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Limitations of New
LORNA WEIR
The term "new social movements" (NSMs) entered the lexicon of social theory during the 1980s. At the most obvious level, "new social movements" de- signates the broad range of contemporary social movements,including environmental, peace, feminist, ethnic, anti-racistand national minority organizing. These movements arethought to be defined by an orientation to identity and cul-tural politics rather than to state and class politics. NSMs have generally been characterized as anti-bureaucratic move-ments which engage in the defence of, and are located in,civil society. Most commentators describe NSMs as havinga loose, informal organizational structure and a membershiprecruited mainly from the new middle class. Yet "new socialmovements" signifies far more than a list, and the discussionabout their defining characteristics has become one of themajor contemporary debates in critical and socialist theory- a largely Western European and American discussion which has received limited currency in English Canadianintellectual circles, although somewhat more in Quebec.
It is not my intention to undermine all the political claims put forward by NSM discourse, but simply to question theopposition it has constructed between "new" and "old" so-cial movements, to dispute the forms of argument whichhave produced such trite binarisms, and to contest the result-ing fictive historical sequences. The critique is aimed againstthe straw figures which NSM theorists have fashioned with respect to both socialist and social movement history. NSMdiscourse does seem to me correct in its general claim that Studies in Political Economy 40, Spring 1993 Studies in Political Economy the participation of a plurality of political actors is necessaryto effect fundamental social change, that no one source ofpower/domination unifies all forms of subordination, that no one political party can represent all social interests. Norwould I argue against the proposition that it is preferablefor critical and socialist theorists to conceive of civil societyas a terrain to be democratized, rather than to be abolished.
However, the present assumption in much NSM discoursethat to write/speak of social class is an automatic sign oforthodoxy and reductionism is a proposition which oughtto be challenged.
The interpretation of social movements would be assisted by terminology which did not give rise to systemic mis-understandings of these movements. Most obviously, manypopular movements are as old as socialism. The constructionof existing popular movements as new also leads to an analysisthat minimizes or ignores their histories prior to World WarII, and results in severe interpretive problems since the or-ganizational form of most contemporary Western social move-ments is first found in the late eighteenth/early nineteenthcenturies.
clusters/cycles interspersed with periods of dormancy. It ispossible to adduce common structural features of the currentcycle, but in order to claim these as "new" the argumentmust become historical, longitudinal and comparative. In simply asserting the novelty of contemporary social move-ments without theorists engage in an invalid logic and seriously underes-timate the complexity of social movement history. NSMdiscourse has also failed to acknowledge the role of socialmovements in the history of socialism: a new and suddenchallenge to socialism of the postwar period they are not.
The present text, however, will not maintain that the last two centuries have been a period of seamless continuity insocial movements; there may well exist aspects of contem-porary social movements that have not characterized pre-vious movements or movement cycles, particularly in con-sequence of the availability of welfare state funding, andthe greater role of social movement organizations in themanagement of local initiatives. The impact of the mass Weir/Social Movements media on social movement practices, both symbolic and or-ganizational, may well have created qualitative differences.!However, for new social movement theorists to establishthe novelty of contemporary social movements in contrastto nineteenth and earlier twentieth century social movements,it would be necessary to engage in detailed comparative analysis of individual movements to reveal common, newpatterns.
Somewhat surprisingly, NSM theorists have not been overly concerned about providing detailed studies of social move-ments, either past or present. In this regard, Barbara Epsteinhas remarked that: the intellectual purpose of their debates has less to do with themovements themselves than with Marxism. the New SocialMovement theorists have produced little in the way of concretestudies of the movements to which they refer in the course oftheoretical debate. The absence of a vital intellectual connectionto the new social movements, the fact these theorists understandthemselves as developing theory more about than for the move-ments, leaves New Social Movement theory open to blind spotsabout these movements, and gives it, overall, a certain academiccast2 Another indication of the divergence between the prac- tical perspective of existing social movements and NSMdiscourse can be found in the tendency of the latter to ignorethe historical self-understanding of the movements them- selves. Many contemporary movements such as feminism,anti-racism and gay liberation make legitimacy claims precise-lyon the basis of their historical continuity. Documentationdemonstrates that this perception constitutes more than amyth of origins. That such a disjuncture should exist, andthat NSM theorists should demonstrate no awareness of it,constitutes a telling instance of the "absence of a vital in-tellectual connection to the new social movements" alludedto by Epstein, a lack of connection visible to Epstein asthe result of her dual positioning as a peace movement ac-tivist and an academic.
of Novelty Texts dealing with new social movements customarily provide lists of the movements and Studies in Political Economy often identify subtypes. Carl Boggs distinguishes five prin-cipal types: "urban social struggles, the environment or ecol-ogy movement, women's and gay liberation, the peace move-ment, and cultural revolt linked primarily to student andyouth activism/'J In their well-known book, Hegemony Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe num- ber the following (these being based on "new forms of socialconflict") as new social movements: the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, nationaland sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggleswaged by marginalized layers of the population, the anti-nuclearmovement, the atypical forms of social struggle in countries onthe capitalist periphery .4 Noting that "new social movements" seems an "unsatisfac-tory" term, Laclau and Mouffe specify the meaning of "new"for their purposes: "The common denominator of all of themwould be their differentiation from workers' struggles, con-sidered as 'class' struggles, together with an expansion ofsocial conflict."s In one passage, they justify use of "new"with reference to women's and ethnic struggles on the groundsthat there has been a "radicalization" of these movements inthe contemporary period, although what this might consistof receives no further elaboration.s Jiirgen Habermas iden-tifies the following, among others, as new social movementsin the Federal Republic of Germany: anti-nuclear and en-vironmental struggles, the peace movement, citizen's action,social minorities such as lesbians and gay men, tax protestand the feminist movement." Similar series of movementsare enumerated in other texts.8 Scanning these lists one might have flickering doubts about calling many of the movements "new," for a consid-erable portion of them were in existence, continuously ordiscontinuously, long prior to the end of World War II.
