A Critique of New Social Movement Theory.

This is, however, neither the only possible conception of class and class struggle, nor the most useful.  In the tradition deriving from Marx, the terms have a very different meaning.  Class is a relationship at whose core is an ongoing process of exploitation - a term absent from the Weberian schema.  Exploitation - especially that between competing accumulation centres, in capitalism - engenders constant tendencies to resistance, thus providing the root of class struggle.  Accumulation, the heart of capitalism, is an inherently conflict-ridden process, involving struggle along two axes: first, between capital and labour over the extraction of surplus value to fuel further accumulation; second, among the capitalist class themselves - Marx's (1981) "band of hostile brothers" competing for that surplus.  Class struggle is not simply something which workers sometimes engage in, but is equally a defining activity of ruling classes, who are compelled to organize and strategize to overcome resistance.  A reduction in an index such as strikes may be evidence of a strategic onslaught by capital and state - not a reduction in class conflict, but a sharpening (eg Fantasia 1988, ch 2).  In this conception, the term "working class" is in no useful sense limited to "manual" or "industrial" labour, but includes all those whose life-situation places them in dependence on employment by capital.

Here, "class" and "class struggle" are not conventional "economic" concepts.  Rather, the terms refer to compelling patterns of social relations, which are as much political-legal, cultural and psychological in their implications as they are economic.  As the categories of Marx's account of the "economic" are inherently political and cultural in emphasis, so also as "political" a category as the state is equally "economic," and part of the class struggle.  For the state, as a condition of its own existence as a social relation, does not simply prop up exploitation by others but itself necessarily pumps surplus labour from society, primarily in the form of tax.  It is thus a relation of struggle with those whom it exploits.  (Here it is appropriate to mention that the largest social movement in Britain of the past decade was that against the Poll Tax, which mobilized into varied activity far more people, via its diffuse networks, than any "new" movement.)  

Ruling class activity, in this view, is a form of "class struggle from above," itself enforced upon its members by the social relations in which they find themselves.  It is omnipresent, compelled by both the competitive relations among the powerful and by the fact that it faces something which it must constantly contain, repress and manage - namely daily resistance from below.  Behind what contemporary sociology notes as impulses towards rationalization, standardization and the like lie capitalism's ever-compulsive social relations.  The very fact that exploitation is conducted against ever-regenerated human resistance requires that capitals and states elaborate forms of labour control, repressive and ideological alike, as necessary aspects of the pumping of surplus value.  Resistance to capitalist (and older forms of) domination, moreover, is motivated by more than simply "material" deprivation, but equally by subordination and humiliation (cf J C Scott 1990).  Class struggle is rooted in a clash of opposed needs.

NSM theory and Marxism treat this question of needs rather differently, as a brief consideration of Ingelhart's argument reveals.  Firstly, for Inglehart, scarcity for the majority is being transcended as society shifts to its postindustrial stage, opening the way for the blossoming of movements based on "postmaterialist" rather than "materialist" needs.  For Marxism, by contrast, scarcity for the majority is systematically reproduced by capitalist exploitation.  Indeed, the very period in which NSM theory became ascendant was also a period when, in many parts of the world (not least the USA), the living standards of major sectors of the population were stagnant or falling.  Secondly, Inglehart holds materialist and postmaterialist values to be both antagonistic and inversely related.  Hungry people crave food and neglect questions of moral and spiritual illumination; the better-off crave aesthetic satisfaction and neglct questions of material security.  This position seems weak.  Consider an obviously "materialist" scenario: a successful strike for higher wages.  Even were all the strikers were to spend their higher wages solely on better quality food, they would not only satisfy their stomachs, but also cultivate their senses.  But they would also spend on things that cultivate knowledge, the imagination, and so forth - from cinema, to toys for the children or a holiday trip.  More importantly, the motives for the strike itself inevitably include the "non-material" - resentment of humiliation by management, pride in standing up to them, contestation of control.  As one worker explained, when demanding more cash, workers are actually "seeking those things that make them human - a certain dignity, a measure of equality, and above all their self-respect" (in Cronin 1979:143).  In other words, the demand that labour power be valued more highly is indissolubly connected to the feeling of self-value.  Cultural matters, to do not least with both "identity" and "power," are inherently part of economic issues.  To divide the world of "need" arbitrarily into two segments forgets that "material" needs are always loaded with cultural and symbolic significance and that "symbolic" needs require access to material resources in order to be fulfilled.  It is bad sociology that sharply separates the material and symbolic, either assuming one of these then to "cause" the other or to have some entirely separate existence.

The argument cannot rest here.  Readers might accept that capital-labour conflicts have a "non-material" aspect, but surely there do remain the "post-materialist" issues with which non-class NSMs are concerned?  Yet there is no secure basis for limiting labour's needs to wages. Capital has a "totalizing" logic (Carroll and Ratner 1994; Wood 1995) which shapes and invades every sphere of social life.  At every point of contact between the opposed circuits of labour and capital, labour finds itself in antagonism to capital's needs, which hinder its own expanding need for self-development - part of which is itself stimulated by capital.  Labour's needs encompass far more than just the means for workers to "maintain themselves as pure labouring machines."  Marx casually mentions some of the elements involved in expanded needs: "the worker's participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc" (Marx 1973, 286-7).  Workers are not simply bearers of the capital relation, but "living, changing, striving, enjoying, struggling and developing human beings" (Lebowitz 1997) - i.e. are subjects.  It is from capital's "instrumental" standpoint, not that of labour, that the worker's needs can be reduced to narrow materialism.

Within actual social movements, "material" and "non-material" strands cannot be separated out.  Both "new" and "old" movements are driven by material and "postmaterial" needs.  The Green movement makes material demands for a world where beef doesn't rot the brain, where there is clean air for all, where fishing and pollution policies don't destroy the life of the sea, etc.  In declaring an expanded range of needs to be political, it challenges the agendas set by established power relations.  These are not matters antithetical to workers' interests.  Indeed, as Adam points out (1993:323), "one of the most sustained areas of struggle around the control of the toxic effects of industry" is within industry itself, carried forward by trade union health and safety committees. Struggles over the workplace environment are not opposed to but continuous with most demands of the Green movement.  Most of the worst effects of environmental pollution are anyway visited upon working-class people.

