A Molotov Might Do It

The history of society can be written in the actions of ordinary people. Waves of protest break over a society not because leaders stir up waters of discontent but when people dare to claim rights and benefits that they think should be theirs. Protest waves subside when people are satisfied, exhausted or when they are cowed into submission by police or terrorists.

There is wave of protest sweeping around the world. Is it a truly significant series of events or merely one more ‘long wave’ of dissent doomed to recuperation and demobilisation? What are the critical points within the ‘protest cycle’ that seems to move inexorably through mobilisation, disruption, exhaustion and recuperation without moving on to a more threatening, revolutionary phase?

We can learn a lot from a study of the decade of protest (Il Sessantotto) in Italy from 1965-1975. It was part of the ‘new wave’ of protest that began to sweep over Western Europe. Using direct confrontational action, people erupted into the streets, the campuses and the factories, demanding new rights, access to power and revolution. The demand for autonomy caused students to occupy universities, for tenants to ‘auto-reduce’ their rents and workers to slow down production lines. Women campaigned for more nurseries, greater access to contraception and abortion and greater action against rapists. These actions had political significance because of large-scale and widespread industrial action; society seemed to be on the edge of collapse and governments teetered. The Italian economy was restructuring, as all capitalist economies periodically do. On the one hand, some old or state industries were shedding tens of thousands of workers. On the other, the bosses were trying to introduce ‘flexibility’ and new processes. Both provoked strikes in defense of jobs and for more pay, shorter hours, to maintain differentials, and so on. These were matched in intensity and spread by rent strikes and mass campaigns over housing, transport, the environment and other issues. The institutionalisation of the mass parties, the unions they sponsored and the municipal councils they controlled led mostly working people to look to other means and other ways of making demands. With a combination of threat and ridicule, radical groups and the people they mobilised disrupted institutions, opposed elites and attacked authorities. But "when the dust of disorder had settled... the boundaries of mass politics had been extended". Disorder contributed to the broadening of bourgeois democracy. Protest activated the state’s formal mechanisms of decision-making (the task group, the white paper, legislation) and reforms were made. When excluded groups protest on behalf of marginalised agendas, do they simply strengthen democracy and the state that hides behind it?

Disruption

Disruption is possible where societies and organisations are polarising and where victory or defeat will have far-reaching effects: an example would be the demands for greater democracy in the Catholic Church and the challenge of liberation theology - if their supporters had triumphed it would be a radically different entity. Does such structural conflict exist? Possibly, as we begin to confront the multi-nationals and the process of globalisation they are pushing. The question of power in areas such as national sovereignty, trade, finance and development is again, as it has before, reaching a critical point. Where political arrangements are unstable and allies available to the movements, the wave of mobilisation will be prolonged. But where alignments are stable and elites repressive, opportunities for protest disappear and demobilisation follows. This fairly describes Europe and North America, where it is likely that protest movements will be short and quickly recuperated through short-term political alliances, reforms and repression.

Protest

The potential for protest is chiefly determined by a number of factors. Firstly, the extent to which formal political institutions are open or closed to participation by groups on the margins of democracy and the presence or absence of repression. Most bourgeois democracies used to be closed to dissent but have learned the lessons of ‘inclusion’. Levels of repression are comparatively low, but the capitalist state keeps its armoury of repression well-maintained; witness the Anti-Terrorist and RIP Acts. Secondly, opportunities present themselves as capitalism restructures and political parties realign in response. Thirdly, conflicts between elites signal weakness and create potential allies for the radical groups; the conflictual consensus of modern politics contributes to disenchantment and protest but important political differences just do not exist. The political system may be decaying but is not (yet) beginning to realign.

