Everyday creativity, counter cultures and social change

5

involuntarily launching into fits of twitching and muttering and getting tied up in knots trying to explain this to people when they'd ask, I eventually developed my one-line answerof-convenience to the dreaded question, "So what are you doing your thesis on?"

My answer became: "Social movements and counter culture. And, em, the relationship between the two." (No shit.) The reactions to this answer were interesting. Of course, to friends and acquaintances who hadn't a breeze about politics, I might as well have been saying "It's on 14 th century church music", or "It's about teenage hat wearing in the Falkland islands", and a stock polite reply of feigned interest would follow. But with political people it was different. A lot of the time it was a conversation killer. People would look away and say "oh right". One person -a member of a certain platformist anarchist organisation -actually said "Ha! That's very original", in great amusement and irony.

But there is a good reason for this kind of reaction. As Laurence has pointed out elsewhere, and as I'm sure he might talk about today, there has been very little in the way of serious research on counter culture in Ireland. This is no doubt the case, but there is certainly a perception amongst many people involved in oppositional politics in Ireland that actually, this subject is a great cliche. Tellingly, another member of an anarchist organisation in Dublin, in another conversation about my thesis, informed me of his reference points for the kind of thing I sounded like I was researching; he told me about a girl he knew of who'd done a thesis on "anarchist fashion". I don't care about anarchist fashion. And I'm not interested in writing about how punk, or hippy, or "DIY" subcultures, are 'counter-hegemonic' because they supposedly don't have any hierarchy. I think that these kinds of 'scenes' are what people usually think of when they hear the words, "counter culture". But I'll tell you what I am interested in: I'm interested in the way that so much of the tension found within various nodes of what (for want of a better term) might be called the 'movement of movements' today -not least in Ireland -revolves around opposing perspectives on what I consider to be issues of counter culture -and issues close to these; and I'm interested in the idea that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. 6 Lines in the sand are frequently drawn by participants in these spheres, on the basis that on one side, you have the people who get identified with "proper class struggle" -"proper materialist politics" -and on the other, the ones who get identified with "counter culture" or "subculture". And I'm interested in why, frequently, the people on the "class struggle" side of the divide -who find themselves tearing into "the punks", and the other obvious subcultural groupings who either associate themselves, or get associated, with anarchism, autonomism, or the movement of movements, or whatever -are often people whose own consciousnesses have been deeply shaped by the codes of youth cultures, subcultures and counter cultures.

This stretches from anarchists in their 30s and 40s who cut their teeth on punk -or rather one or other generation of punk -or acid house, to movement newcomers in their early twenties or even late teens whose first whisper of radical political ideas came from reading Nirvana album sleeves in their bedrooms, before tracing various musical lineages of their parents' generation back, and becoming 1977 scholars. (This includes, arguably, myself.) And I'm interested in the way that all of this intersects with other debates prominent on the movement of movements landscape; the 'activism' debate, for example -essentially revolving around the idea that frequently, meaningful political action, strategy and thinking are sacrificed as movement participants gravitate toward comfort zones in "activist" subcultures; spaces where "activism" becomes an end in itself, a ritual as much as a piece of thought-out and purposeful political action.

At this point, it may sound like I'm on the way to suggesting that in spite of the association of counter culture with lifestylism, with tribalism and ghettoisation, and with an abdication from real political struggle -arguments with a long currency (and which, incidentally, I largely agree with), and having been famously articulated by Murray Bookchin in terms of the "unbridgeable chasm" between "social anarchism" and "lifestyle anarchism" -in fact counter cultural codes woven through the superstructure of our society circulate, in however elusive and residual a form, oppositional messages or values, and that these can feed into visible and tangible opposition to the power structures of our society. Some pretty swift retorts wait here in the wings; and actually, this is the point in the road for a head-on collision 7 between different ways of viewing the patterns of social change, the dynamics of history, and the world itself.

I'm certainly not about to cut myself off from materialism -but there is a certain kind of materialist line of thought that would seek to scotch the notion of hidden cultural codes as the conduits of oppositional sentiment in this or any other society. (I'm not having a go at a straw man of "orthodox Marxism" here, simply because I don't associate this kind of thought with Marxism in general, any more than with materialist anarchism.) This kind of thinking may hold that superstructual forms, such as counter cultural ones, are determined by developments within the mode of production -not the other way around. Or it might concede that the dynamics tying together the fates of economic structure, and human agency, are more complex than that; but that even when "men [do] make their own history", their action is shaped firmly in terms of material need.

And where the origins of what we understand today as counter culture are concerned, such arguments certainly get made. These counter cultural forms date most obviously and visibly from the historical moment around 1968, and the birth pangs of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. In this context, the changes in consumption spearheaded by the counter culture phenomenon played a major role in breaking the mould of the 'Protestant ethic' era of capitalist economic infrastructure, and facilitating the explosion in ephemeral mass consumption -and in associated fashions, values and attitudes -and in the development of markets, and particularly youth markets, needed to sustain that infrastructure's development.

Above, I suggested that some oppositional content may still linger in the edifice of counter cultural forms. But from this viewpoint, it becomes easy to oppose this account of counter culture along the lines that the ways people find of expressing themselves through youth cultures, subcultures and counter culture may be fun, but they are not political. They are items, essentially, of fashion -even if we shear this word of its pejorative content -rather than factors of the material equations that shape society and history.

There is much to support this. But is that really all we can see when we look to the legacy of the 1968 moment? Paolo Virno describes this late twentieth century legacy as that of a defeated revolution. But could we not see much more? 8 Amidst this legacy of defeated revolution, and amidst the changes in production and consumption ultimately amenable to the capitalist machine that we see in its context, we can also see profound changes in values and, in a sense, social relations. This great moving of the goalposts involved, in a sense, a 'libertarian-ising' of social life -at least on a skin-deep level, and in a manner firmly co-opted to the interests of capital. In terms of the restructuring of work, Virno states that "Dismissing both Keynesianism and socialist work ethic, post-Fordist capitalism puts forth in its own way typical demands of communism: abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc. Post-Fordism is the communism of capital."

Meanwhile, Cox notes the adoption on the part of social movements from both above and below of "a rhetoric of libertarian ideals and a critique of taken-for-granted cultural routines" in the wake of the 1968 moment.

So, on this vista should we see the spin-offs of capital's need to change superstructural forms in order to facilitate the development of its economic base? Or should we see the hard-won material gains of a revolutionary struggle that failed to go all the way -a defeated revolution?

Or should we see something broader than simply material equations? Amidst Virno's defeated revolution, aimed at the means of production, could we not see a struggle not just for material victories, but for the freedom to live life as fully human beings?

If we're looking for vanguard elements, and prime movers, in what Katsiaficas called the "world historical movement" of 1968, then I think it would be reasonable to mark out the category of "youth" -from the students of the Sorbonne and of the new mass universities, to the young workers of the Italian factories, to the autonomist and squatter tribes who emerged in the twilight of this moment and followed it into history across many of the cities of Western Europe, surviving in some places up to the present day, and in general colouring deeply the 'social-movements-experience' of life across much of the continent.

We could make that identification, and we would not be venturing into any kind of dangerous or uncharted territory, in that it has become traditional when writing histories of this period to acknowledge that much of its spirit was defined by the relationship of a new politics -the New Left essentially (or rather a particular 'New Left' -there have been a few!) -9 to a sort of oppositional drift within popular culture and youth culture -this, of course, referring to the 'counter cultural' moment of the late 60s that I've already been talking about.

One curious point on this horizon, however, has been the fact that largely, this relationshipwhile universally acknowledged -has escaped systematic analysis, as pointed out long ago by Laurence -being destined instead to remain as "the stuff of introductions and conclusions".

