Outline
This paper examines the entry of social movements in the political arena in the 21st century to compete with regular political parties and institutions. Many of these movements have existed before but in contemporary times they brought new ideas and problems into the political agenda. The opening section sets the hypothesis that social movements diminish their chance of achieving their goals if they engage in the political marketplace with the use of violent and radical methods.
Conversely, those that embrace the policy of non-violence and non-resistance are likely to succeed. Section 2 defines social movements and discusses why they come into being, how they grow, go into mainstream or decline. The next section names the violence-prone radical movements and describes how they engage in politics. It provides evidence that such social movements eventually dissolve, although some achieve some success. By way of comparison, Section 4 lists the peaceful movements that achieved their goals – and political prominence. The concluding remarks are found in Section 5.
Introduction
According to research on social movements, public dissatisfaction about mainstream politics grew before the turn of the 21st century because of the ineffective policy process. This gave rise to the formation of different social groups bent at first on calling national attention to their problems. They then evolved into political movements for social change that agitate for new values and policy frameworks. A social movement is then described as a process designed to facilitate the participation of ordinary people in politics and policymaking.
The history of social movements reveals however that such participation of ordinary people in the body politic is often attended by radicalism. The new problems brought by social movements into the political agenda are also accompanied by radical and revolutionary ideas. The question then that this paper sought to address is: Does radicalism help social movements or do they need to tone down their political action and campaigns in order to attain their goals? Based on a case study of major social movements such as the labor and women’s movements, the paper takes the view that less radicalism helps social movements achieve their goals in a more desirable and longer-lasting way. When carried out with militancy and violence, on the other hand, such movements face restriction and eventual decline.
Social Movements
Tilly (2004: 36) defines social movements as a series of aggressive campaigns, threatening gestures, and displays of solidarity to impose the will of a social group on other people. In this view, social movements are a vehicle used by common people to achieve a desire to participate in politics and policymaking.
In earlier centuries, most social movements fought for the interests of such groups as peasants and laborers, women, religious minorities, and blacks. The 20th century gave a new face to social movements such that their focus has extended to broader issues.
Among the new social movements are the feminist movement, civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, gay rights movement, and pro-choice movement. The creation of these social movements may have been triggered by an event or the emergence of a charismatic leader (Staggenborg, 2008: 6).
An example of an initiating event is the public uproar caused by black woman Rosa Sparks who rode a whites-only bus in the US (Tarrow, 1994: 3). The chain reaction of events that followed led to the American Civil Rights Movement. As for the presence of a charismatic leader, Lech Walesa commanded enough following to influence the creation of the Solidarity movement in Poland (Country Studies, online: 2). How a social movement deals with its tasks and conducts its activities to achieve its goals will determine its impact on society (Freeman, 1978: 1).
Radical Movements
The social movements that verge on radicalism and violence are often those organized to effect far-ranging reforms that require the overhaul of laws of the introduction of new laws (Tarrow, 1994: 13). To achieve these ends, reformist or radical methods are usually used to shock the Establishment into action. The radical social movements also raise new issues and ideas, many of which have international ramifications. Two of these violent movements are the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico.
The Rote Armee Fraktion was an urban guerrilla group founded in 1970 in Germany to call for an end to Western imperialism in Third World countries. In 1972, the group first caught public attention when it launched a series of bomb attacks on US military installations Germany and other targets.
When leaders of the RAF were arrested and imprisoned, the group continued its struggle in prison, staging hunger strikes. With other elements of the group still on the loose, public indoctrination and recruitment of new members went on. Authorities then conducted another series of arrests to net more hard-core members of the group. Nonetheless, the anti-imperialist campaign of violence continued with the celebrated kidnapping of German Employers Federation president Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the killing of industry leaders and politicians identified with Western capitalism.
In 1992, the activities of RAF suddenly stopped and seven years later nothing more was heard of the group.
Apparently, the movement dissolved in fulfillment of the social movement theory that radical and violent movements emerge, grow and then die (Tilly, 2004: 30).
Another radical social movement is the Zapatista movement in Mexico that precisely describes itself as an anarchist, libertarian, and socialist-Marxist organization. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation based in Chiapas, Mexico is an armed revolutionary group that opposes globalization, which it believes threatens the peasants’ way of life and their natural resource base.
Thus, the group has declared war against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as an example of a neo-liberal policy that would reduce income for farmers in southern Mexico and open the Mexican market to cheap agricultural products from the US. The Zapatistas also consider Mexico’s political system irrelevant to people’s needs because of its representative character. For this reason, the group wants to implement a participatory or radical democracy in Mexico in which the terms of elected officials are limited to only two weeks and they would consult the people on every policy decision or strategy.
In pursuit of these objectives, the Zapatistas launched an uprising in 1994 and seized a number of towns and cities in Chiapas province, freeing the prisoners in some jails and setting fire to police and military buildings. The following day, however, state forces staged a counterattack and recovered many of the territories seized by the insurgents, who suffered heavy casualties and were chased back into the nearby jungle.
The territories successfully retained by the Zapatistas were again overtaken by the Mexican army in 1995 during a surprise raid. After this military offensive, the Zapatistas the villages they used to control and fled to the mountains, from which they maintain a guerrilla war with government forces to this day, unable to achieve their goals or go into mainstream politics because of the nature of their demands and their use of violent methods.
In the social movement literature, some movements are basically non-violent but some factions within their ranks digress from the main body and follow the opposite route. In such a case, the breakaway group fails to achieve the goals that eventually reward the main body. For example, the American Civil Rights Movement was mainly a non-violent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to colored people.
