the nature of things are rarely noticed unless they are in our immediate context (or suit our own countries when they challenge competing ones); but rather than presenting them as a unified whole, it shows the tensions, conflicts and learning processes involved as different interests and strategies are articulated and the conflict intensifies and changes. For activists, good work of this kind can help them better understand what it is they are doing. After all, learning in this kind of situation is won at a great human cost; the more we can learn from each other’s struggles, the better for all of us.
This sort of research is really important when we are conscious of a problem in our own worlds but do not know how to solve it. Seeing what other movements have done is often a crucial first step in thinking what we could do and what might work. In a world where ‘bad movements’ or ‘movement failures’ are often held over our heads to dissuade us from taking action, it is really important to have a clear and realistic sense of how movements actually work, and not only what their opponents would like us to believe of them.
An important tradition within Marxist, anarchist, feminist and postcolonial studies is geared towards understanding not simply the learning processes within individual movements, but also something of how movement traditions develop and persist across time, transmitting some sense of learning and collective identity from one generation to the next (or, through migration and solidarity, from one place to the next); at the broadest sense, this raises the question of ‘the making of the working class’, or of ‘the feminist movement’, or of black political agency, or of indigenous resurgence, as one of how whole groups of people become not only collective subjects but also actors on the world stage over decades or centuries.
These traditions themselves, and much of social movements research more generally, draw on movements’ own processes of research and theorising. Different movements have different kinds of capacity and priority in this area, and it is usually challenging for movements to sustain independently over time. But many movement actors do understand the importance (for example) of highlighting movement struggles happening elsewhere and documenting our own as they are going on; of education and training which introduces participants to a wider understanding of movement struggles as well as practical techniques for workplace organising, nonviolent direct action or public mobilisation. Movements develop their own periodicals, films, summer camps, educational workshops or other structures to keep a wider understanding alive and prevent the movement from simply reacting to its opponents by enabling it to have a wider sense of possibility.
The academic versions of feminism and Marxism, indigenous and black studies, queer studies and community education all in different ways draw on these traditions. Some (Marxism most notably) have also sustained institutions of historical and political analysis and complex bodies of theoretical knowledge over many decades outside the academy, in the context of at times ferocious repression, vicious internal conflicts and against a background of huge poverty. In other traditions, theoretical work and practical research may depend on a handful of individuals, or may have largely been absorbed into the university.
But in the widest sense, social movements regularly return to the tasks of trying to learn from their own experience; trying to articulate those lessons theoretically in order to think about the big strategic picture; and trying to develop appropriate forms of education and training to return these ideas to the world of practice. We should be deeply grateful to them for doing so; without this process, neither the Civil Rights Movement nor trade unions, the women’s movement nor the environmental movement would have had anything like the impact they have had on today’s world. It may be clear by now why there is no ‘book’, written by an authoritative Expert, that can tell us what movements can be or what they should do: that book is written collectively, as movements try to move into a space which has never yet been occupied.