Likewise with the peace movement.  That demands greater physical security, indeed human survival itself (a "materialist" demand in Inglehart's sense), but also - expressly or by implication - popular participation in an expanded range of issues, including those which states so jealously, secretively and competitively cling to as matters of national security.  Similarly, most women, gays and lesbians and members of ethnic minorities are working class.  The problem of such working-class people's resistance to felt oppression is not a function of worker animality, lack of awareness or "materialism," but a political problem about collective empowerment.

Labour's needs and activities can in no sense be limited to the problems and questions conventionally addressed by trade unionism or official social democratic politics alone.  That is, "class struggle" involves not merely matters of wages and working conditions, nor the exercise of capitalist authority in the workplace, nor issues of political representation, welfare rights etc., but equally such matters as human relationships with nature, and "alienation" in its manifold forms and appearances. Questions concerning ecology, sexuality, familial relations, racism and the like are themselves inherent aspects of the class struggle, for they affect the nature and quality of life and struggle within capitalist society and hence are of quite as much concern to "labour" as immediate questions about wages and working conditions within workplaces.  All too commonly, NSM theorists offer an account of the labour movement marked by the crassest form of that very "economism" which Lenin sought to combat in What is to be Done?  "Class struggle" involves much wider and more systemic issues than can be grasped with a purely "syndical" reading of the term.

But if class struggle includes within its scope the issues over which "NSMs" contest, we should not elide the concepts of class struggle and social movement.  These terms refer to different levels of concreteness in analysis.  Social movements cannot be reduced to or simply correlated with the categories of class struggle.

A social movement rarely involves members of only one class, it rarely involves them all, and never involves them equally.  Social movements, operating on the terrain of capitalist society, are shaped, motivated and limited by that circumstance.  But the class interests that we can uncover by analysis represent only generalized impulses to action; at a more concrete level, actors have to interpret their "interests" in contradictory settings, where they are subject to varied pressures in the process of negotiating their identities and projects.  The analytical "transition" from a more abstract to a more concrete level, from class struggle to social movements, requires the introduction of a variety of specific concepts for dealing with the particulars of actual historical situations.  Some of these appear in the conceptual armoury of contemporary social movement theory -  resource, opportunity, network, organization, identity, framing, collective action, etc.

Far from being "reduced" to simple expressions of class interests, social movements ("old" and "new" alike) are best understood as themselves sites of contestation and dialogical relations.  Their internal debates and tensions are vital elements in their very definition.  Within them occur conflicts between radical and moderate wings, between various parties and other organized tendencies.  Hence statements about movement "aims," or about their ideological stances or bases of social support, always risk being simplistic.

Social movements, including labour movements, do not directly express the interests of a single class.  Labour movements, for example, do not simply "represent the working class" in anything like the unmediated fashion often assumed by social movement theorists.  Thus the British labour movement straddles classes in a variety of ways.  It includes not only members of the working class (though by no means all of them) but also representatives of capitalist class interests (e.g. Blair and his millionaire advisors!), and also members of middle layers, most notably trade union officials, who are "middle class" not so much because of their incomes (though these can be whopping) but because of their structural position as mediators between wage labour and capital.  Far from being unitary, centralized, and "monocephalous," the British labour movement is internally fractured on many dimensions.  Labour movements indeed conform quite well, in their organizational forms, to the emerging definitions of social movements being produced within modern theory (eg Gerlach and Hine 1970, Diani 1992, Melucci 1996).  The internal fractures reflect not only class divisions within the movement, but also the organizational division of labour between unions and (in Europe) Social-Democratic, Communist and other parties, the sectional division of labour between unions, as well as political divisions - e.g. between militants and moderates, racists and anti-racists, sexists, homophobes and their opponents, and so on.  The fractures are multiple, the overall picture is a dynamic one of a movement as a process.  Movements are not discrete and neatly bounded entities.  The frontiers between them are highly porous.  They share both issues and activists (eg Clegg 1996), they form alliances and working agreements as well as being distinct and antagonistic.

In this conception, movements involve not simply the political or cultural expression of collective forces in struggle, but are about the very creation of such forces.  As arenas of debate and negotiation, they represent points where various political and cultural tendencies - including their opponents - attempt interventions with different proposals for movement "projects," for strategies and tactics, for alliances and oppositions.  Movements are open to being both radicalized and de-radicalized, both coopted and neutralized but also revolutionized.  They are not simply manifestations of struggle, but arenas within which such struggle is conducted.  Their own successes and failures generate refinements of ideas and moods, but in very contradictory directions: the contested interpretation of events within and around movements itself contributes to their further shaping.  Most include a range of positions from left socialist to conservative; most include people actively promoting and resisting linkages with other movements.

In this context, the argument among some NSM theorists that new movements seek "autonomy" rather than "power," that they are "expressive" rather than "strategic" in inspiration, sounds rather disingenuous.  Movements are never autonomous from influence by their own opponents, and there can be no autonomy without a modicum of power (Carroll and Ratner 1994).

Thus issues concerning "identity" are significant, not only in "new" movements but equally in "old" ones like trade unions.  This is apparent as soon as we cease treating unions and others bodies as homogeneous entities, concerned only with "negotiation."  Even in their "negotiating" function, they have to fight for "identity," for example for members' loyalty and for respect for collective decisions.  Employers regularly appeal to workers, over the heads of union representatives, over "identity" questions.  Within unions, equally, there are regularly arguments about "identity" - normative arguments with strategic implications.  More generally, while movements undoubtedly deal with "identity" issues, these are often posed in the context of struggles over rights and powers.  But these concerns are not new.  Long before the wonderful "identity" slogan "Black is beautiful" issued from the 1960s Civil Rights struggle, Sojourner Truth was demanding "Ain't I A Woman?" and Shylock was asking "Do I not bleed?"

