Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part two)

How can we in the left change the pattern of the last 40 to 50 years, where we organize and protest to beat back wave upon wave of reactionary social and political changes, only to face twice as many the very next day? How can we change the situation where pro-capitalist neoliberal ideology has been deeply internalized as the common sense by everyone (including us)? How can we help create a new period of history where the progressive forces get united and organized to work pro-actively (go on the offensive) to achieve a common agenda of changes?

This is Part Two of a three-part series. If you haven’t yet read ‘Social Movements Will Not Free Us, Part One’, go to that post now ( Social Movements Will Not Free Us (part one)).

In part one, I cited Asef Bayat’s critique of the 2011 Arab Spring left activists for their failure to act like revolutionaries (to be prepared to lead and to protect) in their uprisings against their dictators. This led me to advance one major proposal for the left everywhere (made because I think that the left of the left everywhere has the same strategic stance as the Middle East radicals did). To avoid the same fate in future, we need to (a) set aside our Social Movements Only and/or Strengthen Civil Society strategy; and (b) replace it with some version of a Gramscian power-and-claims seeking Political Movement one. In this post (part two of three), I will explain why I think (a). In part three, I will explain why I think (b).

The Social Movements Only Strategy is Based On the Early Civil Rights Movement Approach. It Worked Then. It Is Not Working Now Because Conditions Have Changed.

Perhaps the most successful progressive movement since World War Two (there are of course multiple arguable candidates for this award) was the Martin Luther King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) early civil rights movement from 1956 to 1964. They put the final boots to a system of organized private and state terror that enforced a legalized system of racial segregation in the US Southern states. It became the paradigmatic model for what came to be known in my discipline of Sociology, and subsequently in most other disciplines, as a Social Movement, made up of a host of autonomous Social Movement Organizations (SMOs).

SMOs on the SCLC/SNCC model were autonomous in multiple ways – from political parties, from other social movement organizations, from other social movements as a whole, from governments (but not necessarily from private and even corporate funding).

Today’s Social Movements See Themselves as Spontaneous Expressions of a Manufactured Collective Identity (Yes, That’s a Logical Contradiction).

Social Movements, and the SMOs that make them up, are also understood to be both spontaneous and local (grass roots). As Alberto Melucci theorized, post-war movements in rich countries and elsewhere are fundamentally cultural in nature, or rather they are countercultural subcultures. They emerge more or less spontaneously from cultural milieu where a certain set of values and ideas that are different from the dominant ones in the mainstream culture have been incubated. These countercultural values and ideas express an incipient collective identity of a set of people sharing a social characteristic, that marks them as members of a both self and other defined social group.

Periodically, people active in, or sympathetic with, a given subculture of people with an emergent collective identity, come out of hibernation. They come out from their relative inactivity and dispersal to engage in more active advocacy and protest. They become, or revive, (a part of) a Social Movement. New SMOs are created, and older ones that have remained in operation revive and expand, as a new Protest Cycle or Protest Wave begins.

It is called a wave, because the typical pattern is for not only a rise and plateauing and fall, but also a spreading out in ripples sideways. It starts with a specific social movement protesting a specific issue or two related mainly to one social group in one locale. If and when they achieve some high visibility and especially some success, this inspires other groups to revive or create their own social movements and SMOs and engage in their own autonomous protests. These copycats often not only mimic the tactics of the original group, but they also reconfigure some of the framings of the issues (theorization, ideology) of the original group to apply to their own situation.

Why Do Protest Waves Emerge in a Particular Place and Time?

Hence, in the 1960s in the USA and other rich countries the framings mixed the language of ‘rights’ and of ‘[national] liberation’ and ‘decolonization’ and ‘power’ and ‘Third World’. This indicates that they had been inspired by the US early civil rights then black power and anti Vietnam war example. But of course there were also other ‘early risers’ elsewhere, like the ban the bomb groups like CND in the UK, and certainly the Chinese revolution of 1949, Indian independence, Korea, Algeria, Kenya and decolonization struggles throughout the Third World. According to Melucci and others, after a protest wave subsides, the people in the movements maintain some of their SMOs and discontinue many others, but they mostly go back into the rabbit holes of their countercultural subcultures until the next wave comes along.

