New Social Movements Politics Out of Doors

New Social

Movements

Politics Out of Doors

AUTONOMISTS AND THE ALTERNATIVE SCENE

Terrorism presupposed extremes of alienation, where people lost respect for the system. This went furthest in big cities with masses of younger people marginal to mainstream societywith higher educational qualifi- cations yet displaced from career paths, partially employed, stylistically re- bellious, and living and working in distinctive collective arrangements and quarters, often with bohemian or multicultural links, like the Hafenstrasse in Hamburgs St. Pauli or Kreuzberg in West Berlin, with its 40,000-strong alternative scene, 40,000 Turks, and 50,000 normals in 1989. Cooper- ative living and alternative scenes went with squattingillegal occupations of empty buildings. These liberated zones flouted respectable society via style, music, drugs, sex, and indifference to rules of property.¹⁰

These subcultures presupposed the countercultural militancies of 1968. They preferred subverting politics to its constructive renewal. The Metro- politan Indians Manifesto of 1 March 1977 in Italy demanded squats of all empty buildings to create alternatives to the family, free drugs, destruc- tion of zoos, destruction of patriotic monuments, destruction of youth pris- ons, and the historical and moral reevaluation of the dinosaur Archeop- terix, unfairly constructed as an ogre.¹¹ This stance, for all its irony, encouraged nihilistic displays of public disrespecta profaning of demo- cratic values. It produced violence, not just against police but against unions and other Left organizations. Pitched battles in PCI-governed Bo- logna and the barracking of Luciano Lama in occupied Rome University exposed a savage gulf between Communists and the youth revolt.¹²

Similar battles involved the SPD in West Berlin and Hamburg. Progres- sive cities elsewhere fared no better. In the 1980s, the Dutch kraakers,

whose squats dated from 1968, resisted long siege warfare in Amsterdam before succumbing to landlord and police assaults. In Copenhagen, a self- governing commune on Christiania Island secured official toleration, while in the city the Occupation Brigade were active from 1981, seizing buildings and disappearing just ahead of the police, most spectacularly in the guerilla seizure of Ryesgade neighborhood in September 1986. In Ryesgade, sup- port services were organized for normal inhabitants, barricades were de- fended, the free radio network mobilized wider support, and food, blankets and other supplies were delivered by supporters from the outside. Nine days later, as the army prepared to attack, the media arrived for a press confer- ence to find the Brigade had flown. The political thrust of these actions was clear: the targeted buildings were owned by multinationals involved in arms trade and South African investments.¹³

Activity was highly organized, but on the anticentralist and participa- tory lines of 1968. The Kreuzberg squatters were represented by the Squat- ters Council, linked to the Autonomist Plenary, modeled on those in Ham- burg. Inspiration was transnational, flowing north from Italy in 1977 and through Zurich, where demands for an autonomist youth center exploded in 198082, to Amsterdam, West German cities, Copenhagen, and Britain. Antinuclear actions, wider ecological protests, and the Peace Movement paralleled these squatters movements. The political formsdirect-action militancy, no permanent officials, democracy by general assemblycame from 1968.¹⁴

PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS: A DIFFERENT POLITICAL SPACE

How should we put this togethersquatters, alternatives, autonomists, Metropolitan Indians, Marxists, and wider movements surrounding the West German Greens, including ecologists, antinuclear protesters, peace campaigners, and the feminists common to them all? They came from the politys grassroots. They involved a politics of refusal, showing at best am- bivalence to the parliamentary system. They faced mainstream Lefts that seemed exhausted, despite an ability to continue winning electionsa Eu- rocommunism (Italy, France, Spain) that failed to break through; a sclerotic social democracy (West Germany, the Low Countries, Britain) stuck in its accommodations to capitalism, dogmatically dismissing the new left; and a technocratic socialism (France, Spain) shedding all relation to unions or movement cultures of the working class.

