To Make Another World

Studies in Protest and Collective Action

Colin Barker, Paul Kennedy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781859723265
• eBook ISBN: 9781351878838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a significant contribution to the expanding study of social movements. The essays consider some of the manifold ways in which people join together in popular movements to pursue visions of a different and more just society. They examine the impact of such movements, both on ordinary citizens swept along by demands for change, and on conventional institutions caught in the crossfire between radical protest and the pursuit of more mundane goals. They cast a new light on seemingly familiar themes: participation as a learning experience, the critical ingenuity of leadership but also its failures of judgment and internal divisions and the ever-changing nature of protest in the face of relentless social change. Above all, these essays succeed in capturing the essential vitality and creativity of ideas and language expressed by citizens as they struggle to reinvent their lives and times.

1 Introduction

Colin Barker

The essays in this volume originated as contributions to a lively and multi-stranded conference on ‘Alternatives Futures and Popular Protest’ at Manchester Metropolitan University in April 1995.

The study of protest and collective action is more established on academic agendas in the United States and in Europe than in Britain. This is perhaps slightly odd, given the extensive contemporary and historical significance of these issues in the making and remaking of British society. For if the academic study of popular protest is relatively underdeveloped, the phenomenon itself is widespread, as a glance at any week’s national and local news reveals. Behind, and interwoven with, the formal oppositions of official politics run myriad strands of locally, nationally and internationally focussed protest activities, formal and informal. Neighbours in a street organize a petition or a temporary blockade of a busy road after a child is injured; thousands of people participate in efforts to defend the welfare of veal calves; the testing of atomic weapons on a remote Pacific atoll becomes the occasion for a multitude of protests across the globe.

Processes of social transformation within capitalist society regularly throw existing patterns of life and moral assumptions into confusion, inviting forms of resistance and the elaboration of alternatives. A number of these pressures are registered in the essays here: the impact of workplace closures and de-industrialization on particular workforces (Collins) and also on whole urban regions (Johnson); state attempts to shift the burden of taxation (Bagguley) and to rationalize welfare provision (Barker); growing rifts between popular aspirations and existing political and social systems (Dale and Clegg); the social disasters imposed by imperialist war (Howard); growing perceptions of threat to the environment (Kennedy and Purkis).

The literature on social movements is essentially concerned with the creative responses groups make to the problems that capitalist development generates for them, as they search for means to control the potentially devastating effects on their lives of changes imposed from above and outside, and as they envision alternatives. Its subject-matter is thus central to problems of contemporary social and political practice.

A number of interrelated themes are woven into these essays. One of these is the widespread existence of oppositional ideas within modern society. As Bagguley suggests, perhaps the largest and most effective single protest movement in postwar Britain, the campaign against the poll tax, was underpinned by a ‘moral economy’ of the kind that Edward Thompson (1971) detected within eighteenth century food riots. This ‘complex bricolage of individual and collective sentiments and rationalities’ is generated and sustained as a shared if often subterranean set of critical popular responses to everyday inequalities of power.

A ‘moral economy’ may seem to be a relatively fixed set of collectively shared prejudices. But, constructed as it is from shifting daily experience and remade and reinforced through informal networks, a moral economy is subject to continual innovation. Additional themes appear within what Clegg terms ‘the common sense of an era’. Among those registered in these essays are the shifting evaluation of the place and rights of women (and men) and the relations between them, and a deepening anxiety about environmental issues which underlies the movements discussed here by Kennedy and Purkis.

At any one time, overt political behaviour may be a poor guide to these structures of evaluation, feeling and aspiration. Often existing as what Scott (1990) terms ‘hidden transcripts’, they have the capacity, seen clearly in Dale’s account of the autumn and winter of 1989 in former East Germany, to erupt into the public arena with devastating power. Or, as in Howard’s fascinating historical recovery, they can quietly undermine a whole imperial military machine. The study of social movements tends to throw into question those accounts of social order which treat it as the product of value consensus. Here, submission to authority seems more fragile, resting more on pragmatic judgements of the current risks of open expression of desire, given an awareness of unfavourable power balances and dispositions of forces.

