Why Social Movements Matter: An Introduction - Softcover

Cox, Laurence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786607824 ISBN 13: 9781786607829

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018

Synopsis

Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today’s world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women’s rights, austerity politics, racism, warfare and surveillance are central to the future of our societies, we urgently need to understand social movements. Accessible, comprehensive and grounded in deep scholarship, Why Social Movements Matter explains social movements for a general educated readership, those interested in progressive politics and scholars and students in other fields. It shows how much social movements are part of our everyday lives, and how in many ways they have shaped the world we live in over centuries. It explores the relationship between social movements and the left, how movements develop and change, the complex relationship between movements and intellectual life, and delivers a powerful argument for rethinking how the social world is constructed. Drawing on three decades of experience, Why Social Movements Matter shows the real space for hope in a contested world.

About this title

About the Author

Laurence Cox is one of Europe’s leading social movement researchers, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and Associate Researcher at the Collège d’Etudes Mondiales, Paris. He has published widely on different aspects of social movements, including We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, Voices of 1968: Documents from the Global North, Understanding European Movements, Marxism and Social Movements and Silence Would Be Treason: Last Writings of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Cox cofounded andcoedits the activist/academic social movements journal Interface. He hasbeen involved in many different kinds of movement since the 1980s, includingecological, international solidarity, human rights and organising againstrepression, antiwar, community activism, radical media, self-organised spaces,alternative education and the alter-globalisation ‘movement of movements’.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why Social Movements Matter

An Introduction

By Laurence Cox

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Laurence Cox
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-782-9

Contents

Introduction, vii, 
1 Why We Need Social Movements, 1, 
2 Movements Made the World We Live In, 15, 
3 Social Movements and the Left: Thinking 'the Social Movement in General', 43, 
4 Practice-Oriented Thinking: 'The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World', 61, 
5 Movements and the Mind: From the Streets to the University, 83, 
Conclusion: What Should We Do?, 107, 
Notes, 115, 
Resources, 121, 
Index, 123, 
About the Author, 131, 

CHAPTER 1

Why We Need Social Movements

Anastasia (not her real name) has a son on the autistic spectrum. To access any kind of resources for him, she had to wait four years to get an official diagnosis, by which point her son was already six. The waiting lists for assessments are so long that another parent with a special needs child set up a private centre with subsidised rates so that parents can know what their children need – while they are still children. Her then partner had to take a case with the ombudsman in order to get minimal treatment from inexperienced staff, and go through a lengthy appeal process in order to be entitled to carer's leave. They now have to fight with the school and the teacher to get them to take their son's condition at all seriously in daily classroom work. Despite having to pursue this route, Anastasia does not feel that the official psychiatric diagnosis, or the practices in which their son's special needs assistant have been trained, really describe or help his situation very well; and she has deep-seated questions about how and why he is on the spectrum – but also why school and society are organised in such a way that it is excruciatingly difficult for autistic people to function within them. After all, school supports will mostly cease in children's teens or at best early adulthood; and all being well children outlive their parents. How are they to survive? With other parents, she has set up a local group which provides supports to parents and carers and helps people fill out welfare forms and campaigns for changes in the system: the local health board now refers parents with autism to them rather than changing its own practice. Because of her own health situation Anastasia is limited in her energy, but she also holds down two part-time jobs, in a community centre and an alternative school project.

Seán is a 'nice boy from a good family', but never really fitted into the macho world around him, partly because his parents were immigrants and partly because he was attracted to men as well as women. From an early age, he read intensively and in his teenage years became deeply affected by the suffering and injustice in the world. In his personal life, but also his work as a mental health nurse, he tries to act in ways that take all of this on board – challenging sexist and racist stereotypes among his colleagues, not eating animals, helping organise the local union branch – while also joining in more political actions when he can, from antiwar politics as a student to involvement in local food projects as an adult. In the small town where he now lives in another country, there is a real crisis situation around undocumented migrants, racist organising and Syrian refugees. Seán tries not only to help organise welcome and support structures as well as language classes for the newcomers, but also to develop anti-racist activities for local working-class youth.

Pat came from a very difficult family background and struggled to bring her sons up on a working-class estate without them falling victim to addiction or the police. She is a resourceful woman: when her sons' friends were hanging around the alleyway behind her house smoking dope, she used her comfortable 'mammy' persona to invite them in for a cup of tea. As teenage lads, they didn't quite know what to do except to come in and look embarrassed. Over the years she gradually won their confidence, not lecturing them about what they should be doing but listening as they talked about the lack of any obvious future; the way teachers, shopkeepers and respectable citizens treated them; harassment by the police; and the deaths of their friends by suicide or overdose. Slowly but surely she helped them to reflect more on the power relations underlying this situation, and as they did so they also found it easier to take charge of their own lives in many ways. She now spends a lot of time working with women's groups from council estates like her own, helping them think more about how society is organised and how they can improve things locally. She supported her daughter in her many battles with school authorities and is delighted that she calls herself a feminist.

