Since the turn of the twenty-first century, social movements have been a constantly active presence in many different countries and continents. In the US, the dramatic struggles of Black Lives Matter against the de facto freedom of police forces to kill young black men, expressing the limited effect of the Obama election, fed into a much wider set of struggles against the Trump administration, showing just how varied social movements can be: from the Women’s Marches of 21 January 2017 to individuals and groups from all sorts of previously mainstream backgrounds resigning or resisting the new regime’s policies; from flash mobs at airports welcoming Muslims via coordinated resistance to immigration raids; and from new forms of anti-fascist action on the streets and online to the anti-pipeline struggles at Standing Rock and elsewhere.
In Canada and more recently the US, indigenous opposition to petroleum pipelines and tar sands extraction has increasingly been successful in facing down an industry traditionally seen as nearly unstoppable. Further south, the indigenous-based Zapatista revolution has successfully held onto its liberated zones in the Lacandon jungle for over twenty-four years, encouraging and supporting movements against neoliberalism – the most recent, and most aggressive, form of capitalism – around the world. In South America, powerful indigenous movements fed into the shaping of new kinds of state in Bolivia and Ecuador in particular, but which they have increasingly found themselves in conflict with. Elsewhere, a ‘pink tide’ saw powerful movement struggles, from the Argentinian revolution of 2001 to the Brazilian labour and landless movements, help put left governments of many different kinds in power, a process now being rolled back against huge popular resistance: perhaps 35 million people in Brazil’s 2017 general strike.
In China, there are massive levels of labour unrest in its new factory zones, together with constant rural conflicts over land and environmental issues, while Tibetan self-immolation and Hong Kong pro-democracy activism continue. In India, the struggles of tribal Adivasis and of dalits outside the caste system cross with women’s struggles against rape and dowry killings, while the peasant uprising in the ‘Red Corridor’ forms the target for a vicious counter-insurgency campaign. In South Africa, popular struggles against the corruption and continuing inequalities of African National Congress (ANC) rule have led to increasing independence in the labour movement, which became visible in the 2012 state massacre of mineworkers at Marikana, while the shanty towns are the site of new kinds of struggle against privatisation and against clientelistic power.
In the Middle East and North Africa, long-standing tensions around Palestine and resistance to the war in Iraq fed, alongside labour struggles, democratic and feminist activism and forms of popular Islamism, into the wave of uprisings of 2011, with a series of outcomes ranging from violent repression in Bahrain via the return of military rule in Egypt to Tunisia’s more hopeful process of change. Meanwhile, the uprising of Gezi Park and the growth of a new left in Turkey have been met with a vicious crackdown. In the chaos of the Syrian civil war, the radical-democratic and feminist struggle of Rojava’s Kurds has won the world’s attention. Across Europe, refugees fleeing the war provoked a wave of popular solidarity and direct action while racist movements have used the situation to boost their own power.
On the European periphery, Iceland’s ‘saucepan revolution’ of 2008–2009 and the dramatic Greek challenge to EU austerity from 2007 to 2015 form part of a wide variety of popular experiments alongside the huge anti-authoritarian movements in Spain and the Catalan conflict, more conventional forms of protest in Portugal and Ireland’s widespread and sustained community-based resistance to the introduction of water meters. Elsewhere, the extraordinary democratic experience of Nuit Debout in France and the movement takeover of the British Labour Party through Momentum contrast with the rise of far-right and racist movements across much of Europe – along with a thousand other struggles, large and small, ranging from workplace conflict to direct action against destructive development, from climate change organising to solidarity with refugees.
Social movements, then, are everywhere – both geographically and in the different parts of the social order. They are defeated or decline as well as having their moments of winning. They are not all nice, or right. They are creative and unpredictable, resisting the lazy generalisations of journalists under deadline pressure.