Further, identity questions are inter-connected with the ways movements conceptualize their own situations and problems, the demands they organize around, and the interventions of others in these processes of collective identity construction.  If "materialist" issues have seemed to dominate labour movements, that very fact requires historical explanation (as Calhoun 1993 briefly indicates).  Such a history must explore the processes of negotiation and exercise of power by employers and states through which labour movements were converted to "collective bargaining," to trade-union bureaucratization, parliamentary representation and so on.  (Such a history also needs a proper sense of the resistance to this conversion, always present if stronger at some times than others, and emanating especially from the left.)  There is a complex history of ruling-class "intervention" in the formation and remaking of workers' movements, going right back to early industrialization, which only makes sense if we understand them as arenas of struggle as well as actors in a struggle.

 

An Example: Racism and British Trade Unionism

In a recent paper, Virdee explores the dynamic relations between organizational fragmentation of the labour movement, industrial struggle, and racism/anti-racism, in postwar Britain (Virdee 1997).  His thesis is that there was nothing accidental about the way that anti-racism became a major concern of the British trade-union movement in the 1970s.

Virdee argues that unions emerge historically to organize particular groups of workers around markers of difference such as occupation (trade), rather than unity (class position), thus giving them a sectional character.  As such they are both the creations and creators of sectionalist forms of action, which in turn promote and reflect sectionalist consciousness, defined as the condition "where a worker identifies himself and his interests primarily with a section of his class with whom he has an immediate interest (e.g. colleagues at work)."  Virdee distinguishes this both from "corporate" class consciousness, where "a worker identifies himself and his interests with the corporate body and the interests of the working class as a whole within capitalism" and from "hegemonic" class consciousness, where "a worker identifies the revolutionary interests of the working class with the interests of society as a whole."

During the long postwar boom, sectionalist consciousness was strong.  "With the supply of labour scarce, many groups of skilled workers found themselves in a strong bargaining position.  Facilitated by the growth of lay union representatives - the shop stewards - groups of workers were able to wrest from employers improved pay and conditions at plant level."  Moreover, "With the increasing importance of devolved forms of collective bargaining, the shop steward also had greater independence to employ other strategies to improve his members' interests. One of the most important ... was the use of restrictive practices to control the supply of labour entering a particular plant, thereby ensuring that the price of labour already working there remained relatively high."

However, trans-sectional solidarity was weak. And this was reflected in the political consciousness of movement activists.  As one of us wrote in 1966: "the shop stewards' organizations are largely restricted to the narrow horizon of economic, trade union demands." (Cliff and Barker 1966:105).  Virdee argues that understanding the prevalence of this form of consciousness helps us to see "how a racist ideology was able to gain an audience amongst some groups of workers during this period."  For "one of the central components of [the] negative racialization of black workers was that they represented a source of cheap labour that threatened the newly-improved living standards of skilled white workers."  Given the strength of sectionalist consciousness, one can see why "elements of skilled organized labour at individual plant level, fearful of the perceived threat posed by migrant labour, colluded with employers to ensure that the trade union strategy of restrictive practices took on an added racist dimension by excluding migrant labour from skilled jobs".

However, in the period 1965-74 the trade-union movement shifted its stance on racism, thanks to two factors.  One was the collective resistance of black labour to such exclusionary practices, in part stimulated by the Civil Rights movement in the USA.  By itself this would have had only a limited effect on anti-racism in the labour movement were it not for a second factor, "the growing radicalization of important elements of white labour."  This period, especially 1968-74, witnessed the greatest ever number of strikes in British history, as employers and successive governments attempted to curb shop steward power and enforce wage control.  Strikes changed not just numerically, but in nature too - in terms of personnel, demands, type of activity, strategy.  Virdee quotes Kelly (1988): "By the mid-1970s a wide range of traditionally moderate and peaceful workers, many of them women, had embarked on strike action, many for the first time in their lives."  He adds, "Additionally, attempts to curb unofficial strike activity saw the return of the political strike for the first time since the 1920s" - in the movement against the Industrial Relations Bill.  Finally, over 500 occupations and sit-ins took place during this period.

All this had a dramatic effect on consciousness.  "These developments contributed to an uneven shift in class consciousness taking place amongst key elements of organized labour: in particular there was a growing move beyond the sectionalist class consciousness of the 1950s and 1960s to a form of corporate class consciousness which recognized the importance of working-class unity and collective action if resistance to state attempts to regulate the role of trade unions were to be successful."  This was expressed in the gravitation of many movement activists towards the left-wing reformism of the Communist Party - one "cephal" of the labour movement - rather than that of Labour.

Thus Virdee concludes: "This growing politicization of key elements of the white working class based around the ideology of working-class solidarity coupled with ten years of independent struggle by black workers against racist practices created the political and ideological conditions necessary for the ideas of anti-racism to seep into the trade-union movement and open up the possibility of white organized labour beginning to resist racism because it harmed the development of a corporate class consciousness....  Critical to the organization of this resistance were socialist trade unionists who had a political outlook that was internationalist in character....  By the mid-1970s, there was a recognition amongst increasing elements of white trade unionists that working-class solidarity could only be built by actively opposing the racism and disadvantage faced by black workers."

"This growing change in mood amongst some groups of workers was quickly reflected in the TUC," which began at last to organize against racism.  Thus, for example, the "Unity" and "Respect" anti-racist carnivals organized by the TUC in recent years are partly the consequence of the shift in class consciousness produced by the last great strike wave.

The point of our example is that, with the view of class struggle outlined above, anti-racism (and anti-sexism, anti-homophobia and the like) are not "outside the scope" of the class struggle, but are part of a struggle to constitute a political force with the capacity to attack the very roots of its alienation (rather than merely immediate interests).

