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Even Newer Social Movements? Anti-Corporate Protests, Capitalist Crises and the Remoralization of Society Nick Crossley Organization 2003; 10; 287 DOI: 10.1177/1350508403010002006 The online version of this article can be found at: http://org.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/2/287

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Volume 10(2): 287–305 Copyright © 2003 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Even Newer Social Movements? Anti-Corporate Protests, Capitalist Crises and the Remoralization of Society

articles

Nick Crossley University of Manchester, UK

Abstract. This paper examines the possibility of using Jurgen ¨ Habermas’s theory of new social movements as a way of making sense of the recent wave of anti-corporate protests. It is argued that anti-corporatism fits with Habermas’s model in many key respects. However, a number of problems in the Habermasian model are identified. Specifically, Habermas limits his focus to the First World and develops his account in relation to a now outdated model of the Welfare Society. These issues must be addressed, but if they are, it is argued, the Habermasian model remains useful. Key words. anti-corporatism; colonization of the lifeworld; Habermas; social movements

In the closing years of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st, a new ‘anti-corporate’ social movement has begun to take shape (Crossley, 2002b; Smith, 2001a,b; Starr, 2000). The existence of this movement has been marked, at its most visible tip, by a series of high-profile protests directed against the new managerial elites of global capitalism: the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the parties to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). Identified by either their date codes (e.g. S26, M1) or simply the places where they took place (e.g. Seattle, Washington, Prague, Nice, Gothenburg, Quebec City, Genoa), these protest events are already the stuff of movement legends. In addition, new movement figureheads and intellectuals have begun to take their place in the countercultural limelight: for example, sub-commandant Marcos, the balaclava’d non-leader 1350-5084[200305]10:2;287–305;032774

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing of the Mexican Zapatistas; Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist and author of the internationally best selling No Logo; Jos´e Bov´e, the French farmer, turned McDonalds wrecker, turned celebrity activist; and Norena Hertz, the one-time international banker, turned academic, social critic and author of The Silent Takeover. However, these well-known manifestations of the new movement are just the visible tip of an altogether much larger and more diverse movement ‘iceberg’ (Crossley, 2002b). Hundreds if not thousands of groups and networks interact within the space of this iceberg, representing diverse and conflicting values, goals and aims—from religious groups, through parties of both the far Left and the far Right, taking in a variety of strands of anarchism, nationalism, environmentalism and ‘DIY culture’ along the way. Many of these groups are involved in the high-profile protests but many also, or alternatively, pioneer smaller, more localized protests and a variety of alternative development projects. This movement is only in its infancy and it is impossible to say whether it will survive to adolescence, let alone maturity. This is true of any movement at its birth but the uncertainties are heightened in this case by the shock-wave created by the attack on the US World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the ‘War on Terrorism’ it sparked. Although activists have written arguing for the need for the movement and protests to continue after this event, the fact they have had to do so indicates that this is a turning point (whose direction it is too early to predict). Nevertheless, whatever the future of the movement, its birth is not in question and that is what will concern me in this paper. My aim is to offer a preliminary analysis of the anti-corporate movement, focusing specifically upon its moral causes and effects. What I mean by ‘moral causes’ are the ‘grievances’ and ‘strains’ around which the movement has mobilized. Much social movement theory since the 1970s has cautioned against analysing movements in this way (see Crossley, 2002a). ‘Strain’ models invoke irrationalist models of crowd psychology, it is claimed, and thereby undermine the truth claims that movements raise. In addition, critics argue that ‘grievances’ are not sufficient causes of movement activism, even if they are necessary causes. There are always more strains and grievances in society than movements mobilized around them, it is argued. And such grievances remain a relatively stable and constant feature of societies, whereas levels of mobilization can fluctuate widely (McAdam, 1982; Snyder and Tilly, 1972). There is, in other words, no direct correspondence between ‘strains’ or ‘grievances’ and mobilization. To explain a movement, these critics maintain, one must focus upon such factors as social networks and their formation, shifts in the resources available to key agents, opportunities and the manner in which issues are framed (see Crossley, 2002a). I do not dispute that these factors are crucial to an adequate model of movement formation. However, we should not throw the baby