MOVEMENTS ARE EVERYDAY THINGS

I could multiply these examples indefinitely, but these three snapshots give something of the sense of the down-to-earth and everyday nature of most social movement organising. In fact it is so down-to-earth that people involved often refuse the label of 'activist' and strongly resist the idea that they are doing anything special or different. Just like those around them, they say, they try to help when they can.

Indeed, they are likely to feel that they cannot do enough to respond to all the suffering they are conscious of, and this points to something important: few people are full-time, lifelong organisers. It is very common to dip in and out of different movements and activism (a word I use for lack of a better one) throughout people's whole lives. This is just as well: otherwise, movements would consist of the same handful of people, with probably very little resonance in workplaces or communities. Instead, sometimes – by no means all the time – people feel strongly enough, or strongly affected enough, about a particular issue or campaign that they decide to get involved, whether or not they have done so before.

Total newcomers often bring a great blast of energy and confidence, and a refreshing lack of awareness that some areas or groups may be hostile to movements, and these can be huge strengths. As Facebook groups previously devoted to gossiping about each other start sharing videos of police violence, or as friends or neighbours turning out for a march on an issue they are outraged about take a week to produce a brilliant banner together, there is a great jolt of life for movements and longer-term organisers.

But whether we are first-time participants, long-time organisers, occasional participants or for that matter observers keeping our distance, as soon as you start looking you see that social movements are everywhere. Not all the time, certainly, and not equally successful. This is part of what defines 'normality': since movements come together in part to challenge the way things are, 'normality' means precisely those times and places in which the social institutions and routines that suit the powerful, the wealthy and the culturally privileged are not significantly challenged. Even in periods of utter normality, however, people still come together to fight where they have to – to protect their children, in their workplaces or communities; and other people still resist injustice, whether official support for wars and dictatorship abroad or ecological destruction at home, even when they have little hope of success.

A lot of this activity is very mundane: the support group, the leaflet, the website, the Twitter argument, the invitation to a new colleague to join the union, the small local demonstration to defend services, the email to politicians or the subscription to an NGO. Because social movements are everywhere, they are 'nothing special'; or rather, only some of the time do we even really notice movement activity as out of the ordinary. They go beyond charity in that they have some degree of self-organisation – they are not simply created by the state, local businesses, a church or a committee of local 'notables' – and this is partly because they ask bigger questions about the world and go that bit further, in their ideas even if not always in their action (which is harder to achieve).

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND HUMAN NEEDS

To outline a more formal way of thinking about social movements: Human beings, all of us, have needs, all sorts of them – for food and for hope, for ideas and for love, for health care and for respect, for shelter and for real work, needs for our children and for the place we live in and so on. When we meet one need, we see that there are other things we also need – or, sometimes, when one need is met, we realise that we need not just shelter but decent shelter, whether in terms of cost, quality or how the landlord treats us. Needs, in other words, are developmental, not fixed and given. This is not only true for us as individuals but also at a cultural or social level – what an older generation was not much bothered by can be really distressing to us. We are often aware of needs that aren't fully met, while sometimes we are taken by surprise to discover how much we needed something once we get a small taste of it. This is incidentally often true of meaningful involvement in social struggle around things that really matter to us.

At one level, social inequality is about how far these needs are met; and in capitalist societies, we are offered an 'equality of opportunity' in which we are invited to compete to see if our needs can be met. Of course, this usually means that other people's needs are not, or not met as much; and we may be very well aware that some of the things that are most important to us are never in practice going to be made available to us, that they are basically reserved to other categories of people.

At another level, our kinds of society – based on divisions of class, of gender and sexuality, of race and ethnicity, with states and cultures that support these divisions – are only really interested in a narrow subset of human needs. Hence, even what is offered to 'successful' people is often very short on some of the things that we might feel make life most worthwhile – free time, for example, real human community, a wide natural world within which to wander freely, social equality, a deeper sense of meaning, participation in the decisions that affect us or even the ability to live well without feeling that other people are suffering and dying elsewhere for our benefit. So in order to keep going, our kinds of society offer to selectively meet our needs, in ways conditional on our behaving appropriately, often at the expense of others and with certain needs ruled right out; and many of us know full well that our most urgent needs are simply not going to be met.

We are not, of course, going to stop trying to meet our needs, one way or the other. If we can meet them within the everyday routines and practices we are offered, we are quite likely to try to do so. We are also quite likely to try and meet other needs in unofficial ways when this is the easiest thing to do: an informal arrangement about when we leave work, swapping childcare or school lifts, a bit of dope to help us calm down, watching pirated movies or asking family members for help. A lot of the time, though, none of this quite does it for us. We do not get to the end of the month without borrowing money or leaving bills unopened for fear of what they might say; we hate our job; our living situation is driving us demented; our child is miserable and none of the approved channels are helping; every time we turn on the TV we get furious at the world we see out there.