In many ways, it is this last point which is hardest to take on board: movements are widespread and frequent but not routine, running throughout the social world and across societies but not homogenous. It is, after all, Coca-Cola or Vodafone which tries to sell the exact same thing with a series of branches run on identical managerial principles in different cities and languages. When movements organise, even if they ally across countries, the people involved do not do the same thing in the same way everywhere. They do not transmit a top-down policy decision, but have to work out in many different times and places, under all sorts of pressures and with very different aims and ideas, how they should proceed. This diversity, changeability and internal contradiction is part of what makes them fascinating to study seriously, and hard to describe without making a real effort.
One indication of how hard it is to talk about movements in mainstream intellectual genres is to note the jump in form that comes when movements appear. Thus, protests might appear on the dust jacket or the illustrations of a book about political economy whose analysis is relentlessly structural in focus, or as the opening anecdote to an article whose real purpose is to present as natural or unchangeable the very inequalities protested against in the anecdote. A systematic analysis of institutional injustice may end with a brief moment of moral outrage and a gesture towards the need for radical change with no serious discussion of how to achieve this. Or the phrase ‘social movements’ may appear as a sort of black box, mysteriously bridging the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be.
What all of these express is that conventional intellectual forms routinely break down when faced with movements; or conversely that the only role movements can play within them is to perform tasks which their own main focus cannot – get the audience interested, bring a dry subject to life, paper over the cracks in a deterministic analysis or deal with the awkward fact that yet another sociological exposé of the horrors of the world will not actually motivate policy makers to change anything.
At other times, otherwise careful scholars reach for the most clichéd accounts of movements, whether political or academic in origin, or dismiss them with the laziest of analyses. Four pages of the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas on the subject, for example, have been quite enough to supply many a ‘critical’ analysis, despite his own practical inability to engage sensibly with movements in his own ‘lifeworld’: in 1968, he described the new university movements as constituting a ‘left fascism’, perhaps for asking too many critical questions about professorial power. Serious journalists who would not dream of writing about judicial reform or electoral strategy without doing their homework are only too happy to fill column inches with the most basic misunderstandings about what movements want, think and do.
There are, though, good reasons why what the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci called ‘traditional intellectuals’ – those trained for and working in conventional forms of knowledge production – find it hard to think seriously about social movements. First, at a personal level, their own acquaintance with movements is often just a brief period in college, maybe encountering people who were trying hard to act like activists – and perhaps, in retrospect, embarrassed by their own unsuccessful attempts to adopt the same roles, or needing to justify their own life choices.
There have been times and places when it was possible to move between being an effective activist to being a successful film director, novelist, academic or journalist – but in the normal course of events, a successful career in these highly prestigious and (at the top) well-rewarded professions requires a fair degree of instrumental ruthlessness as well as the ability to impress those who control the distribution of money, power and cultural capital in these milieux. Small wonder then that novelists’ accounts of movement activism are more likely to be caricatures than credible. The profuse thanks often given at the end of police procedurals to professionals on that side of the barricades are rarely found in novels featuring social movements, mostly not to protect the innocent but rather because authors do not feel the need to be remotely as well-informed about activists. The exceptions are rare enough to underline the rule.
Second, in practice, traditional intellectuals’ relationship to ‘society as a whole’ tends towards a stronger identification with society as it is, whether lightly modified in a positive direction or in decline from a conservative golden age. This is, after all, what they are trained in: to assemble the money for a Hollywood movie, it is important to convince nervous investors that a movie will appeal to large North American and west European audiences and to the Asian middle classes. To become a professor, it is important to seem suitably professorial to the managerial class who run present-day universities. To win prizes as a novelist, it is important to respect the boundaries of the novel as a high-status genre. To become a successful journalist, it is important to understand the ins and outs of institutional business as usual, whether that be parliamentary politics or the financial markets.