Why do protest waves emerge in a particular place and time? Why around the issues of one self-defined social group, that quickly builds an emergent collective identity in the course of the rise of the wave (building of course on pre-existing elements available in their subcultures), rather than another? Contemporary social movement theory, matching rather well the movements themselves, has no answer to the second question, and hence does not really have an answer to the first one either (but see the POS theory below). It especially has had no answers since the ‘cultural turn’ in the academy that emerged in the ashes of the 1960s protest wave in the mid to late 1970s and later (not coincidentally, this corresponds with the perceived ‘defeat’ of the 1960s movements, but especially with the defeat of the leftmost wing of them that turned to Marxism and even revolutionary Leninism in and around 1968 – both the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were self-defined Marxist-Leninist groups).

Scholars Say that Protest is a Free Choice of Rational Actors. So Why Do We Choose X and Not Y? Why Do We Make the Choice At One Time and Not Another?

Today’s orthodoxy is that everything is ‘socially constructed’ more or less out of thin air, which is to say only out of cultural value and idea elements. There is little or no theory about objective social structure ‘contradictions’ intensifying for this or that reason that social scientists (and activists) can analyze and grasp before the fact (or even after). Social movement theory explicitly rejects any explanation of social movements as being ‘caused’ in any sense by social injustice grievances, or by what is called the ‘strains’ or endemic conflicts within the social structure. It is assumed that the level of grievance and the level of strain is more or less constant for the purposes of all explanatory models.

The justification for this approach is that the predominant theories of movements and spontaneous ‘collective behaviour’ (riots, trends, crazes, panics) that prevailed up until the 1970s and 1980s identified the causes of their rise as being ‘irrational’ responses to ‘strain’. The young academics who devised the new theory were typically former 1960s activists (or close observers of at least the more middle class parts of it on campuses and in rich country big cities). They wanted a theory that started from the assumption that movements were the work of very rational (and otherwise moderate and acceptable good citizen liberal) actors like themselves. They very much wanted to persuade the elites that autonomous spontaneous and local social movements and SMOs were the cultural work of entirely civilized and rational citizens. Thereby the ‘Social Movement sector’ should be accepted as just an admittedly unruly but mostly non-violent part of a wider ‘Civil Society’ of voluntary associations, that could and should provide inputs into the political party and legislature and courts etc political system, where decisions about laws and policies were made in a liberal democracy like the USA.

Protest is More Likely When Elites Are Divided – And Some Are Liberal. This Helps Explain When. It Does Not Explain the Choice to Protest About X Instead of Y.

There still needed to be some theory to account for the time and place of the rise of the initial protest movements, at least retroactively. Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam are credited with thinking up what came to be known as Political Opportunity Theory. They argued that protest waves began because there was a favourable Political Opportunity Structure (POS). Some social movement ‘entrepreneurs’ (not their favoured term, but it came to be the standard one) recognized that the ruling elites in an institution and/or whole political regime (country or regional subunit) were divided, and that one wing of the elites was open to being liberal and responsive to the demands of their group. There was an opportunity or opening in the ‘market’ that enterprising activists could exploit by initiating protests and related activist work to sell a new cultural product in the ‘niche’ that had opened – if and when they could exploit the leverage offered by the potentially responsive elements within the ruling elite. The early US civil rights movement (but not so much the post-1964 one) and the anti Vietnam war movement in the USA fit this account perfectly.

It will not have escaped your attention that this is in no way any kind of causal explanation. It is not an answer to the question of ‘Why?’. It is merely a partial descriptive narrative about ‘How?’ and ‘When?’. All the variables in this model are actors. It is their free agency, apparently unconditioned by any material causes, that explains whatever little gets explained. Everything is the unexplained agency of cultural actors. Not surprisingly, this account also fits because the collective wave of 1960s movements only ever really changed one set of things. It helped to change some ideas in the culture, mostly the subjective prejudicial thinking of individuals on issues of race, gender, sexuality and to a much lesser extent imperialism/colonization. Very important advances, but it leaves aside that the 1960s left (and subsequent ‘new’ lefts) have abjectly failed to win any of the following: (1) virtually any favourable-to-workers changes in the capitalist economy; (2) any net increases in political democracy (and absence of violation of civil liberty via surveillance and repression); (3) any weakening of the US-led Western imperialist system of neo-colonialism (or Russia’s or China’s or anyone else’s).

Sixties Activists Actually Thought That Their Movements Were Caused By the Heightening of Grievances as well as By the Work of Activists to Raise Consciousness.