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Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley out with the bath water. Grievances, as experienced and made meaningful by social agents, are a crucial key to understanding social movements (see Bagguley, 1992; Crossley, 2002a). Focusing upon them does not invoke the ‘irrationalism’ of crowd psychology. On the contrary, it is only by analysing the grievances of social movements that we can begin to render their actions intelligible, understandable and thus rational. Activism ‘makes sense’ to the degree that it can be perceived to be a purposive response to a problem. Furthermore, despite claims to the contrary, grievances, whether considered as objective states of affairs, subjective perceptions of states of affairs or some combination of the two, do not remain constant. They change as societies change and these changes provide us with clues as to why movements themselves change; that is, why old movements die out and new ones emerge. To reiterate, I do not mean to deny that other factors play a role. I merely wish to state that grievances are important. And in this paper I wish to set other factors to one side, to focus upon grievances and their broader structural context. Specifically I aim to set the new movement within a historical context, alongside the labour movement and the so-called ‘new social movements’ and within the specific phase of capitalist modernity to which it belongs. The paper is not simply about causes, however, at least not in the narrow sense. It is equally about consequences. Picking up on certain arguments that have been levelled in relation to the ‘new social movements’, and indeed to the ‘old social movements’ that preceded them, I want to identify the manner in which the anticorporate movement seeks to bring moral considerations to bear upon social processes that might otherwise be deemed ‘anomic’ and how, in doing so, it functions to regenerate, at the international level, a public sphere. I have titled my paper ‘Even Newer Social Movements?’ There is an element of jest intended here. The naming of the ‘new social movements’ (NSMs) has been controversial and confusing enough. However, the title conveys well enough the manner in which I intend to proceed. The theories of the NSMs were based upon the premise that the era of class politics, at least as expressed in the labour movement, is over. The issues and repertoires of the NSMs may not be new, it was argued, but they are movements belonging to a new era of movement contention and even a new type of society—for example, a postindustrial or ‘programmed’ society (Gorz, 1982; Touraine, 1974, 1981). Furthermore, in many instances these theories were posited, in intent if not name, as post-Marxist theories; that is, theories that offered a critique of and alternative to the Marxist theory of society. The emergence of the NSMs was held up as an indication that the fault lines of modern societies were no longer to be found around the bifurcation of capital and labour. All of this prompts the question of whether the emerging anti-corporate movement fits the new mould suggested by the theorists of the NSMs, whether it calls for


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing another mould or perhaps even indicates that the Marxist model has some explanatory power left in it yet. It is my contention, in this paper, that the specifically Habermasian theory of NSMs can provide a useful inroad for making sense of the anticorporate movement. Habermas is only one of a number of distinguished social scientists who have attempted to make sense of new social movements, including Touraine (1974, 1981), Gorz (1982), Melucci (1986, 1996) and Giddens (1991). Of these writers he has arguably approached NSMs in the most tangential way, having the least to say about them empirically. Furthermore, what he does say is very similar to what many of the others, particularly Touraine (1974, 1981) and Melucci (1986, 1996), have had to say. What distinguishes Habermas’s approach, however, is the manner in which it maintains a firm grasp both upon the relationship of the new social movements to the labour movements that preceded them, and upon the central role of economic as well as political interactions and dynamics at the heart of contemporary Western societies. These ‘levers’ afford his theory a purchase upon the anti-corporate movement that other theories lack. In effect then, this paper is a dialogue with Habermas—an attempt to test his theory of NSMs against the actualities of the emerging anticorporate movement. I begin the paper with an exposition of the theory. Having done this I assess the degree of fit between the theory and the practice of contemporary protest. I argue that there is a basic degree of fit and that, because of this, Habermas’s theory is very useful for elucidating the nature of this new movement. However, I also identify a number of problems that need to be addressed. These problems give me the leverage to argue, in the final section of the paper, that anti-corporatism is a new wave of movement activism that calls for us to move beyond the ‘new social movement’ theoretical paradigm.

Habermas’s Basic Framework Habermas theorizes the rise of NSMs as a response to both ‘the colonisation of the lifeworld’ and ‘cultural impoverishment’. To understand these conditions we must first discuss his theory of society and, in particular, his contention that it can be understood, for analytic purposes, to consist in two distinct ‘levels’: system and lifeworld. Habermas draws this distinction in two different ways. System and lifeworld are different ‘parts’ of society but there is also a distinction between systemic and lifeworld modes of analysis, and the lifeworld can be regarded as a part of the system from the point of view of a systemic analysis. In this brief exposition I will focus mainly upon the distinction between system and lifeworld as ‘parts’ of society. All of society, system and lifeworld, consists in interaction for Habermas. However, interaction can assume different forms and contexts, thus giving rise to different levels of social organization. The lifeworld is