Established parties were melting away, and even where socialist parties kept support, they became a different kind of partydrastically losing ac- tive members and no longer able to rely on traditional solidarity com- munities among a shrinking working class. Instead, they were busily re- making themselves into exclusively electoral machines.¹⁵ And beyond them

emerged new social movementsfeminisms, ecology, peace, Third World solidarities, gay-lesbian rights, and antiracism, as well as squatting and the broader alternative scenes. While most socialist parties ignored this extraparliamentary arena, these new movements composed an expanding political space. Transnationally, peace movements had the largest scale, loosely coordinated through European Nuclear Disarmament (END) launched in London on 28 April 1980, which also pioneered cooperation

from below across Europes two blocs. At the climax on 2223 October

1983, a million West Germans rallied against the missiles; between 500,000 and a million in Rome; 250,000 in London; 400,000 in Brussels; 100,000 in Madrid; followed by 550,000 in The Hague and 40,000 in Bern. The West German Greens translated this into electoral success.¹⁶

Elsewhere, moves into national politics varied. Three British feminists, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, published Be- yond the Fragments in 1978, based on talks to a Socialist Unity Symposium and Socialist Centers in Newcastle and Islington. They presented the womens movement as an example of new ways of organizing, independent of the Labour Party and suspicious of self-defined vanguards.¹⁷ They sparked a chain of meetings, including a conference in Leeds. Then, like other 1968ers, Beyond the Fragments authors found their way to the La- bour Party. When in 1981 Labour captured the Greater London Council

(GLC) on a radical program, Wainwright joined an Economic Policy Group and the Popular Planning Unit, where Rowbotham also worked.¹⁸ With Labour out of office nationally, local government became a key site. If Labour lost four hundred thousand paper members in 197581, it was acquiring a new activist cohort, a missing generationsupporters from the early 1960s, who left, joined community action or the sects, and returned in the late 1970s.¹⁹

Such activists appealed outside the old class-political framework. For the GLC leader Ken Livingstone, Labour had to go beyond the organized working class to articulate the needs of the minorities and the dispos- sessed and single-issue groups as well, because people no longer saw themselves in the broad class concepts of thirty years ago. London Labour Briefing, started by Livingstones circle in 1980, recalled Womens Liberation in the 1970s, which had joined feminism to local activisms around housing and rents, public transport, welfare rights, recreational fa- cilities, childcare, adult and further education, cultural and arts activity, and the plethora of single-issue campaigns from Northern Ireland and an- tiapartheid to Vietnam and other Third World solidarities. The GLCs agenda in 198186 paralleled that of the German Greens but with the resources and problems of a huge metropolitan region. Its policiescheap fares for public transit, creative development strategies for mass unemploy- mentcaptured popular sympathies, while setting a collision course with Thatchers Conservative government. It welcomed inflammatory causes, in- cluding Irish Republicanism and gay-lesbian rights. It promoted a new Left

coalition based on skilled and unskilled workers, unemployed young and old, women, black people, as well as the sexually oppressed minorities.²⁰

This urban left subcontracted with the grassroots, directing funding to

small, relatively informal, community groups who were able to develop projects too politically controversial for councils themselves to engage in.²¹

This was a decisive breakthrough. It was helped by Labours crushing local election defeats in 196768 and subsequent corruption scandals, which dis- lodged many self-perpetuating oligarchies linked to union machines whose enmity against activists was entrenched by the Cold War.²² When Labour began recapturing local government in 1971, its political profile was al- ready different. In 1983, 20 of Manchesters 22 Left councillors were aged

3045, having joined the party in the mid-1970s. On expulsion from La- bour for refusing to accept spending cuts in 1980, they built alliances be- yond traditional frameworks with feminists, gays, antiracists, housing cam- paigns, community centers, and public sector unions, returning to win the council in 1984.²³ The culture shift was extreme: Councillors in jump suits and jeans; clenched fist salutes in the council chamber; the singing (and flying) of the Red Flag; employees wearing CND badges; office walls dec- orated with political posters and cartoons; disdain for many established practices and procedures.²⁴ At the first meeting of the Labour group, the GLCs head administrator remembered, there was a baby and cans of coke. Senior officers found it a great upheaval.²⁵

THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY: LEFT IN THE LURCH

But if the urban left and the GLC captured a sense of opportunity, the national Labour Party reflected chances missed. Labours Left acquired a tribune of the people in Tony Benn.²⁶ His New Politics: A Socialist Recon- naissance (1970) declared politics more than the marking of a ballot paper with a single cross every five years. He contrasted Labours governing debacle with rising extraparliamentary activismcommunity associa- tions, amenity groups, shop stewards movements, consumer societies, ed- ucational campaigns, organizations to help the old, the homeless, the sick, the poor or under-developed societies, militant communal organizations, student power, noise abatement societies. Benn set out to bridge the gap between Parliament and the extraparliamentary arena, intensifying his ef- forts after 1970.²⁷

Benn was hoping to start a great new debate within our movement.²⁸

He rode the militancy of 197074, determined to prevent new betrayals in which Labour governments ignored the partys wishes. His supporters spearheaded pressure for Labours constitutional reform via the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) and the Labour Coordinating Com- mittee (LCC). Where CLPD operated inside the party, LCC addressed Left

groups more widely, from the National Council for Civil Liberties, Am- nesty, Child Poverty Action, and Shelter to the Socialist Education Asso- ciation, Counter Information Services, and Friends of the Earth. After the

1979 election defeat, mandatory reselection of MPs was achieved, estab- lishing the principle of accountability. Then the Special Party Conference at Wembley in January 1981 passed new rules for electing the leader by membership, unions, and parliamentary party rather than by the last- named alone. Michael Foot, the parliamentary partys longstanding radical voice, had already succeeded James Callaghan as leader in November 1980. The lefts position seemed stronger than ever before.²⁹

Yet by 1982 it was in retreat and by 1987 utterly beaten. In protest against Wembley, the Gang of FourShirley Williams, William Rodgers, David Owen, and Roy Jenkinslaunched a new Social Democratic Party

(SDP) on 25 January 1981, taking 29 Labour MPs with them.³⁰ Left and right traded bitter accusations of splitting the party.³¹ The right vilified Benn for contesting the deputy leadership, and after his defeat in October

1981 by less than a single percent, the Foot-Healey leadership counterat- tacked ruthlessly, removing Benn and his allies from their committees. The

1983 elections, stamped by the patriotism of the Falklands-Malvinas War, proved a nightmare, as Labour crashed to its worst defeat since 1935.³²

This fiasco hastened the realignment. Under a new leader, Neil Kinnock, the party was drastically restructured. The National Executives control of policy was dismantled, supplanted by the Campaigns and Communications Directorate, which replaced democracy with market research. Kinnock an- swered another election defeat in 1987 with a policy review, and when the

1989 Conference approved the results, the lefts policies had all gone nationalization and a strong public sector, union corporatism, unilateral nuclear disarmament, opposition to the EEC, and the guiding thread of democratizing the party. Kinnock bequeathed a party more united, more centrist, less distinctively socialist, and wholly demobilized.

This story showed nothing better than the tenacity of right-wing and centrist social democrats in resisting change. For Benn, democracy required more than simply changing Labours Constitution: If democracy is based on a moral claim to equality, the issues opened up are as wide as life itself, he argued, and included womens equality, nuclear energy, gay liberation, racial discrimination, immigration, youth culture, pensioners rights, and more.³³ But even under left-wing influence, Labours 1983 Manifesto had barely integrated these issues with the Alternative Economic Strategy. The latter invoked a Keynesianism already under fatal attack, in a national- economic framework superseded by global interdependence and the EEC. It said little about the changing nature of work and was innocent of fem- inist ideas on unequal pay, part-time working, or domestic labor. The Man- ifesto adopted new social issues without new social movements. Instead, it cobbled together the old Left goals least appealing to a broader electorate like nationalization, union power, anti-Europe, and unilateral disarma-

mentwith a ragtag mixture of new causes conjuring respectable Englands worst nightmares, from Irish Republicanism and lesbian-gay rights to ab- olition of the House of Lords and antihunting. Issues of potentially broad appeal, like feminism, peace, or the environment, were squandered.