Canadians, by way of example, have a long familiarity withnational and ethnic protest movements in the shape of opposi-tional formations among the Quebecois and minority Fran-cophones. Sexual minorities in Europe founded research andadvocacy groups in the last years of the nineteenth century, although one might argue that they did not comprise a social Weir/Social Movements movement until the mass mobilizations of sex reform groupsduring the 1920s and 1930s.9 Urban social struggles suchas the tenants' movement existed during the first years ofthe twentieth century in the United States.l? and it wouldbe a matter of astonishing ignorance for anyone to claimthat anti-racist movements did not predate the Americancivil rights movement.U The peace movement took formduring World War I, with at least some groups such as theWomen's International League for Peace and Freedom con-tinuing after the War. Historians of nineteenth and early twentieth century women's movements have given us a pictureof national movements mobilizing around a much wider rangeof issues than suffrage and having a more diverse class com- position than previously recognized.R The NSM literature accounts for social movement novelty in a number of ways, commonly with reference to bureau-cratization of the welfare state. Thus, by way of example,Joachim Hirsch holds that NSMs have an anti-bureaucraticethos countering the "security state" of the postwar period,security in the double sense of welfare and surveillance.USimilarly, Claus Offe analyses NSMs as a mobilization againstbureaucratic autonomy and for decentralization/self-deter-mination. Offe contrasts the "old paradigm" of the imme-diate postwar period with the "new paradigm" of contem-porary social movements, calling particular attention to dif-ferences in political values. The values of the "old par-adigm" focused on "freedom and security of private con-sumption and material progress," that of the new on "per-sonal autonomy and identity as opposed to centralized con-trol"; organizational values of the old paradigm assisted "for-mal organization, large scale representative association," withthe new valuing "informality, spontaneity, low degrees of hori-zontal and vertical differentiation.t'H Laclau and Mouffe explain new social movementstf the combined result of liberal-democratic discourse and reac-tion to three postwar social processes: "the commodification, bureaucratization and increasing homogenization of sociallife"l6 through the growth of consumer capitalism and the welfare state. Karl-Werner Brand queries the suitability ofcalling contemporary social movements "new," noting that Studies in Political Economy both contemporary and historic social movements have beenconstituted rationalization.I? But the question would, he acknowledges,require careful historical scholarship, and he quickly jumpsto the postwar conditions informing "new protest move-ments," stating that therein may novelty be found. Brand givesparticular weight to the contradictory in the postwar decades, of living conditions.lf regards contemporary social movements as reacting to state action and capitalist modernization processes that give riseto the growing differentials of society, and the increased autonomyof the different systems which constitute it, and lead to "pure"movements which raise the problem of the control of collectiveresources (nature, the body, interpersonal relations) in directlycultural terms.ts Habermas regards new social movements as generated inconflicts "at the seam between system and life-world."20The movements defend collective identities against the "ra-tionalization of everyday life," and attempt to protect thelife-world and communal infrastructure from further coloniza-tion by "steering mechanisms" - money and state admin- istrative power.21 Thus, common themes in the literatureexplaining the rise of NSMs are: 1) material and status frus-tration generated by expectations which the welfare statehas been incapable of fulfilling; 2) the politicization of every-day life through interventions of welfare state/capitalist mod-ernization; 3) the generation of new values resisting the institutional forces of instrumental reason.
Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein's Antisystemic Move- ments has a degree of historical analysis lacking in otherNSM texts.22 The authors contrast NSMs with nineteenthand early twentieth century movements. These latter, theyargue, were of two types - national struggles for ethnocul- tural self-determination and social movements reactive to proletarianization - but both types focused on capturing the state. They detail the new organizational movements during the post-1848 period, but argue that the Weir/Social Movements movements of the post-1960 period are different in the senseof not being in focus, tending, localism,23 and having an anti-bureaucratic ethos.24 The comparative, historical analysis of Antisystemic Move- ments can only be welcomed, but the inaccurate reductionof nineteenth and early twentieth century movements to two subtypes oversimplifies and overdraws the contrast between movements before and after 1960. The international socialmovement cycle of 1880 to 1930 contained many move-ments not conforming to Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein'snational or social types - for example, the Woman Move- ment/feminism, social purity, sex reform, the birth controlmovement, youth movements - and these movements, not mentioned in Antisystemic Movements, narrow the contrastbetween NSMs and earlier social movements. None of these,for instance, are statist movements. Moreover, the tensions between the old Left, treated by the authors as the legacy of older social movements, and the new Left, the voice ofNSMs, had been previously enacted in struggles betweensocial movements and socialist/social democratic parties inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again, thisis not to hold that nothing has changed - cratic critique of some contemporary social movements doesseem uncharacteristic of the 1880-1930 cycle - to maintain that the history of social movements is complexand generalizations about periodization require more carefuland rigorous methods, argument and evidence.
Among NSM theorists, Jean Cohen has demonstrated the most hesitation as to whether contemporary movements shouldbe qualified as new: Yet whether there really is something significantly new aboutthese movements and what the theoretical or political impactof the innovations are, remains unclear. Indeed, there is littleagreement among theorists in the field as to just what a move- ment is, what would qualify theoretically as a new type of move-ment, and what the meaning of social movement as distinctfrom political party or interest group might be.2S [emphasis inoriginal] Studies in Political Economy She acknowledges that "old patterns of collective actioncertainly continue to exist,"26 and states her own preferencefor speaking of "new identity within contemporary socialmovements'S? rather than "new social movements." Havingmade these qualifications, Cohen goes on to make the moremodest claim that at least some identities within contem-porary movements are new,28 and that the movements pos-sess an overall "self-limiting" character in eschewing the struggle for total revolution and defending the autonomyof a reformed civil society.29 The carefulness of her ex- position diverges in happy ways from that of most NSMdiscourse. However, it can be objected that some new iden-tities are formed within all social movement cycles, and itremains to be shown in what ways subjectivities, individualand collective, formed by contemporary social movementsare distinctively different from those of older movements.
Secondly, most social movements of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries were self-limiting in Cohen's sense, anobvious point when one thinks for a moment of the anti-slavery, women's or birth control movements rather thanof the socialist/social democratic parties that form the basisof Cohen's comparison.
These various authors share a common logic of argument: 1) a reduction of pre-World War II social movements to worker's movements and vanguardist/social democratic par-ties; 2) a development of empirical generalizations contrast- . ing pre-World War II social movements with postwar NSMs - a set of binary oppositions; 3) explanations of the resultingcontrast between pre-World War II and postwar social move-ments by social structural changes characterizing Western European and North American states of the postwar era.
