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The
Hardest Question: an introduction to the new politics of change
by
Tim Jordan
Hope is what you say and do.
M.Oil
A
new politics of change
The times
are always right for change: indeed, New radicalism, new hopes, new politics
of change are with us now. Neither the nostalgia of the left, those old bearers
of hope, for the times when it knew the correct line, nor the arrogant insecurity
of a right that simultaneously declares the grass roots dead while fearing
its demands, can alter the fact that new forces for change have coalesced
into a new politics. This did not begin yesterday: our roots are in civil
rights movements, anti-colonial movements, New Left and feminist movements.
And, although it has taken some time to be certain it would not evaporate,
a new politics of change is here. We might tip our hats to ideas and organisations
past but we know we are our own politics now. A new politics of change is
the only effective force for grabbing social structures and transforming them
so that the vast majority of people can one day be liberated and unexploited.
‘Now’ is always a good time to stand up and fight for your life: Storming
the Millennium tries to show that many are doing just that and tries to understand
what it all means.
What do ravers, the disabled, bisexuals, anti-roads campaigners, cyberactivists, and anti-racists have in common? And what do these six movements, all studied in this book, have in common with women struggling to redistribute society’s resources, with people saving animals, with those resisting downsizing, flexible work practices, part-timeism, redundancy, rejection and decay? And where do all of these fit with those, cited in the final chapter, who still make a good case for worrying about the word ‘socialism’? We argue that they all fit together as part of the new politics of change.
Yet these hopes, these renewed desires - backed by action - for a different world, also pose many questions. Has politics changed? Have the words, organisations, actions, signs and passions that have fuelled and informed the many desires to remake our world changed? And if they have changed, as indicated by, for example, the end of the cold war, a resurgence of non-violent direct action, the revision of political history, then we are left with more hard questions. If relief comes from realising that radical, grass-roots social action is more vibrant than ever, it is immediately accompanied by questions about the meaning of this action. Take the word ‘radical’ itself. Once it might have been assumed that talking about radical politics meant talking about ‘harder’ left politics, perhaps the extra-parliamentary or anarchist left, but in the last twenty years most radical change in Western societies has been driven by the right. The left, paradoxically, has found itself defending and conserving gains it once thought untouchable. Then, when we had only just become used to ‘radical’ being the ‘right’, the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States stood together in 1997 and declared themselves for the ‘radical centre’. It is no longer clear at all what being a radical means.
This is the hardest question that new politics poses. Not, ‘is there radical politics?’, but, ‘what would it mean to storm the millennium?’ Here is the challenge of new politics in its transformatory sense: how to comprehend that the field of radical, emancipatory political action has been torn apart and remade in the last thirty years. The emphasis of this collection is not on the emergence of ‘social movements’, as if social movements have not always dotted the political landscape from the Levellers and Diggers in the sixteenth century to the Chiapas in the late twentieth, but on a configuration of the political field that is different from the one that dominated the post-Second World War period. This is not a total break. A reinvigorated non-violent direct action movement carries with it a history that reaches back at least to many post-war anti-colonial struggles and to the United States civil rights movement, both of the 1950s. In addition, the feminist movement that began in the 1960s, second wave feminism, and the emergence of the New Left in the late 1950s are crucial to the development of new politics. The fracturing of a certain way of conducting politics began with these four struggles. The old way of negotiating political solutions had become dominant after World War Two and had at its heart negotiations between capital and labour. The Keynesian (corporate) state of the post-Second World War period in the overdeveloped nations, ensured that politics was ordered between these two great antagonists: capital and labour. This arrangement was fought for not only by liberal capitalists such as Keynes and his followers, but also by labour movements bargaining for higher wages and better conditions. This is no doubt something of a caricature, with enough complexities to be argued over in great detail, but it is also accurate enough to contain the typical political conflicts that new politics has disturbed.1
What followed the 1960s and 1970s was not only the intensification of the four political movements already mentioned, but also a prolonged crisis and restructuring of socio-economies on a global scale that is only now beginning to look as if it may have settled into recurring patterns. From the oil shocks of the 1970s, when hyper-inflation and economic chaos beckoned the West, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, world-wide human society changed. Always at work, within many other changes, were changes within the field of radical politics. A different politics should not be read solely as the result (or epiphenomena) of a great capitalist restructuring, even though that may be partly true, but also as a cause of change. Tianamen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union posed almost unanswerable questions to Marxist radicals who have consistently sought either to lead new political movements or to integrate them within what they hoped would be a newly radicalised labour movement. As argued in many places the Marxist, or more broadly the class or labour-centred, paradigm for radical politics has been broken.2 Settled ways of understanding and negotiating politics have changed not only between left and right, but within left and right.
