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Building counter culture: the radical praxis of social movement milieux

By Cox Laurence

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Foreword  

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.

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 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.