It is not, of course, that nobody is capable of getting through these barriers and still saying something more radical; it is that the routine mode of discourse in all of these fields is one in which social movements are not significant. Even more strongly, when movements do appear, professional success consists in boiling them down for Important Intellectual Matters, in other words reasserting one’s own cultural capital: inserting a brief political interlude within a novel of character and perception, within a discussion of the prospects of a new leadership for a mainstream party, within an art-house movie or within a Serious Work on economics.
Third, and perhaps most important, the normal form of traditional intellectual discourse is usually bird’s-eye description – ‘this is how the world is’ – or moral exhortation – ‘this is how it should be’. If there is a space for what we should do, that ‘we’ is not a radical collective acting without access to power, wealth and cultural authority: it is a national ‘we’, a ‘we’ composed of right-thinking people or those who share the same elevated cultural tastes, a ‘we’ of those who actually decide what happens in society or a ‘we’ of an imagined cultural unity. It is, in some ways, by successfully making such appeals to ‘we’ (success meaning not that action is taken, but that the appeal is recognised as a worthy one) that one ratifies one’s position as a traditional intellectual.
There are, of course, cruder reasons for not talking about movements, or only doing so in caricatured ways. Chomsky and Herman’s ‘five filters’ outline how this works in journalism: concentrated media ownership; dependence on advertisers; reliance on material provided by the state, business and associated experts; ‘flak’ making life difficult for critical journalists and anti-communism. More generally, traditional intellectuals almost always work within hierarchical institutions in which their job, their promotion or their next engagement depends on pleasing people above them, who are in turn closer to power, cultural authority and sheer wealth. Given what social movements are, it is hardly surprising that (at the most basic) the only way to advance one’s career while mentioning movements is to misrepresent them.
The level of discussion of movements in these contexts is often so poor that we have to start by clarifying something about what social movements are, and are not. Of course there are genuine issues of definition, some of which will appear in this book. But that does not mean that there are not simple mis-understandings, and it is important to get some of these out of the way first.
At a naïve level, movements are often understood as ‘something ordinary people do in numbers’, whether that means consuming some kind of food, voting in a particular way, wearing particular clothes, reading particular books or whatever. Any of these can form part of movements, if there is some form of collective organisation behind them: vegetarianism, for example, or a candidate backed by movement organisations; styles or ideas too can be produced within movements and then commodified, brought into a different set of social relations (a familiar process in music, bringing its own tensions between movement and mainstream relationships).
Less wide of the mark, an organisation (perhaps an NGO or a party), an individual (perhaps a political figure or a writer) or a group working on a particular issue is sometimes identified with or described as a movement, at times by those involved. There have been times and places where a single organisation, often with a centralised leadership, formed the backbone of a whole movement: in the mid-twentieth century, this was often true for anti-colonial nationalisms as for social democracy or communism, and fascism was also capable of using the term ‘movement’ in this way. Today, it is still possible to find organisations with the term ‘movement’ in their name, varying from political parties to anarchist groups and from trade unions to mildly political forms of development work.
To understand social movements, though, we need to put the emphasis above all on the people involved in creating this collective agency, in whatever way, and to ask about the relationships between them. In other words, we look for the networks – formal and clientelistic or informal and radically democratic, with many other shades in between – that connect different kinds of formal organisation and informal group, parties and trade unions, cultural figures and politicians and even (in some cases) churches, online media, subcultures, everyday forms of resistance, popular memories of past revolutions or lifestyles. There is no particular, privileged form through which people come together in movements: or rather, in different times and places, in different movements and traditions, people do these things differently.
What makes something a movement rather than something else is above all conflict: movements develop (and argue over) a sense of ‘we’ which is opposed to a ‘they’ (the state, corporations, a powerful social group, a form of behaviour) in a conflict which is about the shape and direction of society, on a large or small scale in terms of geography but also in terms of the scope of the issue. In social movement, then, society, or some part of it, moves, or tries to. As we shall see, part of this moving is also a process either of building alliances and hence ‘scaling-up’ the way an issue is thought about (from defending children against respiratory diseases caused by car exhausts to tackling a whole way of structuring industrial society), or of breaking down into more particularist spaces (villages resisting incinerators set against villages resisting new landfill dumps, for example).