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley constituted through ‘communicative action’, that is, ‘symbolic’ interaction which is coordinated by way of the mutual understanding achieved between agents and their common orientation towards shared norms and values. It is held together by traditions and the various obligations and duties they impose and, qua the communicative space of society, is the area of society wherein those traditions, along with other aspects of culture, knowledge and identity, are reproduced. As a site of symbolic interaction, the lifeworld invites hermeneutic analysis. This is what Habermas means by a ‘lifeworld analysis’. As noted above, however, he believes that the lifeworld is amenable to a systems analysis. This broadly amounts to a functional analysis. The lifeworld, in effect, assumes the ‘Integration’ and ‘Latency’ functions of Parsons’s (1966) AGIL schema. It is a normative order and thereby coordinates action at the ground level (‘integration’), and it is a communicative order which reproduces the cultural patterns and resources that make social life possible and that other ‘parts’ of society require (‘latency’). Where Habermas differs from Parsons is that he draws attention to the possibility of crisis tendencies within the lifeworld, when considered as a socialcultural system (Habermas, 1988). Specifically he refers to the possibility of ‘legitimation crises’, wherein norms are brought into question and contested, losing their integrative power to a degree that the political system is incapable of dealing with, and also to ‘motivation crises’, in which the lifeworld ceases to reproduce the basic dispositions, such as the work ethic, required by the societal system as a whole. Habermas divides ‘communicative action’ into two sub-categories: norm-conformative action and discourse. As its name suggests, normconformative action involves a more or less habitual and unnoticed adherence to shared social norms. Agents conform to the shared social expectations, which apply to whatever types of interaction they are involved in. ‘Discourse’, by contrast, designates those moments at which agents reflexively turn back upon their habits and assumptions to subject them to a communicatively rational interrogation and evaluation. Communicatively rational discourse entails a contest between agents in which each attempts to persuade the other of their view by recourse to logic and the exchange of reasons alone. When groups of agents come together to bring normative arrangements into question they form a ‘public sphere’. This is a key concept in Habermas’s theory. In an early study he identified the famous salons and coffee shops of 18th-century Europe as an important, if bourgeois and male-dominated, prototype of an effective public sphere. It was effective, he argued, because it generated pressure for social change (Habermas, 1989). Much of his work and his critique of contemporary society, however, focuses upon the demise or non-realization of an effective public sphere. In his ‘discourse ethics’ he argues that social norms can be deemed rational, and thus legitimate, only insofar as they are thrashed out in open arguments between all who are party to them and, furthermore, insofar as those


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing parties, by means of the exchange of reasons alone, are able to reach agreement regarding them (Habermas, 1987, 1992). But this does not happen in modern societies. To this extent, he maintains, these societies are characterized by a legitimation deficit—albeit one that is seldom recognized and has not, as yet, given rise to a full-blown legitimation crisis. Habermas (1987) situates his account of communicative rationality within a broader account of historical rationalization. Communicative rationality is, he argues, the result of societal learning processes. Furthermore, areas of social life once deemed ‘beyond argument’, particularly those pertaining to power and authority, are now open to argument and contestation. Prior to rationalization and enlightenment, political structures and laws were rooted in and legitimated by reference to religious authority and lore, which was not open to question. Notwithstanding this, however, to return to the point about public spheres, Habermas believes that the opportunity for genuine public participation in politics is shrinking. The process of rationalization is also central to what Habermas refers to as the ‘system’ part of society. In traditional societies, he observes, all aspects of society were subsumed within the lifeworld. This meant that both political and economic activities were strongly regulated by religion and tradition, which lent them a framework of meaning and morality. Integral to the process of rationalization, however, has been an uncoupling of these two forms of activity from the normative core of society, such that each has become an arena for relatively free utilitarian action, rooted in instrumentally rational calculation (‘strategic action’). As political and economic agents, in modern societies, we make a choice about what is best for us and pursue that choice in a strategic fashion. We are not, or at least need not be, bound by normative considerations or traditions. Furthermore, each of these domains, economy and polity, has been further rationalized through the emergence of communicative media peculiar to them: money in the case of the economy and rationalized political power in the case of the polity. These new media have transformed economic and political relations in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The emergence of a standardized national currency, for example, links all of the members of the nation in question much more tightly than previously in a mutually affective network and thereby gives rise to a whole range of new social dynamics. The number of people linked through a common currency is much greater, as is the strength of the link, and the ways in which people (indirectly) affect and impact upon one another are transformed. The net effect of all of this, for Habermas, is that a new form of societal integration, which he terms ‘system integration’, has emerged. The lifeworld, to reiterate, is integrated by virtue of the mutual understanding achieved between interlocuters in symbolic interaction. This is ‘social


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley integration’. System integration, by contrast, is a more impersonal matter of balance being achieved between inputs and outputs at the macrocosmic level. In the political system, for example, every citizen has a degree of power to ‘spend’ (e.g. at elections) as they wish. This constitutes a transfer of power to the state, which is then mandated to impose policies and laws upon those same citizens. Integration is achieved to the extent that the state accumulates a sufficient mandate to execute whatever policies it is required to make. Similarly in the economy, all economic actors are freed to pursue wealth and then spend it in whatever way they wish. They act, or at least can act, selfishly and without a thought for anybody else. The system is integrated to the extent that people are sufficiently motivated by the desire for wealth to supply the goods that others demand in sufficient amounts that the two sides balance.