There were no thoughts about uniting the parliamentary party with ex- traparliamentary actions in a single movement. And this was precisely the strength of Livingstones GLC and other Labour councilstheir ability to lower the boundaries between party control and broader activism. The GLCs real popularity, after the defeat of the Fares Fair campaign in 1982, was perhaps unclear.³⁴ Its relations with community activists, particularly on the racial front, were often vexed. Local socialismsin parts of London but especially in Liverpool, where Militant ruledsometimes followed dog- matically class-centered approaches keeping other issues like gender, sex- uality, and race away. But the possibilities were there, and the Labour lefts national strategy passed them by.

LEFT FOR THE FUTURE?

Thus the space for new politics in the national polity remained unfilled. On the one hand, like most of its fellow socialist parties, the Labour Party remained stuck in a parliamentarist groove. On the other hand, the new activism, with its direct-action, participatory, and community-based prac- tices, achieved uneven entry into the Lefts political mainstream and some- times stayed completely outside. This tension defined much of the potential for the lefts renewal in the 1980s, and the urban Lefts fusion of class with identity issues, at its most earnest and exuberant during Living- stones reign at the GLC, brought this home especially well. Two other examples from Britain made the fronts dramatically clear: the confluence of feminism with the mass peace movement and the great miners strike. The Womens Peace Camp was founded at Greenham Common US air- base on 5 September 1981 by the Women for Life on Earth Peace March, who walked from Cardiff protesting the siting of cruise missiles. In Feb- ruary 1982, the Camp became women-only. It was maintained continu- ously until 1994, when the missiles were decommissioned.³⁵ The biggest Greenham actions were held annually on the anniversary of NATOs orig- inal decision to house the missiles there, including 35,000 protesters for

Embrace the Base in December 1982 and 50,000 in 1983, together with repeated blockades and many symbolic protests. Invasions, courtroom ac- tions, small-scale sabotage, and protests of all kinds occurred, including monitoring and harassment of cruise missile convoys. Above all, the Camps permanence entailed constant inventiveness. This incorporated the legacies of 1968, declaring a new, distinctively feminist presence:

Whether linking together 30,000 women to embrace the base or en- tering time after time, through the lethal-looking fence of the base, to

plant snowdrops, have a picnic, dance on the silos, occupy a sentry box or a traffic control tower, or paint peace signs on a US spy plane; whether tearing down mile after mile of fencing and padlocking the gates, dressing up as witches or taking two hours to walk 200 yards, women at Greenham have been able for years to mock at and disrupt the efficiency, security and routine of a key military installation of the most powerful country in the world.³⁶

Separatist banning of men caused tensions with the general peace move- ment, and the ecological and spiritualist dimensions of Greenham philos- ophy made many in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament nervous, wor- rying about public reactions to the Peace Camps misbehavior. The spectacle of an unruly and unfeminine womens collective, excluding men and often rejecting husbands, living roughly, celebrating lesbianism, and generally ignoring the rules, was an affront to normal society. But this transgressionthe decision of so many women, grandmothers and school students, lesbians and straights, middle and working-class, professional and unemployed, to step unconscionably outside societywas precisely the point. Greenham women were unassimilable.

The second emblematic event, the miners strike, called in March 1984 against the governments brutal reduction of the coal industry, was the longest and most violent industrial dispute in Britain since 1926. At its height, 10,000 pickets faced 4,000 police in full riot gear with truncheons and horses. A massive paramilitary operation deploying eight thousand po- lice cordoned off the Nottinghamshire coalfield against pickets; roadblocks prevented Kent miners leaving for the north; and violence surrounded working mines. Hostility between militant areas hit by closures (Yorkshire, Scotland, Kent, South Wales) and richer coalfields opposing the strike

(Notts) contrasted starkly with the unity of 197274. Aggressive policing intensified the violence, placing Yorkshire mining villages under the equiv- alent of martial law: 9,750 were arrested during the strike, of whom 7,874 were charged. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) failed to over- come the states assaults, disapproval from Labour leaders and the TUC, and its own internal divisions. The strike lasted a full year, but 71,000 of

187,000 miners had returned to work, and it ended without a settlement.³⁷

For the charismatic NUM president, Arthur Scargill, the miners ex- pressed the unchanged centrality of the traditional working class for so- cialism, the classic labor movement in motion. Miners were class conscious- ness incarnate: heroic champions of the class struggle, defiant embodiments of working-class masculinity, overwhelming their opponents via their col- lective strength. The strike evoked equally classic images of working-class community in the mining villages homogeneous solidarities. It was a pro- test against deindustrialization itself, defending a whole way of life against vandalism. It made an extraordinarily powerful class-political statement.

