File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-14.221, message 1


Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 07:50:14 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Stephen Philion: Critique of New Social Movement Theory, part one


(Louis: This is a paper that Stephen Philion delivered at the Rethinking
Marxism conference. He told the workshop that he had been working on it
for ten years and the hard work is obvious. While the paper was written
for the conference, it should be obvious once you begin reading it that it
is just the sort of thing that should be integrated into our cyberseminar. 
Remember, this brilliant young Marxist is on our list, so he can answer
any questions you have himself. The paper is too long to send out in one
piece, so the conclusion will be mailed tomorrow. I will mail out the
bibliography and footnotes in a separate post later today.) 
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The stance of New Social Movement Theory (NSMT) toward labor has often
been one of suspicion, if not outright rejection (Scott 1990). New Social
Movements emerged in the late 1960's and 70's, and appeared to be
replacing labor as the subject of history, thereby simultaneously refuting
and offering an alternative to Marxist Class Analysis (MCA). In the US,
new social movements were most visible in the form of civil rights and
anti-Vietnam War protests during the 1960's and feminist, black power, gay
rights, anti-nuclear, environmental, and welfare rights protests during
the 1970's and 1980's. The apparent strength of these movements seemed to
confirm conventional sociology's belief that class conflict was no longer
the (or even a) central factor in explicating social conflict and that
capitalism had developed the capacity to resolve its inner contradictions
without the mediating variable of working class based social revolution
(Meszaros 1989; 1995). 

What I seek to accomplish in this paper are the following: 1) a critical
examination of how and why NSMT departed from Marxist class analysis
(MCA), 2) a focus on and critique of three objections to MCA commonly
found in the NSMT paradigm, and 3) to demonstrate how an alternative
conceptual framework that employs the language of class makes it possible
to go beyond the quandaries that NSMT finds itself in at present


New Social Movement Theory

Despite the contemporary paradigm of unfettered global capitalism and the
renewed elucidation of class polarization, mainstream and even left
critical sociological theorists still find it difficult to conceive of
labor based organization and resistance as the critical agent of social
change in the future. If anything, the likelihood seems to be all the more
minimized by virtue of the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe
(Giddens 1995, 2-3). At the same time, in light of the incapacity of NSMs
to transform social relations without labor's active participation
(Navarro 1988; 1991, 54-56; Miliband 1989, 109-112), social movement
theorists have been pushed to reconsider the relationship of class to
social movements, in both theory and praxis1. However, despite occasional
rethinking about class and social movements that appears in NSMT, there
remains nonetheless a resistance to the Marxist focus on working class
agency. This ambivalence, on the part of NSMT, toward class as it has been
conceptualized by MCA, can be traced to the former's ties to Frankfurt
School Theory. In this respect, three prominent NSM theorists, Antonio
Melucci (1989), Klaus Eder (1991), and Laclau and Mouffe (1985) are worth
reviewing. 


NSMT's Attraction to the Frankfurt School

NSMT has its roots in the Frankfurt School's rejection of Marx's class
primacy thesis, which stresses the historically structured and
strategically pivotal role of the working class in the struggle for social
emancipation (Marcuse 1964; Habermas 1973). While the Frankfurt School
produced numerous theorists who applied critical theory to diverse fields,
Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas are most visibly influential on
contemporary NSM theorists (Scott 1990, 80). While both theorists retain
the Marxist critique of alienation under capitalism, nonetheless they
contended that capitalism underwent a discernible seachange in the
Post-war era, one that distiginguished it from the 19th century
industrialism that so much influenced Marx's theorization of capitalism.