You may object that I am critically presenting the prevailing academic theories about movements, not the thinking of the activists themselves. It is my assertion that the academic theories are indeed the working out into academic theory of the thinking of 1960s-and-since new left activists, or at least one very large and I would argue hegemonic (since at least the early 1980s) part of those movements. I am an extremely minor actor, but I myself was part of that world of 1960s and later waves activists and social movement academics. Put simply, we did not have a very good understanding of the causes of our own activism except the emergent sense of social injustices that consciously motivated our participation.

Or rather the left of those lefts did have theories about strains in the social structure (patriarchy, systemic racism, Third World (neo)colonization, post-Fordist third industrial revolution capitalism) and paid a lot of attention to formulating specific demands that addressed particular grievances. We thought that we did know Why. But after the end of the Long 1960s Wave , we as the left of the left often felt that we had been defeated, and certainly felt that our analyses and especially our anti-racist and Third World Marxism inspired neo-Leninist ideology and strategies, had been wrong somehow. Whether ‘Maoist’ or ‘Trotskyist’, we thought our politics would not lead to a repeat of what we now label as ‘Stalinist’ one-party rule. But many of us could see by the end of the wave that it very well could have led there, despite our best intentions. We no longer felt confident in our previous activist understandings. We were no longer sure that anything resembling an actual social and political revolution was possible to win, as much as most of still wanted one.

After the Sixties, a New Theory Won Out Saying that New Movements Were Okay With Capitalism and Western Imperialism. They Just Wanted to Achieve Postmaterialist Autonomy For the Individual.

Other Sixties activists drew different conclusions. For them, they had been vindicated in their view that the early 1960s was fine, but that the left had lost its way when all of its movements (including the women’s movement and gay and lesbian movement and environmental movement and anti-war but not anti US imperialist movement that are usually championed by the same people as the ‘real 60s’ of postmaterialist cultural attitude change) radicalized in and around 1968. This view has come to dominate the academic and especially the mainstream media narrative about 1960s movements and the subsequent 1980s to now New Social Movements, cleansed of all anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, new social system politics.

Today’s left radicals tend to share the ‘truth is subjective’ and ‘society is just cultural ideas’ view as received common sense, but they have restored the radicalism in their feelings about what kind of change they seek. They are increasingly disillusioned with neoliberal policies and their consequences for their upward mobility prospects, impact on climate change, weakening of liberal democracy and a host of other things. But they have not yet begun to question the autonomous Social Movements Only and Strengthen Civil Society ideology and strategy-tactics that was established and sacralized in the US early civil rights and anti-war movements.

The promoters of the New Social Movements theory, especially those who also claimed that the Sixties was all about seeking ‘higher’ postmaterialist spiritual/cultural truths, and not mere material interests of any kind, also argued that movements were autonomous from one another because they had to be so in order to be free to champion orthogonal collective identities. But today more and more scholars are taking a step away from that way of thinking. Many see radical social change as having to be ‘intersectional’. This does not mean merely that the orthogonal autonomous collective identity feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-imperialist and post-capitalist movements should pragmatically make alliances and support one another’s struggles. It also means that there is an emerging view that each of these oppressions, while having various distinct sets of causes, also has very many common causes. The different oppressions cluster and mutually reinforce one another. They are part of a system of subsystems where different structures and cultures of domination and exploitation ‘intersect’.

To be fair, most activists in the left of the left, and most social movement scholars that I know always tended towards something like that way of looking at things individually. But that perspective has not been anywhere near as visible in the public politics of activists and in the theories and analyses of scholars. (And, to repeat, the politics of ‘changing the culture is enough’ that is typically justified by a theory about how we are no longer in the era of material exploitation of an industrial proletariat like in the time of Marx, but in a fourth industrial revolution era of post-materialism so all we need to seek is ‘cultural autonomy’, is not the same thing as supporting the need for an autonomous women’s movement, autonomous African-American movement etc. I oppose the first, and support the second.)

The Early Civil Rights Movement Strategy of Appealing to the Conscience of the Liberal Wing of the Ruling Elites Is Definitely Not Working Well At All in Today’s Hyper-Capitalist World.