The result of these changes has been the emergence of a new paradigm of radical politics which this collection attempts to outline and develop. Looking over our shoulder to the struggles of the 1950s we note that the class warriors that were refusing to bury all politics except the negotiations between capital and labour, and so we can see where this new paradigm began. We can see prophets such as Frantz Fanon or Simone de Beauvoir, who couldn’t know that their work would ultimately help to undermine a framework for politics which they had helped establish. It is only now that we can for certain, see a new paradigm for liberation and can feel, as much as know, that a new politics of change is here. Storming the Millennium sets out to chronicle this new politics, its practices and its theories, and to contribute to it by helping to explore its nature. However, even if we know that this politics has arrived, we are less certain what it means. We are less certain what it is to liberate and be liberated. The hardest question new politics poses is not if it exists or if it will succeed or fail, but what it means. Here, just after the dawn of a new paradigm of radical political emancipation, we are drawing breath to ask this hardest question and to name the new politics of change.
The
field of new political thought
No thought
exists in a vacuum, it is always connected to other ideas and to concrete
manifestations in organisations and books, journals and libraries. The thoughts
that have just been outlined, that inform this collection, exist within a
three-fold field of intellectual endeavour and a wider field of ongoing political
activism. The field of political activism is indicated by the empirical accounts
of movements contained in chapters two to six, in the following chapters the
intellectual context will be briefly outlined. Intellectual efforts have been
underway for some time to come to grips with new politics, though it is often
not called this, and these efforts can be characterised in three ways: rethinking
politics and difference, rethinking collective action and new social movements,
and historical studies. These three areas can be seen as separate but interrelated
and consist of two mainly theoretical and one mainly empirical approach that,
taken together, constitute studies of new politics. For clarity and convenience
they will be treated in turn.3
Politics
and difference
A number
of intellectuals have discussed questions of difference and its effects on
radical liberatory politics. As the assumption, if never the actuality, of
a single framework within which different radical politics would be reconciled
faded, some theorists became devoted to working out the consequences of such
a change. Stuart Hall notes that this poses ‘a different kind of political
problem from the one that you would have if you imagined it [oppression] all
came from one place, because if it all comes from one place then your politics
is to blast that one place out of existence and everything else will change.’4
A number of thinkers have approached this different kind of problem. Each
of these people has tried to develop an understanding of what politics means
when a unified framework is not assumed. Three distinct areas of work have
emerged, creating a connected though uncoordinated set of ideas. These are:
political theories, post-structural theories and theories of a new democracy.
Of course, the thinkers do not work in isolation from each other or from activism,
but for the purposes of a brief summary they can be categorised in this way.
Political theories
A number of theorists have confronted classical political theory with the problem of a multiplicity of politics. Most prominent here have been Iris Marion Young and William Connolly. Young’s work has diligently explored the relationship between injustice and oppression, without assuming that either of these terms is singular.5 Connolly’s work is littered with the history of political theory: even (or perhaps especially) Augustine, Bishop of Hippo plays a role. Again, there is scrupulous attention to questions of good and evil and to the negotiation of political paradox, within a framework that takes the problem of difference as a foundation.6 In addition to these two, numerous other intellectuals have attempted to reinterpret political theory in relation to radical politics on the assumption that difference is a constitutive element.7
Post-structural
Theories
From another
direction, a number of thinkers have developed a politics of difference from
within the intellectual movement that can broadly be labelled post-structuralist,
including the related set of debates called postmodernism. Many could be mentioned
in this context but the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the debates around
postmodern feminism are emblematic. Deleuze and Guattari have elaborated an
explicitly political theory of difference, in which the opposition between
the one and the many is replaced with the assumption that everything is multiple.