Another curious point, for me, has been the way that this literature acknowledges the importance, in spearheading this moment of crisis, of this revolt within youth culture, while failing to link this question up with the question of the very wide expanse of even older youth revolt and youth subculturalism seen throughout the history of the postwar West. From the Rock Around the Clock riots of the 1950s to the Mods of the 1960s and the Skins of the early 1970s -a spectrum with a lot else in between -this history has been studied deeply (most notably by the Birmingham school) in terms of its importance as a means for youth to build their own rationalities and their value systems, however symbolically, autonomously -and in disaffiliation, even -from the cultural and social rubrics of life in the Fordist society.

This failure to link up these questions -often justified on the basis of the supposed differences in class identities between these different spheres of youth revolt -has been, in my opinion, a mistake. We live in a very different world now to that of a century ago, and contained within the legacy of a 'defeated revolution' that we inhabit is another legacy; that of a far-reaching, but unfinished cultural revolution, against the cosmologies, superstitions and moral hegemonies of the church, against patriarchy, and against some of the more obnoxious excesses of the hierarchies that make up our social structure. Alongside the revolts of black power, of women, of workers, etc., the revolts articulated through youth culture -and residualised in the webs of counter cultural codes that in fact string together much of the popular culture we know today -when we look at this all together, make up an argument for the way that outside of clearly visible material equations, powerful forces exist that strive for a world in which it is possible to live as full human beings.

These kinds of forces have been recognised, I think, in different ways, by various writers.

Harry Cleaver some years ago took the lead in relating the concerns of autonomist Marxists of his ilk with what they called "self-valorisation" -the drive of ordinary people to develop their own ways of life and value codes autonomously from capital -to the concerns of Kropotkin a century or so ago with the patterns of self-organisation and "mutuality" he located in both human and non-human nature. Again, attempting to build on Kropotkin's legacy, Murray Bookchin has looked to developments in the natural sciences -developments acknowledging the patterns of self-organisation, and of the striving for some kind of evolution, visible in nature -in his argument for the existence of a "potentiality for freedom" within humanity -existing, of course, alongside a counterweight in the impulse within humanity for domination. And more recently again, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has argued that when "revolutionary ethnogenesis" occurs -that is, the overthrow of authoritarian social structures and the creation of egalitarian ones, or even anarchistic ones, in their place -a process that Graeber argues is constantly occuring in the chunks of humanity outside the field of vision of "western civilisation" -the vitality behind these initiatives can be found to lie in hidden, but ever-present 'counter cultures' of sorts beneath the dominant cultures in question. This is what Graeber calls counterpower, and links to the extraordinary popular ability to re-constitute society in times of revolutionary upheaval labelled "constituent power" by Negri.

The significance of what we can understand as "counter culture" in all this is that it may be an equivalent in our societies for these kinds of forces -that the DNA strands of counter culture, warrened through our mainstream cultures, bear the codes of these impulses of ordinary creativity, and against domination. But so what? In different shapes and sizes, arguments have raged for many decades between those who locate social power within capitalism in the practical drudge of having to make ends meet and succumb to the mundane discipline of wage labour, and those who point also to the importance of cultural factors in the maintenance of capitalist control. Gramsci's muchabused concept of hegemony is a useful optic into this debate; in fact the concept can be interpreted both in a very culturalist way -i.e. focusing on the way that elites rely not just on coercion, but on consent secured through complete intellectual and cultural, and perhaps ideological authority -and in a much more, for want of a better term, material way, in that

Introduction

What I want to do in this presentation is to set Donagh's research, and maybe the rest of the day, in a broader context, coming out of my own research on the counter culture of the late 1980s but going beyond that to think about the various counter cultures in Ireland since the 1970s or so.

And the first question that has to be answered is maybe: why does it matter? So here's a quick answer to that. If we're interested in social change, there might be all sorts of reasons why it comes about; and people are often very attracted to explanations which somehow go behind the backs of people who are alive at the time and make it look as though it was going to happen anyway. We could ask very interesting questions about why those kinds of answers are attractive, but for my purposes today the main point is that they are irrelevant. There may indeed be things going on, forces for change or against change, that are not particularly visible to us, but they aren't that relevant to our action, because we can't do anything significant about them. (This may of course be why they are attractive -because they let us off the hook, break the connection between what we feel is wrong in the world and ourselves as people who might actually take some action.) So if we want to ask about what goes into making social change, without necessarily discounting that there may also be things going on that we can't see, what we need to look at most of all is ourselves and the other people we share the society with. Very obviously, we look at groups engaged in some kind of political action or social movement, and for the last few decades there is no shortage of those -the women's movement, the ecology movement, the socialist and trade union movement, the republican movement and so on -and there is no serious doubt that these have had a substantial effect on the society we live in, even if they have lost many battles as well as won some. Of course we also look at the needs they were 13 expressing -born out of poverty, oppression, the waste of human lives, violence, the destruction of the environment and so on -and this is also fairly easy to understand: that a movement will not be successful unless it is speaking what is in many people's hearts and enables them to say it powerfully and to do something about it.

Counter culture, or oppositional cultures more generally, are a middle term between these two -social movements and human needs. They run from the everyday ways in which people cope with a society that denies their most basic needs, to the ways in which people live when their lives are given over to the struggle for change, and everything in between, but with these two minimum givens: that they enable people to "be themselves" (express their needs and their desires) where they live now, in their own lives, and that they run counter to what is dominant in their society. So among the things that means, in Ireland, is that they don't revolve around money or property, and they don't involve buying into the cosy consensus that "we're all in it together" and we all see things the same way.

Historicising the counter culture in Ireland

Saying anything beyond this about Irish counter cultures runs into a serious problem, which is that there is very little written about them, by comparison with (for example) Germany or Italy, never mind Britain or the USA. Some part of this has to do with our own self-images: for example, the autobiographical tendency to write about individual struggles rather than the collective, or the ever-present desire to come back into the welcoming bosom of Mother Ireland and "be accepted". Much of it, though, has to do with the historical realities, which were different in Ireland to most of the rest of the developed world.

One obvious part of this is that Ireland, in the 1970s in particular, was making the transition into full membership of the "developed world" -and, by extension, out of the world of the colonised: a process which has come full circle with 21 st century racism and our involvement in the American war on Islam. (Of course, this was a period when much of the colonised world was seeing the collapse or decline of their own visions of national economic independence, but in a context which pushed them out rather than taking them in.) So for much of the last four decades, even despite the long recession which set in shortly after those initial moments of optimism, it has been possible (or if you like convenient) to confuse the struggle for basic human needs in an unequal society with the "rising tide that lifts all boats" and a general faith in industrialisation, education, TV, the EU -or any other factor which had the merit of not involving real conflict.

A second, and equally obvious, part of this is that, where the struggles of 1968 in continental Europe turned rapidly into left-wing politics, and those of the English-speaking world into a mushrooming of musical and other subcultures, the struggles of 1968 in the post-colonial world led fairly rapidly into direct conflicts with the state (as in Latin America, or India). In Ireland this was of course reflected in the repression of the Civil Rights Movement and the start of "the Troubles", the longest and most destructive civil war in western Europe since 1945. And, as we know, in the shadow of military events politics, and cultural change, necessarily take a back seat.

Thirdly, the migration which remained endemic until the 1990s meant that to a large extent Irish radicalism, particularly Irish cultural radicalism, could more easily find a home abroad, and contribute to the development of alternatives in Latin America or London than it could in Ireland.

So for all of these reasons, "the literature" on Irish counter cultures is thin to non-existent.

Having said this, what can we say about them?

Mapping Irish counter cultures

In this section, I want to take counter cultures in this period as a whole, rather than separate them out. There are of course some oral history / collective biographical approaches which start from the assumption of a separation between movements -for example, histories of the second wave feminist movement or of the environmental movement. But I would argue that, as lived realities, counter culture at any of these points in time crossed these boundaries between movements, and in fact had to in order to be workable as a way of living one's life.

