Contemporary Left-Wing Activism Vol 2

Democracy, Participation and Dissent in a Global Context

Joseph Ibrahim, John Michael Roberts, Joseph Ibrahim, John Michael Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351047388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Radicalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Within many societies across the world, new social and political movements have sprung up that either challenge formal parliamentary structures of democracy and participation, or work within them and, in the process, fundamentally alter the ideological content of democratic potentials. At the same time, some parliamentary political parties have attracted a new type of 'populist' political rhetoric and support base.

This collection, along with its accompanying volume 2, examines the emergence of, and the connections between, these new types of left-wing democracy and participation. Through an array of examples from different countries, itexplains whyleft-wing activism arises in new and innovative spaces in society andhowthis joins up with conventional left-wing politics, including parliamentary politics. It demonstrates howthese new forms of politics can resonate with the real life experiences of ordinary people and thereby win support for left-wing agendas.

1

Global dissent and left-wing activism today

Joseph Ibrahim ¹

This volume considers a range of international protests and cycles of contention that emerged after the financial crash of 2007/2008. Indeed, 2011 is often cited as a key year when cycles of resistance and the formation of social movements became visible. That said, this volume also considers some less visible episodes that have been challenging neoliberal and authoritarian agendas imposed by various state and market actors. In fact, some of the actors could be classified as invisible at times. This is why the second volume is structured around three interrelated themes, the first of which is ‘Communities of resistance’. John Grayson starts this Part (Chapter 2) by discussing his research as an activist campaigning for asylum seekers and refugees in Sheffield and other parts of South Yorkshire.

This chapter suggests that current left social movements in areas of past social democratic and trade union struggles can be positively framed both by history and geography. The development of the political asylum rights organisation SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group), with which Grayson is involved, has drawn on reservoirs of activism developed in a ‘society of purpose’ (Smith 2010) that survived from the ‘proletarian cultures’ of steel and mining areas, and from the local political traditions of South Yorkshire. Drawing on such community activist resources, this chapter focusses on one major campaign by SYMAAG from 2012 – solidarity campaigning alongside asylum tenants in contracted asylum housing across Yorkshire. The campaign has had impacts on local authority policies towards such contracts and it has produced written evidence and oral testimony to certain Home Affairs Committee inquiries. Grayson is critical of what could be termed ‘asylum markets’ developed by for-profit companies across Europe (Grayson 2016). In this respect, Grayson demonstrates how working-class communities are still mobilising and resisting the effects of neoliberalism through new causes.

Chapter 3 by Louise Folkes considers the way in which citizens have become active through key campaigns following the financial crash in 2007/2008. This chapter focusses on a relatively new method of engaging people in their local communities and in civil society through ‘Citizens UK’, a registered charity that utilises an American broad-based community organising model, with the aim of organising communities for power, social justice and the common good. The core goal of Citizens UK is to strengthen civil society, in order to make both the market and the state more accountable. Two central tenets of this way of organising are that 1) it remains apolitical and 2) its membership is built of established institutions only. The organisation has seen large success in its national Living Wage Campaign, which has its origins in East London and that has now spread with the creation of the Living Wage Foundation, a sister charitable organisation. Alongside larger national campaigns, the organisation has local alliances, or chapters, that work on smaller, locally orientated neighbourhood concerns.

The chapter discusses both the opportunities and limitations of this style of organising for social change. In particular, the notion of neutrality and being ‘apolitical’ is explored, and how this is negotiated and managed by members of the organisation, who largely associate themselves with the political left. A further area that is explored is that of the institutional membership model of Citizens UK and the author asks if this is still relevant and suitable in a climate of reduced institutional membership in, for example, churches, trade unions and neighbourhood groups.

The fourth and last chapter of this Part by Noha Atef focusses on the impact of digital media on the left-wing movement RevSoc in Egypt. Here Atef asks some key questions about when, in 2011, the RevSoc project was launched and a bundle of online social media accounts – video, photos and hyperlinks sharing platforms – were all put together in a website. Here, questions about the usefulness of such media come to the fore; whether it has led to a rise in membership, attracted more supporters who did not join it, or did it only stimulate debates about the left as an ideology? The research presented is drawn from in-depth interviews with activists and comparative analysis of new media and other ‘older’ forms of media. In terms of the latter, Atef asks questions about the editorial and stylistic differences, and what influences they have had over both the short and long term.