As such, it condensed the hopes of socialist traditionalists. Thatcherism had to be reversed: We want to pave the way for an economic recovery, a general election, and the return of a Labour government.³⁸ Conversely, Thatcher intended to break the NUM. The new head of the Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, had a brief to close mines and weaken the union. For Mick McGahey, NUMs Communist vice-president, the political stakes were also clear: In order to dismember the welfare state they had to break the trade union movement, and they needed to break the miners first. Rhetorically, unions were being demonized. Early in the strike, Thatcher declared: In the Falklands, we had to fight the enemy without. Here the enemy is within, and it is more difficult to fight, and more dangerous to liberty.³⁹ Put like this, radicals on the Left had little choice but to support the strike.

But the strike lacked broader working-class enthusiasm. It came during union retreat, as the main unions shifted right, unemployment rose, and strikes became restricted under law. British Steel was savaged after a 1980 strike, under MacGregors previous assignment. In 1984, the Triple Alli- ance of coal, steel, and rail failed to cohere, as did the broader workers coalitions needed for mass picketing. Worst of all, the NUM itself was split:

20 percent of miners continued working, leading to the Union of Demo- cratic Mineworkers, formed in Nottinghamshire by a 72 percent ballot, with 30,000 members. During the strike, neither TUC nor Labour gave official support. More generally, the labor movements breadth was erod- ing. In 197983, Labours electoral strength among trade unionists shrank from 51 to 39 percent, while unions lost popularity with the public.⁴⁰

However, the strike inspired big solidarity along urban Britains Left networks. Left councils gave moral support. Supporters were twinned to coalfields or individual mines, as in the Durham-Docklands Miners Sup- port Group, or the Cambridge Support Group, which sent six hundred pounds weekly to the Notts villages of Blidworth and Rainworth. A key bridge from the coalfields to the cities was Women Against Pit Closures, originating in Sheffield and Barnsley. From organizing kitchens to joining the picket lines, the womens movement developed a parallel organization connected to womens groups beyond the coalfields, including Greenham Women. The Sheffield group gathered food for local mines, produced a leaflet, and publicized itself via the Trades Council; it consisted of local authority workers, unemployed, nurses, engineers, housewives, pensioners, students, bus drivers, and also the mining women from the villages.⁴¹ In South Wales, such activity amounted to an alternative welfare state and helped sustain a wider political initiative, the Wales Congress in Support of Mining Communities.⁴²

So the strike did produce a politics. Mines Not Missiles provided a common link to antinuclear campaigns. Ann Suddick, a clerical worker in the Durham Womens Support Group, made connections between Blyth Power Station and the pit closures, thence to Greenham Common, and finally to the global context of nuclear fuels; she organized a conference in

1986 called Make the LinksBreak the Chain, also involving anti- apartheid and peace groups.⁴³ The strikes cultural politics involved theater, agitprop, and regional film and video workshops.⁴⁴ The Cambridge Support Groups weekly meetings drew 1550 people, intellectuals and white- collar strata in general, together with people active in issue-politics, partic- ularly feminism and the nuclear question. It worked through concerts, socials, house meetings, jumble sales, art sales, college collections, and con- certed Saturday street collections. The Milton Keynes Support Group was based in the Unemployed Workers Center, linked to the Sikh Society, the Afro-Caribbean Club, the Peace Group, and Ecology Party, and a mem- bership of 150200.⁴⁵ Multiculturalist support in the cities was especially striking among Afro-Caribbean, Cypriot, Asian, and Turkish groups. There were Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners groups in London, Southamp- ton, Cardiff, Manchester, York, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In December

1984, a national conference of 1,500 Support Groups was held in Camden

Town Hall.

