“Social movements” instead of working class?

Why the working class? Some argue that progress will instead be won by “social movements”.

The short answer is that today even the best “social movements” are thin in the sort of durable democratic organisation which could generate, call to account, and underpin a revolutionary government. Or even a radically-reforming one. Or even a systematic long-term campaign to win large reforms by pressure “from below” on governments.

What may appear to be “social movements” these days are usually “mailing lists” tended by a paid “professional” office staff doing almost all the regular in-person activity.

Social media and smartphones have enabled street demonstrations, often called by “mailing list” groups or even by loose unofficial networks, to become more frequent and bigger. Yet the disconnect between such demonstrations and organisation with even a minimum of durability and structured debate has got bigger. The school students’ climate demonstrations in 2019 were tremendous, yet generated little ongoing organisation.

However dismal the weaknesses of labour movement life now, it is on a different scale.

The longer answer is, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, “where the chains of capitalism are forged, there must the chains be broken. That only is socialism, and thus only can socialism be brought into being”. The working class is by definition brought together in workplaces and pushed into collective organising, if only on wages and conditions.

That elemental organising has an expansive social logic. Even if details are dated, the fundamental argument from 130 years ago of the Russian Marxist pamphlet On Agitation (printed in this issue of Solidarity and the last one) still holds.

Working-class solidarity, to be effective and wide-ranging, has to incubate all the “social movement” issues within itself. In many periods, distinct “social movements” may push ahead, but for their effort to feed into lasting and comprehensive change, it has to have an active labour movement as a central mediator and driver.

Working-class movements can generate comprehensive programmes for changing society. How could a miscellaneous aggregate of different “social movements” do that?

The “Eurocommunists” of the 1970s were the first, I think, to argue for progress via aggregated “social movements”. They prompted Ellen Wood’s crisp polemic, The Retreat from Class.

Part of that was that “social movements” — feminist, lesbian-gay, racialised-minority… — were much bigger and livelier then than now, and maybe even more so than at their previous high in the early 20th century. (Both peaks came with, rather than instead of, labour-movement upsurges).

Part of it was that the “Eurocommunists” wanted to take critical distance from Stalinism, which they tended to identify (falsely) with bureaucratic trade unionism in “traditional” industry. Decisive, though, was that the “Eurocommunists” were fading into liberals. They were coming to realise that what they had thought of as “socialism” (in the USSR) was so bad that they really didn’t want it. A welfare capitalism softened by miscellaneous impacts of miscellaneous social movements seemed a better option. They were choosing a different destination as much as a different road.