But despite the private feelings that we left activists and scholars have, we are still wedded to what amounts to a Social Movements Only, or more broadly Strengthen Civil Society, strategy for change. We still believe what I consider to be the pure and simple liberal ideology dogma that all struggles of all groups are reducible to a struggle for a 100% subjective truth defined individual autonomy, a subjective cultural freedom to be the collective identity, the set of cultural values and ideas, that we get to choose in a ‘free choice’ society or market. Autonomy (and individual choice), like liberalism itself, is a crucial value and practical goal in any progressive society. But it is not the overriding one, because in practice it individualizes and subjectivizes oppression. It reduces it to culture and psychology, denies that oppressions are deliberately created and maintained by dominant social groups who benefit from the oppressions, denies that oppressions are systematic and the alternatives are systematic too.

The US early civil rights era strategy of Social Movements Only made sense in the 1956-1964 period because it matched what social movement scholars call the political opportunity structure. It matched up with the sum total of constraints and possibilities in the ‘conjuncture’ (the socio-historical context seen in terms of the most short-term, and subject to change in the short term, factors; there are also constraints and possibilities that vary from place to place due to ‘context’, meaning more stable and longer term factors). The degree of favourableness of the conjuncture, the size of the political opening, is due mainly to the constellation of forces in the political battlefield, the relations of power between the main opponents and third party possible allies in the fight in question. For a clear account of how the SCLC/SNCC strategy was appropriate to the situation – and it is very important to recognize that that very same strategy would not have been appropriate at any time before the 1950s in the US South, and thereby was never attempted at scale – read Doug McAdam’s classic Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Strategy is a Battleplan. It Depends on the Array of Forces and On the Scope of the Social and Political Changes That You Seek.

The appropriateness of a strategy also depends very much on what the goals are. In the same historical conjuncture, the opportunity will be favourable for winning one set of changes but will not be favourable for winning others. Indeed, it is important to keep in mind the distinction between strategy and tactics here. Strategy is about goals. Tactics are about means. A strategic battleplan requires looking at the major social and political forces (actors and resources) on both (all) sides, and thereby assessing what goals can be achieved in that battle, and should be sought. It also requires figuring out (and being ready to quickly learn from the experience of battle) which tactics are most appropriate because they actually serve as means to the strategic ends.

What I am arguing here is not that the tactics popularized by the US early civil rights movement of non-violent civil disobedience were appropriate then and are not now. As Charles Tilly demonstrated in many of his books and articles, the repertoire of tactics deployed by movements and struggles is relatively stable over fairly long periods of time. Movements in quite different opportunity situations will deploy different strategies, but they may well use many of the same tactics, or adaptations of them, in different combinations.

The Early Civil Rights Movement Heroically Ended the Legalized System of Terror and Segregation. They Did Not Demand a New Social System. They Demanded to Be Let Into the Existing System as Equals.

What then was the US early civil rights movement strategy, and why was it a viable one given the goals of that movement and the constraints and possibilities of the social and political situation in the US South at the time? Why am I arguing that the strategy does not match the goals or opportunity situation of today’s Movement? First, goals. The goals of the movement were not to challenge or change the US social system. They were to win admission of African-Americans into that system on an equal basis as first class citizens with the same rights and freedoms as all other US citizens. This may sound like a modest goal, but it was anything but (as Black Lives Matter reminded us in 2020, it very much still is anything but). The goal was to end legal segregation that was enforced by active methods of terror by both governmental agents and private white supremacy vigilante groups.

Second, the opportunity situation (what was potentially winnable given the constraints and possibilities). The opening of a favourable window of opportunity was signaled by the US Supreme Court 1952-4 Brown v Board of Education of Topeka decision, that ordered the racial integration of public schools (most famously, on the grounds that ‘separate but equal’ was a false claim). But much bigger changes underlay that decision. The old cotton plantation pre second industrial revolution economy was in sharp decline. Millions of African-Americans left the South for newly available manufacturing and related jobs in ‘Northern’ cities (especially Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles) in the Great Migration from the 1940s on. The big business class in the North and even in the South no longer supported the Old South economy. They wanted to extend their businesses into the South and hire African-American workers who migrated to places outside the South, and thereby needed a modern educated (African-American as well as other) labour force.

The Liberals in the US Federal Government Were Cold War Liberals Who Worried About the US Social System Being Discredited Internationally By Overt Racism.