Precisely because movements seek to move, they can also change their field of operations: retreating into forms of everyday grumbling, quiet resistance and popular memory in times of defeat, advancing into political challenges or mass direct action in times when success seems possible; even, in periods that shake the world, overturning the existing state and remaking it, or making another kind of society, not always within the same borders. If there is one thing movements are not, it is dull and predictable: if they settle into routines for a few years, they rarely have the resources that in other kinds of social activity keep people behaving in the same way over decades with only minimal changes. Movements, as we shall see in this book, involve people thinking hard and creatively about how to win against opponents who are often more powerful, wealthier and with greater cultural authority than them. This is one of the things that makes them such a delight to participate in and to study – they are among the spaces where people push themselves most fully, in more dimensions of their being than in more narrowly defined contexts.
I have been lucky enough to spend my life around movements in many different ways. I grew up in a world of social movements, lively enough to hear the occasional click on the phone line or wonder about the men sitting in a car outside the house, and have vivid memories of knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes and rattling tins – activities which form the baseline of much movement activity. Later on, I became active in more independent ways and explored many different kinds of activism, from NGOs to direct action, from student politics to community organising and from small projects to networking across struggles. I was able to spend time around movements in different countries and to meet political exiles from many more. All of this helped me to think about social movements not as a thing but as a human activity, about the different ways in which we inhabit and give life to movements, what we do with them and who we become in the process.
As a student, I was introduced to the wider world of the history of the French revolutions and the place of left, far left and green parties in 1980s Europe. I researched Hamburg’s social movement milieu and the Irish counterculture as a participant and through all of this encountered many more ways of thinking about movements, both activist and academic, though at the time these approaches often had little contact with one another. For over two decades I have been lucky enough to work mainly on social movements in my research and teaching.
I have remained involved in movements throughout but in a very wide range of different situations, each challenging in its own different way. Through the Manchester Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference and the open-access journal Interface, I have had the privilege of working with some of the most interesting activist researchers in social movements on the planet and contributing to the project of developing better conversations between the sharpest forms of movement theorising and the most engaged forms of academic research in the area. I have also taught many activists in the university, and learned a lot from the experience. This ‘ecology of knowledges’ has continually forced me to think harder, and not remain satisfied with simple answers to the complexity of movement realities.
For some time now I have wanted to step back from my more specific work in the area to say something about movements for a wider audience, in response to their near-total absence in so many of the social institutions which claim to represent human beings to themselves but instead wind up presenting us with an official vision of the world in which popular struggle is neatly airbrushed out of the picture. (It is telling that acknowledging the presence of massive unemployment, institutional abuse or torture is far less socially threatening than is acknowledging the presence of large numbers of determined people seeking to change the social relations that give rise to these things.)
And yet somehow, despite blackout or caricature from the dominant institutions of intellectual production, movements do manage to articulate themselves and their activity below the radar, and people do come to hear about them, if often only in fragmentary ways. This book is intended as a contribution to that discussion, not around any specific social movement but rather around movement activism as such, and the broader possibility of a better life. Politically, this book seeks to help the process of learning from each other’s struggles, which is one of the most important things I think we can do in trying to strengthen and radicalise our own activity in movements. Intellectually, it seeks to articulate some elements of what I think can be learned from those struggles about how to change the world for the better.
I work as an academic, but at one point I nearly wound up becoming the barman for the Dublin left. Many years ago, a solidarity centre I had good connections with was thinking about finding a new space of its own, and funding it through running a café. Together with some comrades, I agreed to take on the café project. In true Dublin style, things did not go quite as planned: at an early point, someone set fire to the pile of furniture that another café had given us in return for our help with renovation, and the project was eventually abandoned. I like to think that I could have been a good barman, and that I could have helped make a collective café a welcoming space for all sorts of different movements in Dublin.