However, radicalism was preached by several factions, such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
The UNIA pushed for extreme measures like adopting a black Jesus Christ and a black Virgin Mary for American churches.
As a result, this movement collapsed as quickly as it grew in membership.
Peaceful Movements
Social movements are considered peaceful if they are organized solely to effect changes in value systems. Among the examples of the generally peaceful social movements are the Solidarity movement in Poland and the labor movements in UK and Australia, the women’s movements, the Abahlali Basemjondolo movement in South Africa, and the American Civil Rights movement. Another classic example of a non-violent social movement was the Indian independence movement, which followed the policy of non-violence and non-resistance preached by Mahatma Gandhi.
The Polish Solidarity was initially formed to fight for workers’ rights and morphed into a movement that demanded an end to the socialist political system in favor of a democratic regime. As for the Abahlali Basemjondolo movement, it was organized to demand changes in the government policy that prevented shack dwellers from living in South African cities. In the case of the American Civil Rights movement, it sought full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans.
Organizational activities of all three social movements were occasionally attended by violence because of the participation of radical elements but they were generally peaceful and orderly.
For the labor movements, radicalism would have been a strange bedfellow because these movements gained impetus in the early 20th century with the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Also called “On the Condition of the Working Classes,” the famous papal document advocated for workplace reforms such as the 5-day work week limit, rights of labor to organize, a living wage, elimination of child labor, and state regulation of substandard labor conditions.
These were the very same issues picked up by the earlier labor movements which are now regarded as basic features in industrial relations. In the contemporary scene, the Solidarity movement in Poland came into being because of an event: the unreasonable dismissal from work of trade union activist Anna Walentynowicz. Solidarity then spawned into a nationwide movement of 10 million Poles that eventually toppled the communist regime of that country. Led by the charismatic Lech Walesa, Solidarity won such concessions as the right to organize free trade unions in return to which the movement would not form a political party.
This condition was violated as Solidarity grew into an umbrella organization of a broad range of social and political groups opposed to the socialist regime. In 1981, Solidarity voiced a political challenge to communist authorities to hold free elections. When communist authorities imposed martial law to suppress the movement, Solidarity went underground. While underground, Solidarity splintered after radical elements within the organization created a bloc to oppose the movement. However, the moderate faction of Walesa prevailed and Solidarity then entered into negotiations with authorities that led to the holding of the 1989 elections, in which Walesa was elected the nation’s president (Tarrow, 1994: 8).
Other labor movements such as those in UK and Australia have tried radical and violent methods on some occasions and found that this type of action only brings the movements down. In both Britain and Australia, the labor movement has worked within the framework of the existing political parties since the 19th century and is reformist rather than revolutionary. One occasion in which the British labor sector resorted to violence was the so-called Winter of Discontent in the UK in 1979 when the British labor movement mounted violent strikes to demand higher pay.
The series of strikes paralyzed local governments, hospitals, railways, lorry and all transportation services such that in the 1979 general elections, the Labour Party suffered defeat from the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher. After this, the Labour Party found it necessary to abandon some of its left-wing planks. When Tony Blair assumed party leadership in 1995, the Labour Party prefixed the word New to its name as it formalized its abandonment of traditional socialism which condones the use of radical means. Shortly thereafter, the Labour Party reassumed political power with the election of Blair as prime minister in 1997.
The party has since won three consecutive national elections, with now Prime Minister Gordon Brown taking over when Blair stepped down as party leader and prime minister in 2007. By abandoning its previous socialist and left-wing stance, the Labour Party returned to political power.
According to Freeman (1978: 49), most political systems respond less to those that protest loudest. This happened to some sectors of the women’s movement which is basically peaceful and reformative. Following the publication of Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, American women organized and held rallies and lobbies to demand gender equality. The National Organisation of Women (NOW) scored with the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Other feminist groups then emerged to demand more rights such as abortion, federally funded child care, and electoral participation (Wall, 2008:4).
They also sought enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) which was defeated in 1982 when 13 states refused to ratify it. The objection hinges on the fear that under the proposed ERA, women would be drafted for combat duty, abortion or same-sex marriages would be legalized and even unisex toilets will have to replace the current system in which there are separate toilets for males and females. In short, ERA would cause an upheaval in family life (Walls, 2008: 15).
Conclusion
Based on the study, social movements generally engage in politics with the use of radical or violent means. Either that or they make demands that are impossible to grant because they claim other citizens, as Tilly observes. Under these conditions, the social movements fail to realize their goals.
For example, the Solidarity movement in Poland achieved its goals and became part of mainstream politics because of the moderate stance of Walesa. The activities of radical elements within Solidarity nearly caused its dissolution.
The same can be said of the British Labour Party and the women’s movement in the US, which were both established as peaceful, reformist organizations. When the Labour Party flirted with radical left ideas in the 1970s it saw the diminution of its political power. Only when the party abandoned its socialist stance did the party regained power. As for the women’s movement in the US, it won many concessions at first but sputtered when left-leaning feminist groups drowned the voice of the more moderate NOW to demand ERA. Indeed, such radical elements in social movements brought new problems to light but the radical ideas they prescribed to solve these problems gave discomfort to many.
Whilst moderate social movements like Solidarity, the Labour Party, the women’s movements, and the Indian independence movement achieved some successes, the movements are given to radicalism and violence never attained any measure of success. This happened to the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, which dissolved without accomplishing anything, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico, which continues to exist but as an outlaw being hunted by government forces.
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