The study of social movements deals with slippery objects. Marwell and Oliver declare, with reason, that defining the term ‘social movement’ is a ‘theoretical nightmare’ (1984, pp.4-5). Clegg’s discussion of the women’s movement in Britain distinguishes between broad and narrow definitions, recognizing that each contains its own partial truth. Too often, we ‘know’ movements through their public spokespeople and activists; only occasionally, as in Dale’s account of the homemade banners and the informal editing of popular slogans within the insurgent crowds in Leipzig, do we get to hear the voices of the ‘rank and file’ — and thus, also, to estimate the relation between those voices and those of the recognised oppositionists. Nor are the boundaries between ‘movements’ as neat and tidy as theory might hope: is Earth First!, in Purkis’s essay, part of the history of environmental protest, or of anarchism? Questions like these pose practical issues for participants in movements. For they involve dilemmas and arguments about movement meanings and identities, about the relation between specific protests and larger narratives and theories. Within movements, different tendencies contend over such matters as the degree to which issues should be ‘isolated’ or ‘generalized’ (as in Barker’s discussion of a community protest), and thus about movements’ forms, direction and leaderships. Such internal arguments surface in various forms in a number of these essays.

There is a distance between the existence of a ‘moral economy’ and its actual expression in a practical movement. If the moral economy (a critical aspect of popular commonsense) provides intellectual resources on which people may and do draw, its forms of expression are as diverse as human ingenuity. As Bagguley stresses, most of the time (including those moments when it energises collective action) the public disclosure of popular feeling is constrained by another aspect of common sense, which he terms ‘informed fatalism’. This duality of everyday political consciousness sets up tricky problems for those who seek to activate and lead movements. Collins explores the processes by which activists work to capture and transform existing linguistic modes which were not originally designed as containers of protest. Dale offers us one image of this: a portrait of Honecker carried on a demonstration against the regime, only now in a parodic-travestying form (on which see Bakhtin, 1981, ch 2). Collins shows us witty communist shop stewards playing with their opponents’ language, mocking and converting it into an offensive weapon. (Consider the passage that climaxes in ‘Why aren’t you standing on your own two feet?’) Purkis shows us EF! protestors seizing mahogany tables, thereby seeking to impart comic, and thus realist, distance to commercial goods on the grounds that they are ‘stolen property’.

Everyone, remarked Gramsci, in a notable assault on all elitist thinking, is an intellectual. But, he added, not everyone has the function of an intellectual (1971, p.9). Those who seek — successfully or not — to perform that function within movements haunt these pages. Ratcliff (1984) argued some years ago that social science should pay more attention to the role of the ‘cadre of committed grass-roots level “militants”’ we find in every movement. There are no movements without ideas, or without those specific people who seek to embody those ideas in practical organization and activity. Activists of various kinds appear in these pages, as protestors, organizers, representatives (actual and would-be), leaders, speakers, academics, agitators, even ethical business people, all performing that ‘intellectual function’ which is inherent in all protest activity.