The first and second parts of the argument permit the char-acterization of contemporary social movements as histori-cally novel and ascribe to them a discrete set of social char-acteristics; the third part provides an explanation of thenovelty.
Each move in this argument is dubious, but my particular concern here is with the third step. In this last step con-temporary social movements are derived from structural chan-ges of the postwar/postfordist/postindustrial period through Weir/Social Movements the mediation of mystical connectives; the purportedly ag-gregate characteristics of contemporary social movements,such as identity and cultural politics, are mysteriously linkedto particular tautological: social movements are new by definition sincethe historical period is new. Little empirical or analyticalinvestigation joins the structural level of argument, regard-ing a new historicity, with the abstract characterization the processes thought to be typical of contemporary socialmovements.
This approach to theoretical argument creates an impass- able breach between theory and empirical phenomena, be-tween system and process and between extra-local and localsocial relations. If the historical period is new, then, the logic runs, so must be the historicity of its forms of socialorganization, including social movements. Yet, as I will laterargue, historical evidence indicates some continuities in the symbolic and organizational forms of social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is really newto the contemporary period is the fact that the workers'movement is simply no longer the organizationally dominantsocial movement. NSM discourse reflects the trauma of thisdiscovery; hence its engagement with the figure of orthodoxMarxism and its marked limitations for actually understandingsocial movements.
Identity in New Social Movement Theory NSM discoursetypically characterizes new movements as differing fromolder ones in their construction of new, oppositional formsof social and personal identity, and in their non-statist pro-grammatic vision for the reform of civil society. These theo-retical claims suffer from believing an orthodox Marxist reading of social movement history rather than relying uponthe work of social and political historians. The specificanalyses of identity and the non-statist character of NSMshave the same blithe disregard for historical data noted inthe previous section.
A number of NSM theorists have asserted that contem- porary movements refashion identity, doing so on a scalenot found in prior movements. One commonly held position Studies in Political Economy is that social movements act to form identities in oppositionto, and on the basis of, hegemonic socio-identities. TilmanEvers, writing about Latin American social movements, ar-gues that one of their salient characteristics is the construc-tion of subjects who, in resisting "alienation," fashion "somefirst traits of an autonomous identity."30 Jean Cohen similar-ly suggests that NSMs are distinctive, not in making identityclaims, but in the self-consciousness with which they do so; identity formation in social movements develops in rela-tion to "a general social identity whose interpretation theycontest."31 In an argument parallel to Cohen's, Alberto Meluc- ci argues that contemporary social movements have devisednew identities in resistance to processes of instrumental reasontransmitted through "impersonal technocratic power," where-as older movements focused on citizenship claims and theexpansion of political rights.32 So too for Alain Touraine,the identities constituted in social movements are devisedagainst opponents, being a product of normative and cog- nitive conflict for the control of a cultural field dominatedby an adversary.33 Emesto Laclau's recent theorization of "dislocated iden- tity" is in agreement with both Touraine and Cohen's for-mulations: every identity is dislocated insofar as it depends on an outsidewhich both denies that identity and provides its condition ofpossibility at the same time. But this in itself means that theeffects of dislocation must be contradictory. If on the one hand,they threaten identities, on the other, they are the foundationon which new identities are constituted.34 Laclau's comments on identity may be read as an attemptto go beyond the limited notion of "subject position" foundin his joint book with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and SocialistStrategy, toward a more developed interpretation of social sub- Finally, in a formulation overlapping Melucci's, L.A. Kauf- mann argues that contemporary social movements differ fromnineteenth and early twentieth century ones in being less ex-clusively focused on the public sphere and statist change,and more on the interaction between personal and social Weir/Social Movements change. Personal transformation is taken as a fundamentalnorm reflected in "an unprecedented politicization of pre-viously nonpolitical terrains: sexuality, interpersonal rela-tion, lifestyle, and culture."35 "Identity" in social science usage dates to the 1950s and was popularized through Ericksonian psychology, functionalistrole theory and symbolic interactionism, with significant dif- ferences of emphasis, as Philip Gleason has demonstrated inhis semantic history of the identity concept: In the case of identity, Erickson insists that an inner continuityof personality perdures through all the changes an individualundergoes in passing through the stages of the life cycle, whilethe interactionists envision a flickering succession of identitiesadopted and shed according to the requirements of differentsocial situations.36 Poststructuralist appropriations of identity echo those of sym-bolic interactionism, while NSM discourse employs the termto indicate the oppositional process of forming subjectivityin social movements. These processes (somehow) link thepersonal subjectivity of participants with contested forms of social subjectivity, but presumably lack the fixity andstability intended in Erickson's definition. That there may be a distinction between subjectivity and identity is a ques-tion never raised, and the term, "identity," is sufficiently capacious that any social movement practice may in prin-ciple be held to constitute the identity of participants. Allsubjectivity, indeed all finite being, is likely "dislocated"in Laclau's sense. Lacking theoretical specificity, the con-cept of identity remains an elusive hunch in need of elabora-tion, particularly a more developed social semiotic treatment.
Recent work in discourse theory and social psychology would assist in theorizing identity,37 but the literature on new socialmovements has thus far resisted such obvious intertextuality.
Provisionally accepting the claim that contemporary so- cial movements construct oppositional subjectivities amongtheir participants, one might still question the presuppositionthat earlier social movements did not. Tilman Evers con-trasts the activities of contemporary Latin American move-ments in forming new kinds of subjectivity with "the Marxist Studies in Political Economy tradition," in which social classes were first constituted ob- jectively, only secondarily "developing a consciousness that gradually approximated to this objective reality."38 It mightbe objected that this rendition of classical Marxism neverprovided an adequate theory or description of class or classpolitics; Evers merely substitutes a version of orthodoxyfor the history of class politics. Thus, for instance, E.P.
Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class dealtextensively with the formation tity/subjectivity prior to 1830. This classic text was a sus-tained attack on analyses which regarded class as fashionedprimarily within production relations, emphasizing insteadthe cultural formation of the English working class in newways of acting, thinking and feeling.39 To give a secondinstance: any claim that the Temperance Movement, the largestsocial movement of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies in Canada, did not lay militant siege to trans-formed personal and social subjectivities would be mystify-ing; the presently ill-understood Temperance quest for per-sonal and social purity was nothing if not an attempt tocreate a new man/woman, a common orientation in religious movements.F' It is difficult to think of any nineteenth ortwentieth century movement, with the partial exception ofsome sectors of the labour movement, which did not intheir daily practices attempt to subvert hegemonic socialidentities. The link between identity politics and social move-ments, including the workers' movement, has been integralto antisystemic social movements because the social con-flicts in which they engage have been inevitably moral ina Durkheimian sense.