In a certain sense, these theorists borrowed from Daniel Bell's (1965) 
"The End of Ideology," which proclaimed that capitalism was no longer
characterized by class polarization. Instead, the working class was
becoming progressively incorporated into middle class consumer society,
with less and less concern about material issues; hence the term
'post-material society' (Bell 1973). Through the mechanism of the Fordist
'social contract, workers and their unions could be kept satisfied via
collectively bargained pay raises and would give up their claim to social
revolutionary agency. There was a clear rejection of Marx's historical
materialism by the proclaimers of a new, more 'complex' post-materialist
capitalism. Nevertheless, since Post-war capitalism could, through its own
devices, soothe (to one degree or another) class based antagonisms between
labor and capital, workers and their unions acted in their own interests
accordingly, namely by not resisting (openly) the Fordist paradigm of
production. While perhaps during earlier epics of capitalist development
workers had clear materially based motivations to organize and oppose
capitalism, with the advent of the Fordist American Century, there was
little if any reason for workers to oppose the logic of capitalist
production. With the apparent resolution of the material contradictions
under capitalist production, a term which itself seemed ever more
oxymoronic in light of the advent of a new kind of "information
capitalism," new contradictions were seen to come to the fore in the
'non-class' realms of culture, gender, ethnicity, and nature. Culture, for
the Frankfurt School, became a new and critical site for resistance as
middle class populations began to question the meaning of suburban
lifestyles, the organization of urban life , traditional conformist and
hierarchical modes of social relations associated with the former
productivist oriented regime of capitalist production, opposition to war
making projects, etc. Likewise, in lieu of resisting capitalism on the
basis of one's relation to the means of life, 'individuals' in a
post-material society mobilized oppositional movements around cultural
identity oriented single-issue struggles. Finally, a heightened awareness
of and opposition to the environmental damage caused by the unlimited
production and consumption endemic to this new era of "consumer
capitalism" emerged. 

Marcuse and Habermas both embraced the notion that capitalism was able to
soothe class conflict in the advanced capitalist regions through
collective bargaining, Keynesian spending, and new forms of social control
that prevented the working class from critically interrogating its newly
won position of material comfort in capitalist society: 

To the degree which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all
freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a
state of lower productivity are losing their former content.  Independence
of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being
deprived their basic critical function in a society which seems
increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through
the way it is organized (Marcuse 1964, 1) 

For Marcuse, ideology was the main impediment to qualitative change of the
social relation of production under the regime of post material
capitalism. While material needs were satisfied, other desires for human
liberation remained unmet, even more repressed in modern capitalist
society. The consciousness of these desires and the role of capitalist
production in repressing them would stimulate new forms of social
rebellion, which had the potential to overhaul the dehumanizing
stultification of the human spirit engendered by technological fetishism
and rationality in advanced capitalist countries. The agents of rebellion,
however, would not be the traditional blue collar workers, since they were
largely bought off by Capital and accepted all too willingly the need to
conform to instrumental forms of rationality, in return for their share of
the collectively bargained pie. Rather, oppositional agents would consist
of those for whom the cultural logic of post-material capitalism did not
work, namely ethnic/gender/sexual 'minorities,' youth, and populations of
the third world (Marcuse 1969; 1968). Whether or not these social groups
revolted would not be determined so much by material conditions as by
their capacity to see through the limits of the rationality of 'capitalist
abundance' and fight that logic, despite their vested material interests
in the reproduction of the system. At the core of revolt was, then, the
need to break down the multifarious devices of social control available to
capital (technology and commodity worship in advertising, media
entertainment, meaningless newspeak, anti-communism...) to prevent social
individuals from recognizing that they were becoming less and less human
in the process of unquestioningly going through their life routines in the
workplace, becoming what C Wright Mills would call "cheerful robots"
(Mills 1959; 175).

Jurgen Habermas (1973, 40) theorized the types of crises that advanced
capitalism faced, and asked "whither is economic crisis displaced?":

Modern capitalism faces crises of administration, or legitimacy: 
Legitimation problems cannot be reduced to problems of capital
realization. Because a class compromise has been made the foundation of
reproduction, the state apparatus must fulfill its tasks in the economic
system under the limiting condition that mass loyalty be simultaneously
secured within the framework of a formal democracy and in accord with
ruling universalistic value systems. These pressures of deligitimization
can be mitigated only through structures of a depoliticized public
realm(58-59). 

Habermas and his epigones asserted that while crises under Marx's
industrial capitalism were more directly laborer-capitalist in origin,
under advanced capitalism the welfare state replaces the capitalist as the
object of oppositional activity (Ibid.; O'Connor 1973; Offe 1972). As long
as the state is able to avoid crises of legitimation, the reproduction of
capitalist accumulation proceeds smoothly. Various non-class based
constituencies provide the new basis for social movement activity, which
replaces the trade union movement of the past as the agent that can and
will challenge the alienation created by instrumental rationality,
epitomised by the state's need to maintain fiscal efficiency.