Crisis and Old Social Movements The situation described here is akin to that famously described by Adam Smith. Each agent selfishly pursues his or her own ends without a care for ‘the system’ as a whole, and yet the ‘invisible hands’ of the market ensure some degree of (system) integration. However, like Marx, Habermas recognizes that the economic system is founded upon a fundamental conflict of interest between capitalists and workers and is subject to periodic crises. Within modern capitalist societies, he argues, the agents of the state have sought to offset these tendencies by assuming a role of economic management. However, this only displaces the crisis tendency. The state becomes subject to potential crises of economic management (i.e. ‘rationality crises’). Both economic and rationality crises are what Habermas calls ‘system crises’. System crises may be understood as a failure to ‘balance the books’, but they are lived through by agents and might mean unemployment, depressed wages and misery for some. Because of this, system crises can be converted into ‘social crises’, such as legitimation crises. The most pertinent example of this is the emergence of the labour movement during the mid-19th century. As workers were increasingly concentrated in large factories and urban areas, such that they could develop a common identity and a collective sense of their shared grievances, a labour movement began to take shape that contested the legitimacy of the status quo in capitalist societies. Workers formed unions, which allowed them to challenge unacceptable working conditions, and the broader movement generated a pressure for change at the governmental level. This involved the construction of working-class public spheres whose participants debated and contested both the norms of bourgeois society, which disadvantaged them, and broader patterns and aspects of their own lifestyles.


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing According to Marxist theory, the outcome of this should have been revolution, but Habermas notes how the labour movement was increasingly incorporated into the political structure of society. The labour movement fought for representation within the political system and gave rise to parties that were committed to defending the interests of labourers through the conventional political channels. Moreover, having started with a broad range of moral and political concerns about the organization of society and social life, labour parties and unions became increasingly narrowly focused upon securing material rewards for their members— that is, increased wages and better working conditions. A major turning point, in this respect, was the formation of the welfare state, which guaranteed workers a minimum standard of living and basic rights to welfare. This development, motivated in large part by the revolutionary threat of the workers’ movement, served to stabilize class conflict, pacifying workers and giving them an investment in ‘the system’ (see also Gough, 1979).

Colonization of the Lifeworld The formation of the welfare state has clearly had many benefits for workers, but it also generates many problems, according to Habermas. It contributes an essential element to what he terms ‘the colonisation of the lifeworld’. What he means by this is that the state now permeates ever more areas of our lives, exercising a surveillance and regulatory role. Integral to this is a process of ‘juridification’, whereby ever more areas of life are becoming subject to legal regulation, and legal regulation itself is ever more internally complex and differentiated. This results in a loss of both freedom and meaning. The cultural narratives and symbolic forms that give existential meaning and ethical direction to our lives are crushed by bureaucratic procedures, which offer no comparable vision or comfort and which simultaneously reduce our room to choose and manoeuvre. This is compounded by the ‘cultural impoverishment’ caused by an increased specialization and differentiation of the knowledge and cultural base of society. The basic social processes in which we are involved and which impinge upon our lives have become so complex and specialized that it is no longer possible for us to comprehend them fully or to weave them into a coherent narrative. Our conscious grasp upon the social world is thus both incomplete and fragmented. Furthermore, the extension of the legal apparatus and welfare state is matched by an extension and intensification of the economic system. Just as the state extends further into the lifeworld, so too does the market. Juridification is paralleled by commodification. The worlds of leisure, sport and even personal relationships, for example, are increasingly commercialized. New agencies have emerged that seek to package and sell loves and lifestyles to a consuming populace, (again) eroding traditional culture and networks. The colonization of the lifeworld thus


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley amounts to a penetration of the lifeworld by those (economic and political) systems that had become uncoupled from it, in a way that corrodes it. The result is damaging for both society, qua system, and the individuals who compose it. Related to these processes of colonization and impoverishment is a decline of the public sphere. This decline takes two forms (Habermas, 1989). First, Habermas believes that politics has ceased to address issues of truly public concern and has become a vehicle through which sectional groups pursue their own private demands and interests. ‘Truly’ political issues have become merged with economic and domestic interests. Secondly, he is concerned with the general degeneration of the level of political debate and the increased incorporation of the techniques and technologies of the advertising industry within it. Public communication by politicians, he argues, has become a glorified pubic relations exercise, and genuine public opinion is drowned in the sea of manufactured opinion generated by the pollsters and image consultants.

New Social Movements Though the picture is grim, Habermas identifies a glimmer of hope in the form of new social movements that have emerged within this colonized and culturally impoverished context: In the past decade or two, conflicts have developed in advanced Western societies that deviate in various ways from the Welfare State pattern of institutionalised conflict over distribution. They no longer flare up in domains of material reproduction; they are no longer channelled through parties and associations; and they can no longer be allayed through compensations. Rather, these new conflicts arise in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization; they are carried out in sub-institutional—or at least extraparliamentary—forms of protest; and the underlying deficits reflect a reification of communicatively structured domains of action that will not respond to the media of money and power. The issue is not primarily one of compensations that the welfare state can provide, but of defending and restoring endangered ways of life. In short, the new conflicts are not ignited by distribution problems but by questions having to do with the grammar of forms of life. (Habermas, 1987: 392)