In African-American politics, the writings of W.E.B. Du- Bois and Marcus Garvey provide clear examples of the kindof self-reflexive, oppositional identity formation thought tocharacterize "new social movements." W.E.B. DuBois described the "double-consciousness American Negro," by which he meant a tension experiencedby African Americans between their American nationalityand their racial consciousness. The African-American, wroteDubois, lives in Weir/Social Movements a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but onlylets him see himself through the revelation of the other world . The history of the American Negro is the history of thisstrife - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.41 Garvey, in an autobiographical text, detailed his initial a-wakening to racial consciousness at the age of fourteen whenhe first heard the word "negro," and was forbidden to seeor play with a longtime white friend. During his later travelsin Europe, the lesson was reinforced when he was repeatedlytold, "You are black."42 These were the personal experienceswhich led him to dream of "a new world of black men, notpeons, serfs, dogs and slaves, but a nation of sturdy menmaking their impression and causing a new light to dawnupon the human race."43 It would be hard to conceive ofan anti-racist politics without some form of discursivelyarticulated oppositional subjectivity.
Instances of what might be called identity politics in nine- teenth and twentieth century social movements could bemuch expanded. A study of these movements in terms ofoppositional forms of subjectivity would mark an importantcontribution to contemporary social theory. It may be thecase that contemporary social movements differ from earlierones in their modes of constructing oppositional subjectivitiesor their degree of concentration on subjectivity, but no evi-dence for such change has yet been supplied. If MichelFoucault's hypothesis of disciplinary power as a new formof power dating from the eighteenth century proves founded,then the subjectivity effects of disciplinary power wouldhave been associated with new forms of resistance fromthe eighteenth century onwards. The resignification of sub- jectivity/identity in social movements would then be seen against two structuring conditions dating to the eighteenthcentury: (1) the displacement/contestation of class and so-cial stratificational relations, which had been justified interms of status claims secured by tradition, by new claimsbased on what Habermas terms a "communicative morality"of replicable arguments and universalizable norms; and (2)resistance to forms of subjectification consequent on con-stantly changing disciplinary relations of power. At present, Studies in Political Economy however, there is no prima facie case for singling out "newsocial movements" in contrast to prior movements as theexclusive bearers of identity politics - whatever this might concretely mean. Rather, the adoption of a politics of iden-tity needs to be more carefully periodized.
Civil Society and the State - Beyond False Antitheses NSM theorists have typically defined contemporary move-ments as located in civil society and oriented towards cul-tural struggle. Unlike older worker's movements, NSMs sup-posedly attempt neither to overthrow nor to participate inthe state, and they purportedly remain disengaged from eco-nomic struggle. When Cohen, by way of example, contrastscontemporary movements with trade unions and vanguard! social democratic parties, formations which she implicitytreats as paradigmatic of the old Left, she does so on thegrounds that, "they target the social domain of 'civil society' rather than economy or the state ."44 Tilman Evers concurswith Warren Magnusson and Rob Walker in believing that NSMs break with a state-centred approach to politics andpower through demands for and interventions in the recon-stitution of civil society.45 Kitschelt, in common with manyGerman writers, holds that the actions of NSMs are organizedby the principles of "Community identity, self-management,and autonomy from bureaucratic control."46 German inter-pretations of NSMs depict these as resistant to the economicand bureaucratic forces of instrumental reason, thereby pro-tecting civil society.
While it is true to say that feminist, gay and ecological politics are not purely statist in that few of their social movement organizations adopt positions equating capture!reform of the state with realization of their programmaticgoals, nonetheless each of these movements has, in Canadaand elsewhere, made significant oppositional demands onthe state. Canadian feminist groups have put forward a varietyof claims on differing levels of the state in areas such asabortion, daycare, equal pay, violence against women and statefunding for social service and advocacy groups. At a timeof AIDS organizing, gay liberation has been drawn into aseries of confrontations with ministries of health, the medi- Weir/Social Movements cal profession and pharmaceutical companies on funding for AIDS education, support services to people living withAIDS, drug release protocols, and the ethics and design ofclinical trials. Ecology organizations have called countlesstimes on the state for more rigorous pollution standards,independent scientific research, better enforcement of exist-ing legislation, more international agreements protecting theenvironment, the banning of clearcut logging and an end tonuclear arms testing. Anyone with the barest acquaintancewith Canadian social movements would find the claim that these are in the main characterized by a culturalist, lifestyle politics centred on civil society in abstraction from engage-ment with the state and economic demands true only of a small section of these movements.
Having reduced earlier social movements to trade unions and socialist parties, and read these as embodiments of Mar- xian orthodoxy, it is not surprising that NSM theorists shouldregard current social movements as characterized by a novelinterest in civil society. However, if one begins from theEnglish and American anti-slavery movements which tar- geted both the state and civil society for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, then the civil society politicsof contemporary social movements appears less novel. At an international level, the Woman Movement during the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries organized claims against the state in fighting for the extension of democraticrights to women, especially suffrage; however, some of themost significant campaigns of the nineteenth century WomanMovement involved struggles for the transformation of civilsociety in campaigns for greater child welfare and againstsexual violence. Moreover, as John Keane has noted, socialismitself grew from new associational forms within civil society;socialism " . originated in social movements which inventednew forms of local participation within the interstices of civilsociety - the co-operative, the trade union branch, the friendly society and the publishing collective ."47 Nineteenth centurysocial movements did not have an exclusively statist terrainof action.