Protest begins when interests and values are not being represented and when the incentives to protest outweigh the cost and risks involved. The probability that people will use disruptive direct action depends on the depth of their grievances, the availability of alternative means of expression, the perceived costs and risks of collective action and the presence or absence of prospective organisers. When social conflict acquires a visibility and symbolic ‘language’ people can understand and identify with, collective action will develop; especially when the justifying culture of society is weak due to rapid economic, industrial and social change. But when grievances have been aired but not advanced, when the repertoire of peaceful protest runs out, when repression raises the price we all must pay and if we have not greatly increased the numbers of skilled and active organisers - what then? People cannot for long sustain campaigns on behalf of their rights or benefits without identifying them with general values and reaching out to others through a framework of common understanding. Does this explain why (in these islands at least), environmental protest has not developed a mass base nor has protest spread to other groups and interests (such as housing, policing, work and so on)? And if it does not develop a mass base, how easy for the state to isolate the ‘trouble-makers’ by making concessions to the ‘common sense majority’!

Organisation

What role did ‘organisation’ play? In Italy at least, the most successful groups were decentralised and provisional, preventing both decay into ideological sects or degeneration into bureaucracy, and included a strong dose of spontaneity. While an obsession with organisation can dampen disruption and reduce levels of mobilisation, material conditions will burst through whatever organisations exist and throw up new forms of collective action. But as these groups try to intensify disruption to gain mass support, they come under pressures from outside and within which demand greater co-ordination, more control over militants and an increase in organisation. But people experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete setting, not as the end product of large and abstract processes and it is the concrete experience that moulds their discontent into specific grievances against specific targets. Small, radical groups and their scattered supporters will never organise or stimulate mass protest on their own. They need the generalisation of discontent (which exists in some parts of the world but not in all parts of the world) that only worsening material conditions and increased militancy create, allied to groups possessing a mass base and organisational form. In other words, "socialising the class struggle" or (as the AF would put it) "creating a culture of resistance". The problem is that (at the moment) environmentalism and its anti-capitalist rhetoric is inspired by ‘post-material’ issues (ie not based on our material needs), and has a radical pragmatism but no real ideological unity or organisational substructure. It can link with other agendas but cannot unify them.

Cycles of protest

If in Italy the protest cycle followed a familiar pattern to past waves of dissent - from rupture to mobilisation to exhaustion and institutionalisation - can we see similar features in the new protest movements today?

Protest cycles often begin within existing organisations and institutions but are quickly externalised. Studies of protest by Indian peasant women, farmers in South American or the urban poor surrounding any major city in the developing world show how (often decadent or corrupted organisations) fail their members and constituencies and are abandoned. New actors use expressive and confrontational forms of action, demonstrating to others less daring than themselves that the system is vulnerable to disruption and that they have grievances in common.

The first stage in the protest cycle is disruption, which appears in a few sectors of intense conflict (Twyford Down, Newbury, Poll Tax). Protest is spread chiefly through imitation by other groups picking up on issues and tactics. But the rate of spread is determined by the availability of people using experiences and organisational skills acquired during earlier campaigns. And where we make negotiable demands the state has the resources and the guile to concede where it must and compromise where it can't, using institutionalised mediators (like the unions and social democratic parties) to moderate demands and recuperate dissent or, where this is not enough, to join with it in a process of stigmatisation, isolation and condemnation.

New Labour attacks on J18 and N30 protesters is in a long tradition of such actions. As in Italy, protesters look for issues and campaigns they can link with or which are connected in some way, for instance engaging with women’s and neighbourhood groups to protest the health effects of roads pollution.

A very good example would be Lotta Continua in Italy. It was initially a loose coalition of radicals from a variety of ‘left’ groups and splinters who rejected the positions taken by the organisations they belonged to on questions of the vanguard, autonomy and working class orientations. Chiefly, militant workers and students in North Italy (especially Turin), they coalesced around the slogan "The Struggle Continues" through a series of strikes (especially the 1969 FIAT strike) and ‘encounters’ and rejected the idea that it was chiefly or only within the factory that the working class became revolutionaries. For them, what was important was not where the class struggle took place or over what issue but what the working class learned about the class struggle and itself and the development of the working class through struggle. In its finest moments Lotta Continua not only told people where the action was, it was part of the action and most closely resembles groups today such as Earth First! and RTS.