Melucci

While Marcuse and Habermas wrote from different angles on similar topics
of concern, both shared a certain ideational focus, which emphasized class
compromise and the need to locate new social actors who would oppose the
logic, or, better, ideologies of capitalist production through struggles
that were not primarily based on economic motivation. On this score,
Melucci very much follows suit. Melucci asserts in his seminal Nomads of
the Present

In complex societies material production is increasingly replaced by the
production of signs and social relations. Systemic conflicts centre on the
ability of groups and individuals to control the conditions of their own
action...society's capacity to produce information, communications and
sociability depends upon an increasing level of self-reflexiveness and
upon the self reproduction of action itself (45- 46). 

Melucci is concerned with social movements as agents of emancipation and
the process through which they emerge. He seeks to capture the "network of
relationships which constitutes the submerged reality of the movements
before, during, and after events" (45). This feature is perhaps the most
refreshing part of his work, since it rejects the widespread tendency in
the social sciences to only see a movement when thousands of people are in
the street engaging in some sort of "collective action.". Melucci
recognizes that movements consist of reflexive social actors who are
constantly reflecting on the meaning and strategies of their movement, and
that often these interpretations explain the success or failure of
movements. Or put in another way, after the demonstration effect of an
action, the organizing dynamic of a movement continues; unnoticed perhaps,
but continuing nonetheless: 

Because collective action questions the system's structural logic, it is
destined to reproduce itself beyond the forms of mediation that can
interpret it (57).

Melucci contends that, in complex (i.e. advanced industrialized) 
societies, individuals have increasing amounts of resources available to
themselves, which enable them to "assert and recognize themselves as
individuals"(113). These resources include mass education and extended
rights of citizenship. With these resources, individuals have increased
capacities and desires to formulate their own sense of identity, one free
of external state or corporate coercion. Discussing the ecological
movement, Melucci writes,

Ecological problems not only affect individuals in so far as they belong
to a group, a class or a nation; they also affect individuals as such. The
protection of the species that can be assured only by a new equilibrium
between individuals and nature is a problem that today affects the lives
of everyone (97). 

There would be little point in denying that as the capitalist political
economy has developed, especially in the most advanced regions, that
information technologies and media have rendered choices and decisions
that individuals face all the more complex. This phenomenon is closely
linked not only to the development of new "information based"
technologies, but also, and more critically, to the globalization of
capital: 

Globalization is really about the transformation of space and time. I
define it as action at distance, and relate its intensifying over recent
years to the emergence of means of instantaneous global communication and
mass transportation.

Globalization does not only concern the creation of large scale systems,
but also the transformation of local, and even personal contexts of social
experience. Our day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by
events happening on the other side of the world...My decision to buy a
certain item of clothing has implications not only for the international
division of labor but for the earth's ecosystem (Giddens 1995: 5). 

However, there is another facet to everyday life in a globally capitalist
society, including in its most advanced regions, that Melucci (unlike
Giddens) overlooks, or at least fails to stress. That is, globalization
has not only made the social world and demands on individuals and
individual enterprises' decision making processes all the more complex,
but it has also rendered their material existences ever tenuous (Palat
1994; Ross and Trachte 1990; Brecher and Costello 1994; Hutton 1996; Head
1996; Fox-Piven 1995; Tilly 1995). Let us turn to Klaus Eder, who appears
more willing to treat the category of class as yet viable and relevant to
social movement struggles and development. 


Eder

Eder's (1993)The New Politics of Class: Social Movements in Advanced
Societies, at first glance, promises an integration of class analysis and
new social movement theory: 

Class action has always been seen as mediated by class consciousness. 
This consciousness was...seen as determined by class--and thus a circular
argumentation emerged. The circularity has been avoided by the two options
that were offered within this model: either by the collective
consciousness of those acting together, or by the objective togetherness
of actors given by their class position. This polarization has
characterized Marxist discussions on class-without opening up a way out of
the theoretical deadlock(8). 

