The New Emancipatory Agenda of Social Movements.

1. The New Emancipatory Agenda of Social Movements.

In the past decade the identification of alternative sources of power in new social movements has reinvigorated the optimistic case for structural change along radical egalitarian lines. Despite the decline of the labour movement as an organised oppositional force within western capitalisms and democracies, there has been an increase in the visibility and participation in popular social movements that define themselves broadly against the structures of contemporary capitalism and by extension its work discipline. These social movements variously characterised as movements for global justice or anti-capitalist in both the media, academia and the movements themselves, carry an emancipatory agenda. This agenda is fundamentally emphasised through a renewed spread of a pre-figurative politics bearing a striking similarity to the early labour movement in its more utopian moments accompanied by its declarations of building an alternative world.

This chapter will provide a brief over view of the very recent reinvigoration of social movements on a global level, before outlining some facets of how this movement expresses itself on a local level in Ireland. New social movement theory will be sketched before being criticised and reined back into a more ambitious class analysis that seeks to reconcile social movements historically to a new understanding of class composition rooted in today under the auspices of autonomist Marxism. As a conclusion we will look at the theoritical development of a social movement unionism, which in turn seeks to address how social movements can rejuvenate the traditional labour movement through recognising new class compositions and incorporating them into its organising strategies.

2. Whats New In 'New' Social Movement Theory?

The origins of new social movement theory can be traced to both movement level and academic desires to understand a cycle of struggles that emerged from the sixties onwards within the context of the changing dynamics of western capitalism. A revolt that spilled over from the student movement to wider society and challenged the structures of western democracies leaving a legacy of ‘revolutionary moments (Katsiaficas 1987)’ from US campuses, to the May ‘68 general strike movement in France, to Berlin and the long drawn out Hot Autumn of the Italian extra-parliamentary left in the seventies. While the original student movement dissipated, the ideas generated within its milieus became more socially diffuse and marked the start of an era of broader social change and mobilisation gripping western democracies in politics and economics (Russel et al 1990).

Buechler (2000: 33) describes how the period was characterised by a 'fundamental political challenge to the legitimacy of the central institutions of the society that dovetailed with a cultural challenge to the hegemony of the core values of the society.' During the Carter administration, the ‘Crisis of Democracy Report’ carried out by the Tri-lateral Commission, startlingly expressed the concerns of elites and state power when faced with this new mobilisation of previously passive sections of the population such as women, youth, ethnic minorities and others, in describing how "the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.¹"

Simultaneous to this wave of social mobilisation, orthodox Marxism was pushed to collapse as the excesses of Stalinism became more obvious with tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 and then suppressing the Prague Spring later. Actually existing state socialisms as Bakunin (1872) described, began to truly appear as 'nothing but a barracks." To many of those involved in the new left movements from ‘68 onwards, the ‘Communist Party and those workers under its influence proved to be the final and most effective 'brake' (Brinton 1968)’ on the development of social movements and the revolutionary self-activity of the working class. With these final blows dealt during the cycle of struggles in the late sixties and early seventies, orthodox Marxism as a schema for social analysis became increasingly redundant and out of tune to social movements focussed around identity politics, the environment, culture, war and a rejection of the values of the affluent society (Cleaver 2000). New social movement theory arose as a direct response to the failings of institutionalised and official Marxism to understand the changing dynamics of social protest in western democracies from the late 1960’s onwards.

Early attempts to explain the new social movements applied previous studies of violence and crowd behaviour (Gurr 1970) in an effort to understand the protest movements of the 1960’s, and as such echoed state fears over spiralling political protest and a desire to develop mechanisms to police and contain collective action (Goodwin & Jasper 2003: p5). Such accounts of collective action learnt little from previous groundbreaking Marxian accounts of social protest that can be found in many of the classic ‘history from below’ examinations of the revolutionary crowd and social movements in history (Hobsbawm 1959; Rude 1967 & Thompson 1971). These were accounts that moved beyond simple individual psychological determinants, instead striving to understand the social processes creating the crowd in the first place rather than like early social movement theory patronising it and treating it as a homogenous entity with no internal life world, ultimately exhibiting as Buechler (2000: 20) describes, a ‘tendency to view this phenomenon as formless, shapeless, un-patterned, and unpredictable.’ These accounts are usually wedded to other early variants of new social movement theory to emphasise relative deprivation (Goodwin & Jasper 2003) as spurring radicalisation in newly mobilised sectors of society as a result of economic or social marginality. However conceptual gaps failed to explain what was often seen as the relatively elite social base of many movement participants (Inglehart 2003; Cotgrave & Duff; 2003).

Using a model of political economy, rational choice theory (Olson 1965) elaborated on how individuals use cost benefit analysis to determine the personal gain to be made prior to engaging in collective action. However much of the logic in this analysis is contradicted by the actual realities of movement ideologies which are often largely premised on attempts to secure universal goals or the creation of more public goods (Russel et al 1990; Goodwin & Jasper 2003). Equally such approaches foreground what the sociologist percieves as rational behaviour to such a degree that 'the author's definition of rationality appears not only as a methodological premise but also as a substantive conclusion (Cox 1995).'