Lotta Continua attempted to broaden the base of the struggle through its slogan "Take the city!", opposing urban oppressions and exploitations as well as industrial ones with new tactics (the rent strike, can’t-pay campaigns and so on), unifying them into one agenda and programme in a highly successful way. But Lotta Continua adopted a movementist strategy rather than staying on in the unions or forming an electorally-based party. From then on it had to generalise its ideas and tactics or lose its one advantage - the capacity for disruption - that could bring it new support and continue to challenge existing institutions. Its movementist principles and tactics led it to seek an explosion, not mobilisation and organisation of the masses.

This was fine as long as mobilisation and participation were increasing, but without a mass base de-mobilisation left only the rhetoric of revolution and violence. The new movement organisations ‘led’ the masses as long as there were masses to be led; but they could not lead people where they did not wish to go, a danger the environmental movement and anarchism together face today. In Italy, workers had woken up to their economic power just as the post-war political consensus was unravelling, creating opportunities and allies. Protest politics rose to a peak just as mass mobilisation was beginning to decline, the workers bought off by economic and social concessions. The shifting pattern of conflict and campaign prevented a single coalition for change developing and allowed the elite to segment the movement by a strategy of piecemeal reform and repression.

Spontaneity

The peak of mobilisation contains a combination of spontaneity and organisation but as protest diffuses through society, established groups themselves adopt more aggressive forms of activity, institutionalise them and begin to reclaim supporters from the new movements. But as mass mobilisation declines tactical innovation diminishes (J18, N30?) and confrontation is all that is left. Constituencies become narrower and more specialised and it becomes harder to gain support. Violence and extreme demands increase, often stimulated by repression, causing many to defect into interest groups and reformist politics, narrowing the base from which activists can draw support, making them even more vulnerable. Lotta Continua’s activists realised this, but its organisational dilemma led it into local electoral pacts with the communist PCI and development into a party of chiefly urban issues and protest before disintegration. Other groups with the same political background and revolutionary yearnings and rhetoric learned different lessons and went in different directions - some towards the armed struggle, others back into the factory and the unions, for some the electoral road. A salutary lesson for today’s activists, perhaps.

Lessons to be learnt

Italy’s lesson is that inadequate strategic analysis and poor tactical decisions can lead social movements into the cul de sac of institutionalisation or the wastelands of terrorism. In the end, the extra-parliamentary groups in Italy, without a serious revolutionary project or the mass base to carry it through created a generation with the desire for radical change, a cynicism about reform and some of the tools of protest and disruption but little else. "For [Lotta Continua’s] leaders, the only solution to these problems was organisation." Organisation is a product of the decline of mobilisation. And the development of more stable organisational forms could not halt the decline in the intensity and spread of the class struggle either here or in Italy. The revolutionary tide ebbed. Small groups of agitators and clandestine armed groups are what remain, keeping the flame alive and memories bright, striking where they can but increasingly isolated from the mass of the people: ‘islands’ of autonomy, radicalised neighbourhoods and tiny campaigning groups which continue to be attacked by Italy’s repressive state.

Compromise

The Italian protesters of the 1960s and 1970s made non-negotiable demands but were unable to press them home. The State was able to compromise - but not with them. While some demanded fundamental change, the majority did not connect the way they pressed their material demands with any need to fundamentally transform society. The workers won major concessions through rank-and-file and autonomous action and, as importantly, forced the unions to adopt their demands as their own. The industrialists and government caved in (knowing that the gains could be recouped later), for the unions had managed to contain the unrest within the ranks and would keep their historic bargaining and mediating role. The nature of industrial democracy changed (for a while) but not the nature of the system itself. For interest groups, concessions by the state robbed them of their raison d'être. We face the same problem. Many campaigns are infused with a fierce critique of institutions, recognised as tools of the state. But autonomist, grass-roots campaigns being waged across the world are not

necessarily revolutionary and will only become so when people acquire the will and the means to destroy capitalism by its expropriation. Campaigns against work, against state surveillance, police repression or authoritarian education in schools (for instance) could broaden the mass base of protest and disruption and link worker with libertarian, the victimised with the innocent. ‘Anti-capitalism’s’ narrow front of saving the planet must be broadened into the wider front of the class struggle - the struggle of those without power or the means to live without being forced to toil against those who have.