The United States domination of the world system had reached its pinnacle in the Second World War. Fascism had been defeated, but the Chinese revolution and Third World decolonization generally meant that the US saw itself in a fierce competition with Communism everywhere in the world. The US government was very much aware of the disadvantage of being perceived as a racist society vis a vis non-White peoples. ML King and other civil rights leaders explicitly recognized that all of this meant that strategically they could make alliances with the relatively liberal wing of the federal State against the state governments of the South, especially with the federal courts enforcing their rights to protest non-violently and with the US presidency and Cabinet (who were much more sensitive to the Cold War competition stakes than Southern political leaders were).

In short, the strategy of appealing to the ‘conscience’ of the liberal part of the ruling elite that predominated in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, to change the culture of explicit racial prejudice, could work to win the short term goal of winning equal legal rights of citizenship, and it did. Obviously, the battles were won mainly by the sacrifices of the civil rights activists and by the mass of ordinary working people in the South, not by any significant actions by those elites, except in response to what the movement did. But the strategy would not have been successful in any period from the end of Reconstruction to the 1950s, because the liberal wing of the economic and political ruling elite would not have responded positively.

The early civil rights strategy will not work in most places today. Strategy is always longer-term context and shorter-term conjuncture, balance of forces, specific. Both goals that are sought (as expressed in demands/claims) and tactical means will be adjusted in order to maximize the chances of success in winning the battle, and thereby be closer to winning the war. The civil rights movement split over the strategy going forward after winning the 1964 Civil Rights Act (ending legal segregation) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As ML King and his SCLC discovered when they tried to take the civil rights struggle to the ‘North’, the situation was fundamentally different, and required a different strategy.

Segregation in the North Was Organized by the Market, Not the State. The Black Panther Party Said That Capitalism and Colonization Were the Problem.

The Black Panther Party took the leadership. They recognized that the North was also systematically segregated, except the segregation was mainly organized by the market, not the State, although agencies of the State, most visibly the police, helped to enforce it. The BPP set the strategic goal of winning ‘black power’ within all institutions, and argued that this ultimately required an end to capitalism domestically and a neo-colonization of Third World peoples externally. They also recognized that poor Blacks in the cities and elsewhere could not use non-violent civil disobedience tactics alone. They had to prepare for armed self-defence, because no matter how peaceful they were in calling for an end to privately organized white supremacy and at least radical reform to capitalism and imperialism, they would be subject to violent repression.

Other activists (e.g. SNCC’s former head John Lewis) disagreed, but their alternative was basically to go back into the system, and use the newly won rights to achieve change through parliamentary politics (without even creating a social democratic party). Social movement activity was at best very secondary. The reader can make their own judgment about how much fundamental progress in the status of African-Americans has been won by this second approach. The point though is that both sides in the strategy debate recognized that the old early civil rights one would not work to change things in the ‘North’.

The Theory That Sixties Movements Sought Freedom of Choice for Individuals Seeking Their Own Postmaterialist and Subjective Truths Has Come to Be the Accepted Narrative. Racism Was Reducible to the Prejudiced Views of Some Individuals, Not A System of Oppression Supported by Capitalism.

What has happened since the end of the Long Sixties protest wave has been a mythification and codification of the supposed new left 1960s model, as if it could be made modular and transferrable across most contexts and conjunctures. This included the confusion of non-violent civil disobedience tactics with a supposedly non-violent strategy such that nothing beyond civil disobedience is even conceivable. It included the silent assumption that there was always a liberal wing to the ruling elites whose individual consciences could be appealed to, and on this basis they could become tactical and even for some (short-term battle) strategic allies. It implicitly included the idea that changes could be won by simply getting governments to change laws and policies and/or by ‘changing the culture’ and building counter-cultures that would devote themselves to seeking cultural value and idea changes (and not by changing the capitalist economy or imperialist system of states and peoples).

But these were mostly implicit assumptions, and not necessarily believed to be applicable to any given situation by either theorists or activists. The strategic idea that more than any other took on the status of an axiomatic principle, that nevertheless was very explicitly articulated, was the idea that I am calling Social Movements Only. It was the idea that there was an autonomous social movement sector made up of a host of autonomous social movements and SMOs, a sector that was basically ‘extra-parliamentary’ (outside legislative, executive and judicial branches of the State) and outside the power institutions of the economy and culture. The SMOs supplied the ideas. The ruling elites in the power institutions made the changes.

The Left Today Acts As If the People in Power Will Concede To Our Demands If Enough People Protest Often Enough. We Somehow Can Achieve Systemic Changes Without Changing the Organized Structures of Dominance and Control. (Actually We Do Know Better, But We Act As If We Do Not.)