With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, where the "scenes" were and are large enough to sustain more or less separate lives, there is simply not enough autonomous, non-commercial, non-official space (in every meaning of the term) in most of Ireland for the separations to be too rigid. While they are obviously accentuated by national organisations and publications based in these cities, and by their relationship to international (usually English-speaking) material, both of which have increasingly focussed on developing "niche markets", at a personal, cultural and social level my impression is that (even in Dublin) we are talking more about a set of overlapping counter cultures than a rigid separation.

In the absence of much research (beyond what we are bringing together today), I am relying on my own experience: as someone who grew up in the social movement organisations of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has been involved ever since, particularly in various forms of networking capacity (alternative media, gatherings, attempts at alliances, and so on) between and across those movements.

So while this is one person's perspective, it is very much grounded in those practical attempts to bring people together, and I offer it in that spirit. While there are obvious effects of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on in such an approach, what is hardest to control for is rather the effect of time: for example, the difficulty in knowing how far the people who are still active now are good representatives of their own generations, and how much they have changed, or the difficulty of assessing retrospectively the extent and limits of my teenage political world and what it might look like if I were to meet it again as I am now.

With all those caveats, four moments stand out for me: one of consolidation, one of separation, one of co-option and one of rebellion. These connect to particular generations, without of course assuming that everyone in each generation operated in the same way.

Firstly, consolidation: it was abundantly clear in the 1970s, but less and less so as the 1980s wore on, that there was an "activist milieu" which could be found in concrete locations (10 Camden Street springs to mind as the building in which just about everyone seemed to have their offices at one point), marked by some form of engagement with socialism and feminism, with the war in the North, and with international events. It was grungy, ran on (unemployed) volunteers and Gestetners, and I never saw anything -whether it was the huge anti-Reagan protests or the tiny meeting -which happened without it. I think this is also clear from the alternative periodicals of the time: while there was (for example) a separate, "drop-out" milieu of organic farmers, people involved in new spirituality and ecologists (e.g. at the first Mustard Seed gathering), many of those involved in that milieu were very much aware of the broader political picture, and the two came together at events such as the Carnsore festivals (which could of course not have happened without this).

Secondly, separation: as the British and American counter-cultures and social movements turned more into commercially-transmitted lifestyles, which people living in Ireland could buy into, and as some of the earlier generations found themselves homes in the universities and the media, what was rewarded was increasingly separate identities. By this I mean not only those groups who were proud of what became criticised as "separatism", but also those groups who practiced it without acknowledgement: for example, the academic feminists who excluded working-class community women's struggles from their conferences, or the university leftists who created a sort of substitute identity politics around a particular image of the left, to the exclusion of many real working-class struggles; not to speak of the simple consumption of "coolness" and "rebellion" by younger generations. For others, community organising created new oppositional cultures and consciousness in their own estates, which became by far the largest form of counter culture in Ireland from that point on.

Thirdly, co-option, in particular from 1987 onwards, as doors which we had been used to have closed in our faces suddenly started to open, under the double impact of "partnership" as a new policy-making strategy (forced on the state in Ballymun and elsewhere by workingclass communities), and of the victories of the women's movement and its allies, symbolised to the establishment by Mary Robinson's election. Groups and individuals who had been "out in the cold" for years or decades found themselves (apparently) invited to form part of new policy communities in their own areas, encouraged to compete for state funding (with each other) and able to make a living out of what had previously been a labour of love. The effect, as I have charted elsewhere, was to separate out movements dealing with different government departments, to increase fragmentation and competition within movements, and to detach a layer of professional activists, able to operate in the world of funding applications and policy submissions, from their broader movements, which consequently demobilised. To this we should add a class-based faith in the effectiveness of media work and legal actions, which meant that (if you thought you could trust the media or the EU to be on your side) you no longer needed to worry about mobilising large numbers of people for anything, because it would be sorted out for you within a much smaller world.

Finally, rebellion: as people have seen the limits of partnership in their own areas, but also as the global rebellion against neo-liberalism has taken shape, we have seen new generations politically socialised at the protests in Genoa, Evian, Dublin or Gleneagles; around the issues of Shannon, Tara and Rossport, in a process whose outcomes (in terms of counter culture) are still very much up for grabs.

If we turn briefly to look at this in terms of people, there are surprisingly few people left around from the 1970s, let alone the 1960s: the starting age for most Irish activists is about ten years younger than in most other countries in the minority world. The counter culture/s, as it / they exist today in Ireland, still have a certain core of people who were politically socialised in the 1980s (and a handful in the 1970s), but even here much of the weight of numbers is given by those who have identified with a single movement or issue. Often this is underlined by the particular space they have carved out around this, whether organisationally, as a commercial business of some kind, or in an academic or other intellectual identity. The gulf between this "new establishment", or more accurately this would-be establishment, and the newer generations of activists (not to mention the large numbers of working-class youth who are organisationally, politically and culturally homeless) is large.

What can bridge the gap, and does to a certain extent in different times and places, are what I called in my own research "ordinary activists": not the full-timers, or people who identify with politics as their life, but the people whose picture of the world is large enough to embrace a real, and critical, political and social awareness. At the time, when I was researching my own 80s generation at the end of the 1990s, I could say that every one of those I had interviewed -people who had taken part in college occupations, the London squats, the drugs and music scene, street theatre and so on -had not (as popular mythology has it) given up all of that when they grew up, but had remained politically engaged, not continually but from time to time as issues came up that they cared about.

Looking back at those people 20 years on (which is a scary thought in itself), they have been involved in Glen of the Downs and Tara, in DV work and community activism, in the Mayday protests and "pie-ing" the rich and famous, in East Timor and sustainability, in Latin American solidarity and food co-ops, in alternative media and meditation -not to mention

Conclusion: what should we do?

At one level, counter culture needs no help: it is something which people are going to do for themselves, anyway, to the extent that they feel the need and can see the possibility. That does not, of course, mean that there is no value in reminding people about the need and providing practical examples of the possibility, and those are probably the two most important contributions that anyone can make.

Beyond those, what draws people into counter culture is above all action, and particularly actions which create alliances across some kind of diversity -which pull people out of their existing social networks, or enable people to create networks which they did not previously have -around some kind of challenge to the way things are.

Counter culture can also be fed, through communication of different kinds (the "alternative Internet" has been hugely important in this, particularly in Ireland), though different forms of education, popular / community education and training; but (as with anything) too much of this kind of feeding can kill it. Perhaps the most difficult thing I have faced in my own practice over the years is the question of how to get this particular balance right: between simply doing counter culture as a way of life, taking action, and somehow watering the roots.

We can also ask how far any particular project is adequate to the "whole way of struggle" that it comes out of: does it push the limits of what can be done within a world that is systematically hostile to human liberation, or does it settle for something which fits easily

Jean Bridgeman

The uses of humour: how working-class people use humour to survive class power This paper looks at how working-class people use humour as a coping skill when dealing with everyday institutions of class power such as social welfare, court processes, workplaces, health institutions, housing etc. It focuses specifically on people who do have an understanding of their class situation, are coming into a critical awareness of class and are engaged in processes of transformation -and need to manage the impact that dominant structures have on them. It argues that humour among working-class people acts as a "hidden transcript" in the background of these exchanges.

I distinguish three different dimensions of dialogue here. One is related to the need to "get past" the culture in place in such settings. It is risky to give the impression of "being cheeky", "having a gripe" or even "too needy" (and hence inadequate). The goal is to appear to know nothing, to not be in real need but just in need of a little help. We develop humorous hidden transcripts in our "prep talks" before dealing with bureaucrats, in order to come away with our humanity and dignity intact.