Ideally, Eder would offer us a way out of this deadlock. His proposal is
to essentially highlight and insist on the centrality of the "middle
classes" in new social movements, who by virtue of their resources and
lifestyle are opposed to the economistic-instrumental rationality of both
the dominating and dominated classes. Eder wishes to reconstruct a
discourse of class that conforms to the realities of contemporary
"complex" capitalism. He asserts that the classical Marxist concept of a
bifurcated class structure, in which opposition to the social order will
be structured by objective material interests, is no longer useful as a
framework to either explicate or strategize movements for social change
(90-92). What is more helpful, rather, is to examine links between the
present class structure in 'complex societies' and cultural expressions of
opposition to institutions that administer instrumental rationality. Which
experiences of really existing and significant class cultures promise to
be in the forefront of social movements that oppose the logic of
instrumental rationality? It is in his discussion of ecological cris(es)
that Eder most lucidly spells out the reasons why he posits the 'new
middle class' as a uniquely positioned class in complex society in terms
of oppositional potential, and is worth quoting at length: 

The groups comprising an emerging 'new middle class' in advanced modern
societies differ from historical precursors. They appear as carriers of a
new type of society--doubly opposed to the class structure of industrial
society: opposed to its dominant classes and opposed to the dominated
classes...(It) is the potential carrier of counterculture traditions...The
ecological crisis contributes to the further socio- cultural
crystallization of this new class because it is this class that it affects
most directly. The relationship with nature has always had a central
significance for the petit-bourgeois lifestyle. Its leisure patterns,
wandering, climbing,...make this clear. The ecological crisis threatens
the life-world of middle class groups more than that of any other. These
middle class groups are emotionally tied not only to a just world but to a
good world to live in and they react much more intensely to the effects of
exploiting (pollution) the natural environment....We can conclude then
that the new middle classes are the potential carriers of a new
relationship with nature (134-135). 

The ecological crisis, then, presents an exciting opportunity for social
movements and possesses great potential as oppositional movements by
virtue of the subjective class experiences of the new middle classes,
which render them both capable and likely to mobilize a moral opposition
to the destruction of the environment brought on by the
economistic/instrumental ideologies, which both capital and labor unions
endorse. Eder is thus able to expand NSMT, by rejecting the traditional
Marxist conceptualization of class as defined by objective material
interests and at the same time retaining a concept of class that gives
greater attention to subjective interests (163-165, 172-176). Class is a
social construction that shapes the culturally distinct praxis of
collective action (183). How the middle classes relate to each other and
the social system, as a result of their collective practices, rather than
their objective material conditions, is the central issue for NSMT (182),
and that which holds the key to the expression of class based collective
action in a post-material society. This is, ultimately, Marx minus
proletarianization and crises of overproduction. Nonetheless, it is a step
in the direction of challenging NSMT to take seriously its
conceptualization of and relationship with class. 


Laclau and Mouffe

Laclau and Mouffe's (hereafter LM)(1987) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Toward a Radical Democratic Politics is a work that aims to integrate
socialist strategy with a non-materialist framework that sees no basis for
any one subject's claim to historical subjectivity. Although others have
already provided powerful criticisms of LM's reading of Marxist theory
(Wood 1986, 47-75; Geras 1987; Hennesy 1994;  Stabile 1994), it remains
helpful to be clear where LM see their framework as departing from Marx's
historical materialism and its implications for NSMT. According to LM
there is a need for an alternative to a theory of history that posits that
the extant plurality of working class interests can be overcome as a
result of the internal laws of capitalist development or that "an
absolutely united working class will become transparent to itself at the
moment of proletarian chiliasm" (84). The critical point of departure, for
Laclau and Mouffe, from Marx, is on the critical (or determinate) role of
economic processes vis a vis social change and resistance. Even Gramsci,
despite the amount of importance his theory of hegemony attached to
expanding points of resistance beyond the workplace simple, is to be
rejected because of his insistence that subjects comprise fundamental
classes and social formations are structured around a single hegemonic
center(138). LM propose, instead, that socialist strategy should not
'privilege' the notion of class (or any) subjectivity and, instead,
develop a new theoretical problematic: 

There is therefore nothing inevitable or natural in the different
struggles against power, and it is necessary to explain in each case the
reasons for their emergence and the different modulations they may adopt. 

