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Does the New Middle Class Lead Today's Social Movements?

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Does the New Middle Class Lead Today's Social Movements? Does the New MiddleClass Lead Today’s Social Movements? JOHN W. CLEVELAND (University College ofthe Cariboo,Canada) ABSTRACT The conventional wisdomthat today’s movements areled by asection ofthe ‘new middleclass’ is really the oldfunctionalist theory of(post)modernizing elites that denies class analysis. The ‘youngadult nucleus’ thesis is proposedas an alternative theory.The leadingsocial forces in movements in afuent countries areintellectual radicals and‘ advancedelements’ from groupsthat experience some formof exploitation, oppression orcollective hurt.They areGramscian intellectuals as opposed toprofessional intellectuals. They arepeople who tookthe ‘opportunityduring socialization’ when youngadults to choose what oftenbecame alifelong‘ activist career’for social justice. Does theNew Middle Class Lead Today’s SocialMovements? Fromthe 1960sprotest wave throughto today’ s anti-globalizationprotests, aseriesof new lefts have replacedthe oldleft ofsocial-democratic and communistparties and unions as the leadersof major left-wing social struggles.This raises key questions.A centralquestion is: What social classor social force leads the newmovements? Ifit is not the working class,what does this mean aboutthe roleof the workingclass in the new movements? Who leads today’s socialmovements? The mostcommonly accepted answeris that the “newsocial movements” are led by the newmiddle Critical Sociology, Volume 29,issue 2 also availableonline Ó 2003Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden www.brill.nl 164 Cleveland ² class,or at least by somesection of it, not by the workingclass. 1 By Jan Willem Duyvendak’s denition, new social movements are“ characterized bythe dominationof those parts of the new middle class who pursue post- materialist goals”(1995:19). This idea has achieved the statusof a common sense assumptioneven forsocial movement specialists.Scholars writing fromthe perspectiveof the dominantsocial movement paradigm,Resource Mobilization(RM) theoryas well asNew SocialMovement (NSM) theory have bothaccepted it, albeit with different justi cations detailed below. Reducingthese justications to a fewwords, the RMjustication is that only the newmiddle class is competent (has the culturalcapital) to lead today’s movements (McCarthyand Zald 1987)while the NSM justication isthatonly the newmiddle class has the postmaterialistor postmodernizing consciousness(Kriesi 1993). The newmiddle class has been dened many differentways and the boundariesdelimiting the sectionthat supposedly leads the newmovements have been drawnin various ways. The formulationby ChrisRootes is modal:“ the highly educatedmembers of the newmiddle classes witha particularconcentration coming from those employed in teaching, caring andwelfare professions in the non-marketsector of the economy”(Rootes 1995:225-6).In additionit is widelyagreed that the newmovements are,as ClausOffe put it, ‘ ofandby’ a sectionof the newmiddle class but not ‘ on behalfof’ the materialinterests of thatclass or any otherclass (1985). There aremany denitions of new social movements andnew left. I shall usea widede nition of both here. By newmovements, Imean all progressive socialmovements since 1960or thereabouts that are outside the oldleft, i.e.that are not led bythe social-democraticor communist parties or by the unionleaders allied with them. By newleft, I mean the left-wingof the newmovements thattypically triesto unite the overall Movement (in coalitionsetc.) and that has tendedto provide the leadershipin most of the majormilitant collective actions. Inthisarticle I challenge whatI shall referto asthe New MiddleClass thesis (NMC thesis) andargue for my ownYoung Adult Nucleus thesis (YANthesis) asa morefruitful approach to the leadershipof contemporary movements. Ishall rstgive acapsulesummary of the analysis that underliesmy thesis followedin section three bya presentationof the YANthesis insix points.The NMC thesis isthen presentedin six parallel pointsand it is shown how the twoapproaches are incompatible alternative accounts.In section ve, Idemonstratehow relying ona YANinstead of 1 Forextensive citations of important sourceson the politicalstance and role of the new middleclass see Bagguley (1995:293), della Porta andDiani (1999:47-48) and Rootes (1995:226). MiddleClass andSocial Movements 165 ² an NMC approachleads to very differentanswers to eight questions about the roleof the workingclass in today’ s movements. Iconcludewith a discussionof ve waysin whichusing the YANthesis insteadof the NMC thesis asa workingassumption might improve predictions and explanations inthe studyof today’ s socialmovements. II.Analysis Underlying YANThesis Here isacapsulesummary of the analysis