The second dimension is to develop caricatures which take the seriousness and fear factor (based on past experience, actual power relations and cultural learning) out of it. This involves depicting or imagining structures and individuals as animals (the monsters of bureaucracy, the badgers who guard the system, the pod people who operate on auto-pilot within it, etc.) This also helps to break down the static physical experience of the white walls and hard chairs of the structures themselves. Again, we talk in this way among ourselves to prepare ourselves for these encounters.

The third dimension is in the use of humour to avoid actual class hurts -to reflect them out rather than to feel the pain or internalise it. We need to manage how much awareness we can cope with -particularly when we are coming to critical awareness of our own social situation 21 and are trying to change things personally or politically. This is a very important survival skill within universities! This paper draws on my broader research into processes of transformation among workingclass drug users in Ireland. These different dimensions come from my work in training and supporting other people who are learning how to tackle these situations. I give some examples of how this is done and discuss this as an everyday form of working-class knowledge transmission Class struggle ... is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. But these latter things, which are present in class struggle, are not present as a vision of spoils that fall to the victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude, and have effects that reach far back into the past.

Walter Benjamin: selected writings "Them and us" and why humour?

Within the many ivory tower debates on class and whether or not it actually exists, and if that's not bad enough, 1 at times those who have licence to speak on behalf of working-class people peer out of the windows of the ivory town and beg differences with each other over who working-class people are, are we Marx's proletariats, or even the lumpenproletariats?

Can we count how many of you are in relation to the famous mode of production?, why do you endure such inequalities and poverty? Why have you not risen up above all this (Just like the great revolutionary class they said you would be?).

I want to know, or rather ask, why? Between all this conceptual huffing and puffing has there been a lack of attention paid to just what we working-class people are doing when these peering sessions from the ivory tower is going on. I mean are they blind? To the facts of reality that while all this debating is happening, working-class people are busy on the ground 1 Although my galloping class consciousness has taking leave here, all of what I say can be sought in Milner A, (1999) Core Cultural Concepts: Class 22 finding ways to survive the fallout of all this. And more importantly we working-class people they do so with the use of our own knowledge, the kind that 2 EP Thompson says has assisted working class men and women to "till fields, construct homes, and on occasion challenge effectively the conclusions of academic thought"(Poverty of theory: p200. This paper is designed to share this everyday knowledge as it works through the vessel of humour. It draws on my broader research and is a working part of my current analysis into the influences class power has on working-class identity formation. It is specifically designed to construct a subjective frame analysis to the workings of class power in the lives of the participants and the 'hidden' and desperate measures working-class people have to take in order to survive this. Of course my approach on the subject of class here, is not in terms of structures or even categories, but more or less as Thompson sees it-"Something that in fact happens, and can be shown to have happened in human relations"

As we cannot always recognise the happenings of class in our daily lives, especially its ruling forces in fact it is very easy to just believe that all this class thing is in your head, and that things are just the way they are! Perhaps take a defeated perspective -and start to believe that-(life is hard anyway), or, (sure me father never had anything either) When 3 Gramsci refers to the entrenching of working-class people in hegemonic elitism and the ideological apparatuses applied in order to further control and oppress them, we can indeed bear witness to this because we know all about the workings of power, the hoodwinking, the elite attitudes, and interests and even the lies and the oligarchy business but, they always seem to be able to justify this in terms we cannot understand. Thing is there 2 Taking from the writings of E P Thompson, cited in Joyce (1995) on Class.

3 By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony in this sense might be defined as an 'organising principle' that is diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life.

To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by the population it becomes part of what is generally called 'common sense' so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to appear as the natural order of things. [Gramsci 1971 p323] is very little we can do about it -well openly that is), because all this ideology business and elite ruling plays itself out in our lives in the form of "them and us" and we have to figure out ways to survive all this. Especially If you are, or have been living life on the edge and are now coming in from the margins so to speak, and trying to get you're life into some sort of meaningful existence. Finding yourself in these circumstances means that you will have to encounter "them" those people who make all the decisions on your behalf, and who are always seen to be helpful, just like you are always seen to be grateful!.

By "them", of course I am borrowing 4Richard Hoggarts interpretations of the word, who says them are the" bosses, public officials" and the like, and they are those who give out the dole and, your disability pay, or your rent allowance and stuff. In a nutshell "them" are those (higher uppers) who working class people have to depend on and deal with, plead with on a daily basis depending on their social circumstances of course. These are the people who know everything about you, and who sit with all this information in front of them, when you are asking for help. Waiting to judge by the evidence under your nose, your failed attempts at either, the community work scheme they graduated you to, after you finished you three year degree on the dole that is!

What has humour got to do with it?

We may approach the uses of humour in working-class life from many perspectives, in some cases it is very open and explicit (in you face type of thing) portraying working-class culture although funny, in a unruly light such as in the TV series of the royal family where workingclass people are seen to be the opposite to that of the respectable middle classes (Skeggs). In more immediate terms humour like its part in this paper, is used as an everyday form of résistance to class power relations, in that it acts as both a mighty shield from this class dominance as it presents itself in the micro power relations in you community. And it serves as a collaborator in low profile discussions (talk) about what to do when having to interact 4 24 with these powers. Scott (1985) helps to explain the uses of humour in this sense, by suggesting that it may be one of the "weapons of the weak" he says-

The poor "sang one song" (so to speak) when in the presence of the powerful and another when they were among themselves" (1985:20) he points out that this is no big deal its more or less a normal state of affairs, given the facts that the powerless "cannot afford to speak out to power in fear of the resulting consequences"(ibid). What entails then Scott says is a type of "backstage discourse" disputing all that cannot be said in the face of power, this Scott refers to as the "hidden transcript" which can easily be missed or dismissed because they are not public. And more importantly he points out that the analysis of such hidden discourse offers a way of understanding the issue of "hegemonic incorporation"(1985:21) Scott points out that, the upper classes, by virtue of their position, can deploy their weapons directly (in the form of economic and political control, for example). The poor, by contrast, are forced to express their resistance behind the backs of power" (ibid)-"Those we refer to as the "higher ups can say what they like, even using humor to show that they have an interest in the ordinary people (high fellow well met sort of thinking). Such as that Politian that said on TV recently "Tighten your belts, there's an inflation coming" Sure we have nothing, how ridicules is that statement to us?"

Scott terms this talking résistance as -an "Infra politics"-or can we say micro-politics, either way we have established that this discourse does take place, and happens in contrast to powerful dominance. I want to suggest that a vehicle is 5 needed in helping to make sense of the "hidden talk" especially if it is to strengthen the individual on the inside and help change life chances on the outside -a type of knowledge for action process. This vehicle I refer to then is humour and it helps in articulating what is sometimes a very difficult reality to try and find words for. In this sense humour works as a collaborator in finding humorous examples of the 5 I want to make reference to my use of the word we, I am well aware that my writing voice switches around. I use we in all the cultural sense as I am working-class and so are he participants in this project, so when I say we I am speaking with them as one. 25 lived reality and issues working-class people face when looking for help in the hope of maybe "getting it right this time" get your life back on track" shape up and be something! The uses of humour in building a dialogue of hope 6

As an action researcher I work with my participants as equal subjects and architects in this research project, I believe if we want to make any kind of headway in the process of unravelling and trying to represent just how class domination works, then we had better make way for the voices of those who live it everyday, or as better said by 7 Freire himself-"The silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher but are the masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world" (1982:16) I use Humour in building dialogue with the participants in this project, because humour acts as collaborator in brining about a type of cultural Unisom, where individuals are more comfortable talking about their lives when they know that others can relate to there experiences. This process also takes care of any feelings of being judged on their past discretions because it allows for laughter at the self become a collective form of support. It also gives permission to boundary cross, as linking experiences through laughter, and jokes, reach out into family connections, and also community. This dialogue spills over into helping the individual handle the task of having to go to the welfare, or the council offices for rent allowance etc. We use humour here as a kind of "prep talk" in preparing the individual for 6 Groups (1990) he argued that all subordinate groups resist in ways similar to peasants. 7 Just to say with the mention of CV this is where the fun really starts, as participants recall the work experiences and previous addresses, which for some have been the local historical sites, such as the old Grave yard, or in the disused sheds in various different place. 26 the worst. It is built from the telling experiences of participants who have engaged in critical reflection of just how hard it is to get any real chances of employment or even training. For most participants their employment experience is zilch, and they expressed the pointlessness of even applying for a job, as most employers look for five years experience and an impeccable CV.