Social Movements Only is the idea that the left-led movements, and the people whose interests they tried to champion, did not need to ‘take [political decision-making] power’ inside the power institutions of the State, Economy and Culture to win desired changes, most certainly not if this is understood as displacing the rulers of those institutions, and occupying those decision-making and wealth extracting posts instead of them. Rather, the idea was to organize from the outside, and pressure the rulers to make changes. It was to make the rulers accountable to the people, who remained basically outside in their voluntary associations. Some activists would see this strategy as being complemented by a second strategy, by working as individuals and sometimes as associations within the mainstream institutions of liberal democracy to win power in the conventional ways that power is won in that system. Others would not give much weight to the second strategy, while being okay with others who did.

My appeal in this article is to those in the left of the left in today’s social movements to reject the Social Movements Only strategy and to replace it with a Gramscian Political Movement one. I believe that both those who tend to neo-anarchism and those who tend to radical electoralist democratic socialism share the same long-term system change goals with the neo-Marxists that I am closer to politically. Consequently building a united Political Movement united at least around a ‘core theology’, that every ‘church’ and ‘denomination’ within the movement interprets and applies as it chooses, is very much achievable.

What Makes a Movement ‘Transformative’ or ‘Revolutionary’ Is Above All the Scope of the Changes That It Seeks, Not the Strategy-Tactics That It Uses.

The biggest obstacle to this for the left of the left is the hesitation to agree that we can have a single Movement that is united around a common set of social and political principles for an Alternative Society, and on that basis we can come together to strategically wage pro-active struggles to take power in power institutions, and make changes that move us closer to the new system we seek long term. We are afraid to unite, and we are afraid to lead. It might take many, many decades to actually win an alternative society and build it, even in ideal circumstances. My own approach is one of Stephen Jay Gould style ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – there will be relatively evolutionary periods interspersed with periods of rupture, where history speeds up and major changes are winnable.

What is important, what makes any such movement revolutionary, is that we actually work to make progress towards ‘revolutionary in scope’ changes. Maintaining a strong Gramscian element of defining a clearly transformative set of alternatives, and agitating and propagandizing and organizing tirelessly to make those alternatives highly visible to the mass public, has to be included in any of the many strategies that will be required in different conjunctures. The tactical means are much more conjuncture-dependent, defined by a mix of what is possible and what is necessary. A politically united Movement would accommodate different strategy-tactics being applied as long as people were sincerely trying to work together for the same ends. (When repression gets heavy, this becomes more difficult, but pluralism (at least pluralism of political opinion, speech and debate) must be upheld somehow.)

The ‘Social Movements Only’ Strategy for Social Change Is the Same As the ‘Strengthen Civil Society’ One.

What I want to do for the remainder of this post is to look at the version of the Social Movements Only approach that is not necessarily advanced by the left of the left (although most seem to buy into it uncritically to some degree) but by people who are mainstream liberals and social democrats, the idea of Strengthening Civil Society. The more closely you look, it becomes apparent that they are in fact the same idea. Social Movements Only is the left-wing version; Strengthen Civil Society is the moderate one.

There are many definitions of civil society. Here is a recent version advanced by George Ingraham of the Brookings Institution (‘Civil Society: An Essential Ingredient of Development’, April 6, 2020):

“Civil society comprises organizations that are not associated with the government – including schools and universities – advocacy groups, professional associations, churches, and cultural institutions (business sometimes is covered by the term civil society and sometimes not).”

Every definition is interesting for what it includes and what it leaves out. This one includes business, meaning the capitalist free market. Why? Because civil society is all those “organizations that are not associated with the government”. For economic liberals the contrast is between public and private, between the necessary constraints on individual freedom to carry out the functions of a State and the realm of voluntary association, of privately contracted and thereby free, social relations. Other versions softpedal the understanding that voluntary associations and the capitalist market are part of the same ‘sphere of freedom’ in contrast to the ultimately constraining and coercive State, or deny it altogether.

What is relevant for us here is that left and liberal social movement activists align with the version that puts the social movement sector and SMOs within a narrower definition of civil society – they are outside both the State and the Market, and seek to influence both from the outside. A recent definition by the World Bank (quoted by Adam Jezzard in ‘Who and what is ‘civil society’, April 23, 2018) leaves the market out of the definition:

“Civil society… refers to a wide array of organizations: community groups, non-governmental organizations [NGOs], labour unions, indigenous groups, charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, and foundations”.

