The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (104 page)

also in countries obsessed with ideas of purity and homogeneity. The increasing

separation between these two types of collective action, which are foreign to

each other, is not just a given fact. It is a reality as pathological as the wider separation between the world of instrumentality and the world of identity, a

separation that entails the collapse of social and especially political mediation between the economy and cultures.

There is a risk of too easily defining the idea of a societal movement only in

terms of its twofold refusal of communitarianism and of economic globalization,

and also some risk of considering any pressure group or identity movement as a

significant societal movement. It is also important for sociologists to look for such movements underneath extreme ideologies where they are often hidden. Let

us take two opposite examples. In Algeria (and other Islamic countries, Egypt in particular), there are political groups that use Islam to attain power and construct a fundamentally anti-modern, Iranian type of society. To survive, they use the techniques of modernity. However, we should not forget that this also gives

expression to an uprooted population, to young people without jobs who use the

trabendo (black market), or sports, as a means of forcing open the doors of the

society of consumption. Those who oppose lay reactions to the dangerous

politics of religious mobilization are right up to a point, but they are wrong in that they fail to see that many movements draw their force from the culture and

The Subject and Societal Movements

447

society they defend because they feel threatened. The second example is the 1995

strike in the French public services. The events that took place then cannot be

reduced to a defense of vested interests or privileges. They manifested a popular rejection of an economic policy that subordinated all of social life to deficit

reduction, considered to be the key for developing a single European currency

(which, in and of itself, is supposed to bring prosperity and jobs for all).

Let us try to clear up, at least a little, our confusion by recalling thè`natural history'' of any movement. It starts when the denunciation of misery goes along

with a moral appeal to the dignity of everyone and the solidarity of all. Only

thereafter is the opponent identified; and the conflict becomes central, before

being institutionalized ± as the organized social movement turns into a political force or party, which intervenes in economic and social policy-making. This

ultimate phase usually accompanies a return to ideological discourses that, cut

off from strategic actions, call for a return either to open conflict or to the

denunciation of misery. In each phase, this history may be interrupted. This

natural history teaches us useful lessons, even if these are too general to account for the wide diversity of historical situations. But these lessons are of less use for understanding the present than is a historical reflection that pays more attention to the effects of demodernization.

How could the split between the economic and cultural worlds not affect

societal movements? Thè`civil/civic'' movements of the seventeenth and eight-

eenth centuries worked for the creation of a national, republican political order.

The working-class movement has drawn its strength from its consciousness that

it was a means of progress, that it was pulling society ``history-wise'' through its struggle against the irrationality of capitalistic profit-seeking. These movements were borne by collective actors, which we label as social classes because they

were defined by their political, economic, or social situations. This linkage

between an objective meaning and a consciousness necessarily tears apart in

the current situation of demodernization. Such movements are becoming

increasingly moral, while fighting an opponent that is defined less as a power

or class than as an agent of ``dehumanization'' and of domination through

globalized networks of production, consumption, and communication. In this

very concrete sense, the identity between the Subject and social movements

compels recognition. In industrialized nations particularly, movements are less

and less instrumental but more and more expressive.

The awareness of exclusion has spread with poverty, segregation, and jobless-

ness. The societal movement against exclusion is arising out of the efforts of

persons who, working in humanitarian organizations, increasingly think and act

in terms not of the crisis of capitalism but of the conditions for the destruction or creation of the individual as Subject. There is no evidence that, in France, the leaders of the 1995 protests will be the forerunners of a movement that will

organize, undertake a strategic action, and change into a party (as environment-

alists have done in Germany). These groups, associations, and movements seem

to be constituting themselves as historical, independent actors who mobilize

volunteers, who actively use and criticize the media, but who critically stand

aloof from a political system that, in their eyes, is subject to the constraints of the 448

Alain Touraine

international economy. Meanwhile, the weak and threatened sectors of the vast

middle class are organizing political actions for defending their vested interests.

More diffuse, `èveryday'' movements ± which are also more enthusiastic and

more generous ± are undertaking exemplary actions, decrying the denial of truth

and justice, and combining the personal with collective solidarity. How can we

not see in them the already constituted force of a new societal movement? To do

so fits into a broader reflection on the conditions for political action and, therefore, for social control over both globalization and technological revolutions, in particular over the effects directly bearing on personality and culture.

Neither liberals nor revolutionaries believe in the capacity of social actions for producing their history through their cultural orientations and social conflicts. In contrast, I maintain that we should recognize the importance of demands for a

sense of identity or of strategies for pressing demands. But only the idea of

a societal movement enables us to recognize the existence of actions combining

a fundamental social conflict with the pursuit of societal objectives (such as

modernization, social integration or the respect for human rights) defined in

concrete situations and social relations. The idea of a societal movement is not satisfied with completing a sociology that is mainly oriented toward the quest for social integration. It associates integration with conflict and, as a consequence, takes the central place in analyzing the social organization and social change. It is indispensable for any political sociology.