This book tells a few of my own bar stories where they might be helpful, not so much because they are particularly unusual (they aren’t), but because they illustrate the often very everyday nature of social movement activism. More interestingly, it draws on the many different conversations (in bars and otherwise) I have had with other activists, whether listening directly to their stories and ideas, or learning indirectly about them from other researchers.
I have written the book as a series of conversations, or for three overlapping audiences. First, there is a conversation with people who are outraged at the state of the world and want to do something about it but – in the late 2010s – find it hard to believe in the real possibility of doing so. Chapter 1 talks about why we need movements, for people who feel very distant from them. Chapter 2 steps back to talk more about history, and particularly how movements have created the world we live in.
Second, there is a conversation with people who understand themselves as being on the left, progressive or radical in various ways, but do not connect that directly with social movements. Chapter 3 talks about this wider political perspective on changing the world and why movements are, or should be, central to it.
Third, there is a conversation with academics and students outside social movement studies or who are starting to study it, aiming to encourage them to think more systematically about where movements come in, both in their intellectual questions and their own lives and motivations. Chapter 4 talks about what it means to orient your thinking systematically towards practice, joining up theory and study on the one hand with collective social action on the other. Chapter 5 talks about the relationship between social movements and intellectual activity, particularly in universities. Finally, the conclusion discusses what we might need, in this dark time in world history, to keep going and to take on the forces gathered against us. Each of these chapters has its own style: I hope readers will enjoy the changes of gear.
I hope the reader will be convinced that it is worth thinking further about some things.
Most importantly, we can and should take our outrage at the world seriously and translate it into action. In the early 1790s, William Blake wrote, ‘[S]he who desires but acts not breeds pestilence’. If we experience ourselves or those we love, strangers whose suffering we care about or the world we value as being attacked, diminished, oppressed, exploited, threatened or stigmatised, then taking action is an emotionally healthy response – and if we are to have an effect, that action needs to be collective. If we experience these things and do not respond, we are likely to find that we become depressed or bitter and cynical, resentful or out only for ourselves – and in all these cases living a shallower life in which we are not able to fully acknowledge or act on our justified emotions.
But, in order to respond effectively, it helps to recognise how common social movements are and how often they are at least partly successful – far more commonly so than most diet or self-help books, for example. Recognising this reality does not involve thinking that there are any guarantees of success, that everyone we meet in movements is a saint or that there are no costs or risks. It simply involves seeing movements as lying within our normal, everyday sphere of action rather than leaving them ‘out there’ as an impossible option.
Another key point is that movements are not just widespread in the present day, but have also shaped much of the landscape we live in and move through. So rich is this heritage that it can be hard to see the wood for the trees; and this is particularly true for that part of this heritage which understands itself as The Left, at one time ‘the memory of the class’ but now, all too often, something rather different. Indeed, as we shall see, ‘the left’ as a term is a question rather than a definition; it is used to mean everything from ‘right-thinking readers of centre-left media’ via ‘members of a particular intellectual world’ to ‘a particular set of radical parties and groups’. I will argue that we should think of ‘the left’ as bringing together the best of movement experience, organising and action. Without attacking comrades and companer@s who are doing incredible work under difficult circumstances, I want to suggest some ways in which organising politics entirely around the expression of opinions in the media, and fetishising political parties as an organising form, are both unhelpful to a better relationship between the left and movements.
Last, movements offer and have offered a fundamental resource for serious intellectual work, academic and activist alike, around the shape of our societies and how to change them; but taking this seriously on board involves systematically questioning conventional academic and mainstream habits of thought. I will argue that a different kind of intellectual work is possible in which the relationship between thought-in-dialogue and collective practice is less alienated, more honest and fundamentally better – better intellectually, better ethically and better politically.