We can understand little about social movements if we ignore the always problematic relations between activists and followers within them. If sometimes — as in the anti-poll tax movement, or Howard’s ‘shirkers’ revolt’ — movements seem to us to be spontaneous and leaderless, we are probably admitting that we don’t know enough about them to grasp their complex internal dynamics (Goodwyn, 1991). Sometimes, as in these two examples, a movement can be effective without any strong central leadership, because the participants hold effective individual sanctions (nonpayment, opportunities for desertion) in their hands. In other cases, movement success depends on overt coordination, and immediate individual sanctions are less available. This characterised the situation facing the campaigners against hospital closure in Barker’s study. In such circumstances, issues concerning what leading cadres of movements say and do, and how they organize themselves, become more critical. These are themes that appear, variously, in the essays by Clegg, Collins, Dale, Johnson and Purkis. Certainly leaders and their immediate core cadres do more than simply ‘represent’ movements in an unmediated fashion. Whether successfully or not, they play a creative part in formulating projects, defining goals, responding to antagonists, containing or expanding mobilization. The tasks are always complex, and by no means always adequately achieved, as Johnson’s study of Militant’s leadership in Liverpool argues. In Dale’s account of the East German revolution, the huge crowds in the street demonstrations clearly had aspirations that went well beyond the visions of the middle class New Forum leaders, but never found an adequate leadership and organizational form through which to achieve them. Purkis’s study poses a different dilemma: how do those who reject ‘leadership’ (treating it as embodying the principle of bureaucracy) break out of the relative isolation of ‘direct action’ politics to reach wider audiences and achieve wider mobilizations?

Most social movements and protests have a clearly defined target and opponents. It is the interaction between movements and the forces they contest that shapes their development. Waddington, in the final essay in this volume, offers a unique study of one element in the structure of movements’ opponents: the police. Waddington shows how a theme that appears in Collins’ paper on the language of opposition also shapes police responses: they negotiate ‘terms’ to manage and contain demonstrations and other potential sources of disorder in London, using essentially non-legal means to pursue their own interests in avoiding ‘trouble’. Although, as the essays by Howard and Dale also remind us, officialdom is not always so successful.

On one issue in recent debates, that surrounding ‘new social movements’, the authors here are anything but unified. What is perhaps at issue is what should count as a sign of ‘newness’: is it the nature of the issues and demands posed by movements, or the character of the surrounding society, or again some characteristic of the movements themselves: their organizational forms, ideas, activities, social compositions, or relations with audiences and antagonists? Some of these essays reveal scepticism about ‘newness’ claims on many of these dimensions, while others are more inclined to accept and celebrate novelty. In some of the practices of the ‘new’ movements (witness the essays by Kennedy and Purkis) there are powerful echoes of older traditions, of both the 19th century cooperative and narodnik movements.

Social movement theory, like its object of study, is in constant flux and development. We hope that further conferences and publications will extend the theoretical development of some of the themes explored here.

Our particular thanks to Maggy Taylor for her extraordinary assistance in the production of this volume.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, University of Texas Press, Austin.

Goodwyn, Lawrence (1991), Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, Oxford University Press, New York.

Gramsci, Antonio (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, London.

Marwell, Gerald and Oliver, Pamela (1984), ‘Collective action theory and social movement research’, Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, Vol.7.

Ratcliff, Richard E. (1984), ‘Introduction’, Research on Social Movements, Conflict and Change, Vol.6.

Scott, James C. (1990), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, Yale.

Thompson, E. P. (1971), ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, 50, February.

2 The moral economy of anti-poll tax protest

Paul Bagguley

For the first time a government had declared that anyone who could reasonably afford to do so should at least pay something towards the upkeep of the facilities and the provision of the services from which they benefited. A whole class of people — an ‘underclass’ if you will — had been dragged back into the ranks of responsible society and asked to become not just dependents but citizens … And the eventual abandonment of the charge represented one of the greatest victories for these people ever conceded by a Conservative Government (Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years).

Introduction

Margaret Thatcher’s evaluation of the anti-poll tax movement seems remarkably congruent with that of many of those who participated in or have studied the movement in any detail (Burns, 1992; Reynolds, 1992). This is contrary to the major academic assessment of the whole poll tax episode, which largely dismisses the popular mobilization against the tax as having little or no role in its abolition (Butler et al, 1994, pp.297-98). My purpose in this chapter, however, is not to debate the success or otherwise of anti-poll tax protest, as I have argued the point in more detail elsewhere (Bagguley, 1995a and 1995b). What I wish to do here is to examine the mobilization against the poll tax in terms of E. R Thompson’s concept of a moral economy.