Highly allusive and elusive, intoxicated by language but also scrupulously
realising all the consequences of beginning from the multiple, their theories
make clear what a radical politics of difference might be.8 The
debate around the meaning of postmodernism within feminism provides a rethinking
within one movement of the meaning of difference for political change. Here
the more abstract forms of thought that have often been generated from within
post-structuralism and postmodernism are subject to an inquisition for their
political meaning in the context of the subordination of women.9
Numerous other texts, thinkers and ideas could be introduced, for example
the debate over the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work to feminism would
provide another avenue for this more general discussion.10
Theories as a New Democracy
Finally, there is the debate around radical democracy. Undoubtedly the seminal work is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s, both together and separately.11 Here the premise that the social and the political are fields that can never be closed or totalised within one understanding is related to the necessity of radicalising democracy. The shifts between political movements that are particular or specific, but that come to believe they are universal and so re-recognise their particularity, are understood as a field of politics that must be guaranteed by a radical democracy. The opportunity for all movements to participate in the political, and so the opportunity for all movements to realise their claims, is secured by new forms of democracy. These claims make democracy into something like the guarantor that the idea of difference is essential to any new form of politics.12
The various strands of thought that take up difference as a central problem in rethinking the nature of politics tend to coalesce around re-conceptualisations of democracy and/or around developing the political consequences of post-structural and postmodern thought. Ideas that begin from a basis in classical political theory tend towards analyses of democracy, and Laclau and Mouffe’s work relies heavily upon analyses from the post-structural tradition. Clear conclusions from this developing tradition of thought are not available, which is one reason why it continues to deserve attention. However social and political theory, constituted at fundamental levels around concepts of difference and radicalised notions of democracy, are one result from this theoretical work. The consequences of new politics are, on the one hand, a range of theoretical resources with which the meaning of particular movements can be explored and, on the other, some admittedly abstract ideas about the nature of a field of politics within which no one movement or ideology is dominant or can encompass all other movements.
New
Social Movements
Another
major area of work consists of theories of new politics developed out of ongoing
empirical analyses of new social movements. Rather than beginning with difficult
and abstract, though important, theoretical questions this strand engages
with the movements that have appeared, studies them empirically and tries
to develop relevant concepts. In this context studies of anti-nuclear movements,
of Solidarity in Poland, of youth movements in Italy and more have been developed.13
Two key areas of this work have emerged: new politics as middle class radicalism
and new understandings of collective action.
Middle-class
Radicalism
One of
these areas has been around the influence which members of the middle class
have on new political movements. It has been argued that most movements have
a proportion of members who, being middle class, have significant financial
and intellectual resources to bring to politics. New political movements are
here re-interpreted within a class framework and so are de-radicalised when
they are understood as attempts by the middle class to attain its goals irrespective
of the effect on others. A number of theorists, in particular Eder and Inglehart,
have developed general theories of new movements which emphasise middle class
radicalism.14 Undoubtedly the middle class and the resources its
members command have been important to a number of new political movements.
Newspaper reports often note, in a tone of hurt surprise, that protests are
created not only by anarchist outcasts but by respectable professionals as
well. However the reduction of new politics to middle class radicalism seems
both an attempt to rescue class as the dominant framework for understanding
political action and a narrow interpretation of social movements. The breadth
and commitment of new political movements, and the importance of a new paradigm
of politics, seem simply too strong to be reduced to or dismissed as middle
class.15 This does not mean that much of this work is invalid,
only that its strongest claim (that new politics is solely about middle-class
radicalism) seems unsupportable.
Collective
Action
The second
area of work has been to develop theories of collective action that see new
political movements not as single actors on a new political stage but as diverse
networks of individuals, organisations and ideologies. These theories develop
plural understandings of social movements by analysing the ways individuals
merge their single actions into collective action. This approach has generated
fascinating and complex theoretical structures that, by taking the actions
which movements themselves generate as the starting point, do not reduce new
politics to existing political or sociological theories. The work of Alain
Touraine, both empirically and theoretically, opened a path here that Alberto
Melucci has particularly developed.16 Other work in this area has
come from a number of sources, perhaps most notably Michel Maffesoli’s development
of a theory of ‘tribes’ within a polycultural politics and Barry Barnes’s
theory of collective action as the fundamental structuring force in society.17
The common theme is the development of perspectives that begin with
actions which members of movements take and which they then refuse to reify
as collective action. Rather, actions and individuals exist in networks that
spread throughout society, but may not be easily visible. Spectacular protests
and mobilisations here become the public side of the commitments which new
politics’ activists are giving to dissident ways of life. In this way reductive
understandings of new politics are avoided, as are over-enthusiastic readings
which only seem to notice sensational actions and which ignore the social
networks that make such actions possible.