The use of humour in establishing dialogue around the trials and errors of trying to get by with bits of jobs everywhere, doing a day here and there, but for dirt money as employers take advantage of you, or about wanting to train in something, but could not go without money in their pocket for a month, and would never be able to manage with just money every month so it was better to stay as you were. Helps by blending a mixture of living experiences and social critique into a manageable understanding of ones class position, which further helps in breaking down hierarchies and class nastiness. This process of speaking out creates a more level playing ground for the participants when needing support (in the face of power) by those who have the means to help but who are often hostile in their responses to this request. This is important to individuals who have suffered intimidating experiences in these situations in the past-"Like just when you start feeling good "them" will put you back in your box, fairly quick, where you will continue to blame yourself for the misery you are causing them by failing to live up to their helping ways"

In supporting participants work through these issues we put to paper what Scott may allow us call a "hidden transcript" this is referred to by participants as the famous prep talk. This talk has come out of the humorous back stage talk and has been a vital asset to some when things looked bleak in trying to change you life, or turn it around, it has in their words in times of desperate measures "Stopped us from being pushed to the margins yet again"

27

The famous prep talk! Do not loose it, be calm and reassure yourself, that the only reason they are asking for your mother's maiden name is for filing purposes only.

Look to see if you can identify what the mood is like, remember if they are in a bad mood you will have to work all the harder, because you know their mood more often than not dictates how your day is going to be. They may tell you this time like last, that everything (all decisions) are subject to their discretion at the end of the day.

Continue to observe the face for signs of mood change. Begin by asking them! The question how can you help me, do not ever presume to know how they can help you!.

Do not get side tracked when they refer to your last visit, the time you stormed out because after waiting in queue for three hours they said they posted your cheque.

Do not look them in the eye for any longer than necessary. Neither look away to quickly; just calmly allow your attention wonder down to your hands that are clasped in your lap. Only look up when they have stopped recalling past visits or your futile attempts to gain some work while on the dole or disability Do not try to defend there scorning remarks either on your lateness or your recent attempts to gain work. Remember to be grateful at all times for the employment opportunities available to you.

Do allow them scorn your fruitless attempts, and hang in silence till you get their approval and hopefully you can start again, or at least be viewed in terms other than a sponging parasite.

Do try gain empathy, start by looking to connect on a human level of some sort. Either mention the weather, or find a common connection something both you and them experience in daily life such as news headlines, this sometimes works, you will know if you get a grunt, or even a short exhale of held in breath will do. This implies that you are no longer endured the way one would try to avoid a bad smell, it says, you do have some intelligence after all (you know about the news and weather and such) therefore you might just shape up and make something of your self, then all 8 their efforts will have been worthwhile

Monsters, badgers, and pod people

Many of the individuals I work with have to make alternative living arrangements, either by being thrown out of the family home, or have lost accommodation through not paying rent etc, or simply never had their own place. In these circumstances individuals have spent many days sitting around in chairs that are designed to be uncomfortable so as to discourage further visits) waiting for people to decide whether you get a clothing allowance, or rent allowance.

We develop humorous dialogue in order to take the sting out of these past experiences, so as not to be haunted by them when we have to visit these places again. We connect these static environments in a humorous way to that of either sci-fi -or German Gestapo places. Humor is also used to put face to the mountain of bureaucracy that is fired at us in these situations. We share these experiences and refer to this bureaucratic process as the monster of ultimate rule, where everything comes from the monster. We do this because working-class individuals can find the form filling process very intimidating, especially if you have been an early school leaver and you are not over familiar with the words and what they mean, let alone try to pronounce them. In focus group sessions some of the forms have been brought along just to prove the ridiculousness of what they have in print on them, but also stemming from this circle of humor is the united task of actually getting the forms filled in. 8 Sketch( 1) the prep talk sketch-this drawing speaks for itself, and was doodled later retrieved by me from off the floor and re-introduced at a later group meeting. In showing this I have the full permission of the participant. 29 9 Another vital asset of humor is what we term dealing with the direct hit when individuals have to fill out a form on the spot, and in doing so encounter those who just either sit there peering at you, from behind the bullet proof glass cubicle with the black vision bar across it, just to make sure you are off balance. Or, continue to stare at you even though they know you are having trouble understanding what exactly you have to do. But you have to ask for help, grovel like, because it's a class thing and they need to keep their power by-'you had to ask them'. Of course they seem so delighted to help you out even double check things over with you, yet these same people would not let you in to the waiting room of the dole office five minutes earlier last week on a rainy day and left you outside the door in the lashings.

These type of helpers are referred to as badgers (simply because of the territorial thing in badgers have in guarding their dens) and we humorously depict them as guardians of the monster, we play out talking examples of how to handle the badgers, we use humor to ease the knowing that these helpers actually get a power buzz out of saying "You are not allowed" and seeing you out in the rain. This process of putting animal and cartoon figures in place of static and hostile environments is also done in preparation for meeting who we refer to as the' pod people'.

Humor is used here as a way of keeping the calm when waiting to be contacted by various departments. It is best called into play when one is actually in conversation with a pod person and is suddenly cut across and stopped in mid sentence with the words have you got you medical card number, or take a seat. We depict them as pod people for the seemingly lack of facial expressions, and their inability to answer the simplest of questions, to which they reply, "we are not programmed to answer that query, and continue in auto pilot manner into their 'next please' auto pilot voice. 9 (sketch 2) done in focus group during discussions of monsters and badgers I think I have just discovered the reasons for my fleeting terms from we to you when I am explaining just how it is. All discussions are taken from experiences and have all been told to me in individual voices it is these voices I hear in my head as I am writing, apologies if this causes any confusion w

Humor in cultural conflict, and political twists and turns

The school system was just one part of the system of ideological hegemony in which individuals were socialized into maintaining the status quo Gramsci 1971 p40). Most working-class children were schooled in the dominant educational method which Freire refers to as the "Banking model" of education, Here children were force fed the ideas, values and cultural ways of the elite, Freire held this to be a cultural invasion, where the dominant ways of one culture imposed itself on another. In a nutshell working-class children were schooled into learning how to obey not how to learn, and had no choice in even thinking that what they had, or their parents had was good enough, so you always had to be better, or compete in order to be like them, or as Kuhn says-"to be working-class generates a constant fear of never having got it right" (p16 in Skeggs).

{In light of all this then one does not have to be a genius to figure out why working-class people who re-enter the educational system have what Raymond Williams refers to as "a structured feeling, of doubt, anxiety and fear" (ibid).} Yet for most working-class individuals getting an education is the ultimate dream, this of course is, in great part due to the over emphasis by elites in setting out to 'educate the unruly lot, or put manners on them'. Still onward most of us trudge in the hope that when we reach university, all this elite-ness, and class power nastiness will simply not be there, but no, in fact academia is so saturated with class power relations and distinctions working class people if they are lucky, and wise, will take to the use of humor in order to survive it.

Humor the class hurt swatter!