The conceptual failings in relative deprivation and rational choice theory led to the elucidation of resource mobilisation theory (McCarthy & Zald 1973). Outlining how social conflicts are inherent in every society, resource mobilisation posits that the existence of social movements are premised on the capability of organisations to mobilise underlying factors into co-herant political antagonisms. As a fundamentally apolitical and ahistorical schema of analysis, resource mobilisation theory ‘was applied in an almost mechanistic way to organisations of widely differing political and ideological scope (Dalton et al 1990; p10).’ With analysis blunted by the use of generic concepts, the homogenisation of different collective actors and their reason for coming into being led to the construction of movements in theory 'so lacking connection to a particular time and place that its existence may well be doubted (Darnovsky et al 1995; xv).'

These movements are often referred to as engaging in the creation of unconventional political actions and innovative organisations (Kaase 1990) that further create distance between them and movements in the industrial era, as they intentionally remain outside of institutional politics. While the politics of classic industrial society focussed on mass bureacratic parties and the movements associated with them, the new social movements as Inglehart (2003: 70) describes were indicative of emerging cultural values that that 'emphasise spontaneity and individual self expression.' Fundamental to new social movement theory is the distinction made between movements developed since the 1960’s and older ones like that of labour unions, largely this wedge between past and present rests on social and cultural change attributed to the emergence of post-industrial society and the values associated with it.

These values flowing throughout fabric of the new social movements are often sourced in their social base which is often seen as indicative of 'a new post industrial cleavage (Brand 1990: p26).' This echoes Beck's idea that we live in an age of global risk, where not only the traditional working class is perpeutally under threat, but other classes are equally threatened due the potential consequences of modernity like enviromental disaster and the overall splintering of securities associated with the demise of Keynesian economics. While marxists both of the academic and movement hue privileged proletarian revolution rooted in the sphere of production, leading to a marginalisation of other expressions of protest, new social movement theorists emphasised other factors as motivations for collective action. In time the term 'new social movement' came to refer to 'a diverse array of collective actions that has presumably displaced the old social movement of proletarian revolution (Buechler 2000: 46),' some like Castells (1997) even go as far as to dramatically write class off as an agency of change in the 'long dark night of late capitalism (Welsh 1995; 240).'

This displacement of class as an agent of social change and its replacement by social movements remains unconvincing, relying on an ahistoric understanding which forces new social movement theorists to purposefully sideline any analysis of the persistence of traditional workers movements from the sixties onwards. Movements which then (Harman 1998; Wright 2002; Ginsborg 2003 ) and now, still produce dramatic protests as collective actors and social movements. New social movement analysis ofen equally relies on ambigious meanings to identify the historically differentiating social base of movements in a distinctly 'new middle class radicalism (Brand 1990; 41).' We are left with a vague and rarely defined definition of class and new social movement theory ends up weakening its own case for what is 'new' in these social movements.

However the placing of a 'premium on the social construction of collective identity as an essential part of contemporary social activism (Buechler 2000: 47)' has led to some appreciation of how older class based movments were socially constructed by active agency rather than being simply structurally determined by economic forces. Cox (2003) develops this line of argument further in his genealogy of the very etymology of 'social movement' through the use of concepts mined from Thompson (1963). These concepts allow him to contexualise social movements as part of the unfolding of and continuous creation of class in its active sense as 'a relationship and not a thing (Thompson 1963: 10).' Thompson (1963: 8-9) formulated class as the moment where one group 'articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men (sic) whose interest is different from (and usually opposed) to theirs.' These interests are usually determined by productive relations but express themselves in various social and cultural formations. Cox highlights the similarities between this exposition of class and later definitions of social movements, which describe them as 'a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and / or organisations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity (Diani 1992: 13).'

3. Autonomist Marxism: Between Class and Soical Movement.

A. An Anti Authoritarian Marxism.

Building on this understanding of class as an active subject in its own creation, autonomist marxism radically inverts many of the conclusions of post-industrial theory to sketch new collectivities emerging, as Holloway (2005) puts it, 'in cracks in the system of capitalist domination,' creating a space for the accommodation of social movements within a synthesis understanding of new class compositions and social protest.

As post-modernism became hegemonic in academia (Eagleton 2004), the working class moved off the centre stage of theory. Several of those who had moved from Marxist orthodoxies were engaged in a parallel project of revitalising Marxism, in an Italian current called autonomism. If the revolt of Paris 1968 lasted for a week and was enough to spark intellectual fervor, the events of the Italian Hot Autumn (Wright 2002; Ginsborg 2003) would play out over a decade generating strenuous Marxist revisionism among intellectuals active in the extra parliamentary left like Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri. At the centre of the new social movements in Italy, their project was very much focused on understanding the shifting dynamics of social organisation, the role of technology in production, and those new social actors which had traditionally been viewed as being outside the working class (Wright 2002). By '77 the Italian social movements of the seventies were scuppered by a state sponsored 'strategy of tension' against the left echoing the FBI's COINTELPRO operation against the American left (Churchill & Wall 1990). The space for the primary development of autonomist theory and most importantly practice was closed.