Historical
studies
The final
major area of work on new politics is the generation of empirical studies
of new politics. The chronicling, recording and archiving of new social movements
is important for the role it plays in establishing the traditions of movements
that often present themselves as entirely new. This work acts as a collective
memory allowing, for example, Outrage activists to know what the Stonewall
riots meant. Spectacular events that have a powerful grip on the imagination
are here placed within historical contexts. The clearest example of this is
a tendency among some theorists to see new politics as the result of the events
of 1968 and, even more narrowly, the events in France of May 1968. By establishing
connections to anti-colonial or civil rights struggles of the 1950s, it is
possible to grasp exactly what is changing, and when it changed. Exemplary
here is George McKay’s study of British resistance and protest since the 1960s.
His work makes particularly clear the importance of post-1960s festivals to
ongoing radical protest.18 Apart from McKay there seems to be no
single author or tradition that is dominant, simply an ongoing accumulation
of studies.19
The three key areas that have been outlined do not, of course, constitute the only contributors to this new political paradigm. Theories and organisations which have always been plural and which have refused to reduce radical politics to class politics need particular mention. Anarchism especially has been a major influence on much new politics.20 Anarchism’s long and honourable resistance to the more totalitarian tendencies of Leninism and some anarchists’ commitment to a politics that has many centres, only one of which is the labour movement, has provided both models and inspiration for new political activists. Along with these living traditions that have flowed into new politics, the three areas of difference and political theory, new social movement studies and histories of political movements have convincingly established that a new paradigm of politics has emerged and has provided first explorations of what might constitute that paradigm. This collection takes these developments forward, not by focusing specifically on these contributors but by developing case studies and theoretical conclusions that assist in our understandings of this new politics.
The
Book’s contents
Whatever
anyone believes the ‘real nature’ of new politics is, the fact that liberatory
politics has undergone a transformation in the last thirty years is nearly
irresistible. Of course not everyone will agree, but leaving these people
aside, to focus on developing new politics seems undoubtedly the right step.
If the majority who have moved into new political forms, even unthinkingly,
must continually fight for the legitimacy of their political paradigm, then
they will never develop new politics but will remain prisoners of the past.
There is value in further discussion and confrontation with the class-centred
paradigm of radical liberatory politics, but this collection attempts to put
any such discussion, for example the one with the editors of Soundings in
chapter twelve, within a framework that centres on the meaning of new politics
(and not the meaning of new politics for socialism). Further, this volume
does not try to summarise the work, described in the previous section, that
has helped to establish the intellectual context of new politics. The areas
mentioned all appear in the following chapters, but there are no explicit
attempts to, for example, summarise new social movement studies or define
the current state of political theories of difference. Storming the Millennium
aims to develop new politics by engaging directly with current movements and
by elaborating theories in relation to specific questions. The aim is to build
directly on top of present understandings of new politics and to outline the
current situation, putting aside the interesting but long and complex task
of defining how this situation came about. Storming the Millennium does this
with two interrelated parts: accounts of new movements and reflections on
new movements. Part one offers five case studies of five new political movements.
Part two takes up a number of general reflections on the meaning of new politics.