Group discussions on this matter have all come from actual experiences of participants going back to school/education, and being in the situation where you might have to answer a question asked of you, humor works here by way of making a joke, because by saying something funny to direct attention away from what you have been asked, not because you do not know the answer or under stand the concept, but more because you cannot pronounce the wording as you never heard it before, and your culture does not know this language.

Participants who have left college said they did so because they could not understand the wording.

Humor works in building underground support systems in university, by diving for cover from it all to say a canteen. It is here working-class people can feel most in touch with a familiar sense of place. To this individuals connect in humors low profile talk (behind the backs of power again) these talks take place in all the out of mainstream places, events are thrashed out in half joker manner, in order to develop or, not into a full humorous support transcript. Humor acts as an antenna for class encounters and can help the individual preprepare for such an event, it can be a detector of sort by throwing out one or two words, an old saying or something like-ah sure we could be all dead tomorrow" if this is not met with a type of humor response then you know you 10 are in a class encounter in university so its best you know your place.

In conclusion and with some concluding questions

What may we on the ground use as our ivory tower? I mean is there a certain place or point from which we have to get to in order to be heard, do we have to be well educated so to speak, before our words are fancy enough or, jargoned enough before they will be accepted as out truths. I hope this paper has at least shed some light on the facts of just how we cope in every day terms in the face, or faces of power, albeit in the forms of micro resistance. I want to

give the importance of this research in the terms of its explicit innovativeness, because, how else would we even get close to this kind of hidden knowledge that we working class people depend on in out daily lives.

The small but significant events and life changes that has resulted from the knowledge gained in this project is not just for the purpose of sitting on a shelf gathering dust in some university 10 Sketch (3) is shown here and participants say it holds a striking resemblance to me, but I know they don't mean in looks so to speak, but more to do with my own educational experiences which I could share with theirs. This is the beauty of using ones own experiences in the research process, I think!? achieve. Perhaps waiting for the day some one decides to term it a revolution of sorts. Instead it is an active process in moment. And one that is really only achieved through the freedom of research in action. So the knowledge does not sit on the shelf, it's more like knowledge in action. As we are actually dealing with these situations not just sitting around telling bad jokes.

Also I want to point out that humor is a human thing, it is hard wired into us all, therefore it is a very human way of putting truths across, This ensures, or rather helps in the process of speaking out, when all your life you have gotten by only in, and from using, the means of staying silent, keeping the head down, I guess I am trying to ay here, that working-class people feel safe speaking out through humor, cant be seen as a dangerous lot then, sure there has been working-class people hung for less With some concluding questions I want to ask what is to be done with humor, as a research tool, I don't know much about this really other than it developed from a natural means with the group I am working with. I mean is there a particular manual on it somewhere?

How would this process of teaching fair out in a more conventional setting, as opposed to a local one? And how well am I putting forward the analysis of class, can I do it any different?

How might a wider audience receive the famous "prep talk", so to speak? (Would they see all these participants as ungrateful pups?

Ciara O'Connor

Re working our Rootedness (escaping our mutedness) An exploration of Irish women's spirituality and its radical potential

In light of Donagh Davis' recent thesis paper entitled 'Gypsies, nomads, pirates and Indians: counter culture, revolution and the movement of movements', I have submitted this paper to contribute to understanding of the topography of counter culture and radical action in Ireland. The rationale behind this paper is to map out the spiritual landscape of Irish women who are choosing to shrug off the religions of their birth in favour of a more subversive approach to spirituality. It is based on provisional findings and tentative analysis of fieldwork which has been conducted over the past 2 years. The participants came from a call for volunteers on the Active Link forum -an online resource for NGOs and non profit organisations in Ireland. Others came through word of mouth and snowballing.

Women are trying to forage out social spaces to work within which reflect their needs and their realities. As a feminist, I'm interested in this kind of activity for a number of reasons, but not least of all because it is an expression of women's resistance and a grass roots construction of alternatives by women themselves. I tried to capture the feminist significance of these actions and their repercussions in society. I also looked at the kinds of feminist themes which reverberate through their discourse and their understanding of spirituality. This is participatory, action research project. This adopts feminist methodological principles of reflexivity and senstitivity to the research participants, along with an engaged research process.

The intellectual direction of this paper is fundamentally concerned with how spirituality can provide a valuable site for feminist resistance, can prove an constructive aid to feminists who are politically active, and is often the language of an oppressed people who perhaps may not feel able to express a political idea in political language, but the language they are most used to, and comfortable with. This paper expounds upon our interconnectedness and our rootedness. It, through a series of narrators accounts, attempts to give a window into the lived experiences of women at the coalface of Irish radical spirituality, and attempts to frame this from a feminist perspective. I have identified certain key areas which recur in the dialogues I have had with women. These key areas have been loosely grouped as follows: firstly, the women identified the body as a site for spiritual growth. Issues such as guilt and shame from Catholic upbringings, to the transformative powers of body-orientated work (sweat lodges, yoga, breathwork) were highlighted. The second thematic area is Resistance. Here I have grouped both resistance to mainstream religious doctrine and cultural ideologies, a general 'societal' resistance and abnegation of societal values, particularly consumerist and neo-liberal agendas. Finally, the third category which emerged is Autonomy -developing a self-directed spiritual path from a young age and mapping that process throughout the lives of the women narrators. I will conclude with a brief analysis of the theoretical implications of spirituality as a site for feminist resistance and action. Donagh's thesis provided rich fruit for thought on the nature of action and activism in contemporary Irish society. I hope to present a less obvious or conventional conceptualisation of micro-political action within these findings.

Part One -Embodiment

A critical pattern which revealed itself during the research process is that of Body. Each participant (in one form or another) spoke of sexuality, their relationship with their body, and the imminence of the divine as accessible through bodily sensations and practices (chanting, yoga, breathing etc). This drawing back into the body and integration of body and spirit is something often absent from other *dominant* spiritual discourses.

When embarking on the research process, in seeking out participants, I simply sought out women who are involved in or interested in spirituality. Interestingly, the majority of the It emerged that sexual identity, acceptance and meaningful exploration often came as part of a spiritual awakening for some women. Many felt that they could not fully embrace their sexuality until they had opened to a part of themselves spiritually. One woman said: "I couldn't enjoy sex. For years I floundered around looking for love in all the wrong beds. I didn't think I was sexy, desirable, anything. But when I awoke to goddess energy, and I began to find my feminine power... boy! I was powerful! I felt so sexy. And I realised I was bisexual. And I was ok with that. From years of repression to an almost instant recovery. That's part of what goddess has given me." 36 This is one example out of many who equated power with sex and sexuality. And that this power was accessible through spiritual connection, especially as cited by many, through Goddess energy work, is of major feminist import. Another woman expressed dissatisfaction with the way she expressed her sexuality prior to having a spiritual awakening as such, and again, made the connection with lack of power: "I had taken a long, long time to embrace my sexuality. I do see that a lot in Catholic women actually... a lack of power... a few drinks, and well, that's the way to your sexual expression..."

Another expressed this power in a positive way: "At the time I thought maybe I was gay, maybe I was bisexual... and I had to do a lot of reading on that.

And it was in that search that I encountered the idea of feminine power." Cross dressing emerged strikingly as a critical factor for a number of women in exploring and defining their spiritual selves. They saw cross dressing as an integral part of balancing their idea of gender. This was an unexpected finding in the most part, and I was surprised to see it being raised as a significant issue spiritually for women. It echoes Butler's concept of gender performance and the liberatory functions this play can serve. Butler says: 'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.' (Gender Trouble, p. 25). In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are.

Butler suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have seized a hegemony -but, she suggests, it doesn't have to be that way. Butler calls for subversive action in the present:

'gender trouble' -the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders and identity. A spiritual environment may provide a useful site for enacting this kind of gender play, as exemplified by come participants.