These are large claims, and this is a small book. But if I am right that collective agency is far more central than we think to everyday life, they do not involve asking people to engage in something ‘other’ so much as to transform what is an often alienated relationship to present-day experience. Moreover, we are right to test propositions against our ‘experience’ – a term made famous by the great English historian of social movements, E. P. Thompson – in using what we read and hear to think more deeply about the needs we are already conscious of, our existing attempts to meet them and how we understand what we are up to and where we are going. Thus I am not, in this short essay, trying to drag the reader onto an intellectual field set up in such a way that I can ‘prove’ these claims; rather, I want to engage in a conversation in which I hope the reader will hear something that she (or he) can respond to and which will perhaps help them in their own struggles.
This book distils a lifetime of conversations, joint organising projects, radical educational initiatives, scholarly arguments – and more than a little of the intellectual version of shouting at the telly. I am immensely indebted to a very wide range of fellow activists, community organisers, students, colleagues and friends for the ideas we have developed in conversation. Elsewhere I have tried to name individually everyone whose ideas I am aware of as having fed into a particular specific discussion, but to do so here would mean doubling the length of a book which argues that our ideas come out of joint struggle rather than being any one individual’s property.
This book nevertheless owes a particular debt to three people: Colin Barker, who patiently and through his own extraordinary intellectual example showed me how to think dialectically about social movements; Alf Nilsen, with whom I have collaborated for over two decades on the approach that underpins many of the arguments here (and which is more explicit in our joint We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism); and Geoffrey Pleyers, whose project ‘Social movements in a global age’ made it possible for me to visit the Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme/Collège d’études mondiales in Paris, where this book was written. I am very grateful to the Collège for providing a kind of intellectual space which is all too rare.
Very many thanks to ‘Anastasia’ and ‘Pat’ for letting me share part of their stories in chapter 1 (Seán is a composite). And many thanks to Alf, Geoffrey, Órfhlaith Tuohy and Tomás MacSheoin, who all took the time to read and comment patiently on an earlier version of this book. Its weaknesses are all mine.
I also need to make an apology to readers: no one can be involved in all movements, live in all places or know all histories equally well. We have an obligation to take each other’s existence seriously, but it is a form of naïve positivism to assume that we should all read everything each other has written or familiarise ourselves with each other’s culture. Linguistically, we are all constrained by the number of languages that we can reasonably learn to an effective level. So little is translated into English that we have to assume, and gesture at, the existence of whole political and intellectual conversations of which an Anglophone monoglot can only access a small, and often very selective, fragment. By analogy, the same is true for different movements (whose reflections in intellectual journals often privilege certain kinds of celebrity), but also for different academic disciplines and political traditions. We have to speak from where we are, but in an attempt to speak to one another out of this particular experience.
This book is ‘Eurocentric’ in the concrete sense that it is written by a west European with several local languages but few language skills outside that space, only limited historical knowledge outside it (primarily in relation to Buddhist Asia) and involved in movements here, with their specific sets of international solidarities and alliances rather than others. In my own work I try to draw on this experience critically – including its shaping by colonial relationships, which are also fundamental to understanding Ireland – and to credit the rest of the world with equal complexity and equal depths, resisting superficial hand-waving as far as possible. This book is also shaped by the history of my involvement with a particular kind of social movement left, with specific movements and with the dialogues they represent: nobody can be involved in everything, even in a single city. This book talks more about the things I know in concrete ways, but the test of the arguments made here is not in relation to the examples they use but rather in how well they work in other contexts.
Since capitalism’s latest crash a decade ago, the combination of austerity-induced cuts to real wages, my partner’s disability and unemployment and the attempt to find alternative education for my daughter has meant that it has been a constant struggle to get through to the end of the month. I am more grateful than words can express to the friends and family, colleagues and companer@s who have helped us keep our heads above water, especially when they have not agreed with our choices but have helped us anyway. You know who you are: this book is dedicated to you.