For Marxism, "class struggle" is not simply the struggle of the exploited for already given "material interests" within capitalism, but is at its heart a struggle with the potential for transcending the limits of that mode of production.  It is not simply economic, but equally political and cultural.

In summary, our model of "class" entails the following:

*        All social movements are about class struggle.

*        Class struggle includes projects for the establishment and development of social movements.

*        No social movement simply and unequivocally represents one class.

*        The model applies to the NSMs - none of which simply represent the horizons of any presumed "new middle class."

*        The model also applies to the labour movement.

*        The emergence to greater prominence of "new social movements" signifies not a weakening of class struggle within capitalism, but an alteration of its form of appearance, a shift in the balance of forces and in the intensity of collective action.

Secular-Structural or Conjunctural Explanation?

Sadly, some readers may be unconvinced by the above, insist that class be confined to a reified economic sphere, with Marxism consequently caricatured as "reductionist."  But even for those who wish to retain a neo-Weberian theoretical framework, and see "class struggle" as at best something which workers do in workplaces and trade unions, there are serious grounds for disputing the notion that "class struggle" in this narrow and restricted sense is in terminal decline.

What sense can be made of the decline in strikes, and to a lesser extent in trade-union membership and other indicators, since the mid-1970s, along with the parallel increase in prominence of NSMs?  According to the paradigm outlined earlier, both changes are the product of a broad, and irreversible, structural-societal change.

Bagguley (1992) criticizes "structural and class-theoretical" explanations of NSMs on the grounds that they don't explain precisely how NSMs are generated by the presumed changes.  Nor indeed, he adds, is the kind of explanation provided by Offe - in terms of the broadening, deepening and increasing irreversibility of rationalized domination - sufficiently specific.  For just such an explanation could also seem to explain the emergence of labour movements in the 19th century: "The impact of industrial capitalism, and the new forms of discipline directed at the emergent working class also involved a broadening and deepening of capitalist and bureaucratic practices."  We should, Bagguley suggests, be suspicious of "class-theoretical" accounts of (new) social movements, which assume that discovering the social characteristics of the majority of a movement's social base and identifying their interests and/ or values is sufficient to explain that movement (Bagguley 1992: 33,36).

At issue here is what counts as good explanation.  It is not, of course, that the structural conditions in which movements occur are of no significance.  However, broad social conditions do not create movements.  Actors do that, in line with their powers, their own concrete understandings, their immediate networks and opportunities, and so on.  To be sure, broad shifts in structural conditions are likely, over relatively extended periods of time, to leave their mark on the range of movements actors create and the range of forms of collective action they engage in, but such shifts cannot explain more specific choices and developments.  Tilly's recent work on changing "repertoires of contention" in late 18th and early 19th century Britain provides illustrations of this change of range (see e.g. Tilly 1995 and Tarrow's (1996) reflections on the methodological presuppositions of that work).  Tilly (1995:25) suggests that the people have two rhythms of collective action: "a jagged short-term rhythm depending heavily on shifts in the relative strategic positions, shared understandings, and resources of connected actors" and "a smoother long-term rhythm depending more heavily on the incremental transformation of social relations in the course of such processes as proletarianization and state formation."  Here a distinction between levels of explanation, as in Marx's "abstract-concrete" distinction, is a vital one.  To grasp the nature of particular movements, closer-grained and far more "conjunctural" accounts are needed.  This is as true of labour movements as of any other kind.  Short-term alterations - Tilly's "jagged" rhythm - can be mis-interpreted as the product of long-term structural changes, a trap into which modern sociologists quite often fell into during the 1950s and early 1960s, with their theses about "withering away" of strikes, "embourgeoisement" and/ or the growth of "instrumentalism" among workers, and so forth.  The events of the later 1960s and early 1970s provided an acid test.

Our argument is that the evidence of the recent past has also been mis-read: that what has occurred has been less of an "incremental transformation" in the very nature of society itself, and more of a "jagged rhythm."   How might this alternative be framed?

Firstly, consider the following description of employer-worker relations: there was "by and large a ... truce, maintained by a system of collective wage agreements concluded between the centralized unions and the ever more centralized industrial capital."  It might sound like a Habermasian description of postwar capitalism.  It is in fact Trotsky addressing the Communist International and describing the situation in capitalist states before the First World War (Trotsky 1921/1953: I.181).

Trotsky points out that the "equilibrium" in these class relations has been "disrupted" by the war.  By way of theoretical discussion, he argues against those who believe that capitalism displays a tendency to equilibrium.  Rather, he proposes, there are periods of equilibrium, but equally these are disrupted by periods of instability, which affects all spheres of society - the economy, international relations, politics, as well as industrial relations.

A similar argument is familiar to students of social movements.  Tarrow (1994) and others suggest that mass protest movements tend to come in "bursts" or "cycles" or "waves".  Cycles are "less momentous than revolutions, more connected than contingent chains of events... and help us to understand the interactive progressions between structure and action" (Tarrow 1996:597).  They are phases "of heightened conflict and contention across the social system that include: a rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors; a quickened pace of innovation in the forms of contention; new or transformed collective action frames; ... and sequences of intensified interaction between challengers and authorities which can end in reform, repression and sometimes revolution" (Tarrow 1994:154). They are, moreover, "major watersheds of social and political change," and are frequently international in scope.  During protest cycles (as also during social revolutions, with whose processes - though not outcomes - they bear some similarities) it is commonly the case that new ideas are born, along with innovations in the repertoire of collective action.  Cycles are "crucibles" in which new protest movements emerge.  Their "wave" form is revealed in rising, peaking and then declining indices of "collective contention."

Attention to the phenomenon of protest cycles throws doubt on attempts to explain a set of social movements in terms of broad cultural or economic shifts in societal structures.  Tarrow (1992) argues against explaining collective action through "societal mentalities" or "political cultures."  As he says, the basic problem is that, on the one hand, collective action is episodic, highly focused, and activist, and results from explicit decisions to take action by historical agents.  Actors' self-definitions of social situations can change very rapidly and are inherently fluid.  "Mentalities," on the other hand, are long term, unfocused.  They are too omnipresent, too far removed from events of everyday life, and too wanting in agency to be able to go very far in explaining the occurrence of social movements.

