NUMBER 112 / MAY 2001
by Richard Heinberg

PROSPECTS FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

(We encourage you to get books through your local bookstore or from your library. If this is not practical, ordering through our links provides Museletter with a small commission. Book links are to Powell's or, if unavailable there, Amazon. These links are also useful to find out more about the book: price, content and reviews.)

A month ago, tens of thousands of people from throughout the Americas gathered in Quebec City to protest semi-secret negotiations aimed at establishing a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). During the past two years, several similar mass demonstrations have occurred, most notably in Seattle in November 1999 in opposition to a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and in 2000 in Davos, Switzerland at meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). These days it seems that wherever and whenever economic and political leaders gather to discuss the next phases of globalization of capital, they are confronted by hordes of angry citizens wielding puppets.

The burgeoning mass movements against corporate globalization, the genetic engineering of food, and the patenting of organisms; against sweatshops, clearcut logging, and mining on indigenous people's lands; are joined with movements to promote local production for local consumption, human rights, animal rights, preservation of the natural environment, and forgiveness of debts owed by impoverished nations to international banks. There are so many identifiable groups involved (labor unions, environmental organizations, anarchists, indigenous rights groups, women's rights groups, etc.), and so many issues, that the mainstream media have had a hard time understanding this as a coherent social phenomenon - to the degree that they've actually made an honest effort to do so.

From a deeper historical perspective, it would appear that current push toward corporate globalization may be symptomatic of an empire in its final efforts at consolidation immediately prior to collapse; and that the growing global social movement may be comparable to popular movements, in prior civilizations, that resisted those late, futile efforts to forestall disintegration. Like Rome in its last days, industrial capitalist civilization seeks to maintain itself by increasing its investments in social complexity, thereby wringing the last possible benefits (for the elite class, at least) from people and nature. Archaeologist Joseph Tainter describes the general situation well in his classic text The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988):

A society increasing in complexity does so as a system. That is to say, as some of its interlinked parts are forced in a direction of growth, others must adjust accordingly. For example, if complexity increases to regulate regional subsistence production, investments will be made in hierarchy, in bureaucracy, and in agricultural facilities (such as irrigation networks). The expanding hierarchy requires still further agricultural output for its own needs, as well as increased investment in energy and minerals extraction. An expanded military is needed to protect the assets thus created, requiring in turn its own increased sphere of agricultural and other resources. As more and more resources are drained from the support population to maintain this system, an increased share must be allocated to legitimization or coercion. This increased complexity requires specialized administrators, who consume further shares of subsistence resources and wealth.

The elite grow accustomed to solving problems by increasing the size of the society, inventing new technologies, and expanding the bureaucracy. Eventually a point is reached at which the benefits accruing from such investments begin to diminish. Then, as problems arise resulting from diminishing returns on prior and ongoing investments in complexity, they can imagine only one solution: more complexity. But that just makes the problems worse. Eventually, the support population wearies of the onerous burdens levied on it to sustain these increasing investments, and the society collapses. Collapse may be complete or partial, sudden or gradual. "Collapse," in this context, simply means the return to a simpler level of organization.

And that, in essence, is what the present global movement is advocating: less global trade, more local production and control; less investment in risky new technologies, more reliance on simpler, more decentralized, environmentally friendly methods of production; less exploitation of workers, more freedom and economic democracy.

From the elite's perspective, further investment in complexity appears essential: "Don't you see? The globalization of capital and the deployment of new technologies (like the genetic engineering of food) are necessary for further economic growth. Without them, we will not be able to sustain the standard of living to which people in the developed world have become accustomed, nor will people in the developing world ever be able to attain that standard." To which the movement answers, "Even if what you say is true, the cost to exploited peoples in the less-consuming world and to the environment is not worth the assumed benefit." While some within the movement do believe that further investment in complexity would be justified if only the rewards were equally distributed, an increasing number of people in resistance groups seem to be saying that the project of further globalizing industrial production is in itself unjustifiably costly and destructive.