Only in certain cases do...forms of resistance take on a political
character and become struggles directed towards putting an end to
relations of subordination as such...What we wish to point out is that
politics as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of
social relations cannot be located at a determinate level of the social... 

Here, the alternative is clear: either one has a theory of history
according to which this contradictory plurality (of working class
interests) will be eliminated and an absolutely united working class will
become transparent to itself at the moment of proletarian chiliasm--in
which case its 'objective interests' can be determined from the very
beginning; or else one abandons the theory and, with it, any basis for
privileging certain subject positions over others in the determination of
the 'objective interests' of the agent as a whole--in which case the
latter notion becomes meaningless...(F)undamental interests in socialism
cannot be logically deduced from the determinate positions in the economic
process (84-85). 

The central problem, for LM, becomes the identification of 'discursive
conditions' that provide the foundation for collective action to emerge or
to 'identify the conditions in which a relation of subordination becomes a
relation of oppression, and thereby constitutes itself into the site of an
antagonism" (153). LM propose, more concretely, that the terrain of
struggle be extended beyond 'mere' class based issues, to those of the
broader frontiers of 'citizenship' oriented struggles. LM (160-161)
contend that capitalist relations in the Post-war era have intensified to
the point that they subordinate the whole constellation of social
relations to the logic of commodity production for profit. Hence the
conclusion that capitalist relations can and should be contested on all
levels, and no more or less than at the level of class:

..(T)hat "new" antagonisms are the expression of forms of resistance to
the commodification, bureaucratization and increasing homogenization of
social life itself explains why they should frequently manifest themselves
through a proliferation of particularisms, and crystallize into a demand
for autonomy itself...The last in time of these 'new social movements',
and without doubt one of the most active at the present movement, is the
peace movement. Discourse concerning defence policy--traditionally the
enclosed preserve of restricted military and political elites--is thus
subverted as the democratic principle of control lodges itself at its
heart (165). 

Even though LM have been taken to task for their liberal rereading of
Marxist historical materialism, nonetheless LM do pose a serious challenge
to MCA, or at least one that needs to be taken seriously if we are to
overcome some of their most serious theoretical flaws. To begin with, it
should be noted that LM's theoretical purpose is to design a socialist
strategy that is able to articulate itself beyond merely a traditional
working class base, which they regard as one of MCA's central defects. At
best, we could even give them credit for (unwittingly) pushing MCA to have
to theorize the link between 'traditional' labor based movement struggles
and 'new social movements'. Many left and liberal academics and activists
are attracted to LM's analysis precisely because, as Barbara Epstein
(1990, 51) writes, "it speaks a language that has much more resonance for
these people than Marxism ever could."


NSMT's Three Theses

Despite this apparent appeal, it is precisely the notion that classical
MCA is unable to speak a language that is relevant (both strategically and
morally) to the ostensibly disparate and fragmented interests of
particiopants in 'new social movements' and that I aim to challenge.
Before embarking on that task however, let us first consider some common
challenges to classic MCA found in the theoretical works of Melucci, Eder,
and Laclau and Mouffe: 

1. Social conditions of production have qualitatively changed since the
days of Marx's Capital, particularly since the Post-war era, such that
societies (in the advanced regions of the global capitalist political
economy) are now "post-material." The laws of capitalist development that
Marx prolaimed internal to the logic of capitalist production,
particularly the increasing proletarianization and impoverishment of
working sectors of the population, are no longer at work.

2.  A class compromise between labor and capital has been reached in the
advanced regions of the Post-war global capitalist political economy. As a
result, new cultural/identity based social movements have become the main
agents of social protest and change, replacing the traditional class based
movements of the past.2 3. The 'economistic' logic of class based
movements is incompatible with that which motivates new social movements
and this accounts for the failure of class and new social movements to
align. Furthermore, NSMs are (therefore) 'naturally' middle class in
composition. In the remaining sections I will attempt to demonstrate the
problems, theoretically and empirically situated, with all three of the
above theses. 


Post-Material Capitalism? 