This may make the new movements sound reactionary, and Habermas believes that some of them are. However, he is clear to distinguish between reactionary responses by traditionalists and NIMBYs (‘Not In My BackYard’) and more progressive resistance by groups that seek a rational reconstruction of the lifeworld. These latter groups do not defend traditions. They question them and, in doing so, both remoralize and repoliticize politics, simultaneously revitalizing the flagging public sphere. They generate a public debate about matters of public morality and social organization, contesting the norms by which we live our lives. And they are genuinely ‘public’, in that they stand outside of the stage show and bureaucracy of the political system. Furthermore, at the more private


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing level they institute transformations of lifestyle and identity that serve to remoralize and reinvigorate ‘everyday life’, restoring the moral and symbolic texture that is undermined by colonization. It is this latter group that Habermas is particularly focusing upon when he refers to NSMs. They demonstrate the emancipatory potential of critical rationality, rekindling the emancipatory project of the earlier workers’ movement and taking up residence in the oppositional/outsider spaces that the workers’ movement vacated when it became an institutionalized part of the bureaucratic political world. Though Habermas is not perfectly clear on the matter, I suggest that the links between colonization and the rise of NSMs are threefold in his account. First, it is the cause of the various grievances and strains that the NSMs mobilize around. That is not to say that these strains, in turn, are the sole, necessary or sufficient causes of mobilization. But they clearly are a factor. Secondly, administrative expansion thematizes (discursively) and politicizes once unquestioned and apolitical assumptions and practices by drawing them into the administrative domain. It creates questions where once there were apolitical assumptions. This is irreversible in the short term, since verbalization destroys the basis of any assumption: At every level administrative planning produces unintended unsettling and publicising effects. These effects weaken the justification potential of traditions that have been flushed out of their nature-like course of development. Once their unquestionable character has been destroyed, the stabilisation of validity claims can occur only through discourse. The stirring up of cultural affairs that are taken for granted thus furthers the politicisation of areas of life previously assigned to the private sphere. But this development signifies danger for the civil privatism that is secured informally through the structures of the public realm. (Habermas, 1988: 72)

Finally, protest is further fuelled because, having ploughed up traditions and stirred up a hornet’s nest of political issues, the administrative system proves largely unreceptive to public opinion and pressure. The public sphere, as I have said, has been largely eroded through the process of colonization, and the bureaucratic structures of the system are indifferent to communicative action and debate. Thus, the system frustrates the very same projects that it sets in motion, amplifying the intensity of these projects and their tendency to follow ‘alternative’ and ‘contentious’, that is, extra-parliamentary, routes.

From Colonization to Anti-Corporatism Can Habermas’s theory adequately account for the anti-corporate movement too? Is this movement a response to colonization of the lifeworld? On the ‘yes’ side, many of the key ‘movement intellectuals’ of anticorporatism, including Klein (2000), Hardt and Negri (2000), Monbiot (2000) and Hertz (2001), talk precisely of a ‘takeover’ of everyday life.


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley They outline the many ways in which public space has been invaded and subject to new forms of corporate regulation; the way, for example, in which town centres are being replaced by private shopping malls and every blank wall is becoming advertising space; the way in which university campuses and even courses are increasingly corporate sponsored, with the effects this has for student activity, course content and even the existence of some courses and departments; and the similar range of effects that are discernible in relation to various popular televisual and artistic publics. Klein, in particular, argues that artists (e.g. popular musicians and film makers) are increasingly being censored by retailers, who are concerned not to offend sectors of markets and potential markets. Although they do not use the term ‘colonization’, these intellectuals come very close, as the titles of their books indicate: The Silent Takeover, Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain and Empire. The image of colonization runs right through these books: Corporations, the contraptions we invented to serve us, are overthrowing us. They are seizing powers previously invested in government, and using them to distort public life to serve their own ends. (Monbiot, 2000: 4) This is the world of the Silent Takeover, the world at the dawn of a new millennium. Government’s hands are tied and we are increasingly dependent on corporations. Business is in the driving seat, corporations determine the rules of the game, and governments have become referees, enforcing rules laid down by others. (Hertz, 2001: 7) [T]he assault on choice has moved beyond predatory retail and monopolistic synergy schemes and become what can only be described as straightforward censorship: the active elimination and suppression of material. (Klein, 2000: 165)

Furthermore, these activist-writers characterize the anti-corporate movement as a movement of opposition to this ‘colonization’. Groups such as Ad-Busters, discussed by Klein for example, seek publicly to subvert the billboard and internet advertisements which, they believe, misinform and pollute public space. Similarly, Reclaim the Streets, as its name suggests, is in the business of reclaiming physical public spaces for the public. The examples are potentially manifold but the point is clear enough: reclaiming ‘everyday life’ (the lifeworld) from ‘big business’ (the system) is a key theme of the anti-corporate movement. In this respect there would seem to be a basic level of fit between Habermas’s theoretical arguments and the claims and activities of the protestors. Indeed, it is arguable that these recent movements are much more clearly attempting to ‘reclaim the lifeworld’ than are the NSMs that Habermas was focusing upon. They are mobilizing around precisely the issues that he is seeking to explain. In addition, the role these groups play in remoralizing the lifeworld and (re)generating manifold critical ‘publics’ very closely conforms to the model suggested by Habermas. This remoralization and regeneration assume many forms but it will suffice here to consider three important