The second Part is focussed on ‘Political spaces of the left’. That is, particular sites of resistance where leftist protests and movements have used key sites for their actions that have political and symbolic significance. Chapter 5, by Bora Erdaği, is on the famous Gezi Park rebellion in 2013, located next to Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey. The chapter focusses on the starting points and the progress of the Gezi Rebellion while comparing it with similar historical processes. The aim of the chapter is to take a standpoint that reveals and situates the Gezi Rebellion as an event/process in its originality. Therefore, the chapter moves on to argue that each historical event/process is distinct and authentic; that they always resist interventions; they represent the concreteness of the life world since they emanate from material social relations; and, finally, that they are always temporal and spatial.

Chapter 6, by Jorge Sequera and Jordi Nofre, focusses on urban activism and its relationship with the touristification in European cities. The authors argue that urban tourism has gained a central role in the struggles and discourses of housing activism and anti-gentrification movements. In various European cities, the original euphoria associated with tourism has now given way to antagonism, protest and social conflict. These protests are relating housing issues with the rapid expansion of touristification in these cities, which has implicitly favoured the emergence of new conflicts in urban coexistence and community liveability that need to be urgently tackled and addressed towards a more inclusive, liveable ‘Tourist City’. By adopting a cross-national, cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological approach, this chapter analyses how the recent expansion, commodification and standardisation of tourism has reshaped the multifaceted set of strategies, interests, alliances and conflicts of housing struggles and the grassroots mobilisations of local communities in central areas of three European cities (Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon).

Chapter 7 by César Guzmán-Concha and Carlos Durán Migliardi discusses the evolution, situation and prospects of left-wing parties and groups in Chile, with a special focus from the student protests of 2011 up to the present time. The chapter situates the Chilean case as an outlier in the context of the Latin American left turn that started with the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999 in Venezuela and includes other countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. The authors describe how a number of domestic and international factors explain the decline and weakness of the radical left since the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1989. Contradicting previous analyses, their research argues that the massive student protests of 2011 made evident a crack in the political consensus that had emerged with the socio-economic model and the political institutions after two decades of stability and apparent social acquiescence. Interestingly, and unlike similar episodes that occurred around this year in other countries, this outbreak took place in a context of economic growth and expansion. The authors go on to argue that the exhaustion of the post-transitional consensus has allowed the emergence of various protest movements and left-wing groups that challenge the parties of the institutional left, which have prevailed over much of the last century. They describe the ideology and characteristics of the most prevalent groups that have emerged, showing that they are not completely new but have deep roots with previous experiences, and they identify the opportunities, challenges and risks they face in the current period. The authors conclude that, despite its various weaknesses, a new radical left might have opportunities to grow in this country, provided certain internal and environmental conditions.

The next two chapters by Maia Kirby (Chapter 8) and Rogério Giugliano and Jacques de Novion (Chapter 9) discuss what might be termed ‘Movement Parties’ (Della Porta et al. 2017) in the UK and Brazil respectively. These chapters appear in Part III of this volume: ‘Hegemony, the state and extra-parliamentary politics’. Movement Parties can be considered to be those organisations that have on the one hand close connections to institutionalised politics but, on the other, are part of the social movement milieu. Kirby’s case study is of Momentum, which was established in October 2015 in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the UK Labour Party. Momentum was formed from the thousands of volunteers who worked on his election campaign. Over the past twelve months it has begun to establish itself as an organisation, with paid members of staff, structures and procedures. It has, through this process, replicated many of the forms of traditional political institutions. However, it has also adopted a position that is in many ways historically unique. It is both inside and outside mainstream politics, establishing new spaces of political interaction as well as following old forms of local activism. However, the relationship between party and movement is not always a smooth one and Kirby asks whether there is a tension between the two elements of this dual function and identity. What dynamics are at work between local and national structures, older and younger members and those within and outside of the Labour Party? Using interviews with Momentum officials and members, the chapter outlines the process of instituting Momentum. With a great deal of regional diversity in the operations of the organisation in its infancy, it is a study of a process. Therefore, further questions arise such as, for example, does the establishment of organisational structures inhibit the energy and propulsion implicit in the name ‘Momentum’, or indeed is it one of the first examples of a ‘new politics’ able to transcend the decelerating effects of institutionalisation? Ultimately, what does the process of instituting Momentum tell us about where the left is today?