John Keane and Alan Scott's writings on social move- ments are not dominated by the false antitheses characteristic Studies in Political Economy of NSM theory. Keane has breached NSM either/or reason-ing with a both/and position: contemporary social movementsstruggle for the democratization of both state and civil society. Scott's neo-Weberian approach interprets contem- porary social movements as acting to challenge processes of social closure. Quoting Parkin, he defines social closureas "the process by which social collectivities seek to max-imize rewards by restructuring access to resources and op- portunities to a limited circle of eligibles."48 In analyzingsocial movements as contestations of social closure, Scotttries to account for two consistent patterns of activity: "theexpansion of citizenship," and "the insertion of excluded groups into the polity,"49 a polity dominated by elite group-ings and negotiations. So characterized, contemporary socialmovements, workers' movements and various pre-World War II movements occupy significant common ground: "Newmovements carryon the project of older movements in a vital aspect: they open up the political sphere, they articulatepopular demands and they politicize issues previously con-fined to the private realm."50 The Utility of a Longer View: Learning from Social His-tory Social movements, as Andre Gunder Frank and Marta Fuentes have observed, are cyclical phenomena. To establishthe innovative character ofpost-1968 social movements, NSMdiscourse would need to contrast the present cycle with theprevious social movement cycle in Western Europe and NorthAmerica (1880-1930), and view each cycle against the generalbackground of organizational and symbolic forms which so-cial movements have taken since the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries (the latter date varying nationally).
In their well-known book, The Rebellious Century, 1830- 1930, Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly and Richard Tilly argue that the "action repertoire" of collective protest in WesternEurope underwent a series of shifts from "competitive" forms,which date roughly to the end of the eighteenth century, tothe "reactive" ones of the nineteenth century, succeeded by primarily proactive types by the early twentieth century.
Competitive collective action mobilized hereditary or local groups in "attacks (on) the resources - personnel, property, Weir/Social Movements premises, symbols - of the other."51 Reactive mobilization involved the seizure of resources and resistance to that seizure. In proactive action repertoires, social groups seizedresources and constructed their actions as generalizable andlegitimate. The authors of The Rebellious Century maintainthat the shift to proactive collective action occurred as a result of the rise of collective organizational forms in the context of industrial capitalism and nineteenth century stateformation.
Older movements such as slave and peasant revolts, hereti- cal and religious sects, customarily demanded a return toan earlier, better time, not the creation of a transformedpolity/society. 52 Those people mobilized by archaic move-ments were in regular contact with one another through eco-nomic transactions or close geographical residence; they metto select leaders, and to discuss grievances and the condi-tions for a re-entry into their previous social relations. "Thenineteenth century, however," writes Charles Tilly, "saw therise of the social movement in the sense of a set of peoplewho voluntarily and deliberately commit themselves to ashared identity, a unifying belief, a common program, anda collective struggle to realize that program."53 The groupscomprising social movements of this form were purposelycreated, voluntary organizations. Certain of the nineteenth-century social movements broke from archaic movementsin reaching a national level of organization. Instituted withincivil society, the movements were formed simultaneouslyand in association with the constitution of interest groupsand the national electoral politics of representative democracy.54 The organization of nineteenth century social movements them to an extra-local level of effectiveness.
Nineteenth-century English social movements, for instance,utilized a range of written texts which had ftrst been used inthe anti-slavery campaign, including petitions, subscriptionlists, periodicals and letters to Members of Parliament:55 themedia of "public opinion" through which "the public" wasconstituted. These documentary methods enabled the move-ments to connect on a continuing basis people who weregeographically separated or unfamiliar with one another, thusbreaking with the limitations of archaic movements. To date, Studies in Political Economy no one has established that NSMs comprise a form of col-lective action significantly different from the proactive formdelineated in The Rebellious Century. If anything, NSMtheory has suffered from a sublime indifference to questions of the social organization of social movements, a topicwhich has been the staple of American resource mobilizationtheory.
An historically-informed understandingof the action reper- toire and institutional placing of social movements in rela-tion to civil society and the state would enable NSM analysisto distinguish the specifics of the current movement cycle.
Carl Boggs typifies the kinds of explanatory error whichoccur in NSM texts as a result of their ignorance of socialhistory. Cautioning readers against dwelling on "earlier iso-lated parallels,"56 Boggs differentiates new social movementsfrom older movements on the grounds that the new onesare located in civil society rather than in "the institutionalrealm of pluralist democracy,"5? and that NSMs demonstratean increasing inter-movement ideological convergence andarticulate new political priorities.58 Yet, evidence from so-cial history shows that many social movements of the lasttwo centuries have been institutionally located in civilsociety. The examples of ideological convergence chosenby Boggs - feminism and the peace movement - also have been adduced for the World War I period.59 Thedegree of organizational convergence presently differs ona national basis, being less true of Canada than Germany forinstance.60 As to new priorities, some certainly are unprece- dented and others not; given the variability and mutabilityfound among social movements, this will likely be true ofsocial movements in another generation. It is, therefore,quite possible to reinterpret the movements Boggs calls"new" as a particular cycle within an organizational andcultural type inaugurated in the nineteenth century.
The contestation of subjectivity found in contemporary social movements should similarly be viewed in a broaderhistorical perspective as a new phase in a change dating tothe eighteenth century. Josh Gamson, in his study of identity politics in AIDS organizing, has suggested that the waysin which ACT-UP, an AIDS organization, contests the state, Weir/Social Movements media and the American health care industry are not originally nor uniquely "postmodern." They can rather be interpreted as resistance to the normalizing regulation of "disciplinarypower," a form of power which Foucault dated to the eighteenthcentury in France.s! In this light, Gamson casts doubt on"the value of 'newness' as a reified category of analysis,"suggesting that "it may obscure what may be instructivecontinuities across time."62 One may separate the significance of Foucault's contribu- tion to theorizing discipline from his commentary on stateand class formation; his corpus of texts does not have tobe accepted or rejected as a seamless whole. The linkagethat Foucault posits between the normalizing, optimizing, standardizing disciplinary power and control over the for- mation of subjectivity comprises a fundamentally Durkheimianinsight: external constraints correspond to moral authority,persuade through moral authority. The historically specificforms of external constraint which Foucault termed, "dis-cipline," gain purchase upon the lives of people throughthe dissemination of subjectivities which come to be resistedin oppositional organizing. Foucault's contribution lay notin his remarks about subjectivity, these being common coin, but in his detailed specification of how discipline was or- ganized and how it was distinguished from prohibitory formsof power.
If Foucault is correct in arguing that disciplinary power of ruling from the eighteenth century onwards in Europe and North America (al-though much less so in the Third World), then modes of sub- jectification were correspondingly refashioned, with manifest implications for social movement practice. At present, sus-tained scholarly work from a Foucauldian perspective on thehistory of social movements has yet to be accomplished.
