Networks of Resistance: Global Complexity and the Politics of New Social Movements

Abstract

The labour movement was the social movement of modern society. The labour movement emerged during the nineteenth century as the principal oppositional movement in civil society that articulated a collective resistance to the individualizing dynamics of the capitalist market. The principal objective of the labour movement was to politicize the employment relation and social welfare. The successful expression of this was the KWS and nationally specific forms of institutional corporatism which resulted in the labour movement becoming integrated or incorporated into the institutions of the state. The resulting contradictions were responsible for both the long-term crisis of state welfare (Offe, 1984) and the erosion of the legitimacy and mobilizing capacity of the labour movement (Offe & Wiesenthal, 1985). This crisis of ‘institutional politics’ was the context for the emergence of the ‘new right’ and the ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Offe, 1985a) associated with globalization. The social democratic and socialist left decomposed into a series of radical new social movements concerned with rolling back the state, not in favour of the market, but in favour of advanced welfare ideals based on self-management in civil society (Offe, 1985b). The ‘new social movement paradigm’ is premised on the proposition that the labour movement belongs to a past era of industrial capitalism.