Jezzard continues to explain:

“The term became popular in political and economic discussions in the 1980s, when it started to be identified with non-state movements that were defying authoritarian regimes, especially in central and eastern Europe and Latin America. When mobilized, civil society – sometimes called the ‘third sector’ (after government and commerce) – has the power to influence the actions of elected policy-makers and businesses.”

Social Movement Organizations Are Seen As a Particular Type of Interest Group That Uses Protest Tactics to Advocate On Behalf of A Particular Collective Identity in a Liberal Democratic System.

The key idea here is that it is not necessary to organize popular struggles inside the realm of economic or political institutions in order to ‘take power’ within them. It is not necessary (or alternately, not possible given ‘human nature’) to qualitatively transform the capitalist economy or State, to work to achieve a new social system. It is possible instead to build up a stronger and stronger counterculture of voluntary associations, a ‘third sector’, a (left wing within a ) civil society that is built up as an alternative way to do things to the economy and government, and to engage in advocacy that “has the power to influence the actions of elected policy-makers and businesses”.

The 19th century liberal Strengthen Civil Society strategy was given new life by the 1980s activists in Eastern Europe, who declared that they were engaging in a “self-limiting radicalism” approach. This meant that they were not overtly seeking to overthrow the political rule of the single communist party State, or to replace state ownership of most of the economy with private ownership. They were building up a separate zone of free voluntary associations that would engage in non-violent pressure and a rational debate with the communist party rulers (or with themselves in front of the rulers). They would do something analogous to what the early civil rights movement had done in the USA. They would appeal to the conscience of the liberal wing of the ruling class. They would name and shame (or at least shame).

Eastern European Activists Self-Limited to Calling For the Autonomy of Civil Society from the Marxist State. The Strategy Worked, But Only Due to Unique Circumstances.

The strategy worked, but it only did so because of the specifics of the conjuncture and context, specifics that I would argue are very unlikely to ever to be approximated in any situation the left will find itself now and the foreseeable future:

-- The ruling communist party in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was unwilling to use armed force to defend the rule of the Eastern European communist parties.

-- The United States military and NATO were right next door. They had not intervened in Eastern European states with their armed forces in the past, except in limited ways (e.g. enabling refugees to escape, the airlift in Berlin). It was not likely that they would do so then either. But they were there to discourage excessive use of force to put down uprisings. And they were especially there after the regimes began to collapse, as the military force to protect the newly freed countries from anyone who might try to stop those countries from continuing on a course towards integration into the West.

-- The majority within the ruling communist parties were ready to abdicate, to end the control of the State by a single communist party, their party. They were ready to cede State power peacefully and unilaterally. They did so because they had lost ‘faith’ in their own ideology, and in its alleged superiority to the ideology underlying Western capitalism. This is perhaps unprecedented in human history.

-- Of course, many of the top people in the Eastern European states, people like Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin and all those who eventually grabbed ahold of state businesses when they were privatized, were quick to reinvent themselves as free enterprisers. They were quick to add that they were now entrepreneurs that should be supported by the locals, instead of potential outsiders coming in to take over those businesses, on the basis of an exaggerated narrow nationalism.

-- There was no need to invent a new ideology or new ideas for specific institutions and policies for a replacement social system. They only needed to observe the readily viewable and importable model of liberal capitalism that existed in the next-door states of Western Europe.

The Capitalist Economy and Neocolonial World System Will Not Concede Power Gracefully Because of a Strengthened Civil Society.

The ‘civil society’ of voluntary associations in Eastern Europe did indeed succeed in winning social and political changes that were revolutionary in scope. They won a different State and a different economy. And they did not have to wage a revolutionary challenge to the communist regimes in order to do so. Their challenge worked even though it was limited to a purely ideological or ‘change the culture’ challenge. They barely had to huff and puff, and the communist regime houses all fell down.

It is my contention that the capitalist economy and imperialist world system and coercive parts of existing capitalist states are not going to fall down, no matter how much huffing and puffing is done by left-leaning activists organized into their own separate third sector sphere of autonomous social movements and social movement organizations. The Social Movements Only strategy that is today’s orthodoxy should be critique and debated and rejected. It should be replaced with a new strategy that includes the idea of a Gramscian Political Movement. That is what will be argued in the third and final part of this article series.