Assuming that this description of the situation is more or less correct, what are prospects for the movement's success?

One way to approach the question would be to examine social movements of the past and try to isolate conditions that led to succcess or failure. Such a study would have to begin with an historical overview of social movements in general.

LESSONS OF HISTORY

Movements for social change are as old as civilization itself. The most prominent early example, perhaps, is the semi-mythical exodus from Egypt of the Hebrew people, under the leadership of Moses and Aaron. Other early instances consist of slave or conscript rebellions in Greece, Rome, and China. Typical is the story of the collapse of the Ch'in empire in 206 BCE: Put in charge of a group of conscripts headed for service on the northern frontier, a commoner named Ch'en She realized that his contingent would miss its prescribed rendezvous with the main army due to heavy rains. Ch'in law, which was infamously harsh, demanded severe penalties for such lapses, with no extenuating circumstances considered. Ch'en She realized that he would be better off as an outlaw than as a prisoner, and quickly persuaded the group to take up banditry. Thousands of malcontents from the countryside soon rallied to their support. News of this triggered other uprisings throughout the region. Generals began defecting to join the rebels, and before long the empire had come undone.

In virtually all instances, social movements consist of efforts by the common people to overcome the depredations of powerful elites. During the Middle Ages, such efforts were most often framed in religious terms - as in the cases of the Crusades of the Poor in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the Peasants' War in Germany in the early sixteenth century, led by revolutionary theologian Thomas Müntzer; the Hussite Revolution; and the Anabaptist movement (all documented in Norman Cohn's classic text, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1961). In the profession of faith of one Anabaptist, we find distilled the essential message of most of the rebels active in Europe during this period: "Christ will give sword and revenge to them, the Anabaptists, to punish all sins, stamp out all governments; communize all property and slay those who do not permit themselves to be rebaptized. . . . The government does not treat the poor people properly and burdens them too heavily. When God gives them revenge they want to punish and wipe out the evil. . . ." As Eric Hobsbawm shows in his book Primitive Rebels (1959), social rebellion in rural societies also often takes the form of banditry. Robin Hood is the prototypical bandit-hero, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Hobsbawm gives numerous examples from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many from Italy and Russia, and sketches a standardized picture of the social bandit's career:

A man becomes a bandit because he does something which is not regarded as criminal by his local conventions, but is so regarded by the State or the local rulers. . . . It is important that the incipient social bandit should be regarded as "honourable" or non-criminal by the population, for if he were regarded as a criminal against local convention, he could not enjoy the local protection on which he must rely completely. . . . Normally he will be young and single or unattached, if only because it is much harder for a man to revolt against the apparatus of power once he has family responsibilities. . . . The outlaw may of course remain alone. . . . If he joins or forms a band, and is thus economically committed to a certain amount of robbery, it will rarely be very large, partly for economic reasons, partly for organizational ones; for the band is held together only by the personal prestige of its leader. . . .

It does not greatly matter whether a man began his career for quasi-political reasons . . . or whether he simply robs because it is a natural thing for an outlaw to do. He will almost certainly try to conform to the Robin Hood stereotype in some respects. . . . He is virtually obliged to, for there is more to take from the rich than from the poor, and if he takes from the poor or becomes an "illegitimate" killer, he forfeits his most powerful asset, public aid and sympathy.

Robin Hoodism is most likely to appear when a rural society's "traditional equilibrium is upset: during and after periods of abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars" - that is, when the normalized status quo of social parasitism by the upper classes upon the poor has been exacerbated by some external event - "or at the moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seize static communities in order to destroy and transform them." The social bandit, at best, is able "to impose certain limits to traditional oppression in a traditional society, on pain of lawlessness, murder, and extortion. . . ." (It is no mere coincidence that the League of the Communists, for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, was originally named the League of the Outlaws. And the word used by Roman authoritis to describe the early Christians (Greek: lestai) is best translated as "bandits." As we have just seen, the historical roots of revolution and banditry are deeply intertwined. Today, the favored epithet for rebels is "terrorists." The underlying assumption always fostered by those in power is that anyone who attempts to level the social pyramid is lawless, dangerous, and violent.)