However, it is clear that NSM theory mistakes the current passion of the intelligentsia for analyzing subjectivity for a sudden transformation in social movement practice.
Social theory currently has the tendency to theorize either in terms of seamless functional continuities or sharp rup-tures. The displacement of this compulsion to dichotomizemay be effected in a number of ways. Historical interpretation Studies in Political Economy of social movements is, I would propose, better served bya concept of fissured continuity - or perhaps continuous the continuity being given in the constancies of organizational form found in modem social movements sincethe eighteenth century, and the fissures by the reactions ofsocial movements to changing system conditions of capitaland state formation. The position here argued is not thatsocial movements have been unchanging either transhistori-cally or even since the later eighteenth century. Disagree-ment lies in where the point of rupture occurred: whether,as NSM theorists agree, in social conditions of the post- World War II era, which separate the "new" from a hazyhorizon of older others, or in the growth of civil societyarticulated to the dominance of capital and representativedemocracy. If the latter, then the post-1968 movements rep-resent another in a series of social movement waves, the dif-ferences among which have not yet been studied.
Social Movements within the History of Socialism NSMshave been constructed as a recent and sudden challenge toclass politics and the labour movement. Examining the his-tory of socialism we find, however, that tensions betweensocial movements and socialist organizing have compriseda long and relatively constant aspect of socialist history,63and that socialism itself has had variable meanings by no means restricted to economism and class reductionism. ClausOffe has been exceptional among the contributors to NSMtheory in calling attention to a memory of relations betweenthe Left and social movements, a memory which he char-acterizes as "more or less defunct, forgotten or repressed."Offe underlines the importance of "parallels" between present peace movements and "European socialist pacifism beforeWorld War 1" as well as "demands for an end to politicaland economic discrimination against women"64 for consti-tuting an alliance between new social movements and theold Left today. It would be beneficial for the Left today tohave a more active knowledge of this past history in orderto avoid pat and unselfconscious repetitions of prior politicalpositions, the results of which have already been thoroughlylived in actually then-existing socialisms.
Weir/Social Movements Historians of the last generations, often inspired by con- temporary social movements, have recovered a history of socialisms sharply distinct from the economist history ofsocialism to which NSM theorists ascribe. Barbara Taylor,examining the history of Owenite socialism in England, em- phasizes that socialism prior to 1850 was based on, "ahumanist ideal of universal emancipation - communal society free of every inequality, including sexualinequality."65 She forcefully argues that socialism had variant and discrepant meanings: socialist development has been characterized by ruptures so fun-damental that they have often thrown into question not merelythe means required to achieve common ends, but the ends them-selves. 66 The conflation of socialist history with mechanical Marxismacts to reinforce the binary opposition between the plural,culturalist "new social movements," driven by identity politicsand focused on interventions within civil society vs. theunified, economistic, statist, vanguard parties of socialisthistory. The existence of socialist formations such as theOwenites proves fatal to this dichotomy.
Strong counterpoint elements to mechanical Marxism can be discovered in the relation between social movements andsocialist parties during the heyday of orthodoxy in numerouscountries. In Germany during the 1920s and early 1930sthe Socialist Party and the Communist Party formed allian-ces with the sex reform movement. This movement had amass following in the working and middle classes and con-centrated on making available sex education and birth con-tro1.67 Before World War I in Germany feminists within theSocialist Party repeatedly contested its formulation of theWoman Question,68 with a similar history occurring in andaround the Soviets in Russia during the same period.s? Itwould be easy to proliferate examples of non-economistic,unorthodox socialisms, but the above are sufficient to callinto question the image of socialist history put forward inNSM discourse.
Economistic and class reductionist socialisms did exist, be- coming the dominant tendency after World War I. However Studies in Political Economy they interacted in complex ways with social movements.
Two texts in the NSM literature do refer to the history ofengagement between orthodox socialism and social move-ments, albeit in a schematic fashion: Social Movements andPolitical Power by Carl Boggs and Hegemony and SocialistStrategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Since thesetexts represent a significant attack on Marxist theories ofpolitical agency, how they both recognize the engagementsof socialism with popular movements prior to World WarII while still utilizing the collocation "new social move-ments" forms a topic worth pursuing.
Social Movements and Political Power devotes an un- usual amount of space to social movements within the his-tory of socialism, although seven pages of the ten-page dis-cussion focus on contemporaryhistory and Eurocommunism.I?Boggs' condensed presentation of the Second and Third In-ternationals characterizes the socialism of that period ashaving a two-track relation to social movements: destructionor absorption. Where absorption obtained, movements were converted into transmission belts for the administration ofParty policy. This sketch contains much accuracy, but suffersfrom being overly schematic.
Although investigation of the contacts between Marxism! socialism and social movements will track through vanguard politics, it should not be confined to that terrain; a longand very interesting history of independent socialist par-ticipation in social movements may readily be documented- from birth control movements to peace movements. Last- ly, Popular Front and United Front politics, while havinglimited applicability today, differed from the absorption ordestruction strategies that Boggs suggests exhaust the pos-sibilities of socialist history,"! Hegemony and Socialist Strategy contains glancing ref- erences to social movements during the period of the Secondand Third Internationals, together with a dense, one-para-graph analysis of the relation between class and non-classcategories of socialist discourse at that time. The paragraphin question points toward a productive line of investigation the analysis of the discursive strategies used in the history of socialism to organize relations with social groups not Weir/Social Movements co-extensive with the working class.72 Laclau and Mouffesuggest two principal strategies: arguments from appearanceand from contingency. The argument from appearance, theyargue, had two manifestations: 1) "appearance as a mere artifice of concealment" - e.g. Christian philanthropy as a smokescreen for imperialism; 2) appearance as a "manifes-tation of essence," giving as example, "The Liberal Stateis the necessary political form of capitalism."73 The argu-ment from contingency recognizes the existence of socialforms which are only partially organized through class rela-tions, but dismisses these as becoming progressively mar-ginal as the train of history chugs along its linear tracks.
The two arguments provide a valuable beginning for tracingdiscursive strategies, although the schema would need more elaboration in order to distinguish a series of other techni-ques, such as dismissing a social movement on the groundsof "deviationism" (from the primary struggle), regarding aparticular democratic demand as so utterly trivial/repugnant as to fall below the threshold of political seriousness, orstating that social movements act to divide the working class.