New
political movements
In relation
to movements we try to see how some of them have worked and what they have
fought for. As reflections of new politics, the movements are a disparate
group: ravers against repressive legislation, the United Kingdom disability
movement; campaigns to turn society away from cars; the bisexual movement;
and United States Internet civil rights activists. In Part 1 we will find
party-goers whose distinctive style of celebration - the techno-based, ecstasy-driven
rave - has been criminalised and attacked by the state, alongside a history
of the increasing dominance of roads in London and the current tactics of
direct action to prevent more roads being built. While ravers offer a familiar
issue (protest against repressive legislation), they are not typical actors
in radical politics (who could have foreseen a government that would name
and criminalise a style of music--techno--and so recognise and attempt to
repress a carnivalesque politics of pleasure and freedom?), and while ecological
and anti-roads campaigners seem familiar political actors, the tactics and
actions they have developed mark them as a new phase in the history of non-violent
direct action. Similar to ravers, the disabled and bisexuals appear as part
of new political movements, while the subject of Internet activists’ concerns,
the Internet, has only existed since the early 1970s. Examining these five
movements does not, however, lead to an easy definition of ‘new politics’
because difference as well as sameness can be found. The analysis of Internet
activists leads to an ambiguity in that this movement is simultaneously arguing
for grassroots or user interests but is also participating in the development
of a new power elite. Such a combination need not be surprising, as J
lites sometimes develop social patterns that then become part of mass society.
For example, many forms of consumption now taken for granted by most people
in the over-developed countries were developed in the nineteenth century by
the aristocracy and upper classes. However such a comparison raises questions
about the meaning of Internet activism and its significance to new politics.
Ravers might also be thought of as having been forcibly politicised rather
than engaging in politics. If the UK government had simply left ravers to
develop their pleasures, would any recognisable politics ever have emerged?
Finally, if all five are taken together, the obvious question might not be:
what are the similarities and differences?, but: are there any similarities?
That last question might lead to a common (mis)understanding of new politics. If the movements that make up new politics reflect a series of separate, disconnected and different concerns, then the only unity in the field of new politics is that it is single-issue politics. The broad understanding of new politics would then be very simple: radical politics would consist of separate issues, each with its associated political actors, and no further general theory would be needed. The simple response is that each of these politics affects everyone because they all concern not solely the disabled, bisexuals or Internet users, but everyone because we are all abled, all have sexualities and all communicate. The question is not that new political movements are all single- issue movements, usually taken to mean relevant only to a minority, but that they all address universal issues. Here questions arise that are explored in Part 2, where the broader implications of new political or social movements are examined.
Reflections
on meaning
Part 2
begins by extending the range of movements looked at through a case study
of anti-racist politics in the context of a community’s response to racist
murders. The implications of the organisation and negotiation of political
identities such as black or Asian clearly has a broad significance beyond
its importance to the particular struggle described by Sanjay Sharma and Shirin
Housee. An interview with Nancy Fraser follows that explores the relationship
between a politics of recognition or identity and a politics of redistribution.
Fraser stresses the need to explore the distribution of material resources
in addition to maintaining the gains of a general cultural politics that focuses
on the generation of different political identities. Tim Jordan explores one
of the questions posed by new politics concerning how we understand a political
field in which a number of different but universal politics co-exist. Disability
and sexuality are universals because we all have relationships based upon
our varying abilities and sexuality. Tim takes up the problem of ‘too many
universals’ and explores new definitions of liberation and exploitation that
might help towards an understanding of new politics. The question of social
policy in relation to new politics, of what demands on the state are relevant
to new political movements, is a field too rarely explored. Tony Fitzpatrick
begins to address this problem by examining the challenge which local, autonomous,
wealth-creating intiatives (such as LET Schemes and Cedit Unions) pose for
traditional notions of welfare promoted, historically, by the left. Adam Lent
looks more closely at the disputes within new politics, identifying a three-way
division that has dogged campaigns for change throughout history and which,
he argues, current movements will have difficulty avoiding. Storming the Millennium
closes with an interview with the editors of a journal called Soundings, recently
founded to develop the legacy of the left and liberatory politics. Stuart
Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin are long-standing activists and outstanding
intellectuals and they explore how they see new politics. They discuss what
is ‘new’ about new social movements and analyse the nature of activism, relations
between intellectuals and activists within movements, what currency ‘socialism’
has or should have and the difficulties facing new political movements.
New politics, in all its contradictory and glorious guises, can be found in these pages. Broad theoretical pictures are painted and specific empirical analyses are established. All of these contribute to the developing field of new politics. If radical forms of liberation are to survive the collapse of an old way of doing politics, then a new way of doing politics has to be recognised, explored and developed. Ways of being political that previously seemed of little importance now hold central lessons.