As Meszaros (1989) notes, neither Frankfurt School nor NSMT could be
applied to the majority of the world's non-core working class population,
which has not escaped real material oreinted concerns in their everyday
encounters with capitalism. Some 30% of the world's labor force is
unemployed or underemployed, that is 120 million are registered as
unemployed and another 700 million are underemployed. What the
restructuring of the global political economy has generated, since roughly
around the first oil shocks and the dismantling of Bretton Woods in the
early 1970's, is what Brecher and Costello (1995), and many other social
scientists (Barnet 1994; Palat 1993; Ross and Trachte 1990; Tilly 1995)
have now termed the global "race to the bottom." 

For the working populations in Newly Industrialized Countries, all the
rave of development theorists in the 1980's, "development" has come to
take on quite a unique meaning. Unlike its Western European and North
American working class counterparts, for whom development served as a
foundation off of which social democratic parties (or in the American
case, a liberal party, aligned with organized labor) could pressure the
state to implement welfare state reforms, the East Asian NIC model has,
thus far, only been able to provide its working populations with
development plus capital flight, minimal welfare state reforms, and
repressive labor regimes that deny workers basic organizing rights (Bello
and Rosenfeld 1990; Brecher and Costello, 24; Deyo 1987; Ha 1996; Palat
1993; 1994). For working people in Third world nation states, the
ramifications of global "flexible accumulation" are all the more
potentially devastating: 


Almost 1/3rd of the population of developing countries, 1.3 billion
people, live in absolute poverty--too poor to provide the minimum diet
required for full human functioning. It is argued that foreign investment
will raise wages in poor countries. But a review of US corporate behavior
abroad...found that "rather than raising standards of living, American
firms are more likely to be paying no better than local minimum wages. A
study, sponsored by the ILO, found that in Indonesia--now a favorite spot
for companies like Nike and Reebok-- 88% of woman earning the Indonesian
minimum wage were malnourished (Brecher and Costello, 24). 

Women in the "third world" are most vulnerable and likely to be employed
in labor intensive industries that provide low wages, no job security or
mobility, dangerous work conditions and the like (Ong 1991). 

Nor has the impact of global downracing stopped at the doorstep of the
advanced regions of global capitalism. While, "between 1979 and 1989, the
real annual pay of corporate chiefs rose by 19%, and 66% after taxes (Head
1996, 47), average real weekly earnings in the United States came to $300
in 1969, compared with $264.22 in 1990, and continue to fall (Business
Week July 17, 1995: 54-62). Globalization increasingly puts larger numbers
of workers who formerly fell under the rubric "middle class" at risk. In
lieu of the middle class way of life, so glorified as the ultimate
refutation of Marxist class analysis in Daniel Bell's End Of Ideology
(1965), the "middle classes" in advanced capitalist countries of the west
see a future of what can only be described as progressive
proletarianization and decreasing "autonomy" (Hutton 1996, 15-19;
Braverman 1974). An article in the London Sunday Times comments on the
situation of the British middle class, one which could well be applied to
the rest of the advanced capitalist nation states: 

In the uncertainty of life in Britain today, one fact stands out: the
middle classes are getting poorer. Nor is this a temporary phenomenon. In
any future we can foresee, they will get even poorer...A decade ago, it
was assumed the working class would slowly disappear as it fulfilled its
aspirations and became absorbed into an enlarged middle class. Instead,
the opposite has happened, with the middle classes being overtaken by the
chronic uncertainty and worry that has always gone with working class
life...  It is the relentless pressure of...new cheap sweatshop
competitors in a global free market on Western economies that spells ruin
and impoverishment for the middle classes in Britain and similar countries
(Gray 1994). 

In the United States, since 1982, temping has increased two and a half
times, such that it comprises two-thirds of new private sector jobs. The
likelihood of poverty for families of part time workers is six times
greater than the national average. At the same time, hours worked by these
same workers has actually increased, with a commensurate reduction in
health insurance and other benefits (Brecher and Costello 1994, 23). 
Finally, it is ever more apparent that NSM theorists who cling to the
'post material' society notion that objective material conditions are no
longer focal issues around which opposition to the social relations of
capitalist production can be organized appear, ill equipped to confront
the problems of the here and now. If a growing consumerism was the
defining characteristic of earlier decades, the capitalism of the
nineties, while still, of course, consumerist, has its own distinctive
form. It is more specifically defined by things like structural mass
unemployment, growing poverty and homelessness, 'flexible' labor markets,
and changing patterns of work in the form of casualization and low paid
part-time jobs, or overwork for the remaining few in 'downsized'
enterprises, together with the global imposition of market imperatives
increasingly immune to cushioning by the old forms of state intervention
(Wood, 1995, 46).3