Global collapse

It is encouraging that so many throughout the world continue to demand not only material advancement but also new or withheld rights under the banner and with the ideology of ‘anti-capitalism’. In industrialising countries this was always a life and death struggle fuelling both the militancy of the oppressed and the fierceness of reaction. Our struggles in these islands over the last two hundred years are mirrored in the Philippines, Brazil, South Korea, Colombia and dozens of other countries today. The next crisis of capitalism will not be a crisis of imperialism (for instance) but one of environmentalism; the problems of over-rapid and inappropriate development that formed the radicalised working class in Europe will fuel the same process globally but on a much bigger scale. In the West, struggle remains at the level of reform. Yes, the rhetoric of anti-capitalism is there, but the potential for marginalisation and recuperation is great (although, thankfully, transglobal corporations and institutions show little willingness to compromise nor the bourgeois democracies of reining them in – capitalism’s oppression on a global scale will go on intensifying). Prague may well have been an important event and as levels of exploitation increase, we may even see larger protests, mass campaigns of rural and urban poor and even the toppling of regimes and governments. But it is also likely that in the developing world struggle will be transformed into movements for democracy, supported by the west and especially the US without the development of any deeply-rooted class consciousness. This suggests that the decisive struggle will be in capitalism’s stronghold in the West. But here the environmental and anti-capitalist movement that has sprung from it is bound to fail and be recuperated in the short- to medium-term unless political or economic circumstances change radically (accepting that it might well be environmental catastrophe that triggers political or economic crisis). The movement’s thinkers argue that capitalism is bound to generate periodic and mounting economic, political and ecological crises and there is a great deal of evidence supporting this view. Global collapse may lead to chaos on an unthinkable scale, but not necessarily (and indeed is very unlikely to lead to) revolution.

If this is so, what can anarchists and anarchism do? Well, it is already being done. The analysis that capitalism is the underlying cause and mechanism creating the ‘ecological’ and ‘developmental’ crisis is one anarchists have been refining and developing for decades. The task is to ensure that that analysis is available to all in struggle so that they can test its bases and conclusions in the light of their own experiences, one we share with the environmental and anti-capitalist movements. Within that message is a second: that neither the state nor the institutions of mediation and recuperation (the unions, bourgeois parties) can deliver us from capitalism but only feed off us; we may win a strike or a campaign but be, in political terms, much worse off. Ecological catastrophe may lead to decisive events (as catastrophic defeat in WWI did in Russia in 1917) but leave the population of the world at the mercy of hunger, poverty, war and dictatorship. We can orientate ourselves and align ourselves with this coming struggle only if we recognise that the revolution may be made elsewhere but its agenda must be our agenda. Capitalist exploitation and oppression will continue to intensify and keep these struggles alive and energised. What the anarchists and autonomists of Italy proved was that the working class in all countries seethes with injustice and is never entirely cowed by oppression - it needs little encouragement to vent its anger. We must supply the spark, if not the means as well.

Bibliography

This article was inspired by and borrows heavily from Sidney Tarrow’s Democracy & Disorder (1989). Other reading might include Charles Tilly’s From Mobilisation to Revolution (1987), Judith Hellman’s Journeys Among Women (1975) and anything in translation by Luigi Bobbio or Adriano Sofri on the period or Lotta Continua. If you want an insight into the AF’s view of what needs to be done, read our Manifesto for the Millennium.