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing examples. First, the many big protests at such places as Seattle and Prague constituted an effort to make international governmental agencies accountable to the people whom they affect. The operation of these agencies, and indeed also the large companies whose interests they serve, is identified and criticized on the grounds that it constitutes an unjustifiable legitimation deficit. Like both the Chartists and the bourgeois reformers referred to by Habermas (1989) in his classic study of the public sphere, the protestors are calling for the powers that influence their lives to be made accountable to them. This is clearly an effort to regenerate democracy and the public sphere, in just the fashion envisaged by Habermas in his account of the NSMs. Secondly, such projects as ‘fair trade’ schemes and boycotts of sweatshop products constitute a remoralization of everyday life and activity. The participants in such projects abandon the ‘strategic rationality’ more usual for the consumer role, which focuses the individual only upon the best means for realizing their own selfish desires, and question the ethics of consumption as it is ordinarily practised. They raise previously doxic assumptions concerning consumption to the level of discourse, contesting and questioning these assumptions. And they look through ‘the system’ to the ‘other’ (the producer) who is affected by their consumption activities, constituting themselves in a moral relationship with that other. In these respects we might say that ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ is being challenged by way of a remoralization of ‘the system’. Again this conforms to Habermas’s characterization of movements addressing the ‘moral grammar’ of their societies and claiming back their right to a morally organized society from the economic system which threatens that possibility. Thirdly, the sales of such books as Naomi Klein’s No Logo—which has been published in 18 different languages and is already a best-seller in 6 countries, including the UK—combined with the media profile that she, the other movement intellectuals and the movement itself have received within the media, all indicate the existence of a growing public debate over the power of the corporations, globalization, etc. Not everybody agrees with the anti-corporatists. Indeed, on many issues they do not agree with one another (see Crossley, 2002b). But a debate, a ‘discourse’ in Habermas’s sense of that term, has been instituted within popular culture. The corporate order is not being taken for granted. Some are questioning it and the noise they are making forces issues into the consciousness of many others. Where this will lead is difficult to predict, particularly in light of the shift of political agendas occasioned by ‘9/11’. But what has already been achieved at the level of raising public consciousness is by no means insignificant.

From Welfare Societies to Neo-Liberalism This suggests a basic ‘fit’ between Habermas’s model and the actualities of the anti-corporate movement. However, this fit is far from perfect. In


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley the first instance, Habermas’s ‘colonisation’ is primarily, though not exclusively, colonization by the state, whereas what the anti-corporate movements are protesting against, primarily, is colonization by the market and the large corporations. They do direct their critique at governments and, more particularly, international governmental organizations such as the IMF, but even in these cases the focus of the critique is upon the way in which these agencies promote the market, affording the corporations too much freedom and power. This discrepancy can be explained historically. The anti-corporatists are addressing societies and indeed a world society dominated by neo-liberal modes of economic and political governance. They are addressing a world where the ‘frontiers of the state’ have, in some (very specific) respects, been ‘rolled back’. Habermas, by contrast, was writing his thesis in the early 1980s, reflecting back upon the 1960s and 1970s. He was writing his critique at a point when the ascendancy of neo-liberalism was not yet fully visible but when the problems of ‘welfare capitalism’ were very apparent. Can this historical gap between Habermasian theory and the practice of anti-corporatism be filled? I believe that it can. To reiterate, Habermas explains new social movements as a response to greater state interventionism and the advent of the welfare state. And he explains these developments by reference to the crisis tendencies of laissez-faire capitalism and the socialist agitation they generated. Welfare capitalism was a response to the ‘socialist threat’ which emerged within the context of laissez-faire and early interventionist modes of capitalism. The history of capitalism, for Habermas, is a history of crises, of the movements spawned by those crises, and of the various political–managerial efforts that have sought to resolve those crises but have, in fact, managed only to displace them. Furthermore, his model anticipates further rationality and perhaps legitimation crises in welfare capitalism—crises that, in the UK context, came to light in the form of ‘stagflation’, the ‘winter of discontent’ and other major managerial problems of the state in the late 1970s. What Habermas did not anticipate was the rise of the New Right. He saw the new social movements as the forces inclined to meet the challenges of welfarism, overlooking the possibility of a movement committed to reversing the trend of interventionism in favour of a return to laissez-faire. Nevertheless, this development conforms to the basic pattern his work details. Just as the crises of laissez-faire and early interventionist forms of capitalism were addressed by a shift towards welfarism, so too the crises in welfarism were addressed by a shift towards neo-liberalism. A rationality crisis gave rise to a shift in the mode of governmental rationality. The anti-corporate movement, from this point of view, is a response to or manifestation of the growing crisis of neo-liberalism. In one respect the neo-liberals have addressed the problems of colonization identified by Habermas. They have attempted to reduce state interventionism in selected areas. But they have done this by increasing economic colonization, which has merely tipped the scale