The poll tax was proposed by the 1987 Thatcher government as a new form of local tax to replace the rates. The poll tax, or community charge to give it its official name, was a flat rate tax on individual adults. The only concession to the ability to pay was that those on social security benefits, etc. only had to pay a proportion of the standard tax. However, this still meant for many individuals with little or no income that they had to pay local taxes for the first time, and at the same level as those on high incomes. Not surprisingly, with the benefit of hindsight perhaps, the poll tax was actively opposed by millions of people.

In this chapter I shall examine in some detail the underlying moral response to the poll tax that contributed to generating the massive participation in the movement. I shall attempt this through an examination of the political morality of the activists in particular, and through their accounts, that of the participants. The interviews with activists that I draw upon below, were carried out in Leeds in 1990, and further details of these have been published elsewhere (Bagguley, 1995a).¹ Furthermore, much of my argument will go against the grain of many contemporary accounts of class and politics in contemporary societies such as Britain. Briefly, such accounts often suggest that class is no longer a major political issue, that class-based inequalities no longer inform and motivate political action. Often it is asserted on the basis of rather flimsy evidence that class movements have been replaced by ‘new social movements’, or that consumption now has some kind of priority over production as a politically structuring set of social relations (see for instance Bauman, 1987; Lash and Urry, 1994).

In contrast to some of what is argued in this literature, I find myself in closer affinity with the more empirical Weberian tradition of British sociology, which continually demonstrates the salience of class for voting behaviour and social identities among the working class in Britain (Goldthorpe and Marshall, 1994; Marshall et al 1988). Although largely associated with the Weberian tradition in British sociology the broad concept of ‘informed fatalism’ also has roots within the Marxian tradition (Abercrombie et al, 1980, pp.165-6). From this kind of analysis I want to develop the idea of ‘informed fatalism’, where working class protest does not routinely occur due to the perceived immutability of capitalist social relations. This helps to explain the lack of protest prior to, and after the poll tax.

Further, I want to develop some of the themes from this literature in relation to E. P. Thompson’s notion of a ‘moral economy’. In particular I want to argue that the anti-poll tax movement in part reflects a class consciousness in the form of a moral economy. Broadly my aims are twofold. Firstly, to provide an examination of the moral dimension of opposition to the poll tax, but not one which pretends to be a comprehensive account of what happened and why. Secondly, I want to link together these broader theoretical issues regarding Thompson’s moral economy, class consciousness and the possibilities of collective action among the working class in the conditions of contemporary capitalism.

Thompson’s moral economy and the poll tax

E. P. Thompson’s paper ’the Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ was first published in the journal Past and Present in 1971. It has generated much debate among historians, a debate considered in some detail by Thompson himself some twenty years later (Thompson, 1993, pp.259-351). Although apparently widely admired among sociologists, the work has rarely been used and developed by sociologists, and certainly not in relation to contemporary social movements, protest and collective action in the UK. There are many purposes to Thompson’s original paper, and I wish to draw upon its arguments selectively for theoretical development. Most of all I want to suggest that the concept of a moral economy is an especially useful way of understanding certain aspects of opposition to and protest against the poll tax. Furthermore, I have a more purely theoretical case to make. In particular I want to begin to open up a theoretical dialogue between Thompson’s notion of a moral economy and some wi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the authors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The moral economy of anti-poll tax protest
• 3. What is to be done? Contrasting activists’ visions in community protest
• 4. From the women’s movement to feminisms
• 5. To concede or to contest? Language and class struggle
• 6. The East German revolution of 1989
• 7. Shirkers in revolt — mass desertion, defeat and revolution in the German army: 1917-1920
• 8. Militant and the failure of ‘acherontic’ Marxism in Liverpool
• 9. Business enterprises as agents of cultural and political change: the case of green/ethical marketing
• 10. Daring to dream: idealism in the philosophy, organization and campaigning strategies of Earth First!
• 11. The other side of the barricades: policing protest