Until the modern era, then, many social movements were organized either around mysticism, banditry, or both. Whether they succeeded or failed depended on the charisma of their leaders and the historical circumstances - whether the regime against which they were rebelling was sufficiently overextended or weakened to be toppled by insurrection. Gradually, however, as we approach the modern era, we begin to see more sophisticated social analyses and new tactics of resistance.

Seventeenth-century England saw the emergence of the Diggers and Levellers - English peasant movements resisting the private enclosure of common lands. A little over a century later, the Luddites rose up to protest the replacement of cottage cloth-making by mechanized looms in factories and mills. None of these movements was successful, but all transcended the categories of bandit band or mystical sect (though a leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, did embellish his anarchist pamphlets with apocalyptic imagery).

The best-remembered social movements of the eighteenth century, the French and American Revolutions, are probably most accurately characterized not as spontaneous uprisings of the masses, but as struggles for power between the emerging merchant-capitalist class and the old aristocracy. Nevertheless, these revolutions produced influential philosophical documents (including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and the writings of Thomas Paine), which aroused popular expectations regarding human rights and democracy.

In the nineteenth century, as working people struggled against new masters - the owners of the mills and factories; the corporations and banks - Karl Marx and various anarchist philosophers (including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin) produced detailed analyses of the phenomenon of social oppression, offered visions for alternative ways of organizing society, and prescribed varying tactics for social change. Marx presciently foresaw the eventual globalization of capitalism and described its corrosive effects on the human community in terms that today ring truer than ever. The ability of one individual to profit from the labor of others, he wrote, ". . . has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment'. . . . It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - free trade." Meanwhile, the new urban reality of masses of wage laborers led to the possibility of new kinds of social movements. Instead of sporadic, episodic, random rebellions of rural society, we begin to see strikes, marches, and efforts at public education organized by trade unions. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America, the emblematic leader of a social movement is not a bandit or a mystic, but a labor organizer. In the more rural colonized world, however, many rebels are guerrillas - outlaws with at least a smattering acquaintance with Marx or Bakunin.

In America, during the 1870s, '80s, and '90s, a mass rural movement known as Populism organized itself around the creation of an alternative support system (cooperative banks, stores, grain mills, and so on). The Populists were remarkably successful, training over 40,000 public speakers to travel to meetings in rural communities around the nation, questioning the power of the corporations and banks, offering guidance in the formation of coops and collectives. The entry of the Populists into electoral politics in the 1890s proved their undoing: their presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, was beaten by William McKinley (who was later assassinated by an anarchist). The movement soon lost momentum and gradually disappeared, though unrest still simmered among the rural and urban working poor. The later mild reforms won by the Progressive movement were in large measure palliatives offered by corporate rulers to prevent another truly radical movement like Populism from gaining a foothold in American society.

In his history of Populism, The Populist Moment (1978), Lawrence Godwin summarizes some of the lessons from that era for social movements in general:

The sequential process of democratic movement-building will be seen to involve four stages: ( 1 ) the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority - a development which, for the sake of simplicity, we may describe as "the movement forming"; ( 2 ) the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people - "the movement recruiting"; ( 3 ) the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis - "the movement educating"; and ( 4 ) the creation of an institutional means whereby new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way - "the movement politicized." The twentieth century saw dramatic successes for many social movements, due at least in part to advances in tactics - more sophisticated organizing and publicity efforts, and the use of nonviolent direct action. The century saw the partial dismantling of the colonial system (I say partial, because that system largely still exists under the guise of global trade) led by Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent struggle to liberate India; Martin Luther King's leadership of the American civil rights movement; the women's suffrage movement; the American Vietnam antiwar movement; the antinuclear movement; and various environmental conservation struggles. Since the tactic of nonviolent direct action played such a central role in these efforts, it deserves separate discussion.