Tarrow's cycles are of protest in general.  What of industrial action in particular?  What is clear is that strikes also occur in "waves" (eg Cronin 1979, Haynes 1985, Kelly 1998, Shorter and Tilly 1974).  What official strike statistics for different states invariably reveal are irregularly alternating periods on the one hand of relative stability or "pacification of class conflict" and on the other of "resurgence of class conflict."   Is "pacification" a progressive structural trend?  Such arguments have been presented before (eg Ross and Hartmann 1960), but have not been borne out by subsequent developments (Hibbs 1978, Screpanti 1987).  After periods of relative passivity we see enormous peaks of activity.  As Cronin (1979:11) remarks, "strikes tend to fluctuate together in all industries, to cluster and bunch up in several, relatively short, periods of time. They come in waves."

What are the characteristics of these strike waves?  Cronin notes the same kinds of features which Rosa Luxemburg (1906/ 1964) first detected in the 1905-6 revolutionary period in Russia, and which Tarrow has since suggested for social movement cycles more generally.  First, their scope and range: they touch a more varied cross-section of the workforce than industrial conflict normally does.  Second, they are marked in their upward curve by a surprisingly high rate of success.  Third, they possess a strong element of apparent spontaneity and innovation in organization and tactics.  These features "spring from the occasional and massive intervention of the rank-and-file into the affairs of labour-management relations.  They are profoundly democratic movements which ordinarily develop as much in opposition to entrenched labour leaders as to employers or the state" (Cronin 1979:48).  To this we could add a fourth characteristic which is connected to the first three: in strike waves, workers often expand their demands beyond the narrow limits of the industrial relations agenda set by employers, the state, and union officials.  In the process, they tend to break down the divisions between the labour movement defined narrowly and other social movements - as our earlier discussion of strike waves and anti-racism suggested.

These features of strike waves contribute to their wider role in generating reconfigurations of political consciousness.  It should be noted that general waves of protest in the 20th century normally feature strike waves.  This was true, for instance, in Britain 1910-14; in Russia, Germany, Italy and elsewhere 1916-23; in Spain and France 1936; throughout Western Europe and elsewhere in 1968-76, and in Poland 1980-81.

Roots of the Current Conjuncture

Let us now return to the present situation.  Some readers might concede that strikes come in waves, and that these have effects on political consciousness, but then object: "Look at the recent figures.  What we have today is more than a mere 'trough' or 'downturn.'  The fall in strike activity across Western Europe suggests a long-term decline, which occurred moreover in all the countries under discussion even if at a varied and somewhat jerky pace.  Surely there is more at work here than a mere drop after a cycle?"

The essentially historical character of protest wave movements means that both their "upturn" and "downturn" phases must be explained in terms of preceding conditions.  The current downturn in strikes is incomprehensible without reference to the nature of the previous upturn of the later 1960s and early 1970s.

That upturn came at the end of an extraordinary and unprecedented "long boom" in world capitalism.  A quarter century of sustained accumulation followed the Second World War, generating a particular pattern of social relations.  In this period, employers and states could afford concessions, and thus generally avoid large-scale confrontations.  With tight labour markets, workers could, as Virdee suggests, make significant gains through action on only a limited, sectional basis.  Across the industrialized West the long boom thus tended to sustain union movements that were relatively a-political.  In many industries, workers practised a kind of "do-it-yourself reformism," relying neither on their official union leaders and machineries nor on parties to secure improvements, but using their own shop-floor strength to fight for better wages, improved conditions, defence of their shop stewards and the like (Cliff and Barker 1966; Barker 1967).  This imparted a high level of everyday confidence in challenging, for example, "managerial prerogatives" over control of work processes, albeit on a very sectional and fragmented basis.

However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the boom began to unravel.  Employers faced growing pressure to restore profitability.  States made greater efforts to curb workers' demands, and to shackle and/or incorporate labour movements.  Workers, with the confidence gained during the boom, resisted with sometimes explosive waves of strikes (May 1968 in France, waves of wildcat strikes in Italy and Germany, political strikes in Britain).

However, the shifts in political consciousness were limited.  Everywhere the hold of "reformism" remained strong, in several senses.  Most workers did not challenge the employers' argument that raising productivity (i.e. increasing the rate of exploitation) was a way of saving jobs.  Although some had uneasy moments, the dominant political organizations (Social-Democrat and Communist) retained control within labour movements.  These parties were nationalist, accepting and preaching that national economies should be made fitter against the threat of foreign competition.  Although the period saw a revival of more left-wing ideas, the "groupuscules" rarely succeeded in establishing serious roots within working-class institutional life and networks - a weakness not helped by their widespread tendency to link "revolutionism" with a strange brew of essentially elitist and reformist ideas associated with romantic images of peasant revolt and Third World state-building and a semi-anarchist unconcern with real problems of working-class organization (Harman 1988).

The question of the politics of labour movements became more significant in the subsequent recessions of the mid 1970s and early 1980s.  During the boom, sectionalism both produced significant gains in terms of wages and also local challenges to managerial power and was quite effective against small offensives by employers and states.  But when small gusts turned to gales, sectionalism could offer only weak defences.

In this context, control over industrial action tended to shift upwards from the rank and file as initiative passed to full time officials.  This shift in control within labour movements was encouraged by unions, governments and employers alike.  Rather similar processes occurred across Western Europe, though they were perhaps especially marked in Britain and Italy.  Britain saw the weakening of shop steward organization, as piecework was replaced by new nationally agreed payments systems and as the number of full-time convenors grew - extending the trade union bureaucracy into the workplace (Hyman 1979, Cliff 1979).  In Italy, developments followed not dissimilar lines.  Ginsborg (1990:358-9) suggests that, in the mid-1970s, "the union movement ... became more institutionalized.  The vigorous ebb and flow between base and leadership which had characterized earlier years now coagulated into a more traditional pattern of centralized direction.  The factory councils began to decline in importance."