Alas, however, although such empirical data demonstrates the thin ice on
which much of NSMT skates when it proclaims that economic inequality no
longer centrally shapes the experiences of the majority of the world's
employed populations, even in capitalism's most advanced regions, we are
still left with the challenge posed by NSMT, namely what is the relation
between class and new social movement constituencies? What does MCA have
to offer them? In answering these questions satisfactorily, perhaps we can
finally reduce the hold that NSMT has over much of social science and
activists.


The MCA Alternative to NSMT's Post-materialism

One theorist who offers a number of noteworthy answers is the eco- Marxist
James O'Connor (1992), in an article on the 'second contradiction of
capitalism.' Synthesizing the works of Marx and Polanyi, O'Connor examines
the notion of "conditions of production', which include the personal,
community, and 'external' or environmental related conditions of
production. A condition of production 'consists of everything that is
treated as if it is a commodity even though it is not produced as a
commodity in accordance with the law of value or law of markets' (1-2).
Through such an inclusive definition, O'Connor aims to treat labor power,
land and nature, and urban organization as equally important categories.
As such, O'Connor hopes to bridge the gap between social movements and
Marxist critique.  Engaging a traditional Marxist political economy
framework, O'Connor contends that there are two contradictions of
capitalism, 'overproduction', the natural drive on the part of capital to
drive down wages and increase productivity to make up for falling rates of
profit and 'underproduction', or the costs incurred in that process from
underrealization of surplus value and/or costs on nature (e.g.. ecological
crises rendering production less and less profitable, let alone possible).

The basic cause of the second contradiction is capitalism's self-
destructive appropriation and use of labor power, space, and external
nature or environment. The present day crisis of health, education, and
the family; the urban crisis; and the ecological crisis exemplify this
self destructiveness (4-5) 

However, without imposing massive environmental havoc on the world's
working peoples, global capital would have been unable to attain the
growth rates it did achieve, at least during its peak period before the
oil shocks of the 1970's (4). Thus, social movements that arise in
response to these unintended consequences of 'growth' policies are
intrinsically challenging capital's capacity to be flexible. That is, they
are, no less than traditional trade union based movements, challenging
capital and are, therefore, theoretically speaking, quite capable of
possessing a subjectivity within the framework of classical MCA. O'Connor
rightly notes that new social movements face increasing surveillance and
repression from the state and that, faced with such state/capital
sponsored hostility, it is wise for NSM's and labor based movements to
build alliances: 

All the old issues once addressed by classical socialism--inequality,
social injustice...--have reappeared...What better time for labor and the
left, labor and the environmental and feminist movements to sublate
themselves into a new eco-socialism, an eco-feminism, and eco-
urbanism--in short a new movement that can change the history of the
world? For the better, this time (10). 

This appeal to NSMs and labor to engage in some kind of reconciliation for
the sake of survival does certainly contain more than a kernel of
sensibility (Brecher and Costello 1995). However, although O'Connor's
theorization of the 'second contradiction of capitalism' poses a challenge
to the contention that traditional Marxist political economy has little to
offer NSMs, we are still left with some problems that remain, for the
moment, unresolved. How can social movements rely on a labor movement that
has entered into a 'class compromise'? And can the union movements, even
if they break their 'class compromise,' be expected to overcome real
ideological impediments such as racism and sexism? Why should they,
according to MCA? Aren't NSMs predominantly movements of the middle class?
How would they benefit from an alliance with labor movements, especially
when the already tense relationship between labor and NSMs is taken into
account? Finally, since much emphasis of NSMT is on 'discourses,' does MCA
have an alternative to the discourse produced by NSMT, one which can help
to bridge the gap between NSMT and MCA? These questions are, essentially
extensions of theses two and three, which I propose O'Connor's article is
a very productive step in the right direction of handling, but which falls
short of our goal nonetheless.

(end of part one; bibliography and footnotes will be posted later in
the day; part two appears tomorrow) 




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