It now seems naV ve to hope for a single cataclysmic struggle that will finally rid the world of exploitation. But hope has now appeared for many cataclysms, each of which will, in its own way, help to re-order the social relations that affect us all. Perhaps these several cataclysms will be less dramatic than the machismo of storming the barricades, and perhaps, even taken together, they won’t constitute an entirely emancipated world, and perhaps there is no one utopia, only many utopias. But the time to change the world is now: it always will be, and the radicalism of the new millennium is in your hands.
Notes
1. But not such a caricature as to be unsupported by many analyses. See M. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age Volume 1, Blackwell, Oxford 1996; S. Hall and M. Jaques (eds), New Times: the changing face of politics in the 1990s, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1989; D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford 1989.
2. See J. Pakulski, ‘Social Movements and Class: the decline of the Marxist paradigm’, in L. Maheu (ed) Social Movements and Social Classes, Sage, London 1995, pp55-86; E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time , Verso, London 1990; T. Jordan, Reinventing Revolution: value and difference in new social movements and the left. Aldershot, Avebury 1994.
3. Of course the following summary cannot hope to be comprehensive, nor does it imply approval of those discussed.
4. Stuart Hall in chapter 12, brackets added.
5. I.M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1990.
6. W. Connolly, Identity\Difference: democratic negotiations of political paradox, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991.
7. See, for example, contributions in J.Squires (ed) Principled Positions: postmodernism and the rediscovery of value, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1993 and M. Perryman (ed) Altered States: postmodernism, politics, culture, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1994.
8. G. Deleuze, and F.Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Viking, New York City 1972; A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, Athelone Press, London 1982. See T. Jordan, ‘Collective Bodies: raving and the politics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’, Body and Society, 1 (1), 1995, pp125-44 for an analysis of the political consequences of Deleuze and Guattari’s commitment to difference.
9. There are too many texts to name here; the seminal beginning point is L. Nicholson, (ed) Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge, London 1990.
10. L. McNay (ed) Foucault and Feminism, Polity, Cambridge 1992; C. Ramazanoglu (ed), Up Against Foucault, Routledge, London 1993
11. E. Laclau, and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: towards a radical democratic politics, Verso, London 1985; E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Verso, London 1990; E. Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London 1996; C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, Verso, London 1993.
12. Jean-Francois Lyotard develops similar conclusions from within one of the most influential analyses of postmodernism. He argues that the incommensurability of different language games means that the only common political principle that can be justified within postmodernity is the right to participate in politics, and democracy appears to be the only clear means of ensuring that right. See T. Jordan, ‘The Philosophical Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25(3), 1995, pp267-85.
13. The best introduction is M. Diani, ‘The Concept of Social Movements’, Sociological Review, 40(1), 1992, pp1-25 or L. Maheu, (ed) op.cit..
14. K. Eder, ‘Does Social Class Matter in the Study of Social Movements?: a theory of middle class radicalism’, in L. Maheu, op.cit., pp55-86; R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1977.
15. See especially J. Pakulski, op.cit. and any case study of a movement, including the case studies in this volume, for evidence of greater political significance than simply middle-class demands.
16. A. Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: an analysis of social movements, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981; A. Touraine, F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus, and M.Wieviorka, Anti-nuclear Protest: the opposition to nuclear energy in France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983; A. Touraine, F. Dubet, M. Wieviorka, and J. Strzlecki, Solidarity: Poland 1980-1981, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983; A. Melucci, Challenging Codes: collective action in the information age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996; The Playing Self: person and meaning in the planetary society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996. See also L. Maheu (ed), op.cit.
17. M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society, Sage, London 1996, B. Barnes, The Elements of Social Theory, UCL Press, London 1995.
18. G. McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties, Verso, London 1996.
19. For example, see P. Bagguley, ‘Protest, Power and Poverty: a case study of the anti-poll tax movement’, Sociological Review, 43(4), 1995, pp693-719 or S.Evans, Personal Politics: the roots of women’s liberation in the civil rights movement and the new left, Vintage, New YorkCity, New York 1980.
20. For example, see G.McKay, op.cit., chapter 3.