With their own immediate relative strength weakened, workers tended to place greater reliance on their political parties, but these were committed to rescuing the situation for the "nation."  The form of rescue involved making workers pay for the recession, with the most influential union bureaucrats being harnessed into selling the ensuing hardship even to sections of the militant left of the union movements in the name of "realism."  The rescue packages were broadly similar in different countries: in Britain the "Social Contract;" in Italy the "Historic Compromise," in Spain the "Moncloa Pact."   Nowhere were rank-and-file movements sufficiently strong - nationally organized, strategically clear, influential - to pose an alternative.   The weakness and widespread collapse of the "1960s Left" was all too apparent.

Undermined by rightward-moving Social Democracy and Euro-Communism, workers' movements were vulnerable to attacks by employers and governments from the mid-1970s onwards, in a context marked by sharper crises and rising unemployment.  The inherited formal and informal structures of labour movements, shaped in the context of the boom, proved to lack the organizational and ideological resources to mount effective resistance.  The tide of advantage in conflict shifted, and employers and governments alike hardened their assaults.  Callinicos's summary of the situation in Britain applied equally to most of Europe: "This threefold crisis in the labour movement - of organization, leadership and ideology - has led to a marked shift in the balance of forces in the ruling class's favour since 1974" (Callinicos 1982:28).

Although the downturn began with a demobilization achieved by organized reformist forces within unions and workers' parties, its precise character was mixed.  On the one hand, workers' organization and political rights were not smashed up, as happened in Italy in the 1920s or Germany and Austria in the 1930s.  Union membership fell, but mostly as a direct result of rising unemployment and the destruction of the industrial bases of some "traditional" sectors of powerful unionism; in other sectors it held up and even grew.  On the other hand, the strength of rank-and-file organization was seriously undermined, and with it popular confidence in the possibilities of collective action.  Over the same period, a host of often local battles were conducted over cutbacks and stringencies in welfare spending and "collective consumption," many of them imposed by social-democratic local councils and the like.  Often these involved working-class people but also often they ended in defeats.  The defeats and demoralization of the later 1970s and 1980s had a strong effect on workers' consciousness, narrowing horizons and lowering aspirations.  This conjunctural situation, in which rank-and-file organization has remained weak and confidence low, has, broadly, been maintained into the early and mid-1990s; the fact that unemployment levels have stayed high and inflation levels low has also played a part.  

What of the "New Social Movements" during this period?  In Tarrow's theorization of the patterns of social movement cycles (as earlier in Luxemburg's) the different sections, elements and movements interact with each other, first in a positive sense up to the peak of the cycle, and then negatively.  Movements rise and fall together, each element, however, following its own particular trajectory within the larger pattern of expansion and contraction.  The pattern of development of the NSMs seems to have conformed to this broad picture.

When the (second wave) women's movement and the gay and lesbian movement emerged in the later 1960s and early 1970s, in conjunction with the rising strike level, they were often seen - and rightly - as critical of the existing practices and organizational forms of the labour movements.  But they were rarely seen as antithetical.  The growth of a kind of "unity consciousness" among workers (see above) helped in this respect.  Indeed, women workers themselves - both "manual" and "white-collar" - provided some of the important impulses to the expansion of union activity in the upturn of strike activity between 1968 and 1974.  In this very period, as industrial restructuring was reducing the proportions of "manual" workers with the workforce, the growing "services" sector, which anyway employed a higher proportion of women, was witnessing sectoral rises in "trade union density" (see, for example, Bain 1970).  These patterns have, broadly, continued up the present, along with an increased "unionateness" of white-collar organizations.

The downturn in industrial struggle in the 1970s had contradictory effects on the NSMs.  One short-term result, quite frequently, was a kind of transfusion of personnel, as movement activists (usually socialists) who had been radicalized in the period of industrial upturn now turned elsewhere. (For example, a whole wave of former German Maoists flocked into the Green movement.  The Left of the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party also expanded briefly.)  Many activists had had their hopes in further rises in labour militancy dashed.  They turned their backs on such struggles (Harman 1988).

More generally, there appeared to be two opposed trends, with a widening gap between workers' movements, retreating, demoralized, more tied to social-democratic bodies, and the NSMs, some of them gaining new life and forces.  The gap between "old" and "new" seemed to broaden.  An entirely new, and separate kind of movement appeared to be emerging.   NSM theory took off in this climate.  Scott (1990: 80) called it "Marcusean," in the sense that, like the Critical Philosopher in the 1960s, some of its more prominent  thinkers were searching for a new agent of historical change to take the place of the disappointing working class, which was (again, as in the 1930s to 1950s) being "incorporated" as well as "shrinking."

Many became pessimistic about the possibilities of taking on the power of capital and the state.  Previous "revolutionary illusions" were denounced as activists, and academic theorists with them, scaled down the permissible limits of transformation, and came increasingly to celebrate the horizons of immediate existence, and to make their peace with the principles of market competition and parliamentarism, which previously they had hoped to transcend.

But the new movements themselves, in which hopes were invested, proved to be relatively small and weak.  The German Greens became increasingly incorporated into the normal routines of parliamentarism; movement activists retired into an academicization of protest as new study programmes filled the humanities curricula.  Many movements became, in the absence of a militant workers' movement, increasingly isolated, took on the character of small, middle-class pressure groups, or simply seized on the new commercial possibilities created by the formation of new but politically passive networks.  The emphasis on "identity politics" and "abeyance structures" (Taylor 1989) often masked a retreat and defeat rather than the new source of strength that some read in it.

All of this signified a shift in the European left.  Disconnected in part from larger processes of struggle, surviving radicals were compelled to retreat and adapt, but often imagined that they were doing otherwise, inventing explanations for their conjunctural situation which they took to be the birth of a whole new praxis.