"I had to then explore a lot of my male-female issues. In 1997 I cross dressed for the first time. The first time was for a play. And I did it again a few times. Once was for the women's circle I was part of, we enacted the decent of Persephone, and I played Hades. Cross dressing is very interesting... first of all I didn't get as masculine as I thought Id get. And on the other hand, this integration started to happen.

And after these experiences I had such a sense of the male and female within me being interconnected. I felt strange first reading witchcraft books who talk about God and Goddess. My father would have been 37 very violent verbally and physically. Although I loved him dearly I was afraid of him. This concept that a God could be associated with desire and feistiness but without the need to dominate...without the need to subjugate and without the violence, the male being associated with that which is life-supporting.

That was a major paradigm shift for me. One of the ways I could begin to deal with this was by getting in touch with my own male side."

Another woman commented that cross dressing made her feel more like a gay woman. She felt if she didn't fit into the world which said she shouldn't be gay, she should immerse herself in the world which said she should embrace this.

"I used to go out dressed as a man... I used to play so much with gender...so much! What does my sexuality mean, am I supposed to look butch, and shave my head, and wear boots and be the stereotype? So I used to have my head shaved, and wear a shirt and a tie, and I looked like, a boy... and I did a lot of artwork around gender and identity as well. Which was so healing."

A salient aspect of the research was the women's relationship to their bodies and the connection to their spiritual path. It emerged that women equated their relationship to their body with the perceptions ingrained in them at a young age by the Church they were born into. This is unsurprising, but what was most interesting was that all my participants so far have unprovoked raised this issue of guilt and shame around the body being as a direct result of their Christian upbringing, and how overcoming this was directly linked to their realization of spiritual identity outside this. One woman had a particularly negative perception of her religion of birth: "I did get a lot of shame and guilt issues, especially as a teenager... you know, kissing boys for the first time and feeling really filthy afterwards, just disgusting. Also, I was so ashamed of my body. I menstruated early; my breasts grew early... it all related back to this shame. Like I couldn't tell my mother when I got my period... I was 11. My first time… I made a pad out of cotton and toilet paper. I remember spending the whole day worrying would I bleed through, had I bled through? It wasn't that I was ashamed of the blood itself... I just didn't want to tell my mother. That I see now as this shame thing she had around her as a Catholic." This perception that her mother saw her body as something to be ashamed of reverberated through many women's depiction of their body-awareness.

Other women pointed out how fear surrounded their first menstrual period and that they had felt a great deal of shame around their bodies changing and puberty and that many times, 38 this was related to the church. There was a definite linking of spiritual change with a bodily acceptance. One woman spoke of the shift in perception starting when she read "When God was a Woman": "It made me wonder what we would feel like if we had never been exposed to the idea of a male god.

There was no way I could even conceive of having developed free of the idea of shame, without ever having the kind of guilt associated with the body."

Most of the women I spoke to are drawn to spiritualities like paganism, shamanism and witchcraft. These spiritual paths venerate and revere the female form, the body, and express divinity as imminent. It seems to make sense to women to feel spiritual about their bodies rather than 'transcend' or eclipse them.

"I was always put off by ascetic branches of spirituality that were still talking about transcending the body. I felt I'd done enough of that transcending shit. Especially as a woman, the last thing we can do is transcend our body; we are confronted by the reality of it every day. We've barely even gotten into our bodies and they want us to get out!" So many different women commented on this body estrangement. It was a powerful motif in all of the participant's narratives. Healing seemed to come through a spiritual realignment of sorts. Many women spoke of a kind of awakening to their bodies through their spiritual practices.

"I started doing things like burning candles, burning sage, blessing my body with sage, blessing my body in the mirror, realising when I did that my initial reaction was 'yuck' -but the idea that the body was not this thing to overcome or the source of all evil, but rather the vehicle that we're in now, and is possibly the source of all joy... and that evolution may actually come through the body, not by trying to cut it off."

The disassociation felt by women with their bodies is rampant in our sanitized society, and many pointed out that a lot of this shame and disconnection with the body begins with the guilt of religion.

"I recently become aware of how disassociated I was with being a woman, There is a lot of negative association and distain for woman, I believe due to their power, which of course has an impact on us women… medicine men, monks, spiritual teachers, always wear a dress, or robes when doing spiritual work, as the feminine is closer to God, so obviously men have been threatened by the feminine energy. I am now working on loving myself wholly, and embracing my body, my breasts, my vagina, my blood, my sexuality. Breaking down the patterns inside me that society has built." Rita Gross affirms this embodiment narrative claiming: "conventional, male dominated religions long for transcendence and immortality…are anti-body and anti-nature…Women are identified with the despised body that constantly changes and finally gives evidence of its finitude by dying, compounding the negative effects on women, the world of nature is symbolically and conceptually assimilated with the body and the female" (p237, Feminism and Religion)

Part 2 -Cultural resistance and resistance to 'religion'

Most consciously political people are not consciously spiritual, and vice versa. I wanted to identify where these women expressed a resistance to either mainstream religion, or countercultural inclinations. It's important to reflect on examining these narratives not just the actual resistance expressed, but also what is present or potential, but not conscious or spoken. The women spoke of feelings of dissent and discord but not always of direct action, this is also important to note.

Before examining the narratives, it is important to note the nature of this inquiry is seated in a search to unite feminist politics and spirituality. Movements have "a barely graspable fluid structure" (Scheller, 2000). This lack of defined boundaries makes feminist and other movements self-consciously reflect on their nature on a regular basis. This also leads to a huge degree of reactivity among activists and others who are attempting to eek out an identity for themselves. So where does feminist politics and spirituality meet? Many activist groups are under pressure from external agencies, that they are at odds with mainstream society and constantly trying to defend their position This strategic essentialism and resistance to other forms of resistance of mainstream ideologies highlights a movements own lack of self confidence and anxiety about branching forth into areas which may distract from their basic political agenda. This is a form of resistance which would seemingly run contrary to most activist sentiment regarding free 40 exchange of ideas etc and yet self consciously they have an image that they wish to be preserved in a pristine way as they reflect back at the world.

I have experienced great resistance to the idea of spirituality as a site for feminist enquiry.

Here I want to display how women who are involved in the spiritual sphere are doing so to resist cultural norms and can be seen as feminist activists in a micro-political resistance.

Many of the participants expressed a general animosity for contemporary consumerist society. Others lamented the patriarchal system historically, and all related this back to spiritual development and religious change. One woman commented "In the history of humanity, we seemed to choose primal and fear based ways of seeing the world. Our society chose an entire iconography and belief system based on that. A lot of the negatives in Judaeo-Christian beliefs and general societal beliefs come from the same source -the suppression of wildness.

They put all that on women, we carry the burden."

Another woman expressed her non-conformity and how it can hamper integration into 'normal' society. She speaks of her spirituality as a means of coping with alienation: "I think it's to do with society. If you don't conform you're seen as mad, crazy, weird...so we suppress all our wants and desires, and our whole spiritual self, and we put it away... that's not ok. So what is ok?

And that becomes an emergency in yourself, until you find something [spiritual] to fill that hole, there is a void within yourself."

The theme of suppression has arisen in both those commentaries on society and points to a psychological and spiritual need for Expression. This is what many women seem to find in feminist orientated spiritual paths. Before they do, this lack of expression can often to manifest in abuse of drugs, and other subversive activities:

"I feel as a younger woman and especially in my teens, alcohol and drugs were a way of getting that spiritual fix. Pills, speed, marijuana... it undoes repression a lot of the time. In Catholicism there is that repression of your body, isn't there. .. and connection and proudness of your body. Alcohol plays a huge role in society and peoples expression of themselves because of this repression." Many women do feel 'quirky' socially isolated and a bit 'out of the loop'. This crush on the devil was a common theme in many women's lives. On the rebound from institutional religious forms which proved oppressive, the logical step for many in their search for spiritual identity, was to seek out the opposing spiritual side to Christianity. One woman spoke of being 'obsessed'; another of becoming scared and paranoid.