For the most part Hegemony and Socialist Strategy refers only tangentially to social movements in existence prior toWorld War II. In defence of the text, it might be remarkedthat the topic of social movements within socialist historyfalls entirely outside the authors' aim, a genealogy of hege-mony. Because Laclau and Mouffe's sources did not theorizehegemony with respect to social movements, the genealogyof these movements might simply not be germane to theinquiry. The text does, however, embed the genealogy ofhegemony in a narrative sequence: a tale of proliferatingsocial antagonism from the fragmentation of class in theSecond and Third Internationals to the new social move- ments of the present. The argument posits an inaccuratesequence. Marxist discourse on social movements was pro-duced during the Second and Third Internationals, althoughthe sources remain little known. In the history of socialism,social movements do not postdate the elaboration of thediscursive element, "hegemony." The multiplicity of socialantagonism and the formation of oppositional identity within Studies in Political Economy social movements have challenged socialism since its in-ception.
Conclusion The thesis that contemporary social movementsare qualitatively different from social movements arisingaround the early to mid-nineteenth century in the West has been demonstrated to have little credibility. NSM theoristshave been shown to subscribe, paradoxically, to an orthodox, class reductionist version of social movement history, resist-ing this interpretation only for the contemporary period; they thereby create a false dichotomy between social move-ments before and after World War II. This body of theoryunderestimates the number and significance of social move-ments outside organized labour and socialist parties duringthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In consequence,the long history of struggles between social movements and socialist/social democratic politics is suppressed, with NSMsconstructed as having recently emerged to challenge ortho-doxy. The reduction of socialist politics to the moment oforthodoxy which occurs in NSM accounts fails to recognizethat socialism has signified diversely and with many com- peting programmatic aims and organizational practices overthe course of its history. The elision of this complex, non-unitary socialist history serves to enable NSM discourse todeploy NSMs against socialist theory.
The class/new social movement dichotomy has helped reproduce one of the stunning absences of the socialist tradi-tion: a debate about the possible forms of socialist politicswithin social movements. Socialist discussions of social move-ment politics have been conducted from a perspective out- side these movements, and the various political tendencieswithin socialism - Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism - attempted to capture a party monopoly on class politics. Yetin the organizational practice of social movements, the bifurcation is undone, for all social movement groups havea class practice, whether consciously or unconsciously held.
To reduce the women's movement to gender politics unin-fluenced by class or race would constrain its action to therankest of liberal feminist programs. This is a position to which the NSM logic of argument necessarily leads, thereby Weir/Social Movements undermining the work of the left within social movements.
In researching Canadian pro-choice organizing I found a leftfeminist practice which was class sensitive, unifying and dis-tinctly different from a class politic which might be appropriate for a party formation or labour movement.74 The class politic did not present abortion as an entirely working class demand,nor did it attempt to ally pro-choice groups with anti-capitalist struggle, but did attend to differential access to abortion basedon class.The phrases "crisis of access" and ''reproductivefreedom! rights" were sites of complex class- and race-sensitive sig-nifications which facilitated links with organized labour. Pro-choice organizing challenged the legitimacy of the statethrough attacks on the Criminal Code of Canada and on statefailures to provide adequate medical services. Greater local control of a state service was demanded. Mass participatory political mobilization implicitly undermined the political pas- sivity upon which liberal democracies are based. A class politichas thus been developed by the influential left wing of pro-choice organizing. I thus concur with Alan Scott's critiqueof NSM theory when he argues (a propos ecology move- ments) that contemporary movements do not overcome olderdivisions between Left and Right since they "display vitalelements of continuity with traditional anti-capitalist andanti-industrial ideologies."75 To avoid recognizing continuities and tensions cuts the ground out from underleft/socialist practice within social movements.
It would of course be a gargantuan error to take a reverse position and maintain that social movements of the 1880- 1930 cycle and the post-1968 cycle are identical - the later cycle has no new elements. The recruitment ofsocial movement participants for the most part from thenew middle class, the relative weakness of working classpolitics with respect to other social movements, the presenceof the electronic mass media are new to contemporary socialmovements in contrast to the earlier movement cycle inCanada. The present article does not dispute the significanceof these changes, but simply puts forward the rather mildproposition that the novelty of post-1968 social movementscan only be established by careful comparison with previousmovement cycles. What the NSM literature desperately needs Studies in Political Economy is some awareness of the complexity of social movementhistory, social organization and longterm structural condi-tions. Preliminary movements with respect to disciplinary power, the elabora-tion and extension of communicative morality, social or-ganization and relations to state and civil society wouldindicate that contemporary social movements are consistentwith the social tensions and structural conditions charac-teristic of modernity.
Thus, the phrase "new social movements" is pervasively ideological (in the worst sense of the word) and shouldhave no place in the lexicon of the Left, just as it currentlyhas none in the practice of contemporary social movements.
For examples of welfare state-social movement interaction patterns, see the excellent collection, Roxana Ng, Gillian Walker, Jacob Muller(eds.), Community Organization and the Canadian State (Toronto:Between the Lines, 1990).
Barbara Epstein, "Rethinking Social Movement Theory." SocialistReview 20/1 (Jan.-Mar. 1990), p. 39.
Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power (philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 39-40.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), p. 1.
Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 165.
Jiirgen Habermas, "New Social Movements," Telos 51 (Fall 1981),p.34.
Cf. Klaus Eder, "A New Social Movement?," Telos 51 (Fall 1982),p. 5; Claus Offe, "Challenging the Boundaries of InstitutionalPolitics," in Charles S. Maier (ed.), Changing Boundaries of thePolitical (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 69.
Atina Grossman, "'Satisfaction is Domestic Happiness': Mass Work-ing-Class Sex Reform Organizations in the Weimar Republic," inMichael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Walliman (eds.), Towards theHolocaust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983); Helmut Gruber,"Sexuality Party Conceptions Programs and Working-class Life, 1920-34," International Journalof Working Class History 31 (Spring, 1987).