Yet the new movements' longer-run effects should not be minimized.  The critical ideas they promoted, their exploration of previously under-considered aspects of the struggle for human emancipation, remain as lasting achievements.  One might say that, in just the same way that Marx in the 19th century radically altered and expanded the very notion and scope of the "political" to include the world of "value-relations" and the workplace as contestable realms, so the new movements of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the naturalness of the personal and familial, of the nation-state system and its inherent militaristic divisions, and the human relation with nature.  They contributed to the revivifying of critical thought, and not least of that Marxism centred on "socialism from below," recovering and developing emancipatory impulses which had been buried for several decades by the combined weight of Social-Democracy and Stalinism.  Movements arising in the future will stand on their shoulders.

But their separate organizational embodiments proved to have less lasting power.  Although the precise tempo and character of their decline was different from those of labour movements, they also sank with them - as they had risen before.  And the fact of their partly separate trajectories of development strengthened those tendencies within them - and within intellectual theorizing about them - which stressed the difference of their aims and concerns from those of labour.  Wood summed up the matter thus: "In itself, the focus (of NSMs) on targets often rendered invisible by traditional socialist preoccupations has enriched the socialist project.  But much has also been lost by the tendency to render capitalism itself invisible and to consider the conditions of human emancipation in abstraction from their determinations by the dominant logic of capitalism.  It is a very striking feature of the Western Left today that, across a wide spectrum, capitalism has apparently ceased to be the enemy."(cited in Vieux 1994:29)

There is a sad eclipse of social imagination involved.

The Return of Class?

There are various tests of rival theoretical approaches.  One test consists in applying the usual queries about internal coherence and the like.   The other is provided by actual social practice.

If those who hold to one or other version of the "post-something" paradigm are correct, then we should expect to see a continuing “withering away” of labour movements combined with further developments in “new social movements” as a distinctive form.  By contrast, if our critique is more correct, then labour movements may revive; indeed as a condition of revival they may to some degree challenge the “economism” and “realism” of their existing organizations and leaders, and incorporate into their ideas and practices some of the materials developed by the new movements. For us, therefore, a further strike wave, providing new impulses to struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism and ecological threat, would be very welcome - on theoretical as well as purely practical-political grounds.

Could it happen?  If, at present, the jury is still out, we suggest they have at least some evidence to discuss.

Let us begin by noting evidence of considerable discontent with existing conditions of life and of work.  Capitalism is revealing a more brutal face.  Contra NSM theorists of the 1980s, this is no age of affluence, welfare and increased material security.  Even the “sensitive” and “aware” new middle classes have become more concerned with “material” issues of job security, pay, work discipline, casualization of employment and the like.  Working hours have not fallen, nor have injury and sickness rates (including "new" work-related disabilities like RSI).  Employers remain on the offensive and governments still preach austerity and practice cutbacks in welfare spending.

Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer. Inequalities are widening.  "Britain is a far more unequal society than 20 years ago" announces The Guardian (28 July 1997), and it is doubtful that many find the news surprising.  Opinion polls suggest that knowledge about widening inequalities is widespread, and that it provokes dissent and dislike.

However, as social movement theory has insisted for the past quarter century, the commonsense notion that anger, bitterness or relative deprivation themselves give rise to popular protest is a false one.   As Trotsky suggested in his great History of the Russian Revolution, "The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt."  In the United States, real wages have fallen by 18 per cent over the past two decades, a circumstance that might be expected to provoke social uproar, yet trade union membership and strike statistics continued to decline.  Even if resource mobilization and political process theorists somewhat played down the significance of popular grievances in the causation of social movements, their essential case was correct.  Movements require a sense of collective identity, of opportunity, of mobilizable resources if they are to convert awareness of exploitation and oppression into common action.  Essentially, the arguments offered by Tarrow against “mentalities” accounts of movements maintain their force.

But there is a different logic that can be applied, that deployed by Trotsky (1921).  The crucial mediating factor between “objective conditions” and “subjective, collective responses” is not absolute poverty, nor relative deprivation, nor boom nor slump, but instability - and not simply of an economic character, but equally political, ideological, cultural.  Existing forms of social regulation are destabilized, at once upsetting rulers' confidence and stimulating doubts and criticisms among their subjects.

As Callinicos (1994) has argued, since about 1990 Europe, with the world economy, has seen a marked shift towards greater instability.  At its root lies not simply the “opening of the Wall” but problems with economic growth, especially but not only in Europe (“Eurosclerosis”).  This condition compels employers and states to look for new ways to uphold their world market position.  It demands radical “restructuring” of social and political relations, within firms, within states, within industrial relations, within welfare institutions. That restructuring involves European integration, including European Monetary Union.  It involves slicing the welfare state.

These are anything but simply “economic” matters, for their implications reverberate through all social and cultural relations, institutions and assumptions.  Even more to the point, restructuring is easier to propose than to carry out.  Particular interests and identities are threatened, and by no means only within the working classes.  These issues provoke dissension within and between states, within and between parties, in boardrooms and industrial and commercial associations.  They split the British Conservative Party down the middle in its last years in government.  There are tensions between Jospin and Blair over European labour regulation, between the German government and the Bundesbank over EMU, and so on.

The pressures of slow growth accompanied by austerity measures hit electorates, whose responses include "electoral volatility" but also political polarization.  Thus, on one side, we have recently witnessed the decimation of the Christian Democrats and the Tories.  On the other side, the last decade has witnessed both the rise of Le Pen's Front National, but also Rifondazione Communista.

Predictions of stability in this climate are liable to be overturned.  On 5th January 1996, Paul Anderson told New Statesman readers: "The left in Western Europe is going through a difficult spell. If the Spanish Socialists are beaten this year (they were, CB/GD), not one large country will have a left-of-centre government.... it is unlikely that the [French] left will benefit greatly from the wave of strikes and protests that swept France before Christmas ...  The PS and PCF are bereft of ideas and ... credible leaders.  It looks as if it will be some time before the left returns to power."  Then came 1997 and electoral "pink tides," in which, as at least some commentators noted, voters were often well to the left of the parties they put into office.  A sequence of leaders of the right were toppled (Berlusconi, Chirac and Major).  (The tide strengthened in 1998: the German elections that removed Kohl produced the best ever result in German parliamentary history for parties of the left.)