In Chapter 9, Rogério Giugliano and Jacques de Novion present a historical overview of the trajectory of the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil, beginning with the context of its foundation in the 1980s as a reaction to the military dictatorship (that was in power since the middle of the 1960s) and also to the traditional left, especially the communist party and labour organisations that, before the military coup, were the most significant left-wing forces in the country. The chapter shows the party’s path to winning the national elections in 2010 at the head of a diverse coalition of political forces that took Mr Lula da Silva to the presidential office. It then moves to discuss the PT experience in the coalition government and the challenges of conducting a development project through political conciliation in a country of the global south still marked by its colonial and subaltern past. In addition, the chapter provides a sociological analytic perspective on some of the main issues that arise from this historiographical narrative. The first analytic focus is on the different social forces that composed the party and the concessions made towards a less radical left-wing political perspective. The second connects these political rearrangements to the ideological–theoretical shift from socialism to what became called in Brazil neo-developmentism. As final point, Giugliano and Novion offer some perspectives on the connections of this path with the larger South American political context.

The final chapter by Werner Bonefeld concludes Part III and the two volumes. This chapter provides a critical analysis of left-wing hegemony theory and its practical usefulness for understanding left-wing politics generally. The critical standpoint employed to undertake this analysis is a particular variant of the Marxist critique of political economy. This is important because, in contemporary analysis, the traditional certainty about unfolding processes of socialist transformation has given way to arguments about capitalism as manifesting either a capitalist hegemony, which is referred to as neoliberal capitalism, or a working-class hegemony, which is referred to as either planned economy, welfare capitalism, or simply anti-austerity. This argument suggests that the interests served by capitalist society are determined by the balance of social forces that are governed through the state. In contrast to the Marxist critique of political economy, which argues that capitalism establishes a definite mode of social labour and that the ‘abolition of hunger’ requires therefore a ‘change in the relations of production’ (Adorno et al. 1976: 62), the contemporary critical approach argues for counter-hegemonic struggles to secure the interests of workers in capitalist development. Bonefeld’s chapter demonstrates flaws in this particular school of thought around hegemony and argues that left-wing movements need to bring Marx’s critique of political economy back into their practical analysis of contemporary capitalism.

Note

1    Joseph Ibrahim is grateful to Palgrave MacMillan for permission to reproduce some material in Chapter 8 from Joseph Ibrahim (2015) Bourdieu and Social Movements: Ideological Struggles in the British Anti-Capitalist Movement, London: Palgrave.

References

Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Daherndorf, R., Habermas, J., Pilot, H. and Popper, K.R. (1976) ‘Introduction’, in Adorno, T.W. et al. (authors) The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 1–67, London: Heinemann.

Della Porta, D., Fernandez, J., Kouki, H. and Mosca, L. (2017) Movement Parties Against Austerity, Oxford: Wiley.

Grayson, J. (2016) ‘Red doors for asylum seekers: MPs grill one of Britain’s richest landlords’, Open Democracy, 1 February, at: www.opendemocracy.net/uk/shinealight/john-grayson/red-doors-for-asylum-seekers-mps-grill-one-of-britain-s-richest-landlord.

Smith, D. (2010) In the Frame: Memory in Society 1910 to 2010, Cardigan: Parthian.

PART I

Communities of resistance

2

The making and framing of solidarity campaigning on asylum rights

A radical left social movement in Sheffield

John Grayson

Introduction

Sheffield and its wider region of South Yorkshire was dominated by the steel and coal industries through to the 1980s. The region, its trades unions and politicians contested the industrial and social policies of the Thatcher governments and became known as the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. In 1980 a national steel strike was launched from the region. In 1984 a year-long Miners’ Strike began at Cottonwood colliery in the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire.

These traditions of political contestation and militancy have produced in South Yorkshire what Dai Smith has called “Societies of purpose [where] it is then not nostalgic or historical wish fulfilment to work … to retrieve and take forward the values, of what was worthwhile in past lives that particularly speak to us, connect with us” (Smith 2010: xx).

This chapter, based on my activist research embedded in an asylum rights organisation, SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Rights Action Group), suggests continuities in the region’s political and activist culture that have been important in the emergence of radical asylum rights and refugee movements.

The survival and relevance of a proletarian culture

Avner Offer has recently argued that British working-class communities of manual workers like those of South Yorkshire experienced a distinctive “proletarian” culture from the 1890s through to the 1950s:

Manual workers made up a group with its own distinctive lifestyle and culture [and] … formed a majority in their towns, but these communities lived apart from the main currents of national culture, politics, and middle-class society, marginalized, unknown, misunderstood, despised by outsiders and elites …. Working-class society contained the full range of ability, and a pool of able men (mostly men) provided capable leadership for their own class, in trade unions, local politics, and all the way up to Parliament and government.

(Offer 2008: 2)

It was this local proletarian culture that acted as the context and lifeblood for independent working-class trade union and social movement initiatives. It is arguable that the influence of this proletarian culture structured workers’ histories and their social movements in areas like South Yorkshire through to the 1970s and beyond.

Offer’s proletarian culture produced not only politica...