Ronald Lawson, "A Decentralized but Moving Pyramid: The Evolu-tion and Consequences of the Structure of the Tenant Movement,"in 10 Freeman (ed.), Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies (New York: Longman, 1983), 124.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Verso, 1983); MichaelOmi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States(New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). Omi and Winant havea long explanatory footnote on the question of "new social move-ments": "We employ the term with reservation to distinguish thepopular movements of the postwar period from their earlier antece-dents (where applicable), and from movements of class or status-based groups understood in the traditional Marxian or Weberiansense." (note 7, p. 146). They go on to state that, "the black move-ment was hardly 'new'," but add that it may nonetheless be callednew because its postwar form had a politic articulated to experienceand identity. Their discomfort with Afro-American politics; those located primarily within social movements will have the most difficulty with the phrase"new social movements." I believe that their point regarding thepolitics of identity helps to periodize a particular stage of Afro-American politics, but, for reasons detailed in this article, it is unwiseto continue speaking of "new social movements." Women and American University of Illinois Press, 1981); Richard Evans, The FeministMovement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: SAGE, 1976); Jill Lid-ding ton and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us (London: Virago, 1978); Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women (New York: Monthly Review, 1980).
Joachim Hirsch, "The Fordist Security State and New Social Move-ments," Kapitalistate 10/11 (1983), passim.
Offe, "Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: SocialMovements since the 1960's," p. 73.
Laclau and Mouffe refer to "new social movements" as an "unsatis-factory term" at one point in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p.
159. Their reservations are never explained.
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 164.
Karl-Werner Brand, "Vergleichendes Resumee," in idem (ed.), Neuesoziale Bewegungen in Westeuropa und den USA (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1985), pp. 310-312.
Ibid., p. 313-314.
Alberto Melucci, "The New Social Movements: A Theoretical Ap-proach," Social Science Information 19 (1980), pp. 204-205.
Habermas, "New Social Movements," p. 36.
Ibid., pp. 35-36; and Jilrgen Habermas, ''The New Obscurity: TheCrisis of the Welfare Sate and the Exhaustion of Utopian energies,"Philosophy and Social Criticism 4/2 (1986), p. 15.
Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, An-tisystemic Movements (London: Verso, 1989).
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., p. 37.
Jean L. Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigmsand Contemporary Social Movements," Social Research 52/4 (Winter 1985), p. 663.
Ibid., p. 665.
Ibid., p. 667.
Studies in Political Economy Ibid., p. 665.
Ibid., p. 665 and pp. 669-670.
Tilman Evers, "Identity: The Hidden Side of New Social Movementsin Latin America," in David Slater (ed.), New Social Movementsand the State in Latin America (Amsterdam: American Research, 1985), p. 60.
Jean Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms andContemporary Social Movements," Social Research 52/4 (Winter 1985), p. 694.
Alberto Melucci, "Social Movements and the Democratization ofEveryday Life," in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State(London: Verso, 1988), pp. 245-247.
Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987), pp. 80-85.
Emesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Lon-don and New York: Verso, 1990), p. 39.
L.A. Kaufmann, "The Anti-Politics of Identity," Socialist Review20/1 (January-March 1990), p. 67.
Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity: A Semantic History," The Jour-nal of American History 69/4 (March 1983), p. 919.
See Julian Henriques, Wendy Holloway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn,Valerie Walkerdine, Changing the Subject (London and New York:Methuen, 1984); Wendy Holloway, Subjectivity and Method in SocialPsychology (London and New York: Methuen 1990); Valerie Walker- dine, The Mastery of Reason (London and New York: Routledge, Evers, "Identity: The Hidden Side of New Social Movements inLatin America," p. 59.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Har-mondswortb, Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), passim.
Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1991).
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: WashingtonSquare, 1969 [1st ed. 1903]), Ch.l, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," p.
45. Note the androcentricity of the quoted passage.
Marcus Garvey, "A Journal of Self-Discovery," in John Henrik Clarke(ed.) Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: RandomHouse, 1974), p. 72. This essay was originally published in 1923.
Note the use of masculine personal deixis.
Ibid., p. 73.
Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Con-temporary Social Movements," p. 667.
Evers, "Identity: The Hidden Side of New Social Movements inLatin America," pp. 43-71; Warren Magnusson and Rob Walker, "De-Centring Economy," Studies in Political Economy 26 (Summer 1988), pp.
37-71.
Herbert Kitschelt, "New Social Movements in West Germany andthe United States," Political Power and Social Theory 5 (1985),p.278.
John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988),p. 4. Keane nowhere counterposes contemporary to earlier social movements on the ground that the former focus on the reform ofcivil society and the latter on state and economic issues. Tellingly,he avoids using the phrase "new social movements." F. Parkin quoted in Alan Scott, Ideology and the New Social Move-ments (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 135.
Ibid., p. 155.
Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1975), p. 249.
Bandits (Penguin: 1985, 2nd ed.), pp. 17-29. In England, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was unusual among archaic movements having a transformatoryprogrammatic vision. See Rodney Hilton Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (Lon- don: Temple Smith, 1973), especially, "Early Movements and theirProblems," pp. 63-95 and "Mass Movements of the Later MiddleAges," pp. 96-134.
Charles Tilly, "Social Movements and National Politics," in CharlesBright and Susan Harding (eds.), Statemaking and Social Movements(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1984), p. 303.
Ibid., p. 303.
Brian Harrison, "State Intervention and Moral Reform in Nineteenth-Century England," in Patricia Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Withoutin Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), p. 292.
Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power, p. 22.
Bussey, Women s International League for Peace and Freedom (London: 1965).
Gunder Frank and Fuentes Kondratieff waves and social movement cycles. For a general dis-cussion of the determinants of social movement cycles, see AndreGunder Frank and Marta Fuentes, "Nine Theses on Social Move-ments," IFDA Dossier 63 (January-February 1988), pp. 31-34.
Josh Gamson, "Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Ac-tivism and Social Movement 'Newness'," Social Problems 36/4 (Oc-tober 1989), pp. 357 & 364.
Ibid., p. 364.
For an excellent comprehensive overview of socialist history on the"woman question" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeSonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), PromissoryNotes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York: MonthlyReview Press, 1989).
Offe, "Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: SocialMovements since the 1960's," p. 101.
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (London: Virago, 1983),p. x.
See note 9 above.
Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894-1933. Studies in Political Economy Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860·1930 (Bloomington: In-diana University Press, 1978).
Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power, pp. 64-74.
See for instance the discussion of relations between the Communist Party of Canada and social movements during the period of theUnited Front in Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 21.
Lorna Weir, "Left Popular Politics in Canadian Abortion Organizing, Feminist Studies 1993 (forthcoming).
Scott, Ideology and New Social Movements, p. 81.

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