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing from political to economic colonization, (again) displacing rather than resolving crisis tendencies. In this respect Habermas’s account needs updating, but remains a useful way of framing our analyses. Another difference between Habermas’s NSMs and the anti-corporate movement can also be dealt with in this way. For Habermas, the NSMs and their post-materialist concerns with the ‘grammar of forms of life’ have largely replaced labour movements and their distributional concerns. The key political bifurcation in contemporary societies has thus shifted. In the context of the anti-corporate movement, however, we find both ‘life political’ and distributional problems side by side. Furthermore, the movement involves representatives of both socialist/labour movements and the archetypal new social movements. The alliances between these groups may not be stable and they are rejoined by other groups from all corners of the political spectrum—the far Right, various nationalisms, religious groups—but there is certainly a resurgence of typically ‘old social movement’ concerns. This is not difficult to understand if we view the emergence of the anti-corporate movement as a response to changes in the mode of economic–social governance, from welfarism to neo-liberalism. Not only does neo-liberal governance allow the problem of colonization to persist, albeit in a market rather than stateled form, it reintroduces many of the traditional problems that the labour movement mobilized around. Thus we have the strains associated with both old and new social movements, and it is not surprising that we find mixtures of both within the anti-corporate movement. Again this transcends Habermas’s original argument, but his model is well suited for conceptualizing it.

First and Third World Struggles However, there is a further problem with Habermas’s argument. Like many accounts of the new social movements it is ethnocentric. It focuses upon capitalist development in the West, to the detriment of a consideration of the effects of capitalist development in the underdeveloped world, or indeed of the relationship between developments in the developed and underdeveloped worlds respectively. At one level, for example, Habermas, like the many other NSM theorists, focuses upon ‘postmaterialist’ political concerns in the West, ignoring the many material difficulties faced by the majority of the world’s population. At a deeper level, he fails fully to recognize the extent to which prosperity and stability in the First World have been achieved at the expense of greater exploitation of workers in various parts of the Third World. This is a problem with his very conception of society and specifically his failure to locate the Western societies that constitute the chief focus of his analyses within the context of a world system of economic, political and cultural exchanges. However, it is also a problem with his theory of social movements. The problems of the underdeveloped world are key


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley issues addressed by the anti-corporatists. This is partly a matter of First World activists taking Third World issues on board in the context of, for example, anti-sweatshop demonstrations and boycotts, and debt campaigns such as Jubilee 2000. However, it is also a matter of Third World activists, networks and groups themselves playing a central role in the movement, both individually, as a Third World bloc, and in concert with their First World allies and fellow campaigners. Indeed, in contrast to the stereotypical picture of richer protestors helping their poorer contemporaries to organize, teaching them how to protest and otherwise resourcing their struggles, it is widely recognized that some of the more high-profile Third World groups have had a considerable impact upon ‘the movement’, as a global phenomenon, shaping tactics and strategies as well as issues. Some (Western) protesters have argued that much of what is new about the ‘feel’ and forms of protest associated with anti-corporatism, much of what makes it distinctive as a wave of mobilization, derives directly from this considerable Third World input (Graeber, 2002). Two of the most obvious examples of high-profile Third World networks within the movement are the Mexican Zapatistas and the Brazilian landless movement, Sem Terra. The trajectory of both of these networks or movements pre-dates the anti-corporate movement by many years,1 at least if the chronology of the latter is measured by such major protest events as those in Seattle and Prague. The origins of Sem Terra, for example, can be traced to a series of meetings between Brazilian activists in 1983 and 1984, which were themselves the culmination of a period of resistance and upheaval dating back to 1979 (Stedile, 2002). The name emerged in 1984, over a decade before Seattle, and even this trailed the reality of protest and resistance by some years. Indeed, if the important impact of ‘liberation theology’ is to be taken into account, then the origins of the movement date even further back than 1979 (Stedile, 2002). Initially the focus of the movement was upon its own national locality. It is renowned for its ability to mobilize local populations into land occupation, taking back land that is rightfully, and even legally, theirs. More recently, however, the movement’s critique has become more focused upon the international arena; that is, upon debt, international (and national) neo-liberalism and the impact of the multinationals (Stedile, 2002). This has involved it in a variety of international networks and actions. It has been a central player, for example, in Via Campesina, an international network of farmers’ movements embracing many Third World countries, as well as some from the First World. It enjoyed a strongly felt presence at the important World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (Hardt, 2002). And it has been a central player, along with the Zapatistas, in People’s Global Action, a high-profile anti-corporate network responsible for many of the early calls for international days of action, whose pre-history,2 at least, can be traced to a 1996 meeting in a Zapatista-held area of Chiapas in Mexico (Graeber, 2002).


Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing Both Sem Terra and the Zapatistas are exceptional in terms of their weight and kudos within the movement. The fact that we know so much about them is testimony to the symbolic capital attached to them within the culture of Western anti-corporatism. This symbolic capital is significant in itself, however. The innovations and importance of Third World networks are being recognized within the First. Furthermore, there are many developments elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in Africa, India, East Asia and even China (see Bircham and Charlton, 2001; Starr, 2000). At the very least this demonstrates that anti-corporatism is by no means an invention or exclusive preserve of the First World, even if First World activists are often better placed to have their voices heard. And this, to reiterate, calls for a better appreciation of global society than Habermas offers. Can this problem be revolved by revising Habermas’s account? Habermas’s critique of welfare capitalism is flawed insofar as he failed to recognize the extent to which stability was achieved in the First World at the expense of great hardship in the Third. Moreover, as a consequence of this, he failed to recognize, in the Third World, a further potential source of radicalism and social movements. These are considerable omissions. However, insofar as Third World struggles are a ‘return of the repressed’ for the developed capitalist world, they do still accord with the logic of the Habermasian position. Problems in one domain, in this case the developed world, are ‘solved’ by shifting them elsewhere, in this case the underdeveloped world, but this merely displaces the problem rather than truly solving it and, as a consequence, the problem reasserts itself in the form of radical social movements. Furthermore, we can find at least one good example, in the work of Larry Ray (1993), of how the Habermasian perspective on colonization and social movements can be applied to the broader world context, successfully and to good effect.

Even Newer Social Movements? My purpose here is not simply to rescue Habermas from the challenge that anti-corporatism poses to his theory, however. My interest, rather, lies in the fact that there is a challenge, and not just to Habermas’s model of new social movements. The theorists of the NSMs, whether they referred to welfare capitalism, postindustrialism, the programmed society or postmodernism, argued that society and its constitutive struggles had moved beyond the model identified by Marx. NSMs were deemed the new challengers, replacing the working class, in a new political conjuncture. Much of this analysis still stands in my view, but the anticorporate movement poses a challenge to it both by way of its internationalism, which draws attention to the distinctly Western and national bias of NSMs theories and their conception of ‘the new society’, and because it indicates that the conjuncture has shifted again. Neoliberalism, in both its national and its international manifestations, has


Even Newer Social Movements? Nick Crossley shifted the balance and dynamics of this ‘new society’, such that the ‘new’ fracture lines of society, identified by NSM theorists, are rejoined by a return of certain older fracture lines and perhaps by some that are new again. We thus need to move beyond the problematic of the new social movements to recognize that we are in a new era again, an ‘even newer’ era. Having said this, it is important also to recognize the continuities and the value that theories of NSMs, particularly Habermas’s, can have in our attempts to understand the new conjuncture. The rise of neo-liberalism as a movement and its capacity to secure hegemony were achieved against the background of a crisis within welfare capitalism, which Habermas’s theory predicted (even if he didn’t predict the rise of neoliberalism). Furthermore, that neo-liberalism has managed only to displace the crisis tendencies elsewhere in the system, creating strains that have given rise to further movements, is entirely consistent with Habermasian theory. Anti-corporatism is a new chapter in the history of social movements that Habermas has written but it is one that follows a familiar plot line: crises generate movements and shifts of governance, which displace crises, giving rise to new movements and so on. Furthermore, and finally, Habermas’s theory is important because it allows us to engage with the moral texture of anti-corporatism and the importance of its voice, or perhaps rather of the multiple voices within it. Modernity, for Habermas, is an uneven process in which the technical rationality of ‘the system’ continually threatens to undermine the communicative rationality of ‘the lifeworld’. The anti-corporatists are the latest in a succession of social movements that have sought to redress this balance, using communicative rationality to contest the damage to human life and potentiality engendered by the expansion and dynamics of the system. They have seen through the system, that is, recognized human agents as the nodes within it, nodes who are worn down and damaged by it. And they have sought in multiple ways to make this visible to others and open to discussion in an international public sphere which, at the same time, they have constructed.

Notes 1

2

It becomes very confusing to refer to movements within movements, or ‘the movement’. This is one reason why I have suggested, elsewhere, that anticorporatism is better considered as a ‘protest field’—in Bourdieu’s sense of the term ‘field’—comprising various movements, networks, organizations, etc. and the various interactions and connections between them (Crossley, 2002b). A further meeting was held in 1997 Spain, organized primarily by the European Ya Basta network, and then again in 1998 in Geneva. It was at this final meeting that People’s Global Action was named into existence, but quite clearly much of the momentum derived from the earlier Chiapas meeting.


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Nick Crossley is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester. He has written a number of papers on social movements, and recently published a book on the subject, entitled Making Sense of Social Movements (Open University Press, 2002). His other books are: The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (Sage, 2001), Intersubjectivity (Sage, 1996) and The Politics of Subjectivity (Avebury, 1994). Address: Department of Sociology, Roscoe Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. [email: [email protected]]