TWO LEFTS: PARLIAMENT AND PEOPLE

The British miners strike dramatized the European Lefts dilemmas more powerfully than any other event. It evoked precisely those traditions of class-political militancy now under erasure. Languages of socialism had always presupposed the collective agency of industrial workers, backed by broader community solidarities, in the ways the miners now asserted. A more powerful example of traditional class consciousness could hardly be imagined, but now the latters relationship to socialist politics was becom- ing increasingly decoupled and disavowed.

Socialist parties had always mediated their accountability to the work- ing class, whether viewed as the labor movement, an aggregation of inter- ests, or a social abstraction. As a project of democracy, the Lefts agenda was also larger than any class-based vision of socialism. Once socialist parties started accepting government responsibility, and certainly when they became governing parties, presenting themselves in parliaments and elec- tions as voices of the nation, their relationship to the working class became displaced. Given the power of the changes since 196873capitalist re- structuring, with deindustrialization and massive class recompositionso- cialist politics and traditional images of the industrial proletariat became ever more disjointed. The main axis of progressive politics changed, dimin- ishing the centrality of labor movements and demanding that the Lefts basic appeals be rethought. During the 1980s, socialist and Communist parties began disengaging more explicitly from class politics. The British miners strike was only the most dramatic commentary on this process. German Social Democrats pointed the way. A younger cohort around General Secretary Peter Glotz and Saarland Premier Oskar Lafontaine pro-

duced the Berlin Program in December 1989 after a five-year policy review. Internationally, this proposed a common security approach, plus a fed- eralized EC and social Europe. Qualitative growth was addressed by energy-saving, environmental protection, clean industries, humanizing the workplace, and a shorter working week. Arguments about gender equality, flexible employment, and role sharing marked feminisms arrival, although unions still balked. Glotz even suggested the slogan Patriarchy Must Die.⁴⁶

But rhetorically listing these new issues wasnt enough to recast the pol- itics. It was one thing for Glotz to extend the agenda via discussion doc- uments, reaching out to new social movements, translating Italian Com- munist texts, and even talking to feminists; it was another thing to change the SPDs operative language. Its 1987 election campaign remained boring and gray, treating the Greens as troublemakers rather than allies. New issues might be noticed as slogans and sound bitescommon security, in- ternational economic justice, gender equality at work, rational technology, qualitative growth, quality of life, new forms of democracy based in the liveliness of civil society. The SPD might eventually convert these slogans into a winning strategy. But the quality of political action was also at stakethe empowerment of participation, the promise of 1968. That was what really lay behind the civic upsurge of the 1980s.⁴⁷

This was the difference: between an additive approach to new identities and interests, grafting them onto established policies and constituencies, in a revamped peoples party updating Godesberg for the 1990s and, on the other hand, imaginatively binding the latter into a new philosophy of the future, harnessing new social movements to the remaining socialist cul- tures and working-class solidarities of the old Left, in a new radical vision. The new social movements had a different kind of drive. They were not based in high-intensity membership parties like the socialist subcultures and solidarity communities of old. Parties in that traditional sense were in de- cline. Instead, the new activisms implied loose federations of the like- minded, through which autonomous citizens and local groups pooled their electoral hopes.

What did this splitting into party and movements mean? Left-wing par- ties ability to generate activist identification, binding their members to- gether with wider progressive networks, had gone. They became parlia- mentary operations. In the extraparliamentary world, on the other hand, vigorous social movements developed locally, unconnected to a national party, for in truth socialist parties were scared of extraparliamentary en- ergy. Broad social movements formed without the backing of socialist par- liamentarianspeace movements, abortion campaigns, West German anti- nuclear protests, Sicilian anti-Mafia campaigns, squatting in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and West Germany, support actions for British miners, and so on. A national politician like Benn was exceptional in endorsing that ac- tivity. Communists were more open to it, although only the PCI matched

socialist parties in weight, given the PCFs Stalinist decline. The countless neighborhood and city-based agitations of these years overlapped with the local socialist parties but rarely agitated their national parliamentary sur- face.

The model of the nationally organized socialist party and its affiliated union federation, so effective from the later nineteenth century to the

1960s, was at an end. For the first time since the rise of labor movements, the main impulse for democratic enlargement came from elsewherenot only outside the socialist parties but often against them too. But if new social movements were potential sources of renewal, how in practice would this occur?