So we struggle to cope in everyday life; and at times we feel we have things under control, at times we do not. Sometimes, though, we sense the possibility of pushing things further: changing how a particular institution works, at least at a small level; setting up a new project that would do things better and differently; coming together with people more like ourselves to do the things we value, even when they are illegal or frowned upon. At other times, we feel definitely under attack: we come together to try to defend services that we badly need, to stop a cut in wages or make sure permanent jobs are not turned into contract ones, to express our outrage and try to stop a war, an appalling political leader or the destruction of the planet. Movements are a creative collective response to this sort of situation.

Chapter 4 talks more about this process theoretically; here I want to underline that because we have human needs, and because our societies only meet those partially and for some of us, it is common enough to come together collectively to try to do something about this: to resist, or to push forward; to create new institutions or new forms of socialising; even at times to imagine a different and better world – or to try to stop a worse one which seems to be almost upon us.

MOVEMENTS AND OUR OWN LIVES

We are not always available to do this, or only in certain ways. Social movement researchers talk about this as biographical availability. For example, my child and partner (who has an invisible disability) live elsewhere in order to meet their particular needs, and as the only person in well-paid employment I have to concentrate on making money in order to keep this whole show on the road financially, while my partner does most of the care work and only gets a respite at weekends when I am there. Under these circumstances, I will not be going to many Saturday demos for a good few years, and my involvement in other kinds of activism will be severely limited by my ability to follow through on organising commitments. So too with other kinds of caring and work responsibilities, with our own disabilities, sickness or old age or when we are particularly vulnerable to certain kinds of reprisals, like police violence or losing our job.

There may be other kinds of situational barriers to participation. We may only have encountered kinds of activism that didn't seem to have any place for people like us, or that seemed to depend on following people we didn't really like or respect; we might have moved into a situation where there seems no prospect of involving other people in the kinds of things we care about; or we might already be under a cloud of suspicion for being too different in one way or another. Some of these things, maybe, can be worked around – there are often ways of getting people on your side if the right situation arises or you are able to think creatively; or there may be forms of activism that can be carried out with the time and energy we actually have available. But at other times, movement participation may simply not be on the cards.

Thus many people weave in and out of movements as their lives change. The reason why there is a stereotype of the college activist is in part because this is one of the times of life in which we are most likely to encounter our peers engaging in activism and recognise it as such, but it is by no means the only one. In fact, there are many different spaces of social movement. Some, like trade union activism, are structured around where we work; others, such as community activism and some kinds of environmental or service protest, are very much structured around where we live. Some take place in our 'leisure time', in that they happen after work, online or at weekends in largely public spaces, and may bring together people from all sorts of social situations; some exist primarily as a job, in the sense of a Greenpeace worker, a radical journalist or a staff member in a women's refuge. At times, as in the US mobilisation against Trump, we see people resisting across all of these spaces: resigning their jobs, or carrying them out in ways that actively frustrate administration plans; taking whole school districts out on strike, or mobilising at the airport to welcome Muslims and resist the travel ban; pushing to defend and strengthen the sanctuary status of particular cities or campuses; organising on a neighbourhood basis to resist raids for undocumented migrants; supporting each other in the workplace; and so on.

Not only are we likely to encounter movements in different spaces of our lives; our lives are likely to intersect with them in very different ways. To take a strong example, in some times and spaces – Zapatista communities in Chiapas today or some republican communities in Northern Ireland during the Troubles – most people might be in some sense involved in activism, in different ways at different times in their lives of course, but with no sense that to do so is anything other than normal. A certain level of feminist activism may work like this at the moment in some social groups, meaning that 'my daughter just announced that she is a feminist' is an ordinary statement which friends and family meet with rejoicing as a normal part of growing up.

A more common situation is that of a lifeworld where a particular movement is broadly accepted and taking part in it is nothing unusual or remarkable, although many people do not take part, or only in limited ways. This has been the case for lesbian and gay communities in many cities for some decades, and for politically organised working-class communities in much of the global North until fairly recently. In these situations, most people may turn out to Pride for the party, or (when working) are largely inactive union members, and know some of the songs, while being more or less supportive of actual actions and campaigns. There might be tensions around how people in some organisations treat those who aren't, and a certain amount of joking as between those who prefer to watch the match and those who prefer to go to a meeting, but being an activist is not a problem in itself; it is a relatively well-understood way of being, and there are many supports available for learning the part.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Why Social Movements Matter by Laurence Cox. Copyright © 2018 Laurence Cox. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786607824
• ISBN 13: 9781786607829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150