I am not insisting on placing the idea of the Subject at the center of analysis in order tò`desocialize'' societal movements, i.e. to separate them from the conflictual social relations where they have their origins. On the contrary, this

insistence is intended to distinguish a societal movement from the political

instruments and ideological apparatuses that keep us from seeing that a societal movement always appeals to the Subject's liberty. These appeals are not situated in the social vacuum of natural law, but in the social relations of domination,

property, and power. A societal movement is thus both a struggle for and a

struggle against.

Societal movements are important not just because they reveal the contra-

dictions within modem societies, which is defined by their historicity, by the

concentration of the means for changing society, and by the distance between the rulers and ruled. What best defines a societal movement is the linkage it establishes between cultural orientations and a social conflict bearing demands that

are political and societal. If a societal movement does not form, all these

elements separate from each other and, doing so, degrade. On the one hand,

cultural orientations, when they are split off from social and political conflicts, turn into moral principles of belonging or of exclusion, mechanisms of cultural

control, and norms of social conformity. On the other hand, political conflicts, when they are split off from societal movements, are reduced to struggles for

power. Finally, demands, left to themselves, tend to reinforce established

inequalities, since the most powerful and influential have the most vested interests to defend and are best equipped to press demands. We thus see a juxtaposi-

tion of pressure groups; movements of rejection that comprise categories defined as minorities, deviants or foreigners; and a communitarian populism that

The Subject and Societal Movements

449

appeals to an indeterminate people against leaders and intellectuals. Each of

these aspects of social or political life could, it initially seems, be studied by itself, but that is impossible. All collective actions bear evidence of an absent or

disintegrated societal movement.

Societal movements do not always exist; but they do represent a hypothesis

that must be worked out in order to understand contemporary collective life.

Sociological positivism that takes as starting point not social relations and

historicity but principles of order (whether based on personal interests or com-

munitarian values) provides poor explanations that are insufficient because

positivists place nothing between the individual and society. In actual fact,

however, neither the individual nor society exists as principles that can be

isolated from social relations and processes that constantly join order with

change, and integration with conflict.

Our need for these concepts and principles of analysis is all the greater now, in that we are living in à`fragmented'' society that has been deprived of a consciousness of itself. Under these conditions, issues and actors of historical change are obscure, and discourses and ideologies lag behind practices or become

artificially radicalized practices. Our societies are not just hypermodern; they lack meaning, since they suffer from the dissociation of practices from consciousness, and of acts from discourses. Nowadays, the center of society is an

empty field where are scattered the remains of past combats and old discourses,

which have become second-hand merchandise acquired by the merchants of

power and ideologies. For this reason, the idea of a societal movement must be

defended because it interprets this emptiness and gives a coherent meaning to all the behaviors, contradictory with each other, that originate in the disappearance and breakup or breakdown of the former social movements.

Translated from the French by Noal Mellott, CNRS, Paris.

31

The Myth of the Labor Movement

Rick Fantasia

There is a current of change flowing through the US labor movement that is

really quite remarkable. After a half century of bureaucratic complacency and

organizational torpor, and a quarter century of employer aggression and un-

favorable economic shifts that have caused a steady decline in union membership

and significantly diminished political influence, labor is suddenly experiencing all of the pains and the possibilities of a rebirth. The new reform leadership of the AFL-CIO, headed by the triumvirate of John Sweeney, Richard Trumka, and

Linda Chavez-Thompson, came to power in 1995 as thè`New Voice'' slate in

the first contested presidential election in the history of the union federation.

Instead of simply anointing the designated successor to Lane Kirkland (the

consummate bureaucrat, who had himself been plucked from the dim corridors

of the trade union bureaucracy as designated heir to former President George

Meany), a slim majority of an Executive Council made up of the Presidents of

the member unions broke with tradition by encouraging and supporting the

opposition ``New Voice'' ticket.

Its ascent representing more of à`palace coup'' than a revolution, the new

leadership nevertheless immediately set out to clean out all the closets, to over-haul the bureaucracy and the budget in an effort to redirect substantial resources toward organizing new members, while simultaneously stirring the long-dor-mant arsenal of union militancy by encouraging tactical creativity among the

new heads of the various departments within the federation (Brecher and Cost-

ello, 1998; Lerner, 1998; Mort, 1998). While the results may not be evident for

several years, the initiatives undertaken have been impressive. For example, a

newly formed Department of Field Mobilization has taken on the ambitious task

of resuscitating the system of over five hundred regionally organized and city-

wide Central Labor Councils that currently exist nationwide (Dean, 1998;

Gapasin and Wial, 1998). Central Labor Councils are institutionalized networks

The Myth of the Labor Movement

451

of local unions that once served as powerful sources of inter-union solidarity and mobilization, but that were allowed to atrophy and grow moribund under

decades of a bureaucratic leadership that eschewed most forms of collective

mobilization (Fantasia, 1988, p. 244).

To underscore organizing as the central focus of union activity, the leadership

has established a new Organizing Department to provide strategic assistance to

member unions as well as to facilitate inter-union cooperation in organizing

campaigns by coordinating large-scale, multi-union organizing projects in var-

ious parts of the country, several of which have emerged as experimental models