Shifts in "mood," like other concepts aiming to catch the phenomenon, are always difficult to prove, except where they convert into collective action of some kind.  The necessary conjunction of opportunities and organizing resources is often missing.  (In October 1992, for example, the last round of pit closures in Britain sparked unexpectedly large anti-government demonstrations, but those who wished to convert the flurry of anger into strike movements lacked the capacity to do so, while union leaders, who had the capacity, lacked the will.  The protest wave peaked and faded within days.)  In most of Europe it is still the case that mood shifts have not produced dramatic upsurges in social manti-roadovements.  The "NSMs" are everywhere either dormant or involved in small-scale actions - witness the anti-roads movement in Britain.  On the industrial front, there have been slight upturns in levels of strike activity in many countries since 1994, but these to date are marginal, except in France.

However, where industrial action has broken out, it has often been militant, and quite "political" in its expression, as in the 1997 Villevoorde occupation of the Renault factory, along with the accompanying strikes and demonstrations in France, or the German miners' demonstrations in the same month. Italy has witnessed the re-emergence of quite significant rank-and-file industrial organization, in the COBAS (Brook 1995).  Plus, there is a significant change in climate, if difficult to measure: whereas the decade following the mid-1970s recession saw striking workers suffering defeat after defeat, with consequent effects on wider confidence (in Britain, the miners' strike of 1984-5 had a particularly heavy effect), the books of "gains and losses" are more balanced now.  It is at least possible that a new generation of workers is emerging, "manual" and "white-collar" alike, less crippled by defeatist consciousness.

Certainly, it is difficult otherwise to make sense of the 1995 strike wave in France.  It was, argues Jefferys (1996), in its "nature, development and demands ... similar to previous post-war strike waves".  Among its general causes Jefferys mentions "the bottoming-out of the recession; greater trade-union unity; deep government unpopularity; and a common general threat to the welfare state consensus."  The level of mobilization achieved was much larger than any of the NSMs of the 1980s could claim.  Singer offers the following description:

"Every warning from officialdom seemed to send more people into the streets.  There were a few hundred thousand in November, climbing to around two million on December 12, the climax of the movement.  With transport unavailable, the marches were dispersed, with protestors demonstrating in their home towns, on their own turf.  So Paris did no break any records this time, but many other towns did.  At the height of the movement, there were over 100 thousand people in the streets of Marseilles, nearly 100 thousand in Toulouse, almost as many in Bordeaux, Rouen, Grenoble, and crowds of 5 thousand in towns of less than 50 thousand inhabitants....

     The main slogans were la sécu (short for social security but in the French context meaning all social services), nous nous sommes battus pour la gagner (we fought to get it), nous nous batterons pour la garder (we shall fight to keep it).  But the principal chant was the rather simple, contagious ouais, ouais, tous ensemble, tous ensemble (yeah, yeah, all together, all together). (Singer, 1997:133)

The strikes were more democratically conducted than was true of the larger and more famous strikes and occupations of May 1968 (Harman 1996).   There were reports of daily mass meetings and of rank-and-file "coordinations" between striking industries.  Nor was any iron wall apparent between "old" and "new" movements: among those contributing to the upsurge were the anti-nuclear movement (opposing testing in the Pacific), the student movement (opposing education cutbacks), and above all the labour movement (resisting attacks on pensions, welfare).  The strike wave strengthened other movements: for example the annual women’s movement demonstration was far bigger than it had been for many years, while subsequent demonstrations against French Nazism became more militant.  While private sector workers were mostly not involved, this was not through lack of sympathy: "reporters and pollsters stressed that those in the private sector felt that the public employees were fighting for them too" - hence "the surprising acceptance of the usually very unpopular transport stoppage" (Singer 1997:135).  Progressive intellectuals - though not all (Anderson 1996) - were radicalized.  Pierre Bourdieu at the Gare de Lyon on 12 December 1995 told strikers they were speaking for "the growing numbers of those in Europe and throughout the world who reject the alternative of liberalism or barbarism on offer" (Jeffreys 1996:20).

In summary terms, instability can alter the "opportunity structure" for movements, including labour; even quite small upturns in industrial militancy can begin to provide new sets of examples to other workers; new signals of possibility can multiply.  The mobilizable resources are there: labour movements have not suffered the crushing blows of the 1920s and 1930s, and the idea of unionism is anything but discredited.  What will happen over the next few years is an open book.  What will be written there will depend on who does what, who says what, who organizes and how, and not on some rather badly theorized shifts in the basic structures of society.

An Open Conclusion

In the 1950s and early 1960s, on left and right, there were plenty of announcements of the death of class, the displacement of the working class, the withering away of industrial conflict, structurally rooted processes of embourgeoisement, rising instrumentalism / privatization / incorporation of workers, the impossibility of general strikes, the overwhelming influence of power elites, the victory of one-dimensional man.  Usually the authors of these theses explained how these processes were the product of irreversible shifts in the nature of modernizing and even post-capitalist society, where major contradictions were now effectively managed.  Some welcomed the advent of the new age, others sadly refused it, searching for actors somehow outside the clutches of the industrial system who might yet challenge it: in the Third World, among the most dispossessed, among students or intellectuals.  But the movements of the later 1960s and early 1970s caught all these theorists napping.

Analysts of Russia and Eastern Europe, right into the later 1980s, regularly explained the deep structural roots of stability in those regimes.  1989 took them by surprise.

Will the current generation of social movement theorists also be caught with their sociological pants down?  In that sense, the coming decade should prove interesting.  And, if we are even partially correct in seeing the current conjuncture as one where a revived left might develop, yet where the extreme right is also attempting a come-back, then getting the theory right can be significant in a very practical sense.

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Notes

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