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Building Counter Cultures

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Building Counter Cultures Building counter culture: the radical praxis of social movement milieux Laurence Cox Into-ebooks (http://into-ebooks.com) Helsinki 2011 Foreword Foreword (2011) This work came out of what was then a short lifetime in social movements and the counter culture. From 1990-1, when I spent a year as activist and student in Hamburg, I attempted to theorise some of that experience: a project shaped by intellectual engagement, political commitment and a developing reflexivity. This work was completed as a PhD thesis for the Trinity College Dublin sociology department in 1999. Although it has never been published, it has circulated unofficially on a small scale and has been favourably commented on by other activists, as have some of its individual chapters which have been presented or published in various forms. My own subsequent work, as activist, teacher and researcher, has also drawn heavily on the lines of thought explored here. Lastly, of course, historical development and the work of many other activists and researchers have changed matters so that a rewrite of the scale that would be needed has become practically impossible. Because of this, I have chosen to let the text (and pagination) stand unchanged other than this foreword, and I am grateful to into-ebooks, a project which could easily have found a place in this thesis, for making this possible. The book argues, among other things, that visible social movements from below represent the elaboration and articulation of everyday ways of doing things which cut against the grain of dominant social relationships, and that these oppositional popular cultures can be connected and extended into more direct challenges. This understanding came in part from the processes of networking between and across social movements into a new “movement of movements” which became highly public shortly after the thesis was completed in autumn 1999. In various ways, I have participated in and attempted to contribute to such processes over the years before and since. The process connecting the local rationalities of individual ways of living and struggling scattered around the world into larger campaigns - against a mine, taking over a factory, struggling for non-commodified space in a university etc. - and of these in turn into movements (feminist, anti-war, community organising etc.) is a continual one. At times, such as the present, these movements in turn come together into wider movement projects such as the alterglobalisation movement, with its critiques of neoliberalism, “war on terror” and austerity, its summit protests, social fora and alternative media, and its multiple and messy realities from Chiapas or Bolivia, India or South Africa, Ireland or Italy. ii Foreword Alf Gunvald Nilsen’s remarkable Dispossession and resistance in India: the river and the rage (Routledge 2010) traces one such process, from the resistance of adivasi forest-dwellers to local forms of tyranny and exploitation to the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s challenge to the Indian state’s changing developmentalist and neoliberal projects. I have been privileged to work with Alf on a number of projects which take our shared analysis of these processes, and the struggles of recent years, further. Here in Ireland, the remarkable process whereby the health and safety concerns of a remote rural community have been supported by a remarkable movement alliance and become an international struggle against Shell’s gas extraction project (backed up by the Irish police and military) has highlighted this process in new ways, increasingly central as the state slides into financial crisis. Lastly, I want again to thank the participants in this research. The book argues for greater attention to intermittent or “ordinary” activism: popular cultures which support a critical worldview that manifests at times as visible public mobilisation. I first met most of those interviewed twenty-four years ago, as participants in some of the counter-cultural experiences discussed here. Subsequently they have all in their different ways engaged in social movements over the years (though they would not all use that language): working in NGOs, supporting local campaigns or engaging in dramatic acts; joining summit protests or coming on anti-austerity demonstrations. I cherish a photograph showing most of this book’s participants at one such protest recently, nearly a quarter of a century after we first encountered each other. Along with the necessary work of full-time activists, it is the dogged independence of mind of such occasional activists and their persistent willingness to challenge the system that is central to any long-term struggle for change. The Ireland we now inhabit, with all its injustices, has been powerfully changed for the better by such movements; not only those we think of as political but also the counter-cultural impulses which have dramatically weakened the power of institutional religion, traditionalist patriarchy, virulent homophobia, popular deference to authority, routinised violence and sheer provincialism that blighted the Ireland we inherited. The results are not what we expected, and there are many unfinished agendas; but few of us would want to return to that past. Official memory, and the Irish fear of conflict, now attempts to give the merit for these changes to some automatic processes (television, globalisation, education or whatever) and to downplay just how bad things were. Against this, it is important to say that each step of this path has been bitterly opposed, by many individuals who claim to have been in favour of change all along and by powerful institutional forces; it has taken courage, and repeated iii Foreword courage, to challenge that self-serving complacency and the power relations that underlie it, both in the public sphere and in everyday life. This book is a small contribution to understanding the contribution of such “ordinary” participants in social movements from below in making a better world. iv Acknowledgements Acknowledgements It is a requirement of academic theses to claim that they are the product of the author’s own work and that of no-one else. To the extent that this is the case, I would think I had failed in a thesis whose main point is to attempt to articulate the skilled activities with which friends and comrades try to organise and make sense of their own lives, and which does so with the use of the theories of earlier generations of movement activists. The particular direction from which I have engaged with the counter culture, the political and personal context within which this was written, and the idiosyncracies of my own understanding of our shared experience and action are certainly mine; but I would hope that they do not dominate the text. Thanks are thus due above all to my fellow-participants in the counter culture: friends, comrades and internal opponents; the activists who have built the institutions of the counter culture; and the theorists who have attempted to articulate what we are up to. My debt to them all is enormous. In particular, I am indebted to my friends who were willing to expose themselves to often difficult interviews and to trust me with the results: Ciarán, Das, Frank, Jim, Josh, Mark, Ruth, Steve and Tina. For obvious reasons, they cannot be given their own names; but insofar as this thesis is part of an ongoing conversation between us over nearly a decade and a half, it is theirs if it is anybody’s. I hope they will find something of value for themselves within it, even if they do not agree with all its conclusions. The “academic mode of production” (Stanley 1990), though apparently more isolated, is itself an illustration of the argument I make in chapter six that individualisation has to be socially produced. This is especially true for colleagues who are themselves activists; and I owe a great debt to participants at the annual Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conferences in Manchester, at which many of these ideas found their first expression. In particular, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Colin Barker, Tom Cahill, Max Farrar, Pete North, Simon Parker, Alex Plows, Ben Seel and Bronislaw Szerszynski for comments and critiques. Hilary Tovey has been an excellent supervisor, willing both to let me pursue my own course and to make her own disagreements with it manifest, and this thesis has benefitted enormously from her critique. Thanks are also due (in alphabetical order) to Linda Connolly, Simon Jones, Shane Kilcommins and Anna Mazzoldi for comments on earlier v Acknowledgements papers or on drafts of this thesis; and to Martin Geoghegan, Maeve O’Grady and Ruth Smith for teaching and supervision situations which have helped me develop some of the ideas presented here. Ideas have to be materially produced. Thanks in particular are due to Anna Mazzoldi for constant assistance and support through the years; to Wendy and Richard Cox for unfailing practical help; to Giorgio and Maria-Teresa Mazzoldi for the refuge in which this thesis was completed; and to Alessandro Denardo for the loan of a computer for the final version. Financial assistance came from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; a scholarship from the TCD Graduate Studies office; a teaching assistantship from the TCD Dept. of Sociology; and conference support from WIT School of Humanities. I want to thank John Ennis and Niall McElwee in particular for enabling me to take two weeks at the start of term to complete this thesis. Lastly, but most importantly, I want to thank Anna Mazzoldi, who has shared the experience of living through and working out how to live against the current, as comrade, lover, flatmate and fellow survivor of a society which has little space for human needs that go against the grain, and who has lived with the ideas articulated in this book for many years.
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