VIOLENCE OR NONVILENCE?

While it is possible to trace roots of the philosophy of nonviolence back to the teachings of Jesus and other spiritual leaders, its modern theory and practice clearly began with Gandhi. The story of his long struggles against British imperialism in South Africa and India is well known. These were not immediately or dramatically fruitful struggles: South Africa maintained officially sanctioned racial oppression until long after Gandhi's death; and the drive for the independence of India did not succeed until after World War II, when Britain was no longer able to maintain its overseas garrisons. Nevertheless, as we have already noted, nonviolence as a tactic and a value has been taken up by many other social movements, often with considerable success.

Gandhi himself did not reject violence in all situations; however, he believed nonviolence to be morally "infinitely superior" to violence whenever practicable. He called nonviolence (or ahimsa) "the greatest force in the world." Martin Luther King studied Gandhi's example and applied nonviolent tactics in the American civil-rights struggle, arguing that "the first principle in the movement is . . . that means must be as pure as the end." He wrote, . . . one seeks to defeat the unjust system, rather than the individuals who are caught up in that system. . . . [B]oth violence and nonviolence agree that suffering can be a very powerful social force. But there is this difference: violence says that suffering can be a powerful social force by inflicting the suffering on somebody else: so this is what we do in war. . . . The nonviolent say that suffering becomes a powerful social force when you willingly accept that violence on yourself, so that self-suffering stands at the center of the nonviolent movement and the individuals involved are able to suffer in a creative manner, feeling that unearned suffering is redemptive, and that suffering may serve to transform the social situation.

The last four decades of the twentieth century saw continued development of nonviolent direct action, as protest groups (from the Students for a Democratic Society, to the Women's Liberation movement, to the Clamshell Alliance, to Earth First!) adopted teach-ins, consensus decision making, and small-group organization as standard organizational and tactical tools.

Nonviolence as a strategy is successful when it embarrasses those in power who are using force to oppress others. Its success therefore requires publicity: the general public must be aware that a protest is occurring and why (thus there must be a clearly identifiable issue that is articulated in such a way as to gain public sympathy); that the protesters are unarmed and nonviolent; and that it is the authorities who are striking the blows. Nonviolent tactics are most successful when those using them are numerous, disciplined, and sufficiently motivated to put themselves in harm's way. Success also requires that there be some face-saving way for the opponent (whether it be a corporation or a government) to acquiesce. The opponent must come to view acquiescence as preferable to moral embarrassment. In a struggle in which the opponent sees defeat as equivalent to annihilation, nonviolent resisters will likely be neutralized by any means necessary, with little positive effect aside from the opportunity to serve as a martyr to the cause.

As the stakes in social confrontations become higher, therefore, the use of nonviolent tactics becomes an ever greater logistical and strategic challenge. Part of the difficulty arises from efforts by powerful institutions to undermine nonviolent tactics. These typically include:

the systematic targeting of movement leaders with arrest, intimidation, or assassination; the seeding of the movement with agents provocateurs who urge the protest group to engage in behavior that will discredit the cause or result in premature arrest; the encouragement of fragmentation among dissident movements (the power structure usually finds it easier to deal separately with demands from women, Latinos, labor unions, blacks, gays, environmentalists, etc., than to face a united front); the control of media, via corporate sponsorship-censorship, and the active dissemination of corporate- and government-friendly PR; the use of nonlethal weapons to disperse crowds, including tear gas, pepper spray, and newer experimental weapons such as vmads (the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System - a radar dish mounted on the back of a tank, jeep, or humvee - which uses a directed beam of near-microwave radiation to raise the skin temperature of people in crowds to painful levels). Currently a debate is raging within the antiglobalization movement regarding the actions of the anarchist "black bloc," which typically engages in window smashing and other property destruction during protests. Many regard this as violent behavior and accuse the anarchists of undermining the movement's ability to take the high moral ground (in the public's view). Anarchists respond by questioning standard definitions of violence - which tend to focus on isolated acts by individuals while ignoring systemic and structural patterns of oppression, and which make no distinction between the symbolic destruction of corporate property and harm to humans or other living beings. Moreover, in the view of the black bloc, the system's ability to respond successfully to conventional nonviolent protest has grown to the point that new tactics are required.