thatunderlies the YANthesis. Integration: The newsocial movements arenot the resultof a shiftfrom workingclass goals and leadership to (new) middleclass goals and leadership.They arethe resultof the integrationof the majorityof the masses inall classes andsocial groups in af uent countries into support for the capitalistsocial system andimperialist world system. Mostpeople will notgo beyond economic and cultural militancy to political radicalism, i.e. they willnot challenge the rightto rule of powerholders(the rulingclasses), becausethey areunwilling to risk losing what relative privilegesthey have got.This integration is achieved bya mix ofprivileges, disciplining institutionsand the awesomerepressive capacity of rich country states butthe carrotof relative privilegesis the principalaspect because of two factors.The rstfactor is the economicand political success of capitalism andits post World War Two, Fordist Social Contract strategy: a welfare statein rich countries and continuous limited war coupled with aggressive policiesof capitalexpansion (modernization and development) inthe Third World.Capitalists created enough new wealth to be able to redistribute sufcient income, political liberty and status group privileges to people inrich countries to buy their political support. The secondfactor is the economicand political failure of Marxiststates which greatly weakened the commonsense thatthere couldbe a workablealternative tothe existing system thatwas decidedly better. Rainbowrethinking, renewed movements: The oldleft actively contributedto andaccepted the limitsof the FordistSocial Contract. Consequently new movements anda newpolitical left developedmainly (butnot exclusively) outsidethe oldleft leadershipstructures existing atthe level ofparty andunion. They alsohave developedprimarily outside the conventional (electoraland lobbying) channels ofachieving politicalin uence and governmental power.The oldleft tookthe formof a single central movement (the workersmovement led bysocial democratic or communist parties)and auxiliary movements becauseit was assumed that the auxiliary issues(e.g., women’ s oppression,racism, imperialist colonization) would only beresolved once their structural roots were uprooted by replacing capitalismwith socialism. New movements have overtime taken the form 166 Cleveland ² ofa Rainbowcoalition made up of multiple autonomous movements none ofwhich was the centralone to which the otherswere to be subordinated.Virtually none ofthe newsocial movements isactually newin terms of basic interests and issues. The secondwave women’s movement has foughtagainst patriarchy as did the rstwave movement. The contemporaryenvironmental andpeace movements have been against environmental destructionand imperialist war as were earlier versions ofthose movements. What has changedhas been the specics of the institutionalarrangements affecting the statusof women, environmental destructionand imperialist war and the waysin which movements understoodthe causesof those problems and the specic changes needed tosolve them.For example, male violence againstwomen in the home isnothing new. However, in the secondwave itbecame a salient issue ina contextwhere better birth control and greater involvement inthe paidlabor force gave womenthe leverage tooppose violence asa denial ofequal partner status. I usethe terminologyof class exploitation, status groupoppression and policy-based collective hurtto refer to the three main basesof movements (oftenintermixed in practice). All three basesderive frominequalities of power, wealth and privilege between social groups. Exploitationis rooted in power relations between classes; oppressionis rootedin power relations between status groups; collective hurts(like war andenvironmental destruction)are the injuryor disadvantage done to a ‘public’by dominant classes andstatus groups more or less asabyproduct ofthe exercise oftheir class or status group domination. Radical autonomyand new political left tendencies: Withineach ofthe newmove- ments (includingthe workersmovement inthe formof the notionof the ‘worker’s autonomy’philosophy developed most elaborately in the 1960s wave inItaly –see Lumley 1990)there developeda “radical”philosophy thatidenti ed the autonomousmechanisms that accounted for the specic “autonomous”oppression of the socialgroup that the movement existed to serve (e.g.,radical feminism, deep ecology, institutionalized racism, Fanon’ s conceptionof colonization of the ThirdWorld). The radicalphilosophy jus- tied the notionof a Rainbowcoalition of autonomousmovements (Bysty- dzienskiand Schacht 2001). The radicalphilosophies were at oneand the same timea moreleft wingcritique in the sense thatthey calledfor a more deep-goingset ofchanges andthe basisfor a kindof narrow and immediate self-interest ‘tradeunion consciousness’ (the ‘my oppression rst’mentality ofsome
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