Autonomism has been codified by Harry Cleaver (2000) into a tradition of anti-authoritarian Marxisms, breaking with 'an overly one-sided focus on the dynamics of capitalist exploitation' to focus on and attempt explanations of the initiative behind new movements of social protest outside the sphere of production. In the autonomist analysis, the worker is an active subject of struggle and one that propels capitalist development. In order to reconcile labour to its antagonist incorporation into a 'particular mode of existence of capital (Marx 1976; 451),' it is forced it to engage in constant innovations of production and controlling apparatuses. Capitalism is wholly dependent upon labour to sustain it, but labour on the other hand does not need the rule of capital, it is a potentially autonomous subject.

B. Capital's Paradigm Shifts.

Identifying different eras in capitalist development, autonomist marxists emphasise the shifting repertoires of resistance available to the working class in different periods. Autonomism seizes the nexus of difficulties created for class analysis by post-industrial accounts, inverting the agent of change within it to sketch the new social subjects inhabiting relationships of production that lie beyond Fordism and in doing so it attempts to create a theory of 'class antagonism in the post modern world (Negri 1991; xvi).'

The post war compact between labour and capital, that very zenith of traditional labour movement influence on state policy can be charcterised by the existence of the 'mass worker' as 'the human appendage to the assembly line (Bowring 2004).' A social subject brought into being by the industrial hegemony of mass manufacturing; organized at the point of production by Taylorism; in the wage relationship by Fordism and expressing itself politically and economically in Keynesian economics, and the welfare state (Negri 1982). The 'strategy of refusal (Tronti 1965) ' typified the cycle of worker struggles erupting dramatically in the Italian 'Hot Autumn' and elsewhere in Europe, in industrial conflicts that refused to be restrained within the limits of a Keynesian bargaining relationship with capitalism (Wright 2002; Ginsborg 2003). This relative strength of the mass worker at the point of production expressed itself in traditional unions and led to attempts by capital to destroy the composition of these movements and their political outcomes in the period after 1968 just as the imposition of Taylorism in an earlier period undermined organisations associated with the craft heritage (Braverman 1974).

This restructuring of the organisational dynamics of capitalism from this period on, undertakes 'a paradigm shift of production toward the network model (Negri & Hardt 2000; 304).' As discussed in the union decline thesis, this growing hegemony of transnational corporations exists above traditional national boundaries, at nation state level there is an accompanying neo-liberal discourse that whittles away the 'planner state' and the possibility of utopian 'others.' This network model of production is facilitated by the growth of information technology, leading to a decentralization of production. Freed from territorial constraints, 'communication and control can be exercised efficiently at a distance (Negri & Hardt 2000; 295)' and capitalism sidesteps out of the path of traditional class based resistances, becoming more adepth at uprooting itself in times of crisis, wielding mobility as a perpetual threat over government. It has in other words 'evacuated the bastion they are attacking (Negri & Hardt 2000; 138)'

The shift away from the mass industrial methods that created the social conditions for a political discourses centred on the sphere of production, leads us directly to the fractured identities of the knowledge economy discussed at an earlier point. We now enter a century where a 'new mode of becoming human (Negri & Hardt 2000; 289)' emerges through immaterial labour. The autonomist analysis credits new social movement theorists for moving away from short-sighted economic perspectives limiting the political significance of culture, but it remains insistent on the 'increasing indistinguishability of economic and cultural phenomena (Negri & Hardt 2000; 275).' Sourcing labour as the creative force behind capitalist development, they contextualize the 'dropping out' counter culture of the sixties, as a widespread refusal of the discipline of mass production and 'the experimentation with new forms of productivity (Negri & Hardt 2000; 274).' Deindustrialisation and demise of the mass worker are only one side of a process where capital deepens the manner in which it extracts value. Just as corporations were forced to re-organise the distribution of production in the face of working class organisation, simultaneously they engaged in internal reorganization through 'socialisation, tertiarisation and flexibilisation (Negri 1978: 254)’ harnessing alternative and post material values to the production process in order to incorporate new generations of workers. Capitalism becomes more reliant on extracting value from the manipulation of signs and symbols in the knowledge economy, from affective or emotional labour at the heart of the tertiary sector and in industries with 'communication as their lifeblood (Hardt & Negri 2000; 30).' Capitalism deepens the subsumption of society through mining its communicative processes and 'co -operative interactivity (Negri & Hardt 2000; 294' for value, production becomes fundamentally social. Labour once regulated by Taylorism and then fordism as forms of work discipline at the point of production, is now regulated by control in society, in 'which mechanisms of command become ever more "democratic" ever more immanent to the social field (Negri & Hardt 2002; 23).' 'The factory without walls' can be used as a metaphor for this socially diffuse production, the proletarian inhabiting it can be termed the 'socialised worker.' The deepening colonisation of the social world and culture by a hypermediated capitalism leads us to a scenario where 'life becomes inseparable from work (Lazzarato, 1996: 137-8).'

1 Quoted in Chomsky, N. ‘The Carter Administration: Myth and Reality’ Extracted from Radical Priorities, Viewed August 6^th 2006.