challenges for the movement today

In sum, the antiglobalization movement of today faces both extraordinary challenges and opportunities due to the infrastructural context in which it is rooted. The emerging global energy crisis, combined with increasingly desperate survival efforts on the part of the industrial-corporate system, present an entirely new set of problems for those intent on furthering the causes of human justice and environmental protection. As economic hardship increases, more people will become disaffected with the system. Social movements will thus benefit. However, the general population will also be primed to scan the horizon for scapegoats, and the system's repressive measures will likely intensify dramatically.

In order for the movement to meet those challenges, there is first the requirement for a new level of social-economic analysis - one that builds upon but surpasses Marx. All analysis rooted in the nineteenth century assumes industrial growth based on increasing energy resource availability. The analysis needed today must take into account ecological principles, energy resource constraints, population pressure, and the historical dynamics of complex societies including the infrastructural reasons for their growth and collapse. This analysis has already begun within some quarters of the environmental movement, but even there it is neither complete nor widely disseminated.

Second, there is the need for a reexamination of tactics. The continued viability of nonviolent direct action requires clear articulation of issues via free and open media. Since the corporate media are becoming noticeably less free and open from year to year, the movement must concentrate upon the development of alternative information networks (the Independent Media web site - www.indymedia.org - is a good effort in this direction). In addition, movement leaders must take into account the strategies starting to be deployed against them by the authorities, including new crowd-control weapons. In general, any social movement's greatest strengths are its number of members and quality of organization. If the black bloc is the modern equivalent of the social bandit band, we should also be on the lookout for contemporary mystical sects that could siphon the 's energy of disaffection away from meaningful protest. Not all social movements are coherent or rational, much less successful. The Christian Right is itself a social movement, as was the Ku Klux Klan; Hobsbawm even describes the mafia as a primitive social movement. If the coalescing indigenous-labor-feminist-environmentalist movement is to prevail, it must succeed in articulating a world view that is not only more accurate, but more compelling than competing countercultural messages. This is not a minor consideration: there is the historically recent example of Hitler's rise to power within economically and socially stressed postwar Germany. People who are hurting often grasp at ideological or religious straws.

This again underscores the need for a deeper social analysis on the part of the movement's intellectual leaders. The latter will be tempted to seize on the new energy constraints as evidence of mismanagement on the part of the government-corporate authorities (which is, of course, the case), but then to withhold the further information that the new energy regime (shortages, economic chaos, general suffering) is by now a historical inevitability. They will find it difficult to resist the incentive to offer the public promises of plenty, if only the reins of political power are shifted. However, there is the very real possibility that, sooner or later, the authorities' failure will become so obvious that the reins of power will indeed pass to more "progressive" or "populist" hands. If, at that point, those in charge find it impossible to deliver on rosy promises, then the political pendulum may swing once again, this time very far to the right indeed.

The alternative - telling the public the awful truth that the era of cheap energy and industrial growth is over - may be politically unpalatable, but in the long run it may be strategically preferable. Moreover, it is ultimately the only morally defensible course of action to take: the sooner the general public understands the situation we're in, the less suffering will occur as we make the inevitable but painful transition to a new energy infrastructural regime.

In sum, it is impossible now to predict just how successful the new social movements will be; the best we can do is clarify some of the factors in the equation. Starting in this decade we will be facing a new situation, different from that which has existed from the very beginning of the modern era up through the 1990s. Until now, the social contest has been waged for an equal share of a pie that has been growing year after year due to expanding energy resource availability. From now on, as global energy constraints become apparent, the pie itself will be shrinking. The corporate-government system will weaken, even as human suffering increases. All we can know for certain is that this is a dangerous and volatile mix. q

If you wish to republish any of these essays or post them on a web site, please contact us for permission.