Why Social Movements Now?

Author(s): David Sogge
Publication date: Monday 27 December 2004

To begin answering the question, Why social movements now?, let's pose a counter-question about social movements: Where would we now be without them?

Where would South Africa be today without the United Democratic Front or the Mass Democratic Movement? Where would many societies be without the movement for women's rights? Or, to go way back to the dawn of Western democratic systems, where would we be without the movement for citizen's rights and equality during the English Revolution some 350 years ago? The point is inescapable. Without these and other emancipatory movements, many lands would be a lot less free, less fair, less democratic.

But if social movements have been such positive movers and shakers for humanity, why aren't they stronger and more numerous now? Some reasons are obvious. Apathy and the sheer practical difficulties of stepping off the treadmill of daily life help explain the absence of social movements. And backers of the status quo, often powerful people, oppose them.

Yet social movements may be unwelcome for other reasons -- often good ones. Consider another counter-factual question: Where would we be without the ethnic supremacists and chauvinists in southern Africa? The butchers in Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria? The ultra-nationalist brownshirts in Russia? The love-your-gun, hate-your-government movement in the USA? Here too a conclusion is inescapable: Without these kinds of movements, things would be a lot less terrifying, less hate-ridden, less violent. Some social movements are downright abominable.

However, many may be located in that crowded terrain somewhere between the poles of emancipation and abomination. Take for example movements of religious revival down through the centuries. Evangelical and messianic Protestantism stands out in our day. This movement has swept Latin America in recent decades with the force of a tidal wave and it continues to spread forcefully in southern Africa. In short, social movements may have ugly; anti-emancipatory aims, or may pursue otherworldly visions.

Why they emerge and what drives them forward are complex matters. This brief article can discuss them only superficially. Broadly speaking, however, their presence usually indicates deep-running social stress. Novelists often detect their significance before anybody else; in late 19th century Russia, several novels by Turgenev and Dostoyevsky pivot on social movements of their day. In our times, The Handmaids Tale, a novel by the Canadian Margaret Atwood, offers a chilling vision of life under one of North America's ugliest social movements.

This article necessarily confines itself to that special, even threatened species, the emancipatory social movement addressing exclusion and poverty.

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