Part 3 -Autonomy

The women I interviewed all expressed an aversion to associating themselves with any one path or doctrine. These women do not want to identify with any particular 'scene' or 'religion', or spiritual path. They are self-directed people in these spheres, isolated yet insist on integrating sexuality, spirituality and feminism. They are keen to find freedom and don't want to be trapped.

This search for autonomy begins at a very early age. The voices of these women demonstrate this search for something very unique and self-determined. "I remember going to church at around 6 or 7, and until the priest started speaking, feeling really good. I Feminist idioms of consciousness raising and the activist goals of spreading knowledge is often the way alternative spirituality works. Wimmin-centred spirituality is particularly focused on transcending patriarchy and systems of oppression through ritual and meditation for personal awareness then following through with personal and sometimes political action.

Part 4 -Futures

Feminist goals are often very much aligned with spiritual goals. This is the reason I began this project in the first instance -its never ceases to amaze me how much they have in common… the very lingua franca of much alternative/holistic and woman-centred spirituality mirrors that of feminism (life affirming/positive action/overcoming dualisms/subversion etc). This continuum usually occurs at a level which Alex Plows describes as 'practical paganism' (Plows 1995;. She says "when articulated, there is a fairly 'standard' activist spirituality… 'practical paganism', as opposed to a less-engaged, apolitical New-Ageism.

Affinity with nature, landscape, is also bound up with commonly held ideas about modern society's alienation from nature, again very eco-philosophy based ideas." Similarities in goals can be expressed quite simply, in the quest for spiritual, political, educational, sexual and racial freedom. Feminism in its contemporary phase attempts to give a voice to women and their determination to find their unique sense of 'self' and their identity. This paper attempts to point towards (along with many other disparate voices) a return to the roots of freedom which should be the feminists movements supporting foundation. (Zerilli, 2004). Obviously defining a movement has been a contentious issue for feminists, social movement academics and activists, however at this point I would suggest that women's spirituality has the potential for a drive towards movement and action. As a feminist, my spirituality informs my activism and my activism informs my spirituality. I, too, like many of the people who told me their story, feel like my spirituality is a unique and fundamental part of my feminism and feel the two are inseparable. I also feel that spirituality and social movements have always been interconnected. When women, poor people and underclasses/races speak in a religious or spiritual language they are often speaking something they cannot articulate in other words. The renewed interest in Ireland of pagan/witchcraft and holistic type spiritual movements is indicative of not just a backlash against the church, which has been such a huge influence on Irish people (and continues to be), but also the consumer culture which is very new to Ireland (the last 15 years or so).

Part 5 -Conclusions

The kinds of questions raised by this are many and varied. How do we get from repression of women's needs, through consciousness raising and spiritual mobilisation, towards large scale social change? Are women using their spirituality to express feelings of oppression because they are disillusioned with political alternatives, because for a lot of women feminism means something alienating because it has been so systematically vilified as a narrow discourse? Is there any way to bridge this chasm between politics and spirituality? And how can we see this as part of a larger feminist social movement?

A preliminary analysis of this has, in many ways, already been done. In the 17 th century, English academics analysed spiritual language with respect to class; engaged Buddhist theories have examined spiritual discourse with respect to ethnicity, and I am attempting to do the same thing with gender.

One way into going about solving some of these riddles is the next group which I am currently in the process of setting up. The group is intended to be open to women interested in woman-centered spirituality, or have united your spirituality with feminism, or simply practices a spiritual path and takes it into environmentalism, or other activism. The intention is a woman-centered spiritual collective, for workshops, discussion and research into women's spirituality in Ireland and how spirituality can be used as an empowering tool for women everywhere. It would be open to all women, whether they are an established practitioner or just becoming interested in furthering their spiritual path, to bridge that gap between action and spirituality amongst women not just of the pagan tradition but involved in engaged Buddhism etc. This is not dedicated to any one spiritual path, it is supposed to be a forum to share from different traditions and see how we can make a change through strength, togetherness and friendship. This sense of a need for roots is echoed throughout the literature, and in conlusion I'd like to echo Christina Feldman in saying: "a woman embarking on a spiritual journey travels a path on which there are few sure guides to inspire and affirm her. The institutions and traditions we are heirs to, have been primarily formulated, structured and maintained by men, with their own vision and application of 46 spirituality… we need to be willing to risk the loss of external affirmation and approval if we are to know ourselves deeply." (p1/2 Woman Awake)

We must embark on a lonely and often terrifying path towards freedom if we adopt a feminist spiritual path. But in that aloneness, we can find each other, ourselves, and our truth.

Asia Rutkowska

Counterculture in Poland.

Problems encountered and possible solutions.

I would like to look at polish counterculture by examining the place where I spent more than five years -a squat and an independent culture centre. This will show the condition of polish so called 'alternative stream', its condition, its place and role within Polish society.

The term counterculture, as I understand it, refers to activities taken up and motivated by an objection against dominant culture. As mainstream culture adapts plenty of formercountercultural patterns, I am using the term 'counterculture' intuitively and imprecisely; without differentiating it for 'the real', profound, with deep insight, and for 'the not real', shallow, maybe imaginatory. Counterculture is a starting point for creating a subculture or an alternative culture.

For me, the term is vast enough to call it various cultural and social activities or movements.

There are punks, straight edge, reggae fans, travelers -people who travel, marihuana smokers, anarchists, vegetarians and neo-hippies..

I am not sure about neo fascists and other groups of a right wing ideology. They do create a subculture but are different in the way that they are anti-countercultural and their actions, to an extent, are excused and supported by the government.

Most countercultural initiatives are addressed and attractive to the appropriate countercultural groups. Maybe it is so, because there are no powerful means to reach the general public. Or maybe because countercultural arguments -such as calls for equality for humans and animals, standing in solidarity against 'the system', boycotting the cheapest hypermarket are not understood, seen as being too risky or simply not realistic.

Therefore there are many different styles of alternative music concerts, or low-edited zines or brochures produced which may be entertaining but achieve little else. In spite of countercultural calls for a revaluation of ideas and for a profound change of society I see some countercultural ideas as quite authoritarian and narrow-minded. And in some cases I have the feeling that it is not about finding new ways for all of us, but about us -the societyto become countercultural.

In Poland counterculture hasn't brought too many ways of social transformation. For years it has been a world of alternative escape rather than the real lobby for change or anything else.

Fortunately, some members of some countercultural groups were able to reflect on their own activity, and to draw some conclusions which enabled them to act accordingly to the social situation and to work slowly on its change. In Poland many activists begin their "careers" with high optimism that they will be able to change the world. As the years go by and disillusionment sets in they opt for creating an alternative world through creating squats, alternative communities etc. After more years pass the disillusionment grows so strong as to render the activist incapable of anything accept having to retreat to a place where they have no contact with their former lives. Present day activists with a knowledge of this and past mistakes made by former activists approach life with a more pragmatic approach, accepting that they will, if they want to achieve any real change, have to operate in the real world and with all the consequences that may bring.

I would like to present the story of Polish countercultural legend from my own experience. It will present various stages of its development, the problems, difficulties and conflicts encountered and the ways in which solutions were sought.

Rozbrat is the first and the oldest squat in Poland. Situated in the heart of the wealthy city of Poznan it is a home for a great amount of countercultural and alternative initiatives.

It was established in October 1994 to be a dwelling place and an independent self-realization space for a few anarcho-activists. It is placed within a former car-repair workshop, surrounded by some commercial buildings, city gardens and a park. The area squatted consists of a few various buildings, most in pretty bad condition, some industrial remains and a small green space. It used to be a relatively closed place, trying to stay hidden and isolated, opened for friends only. However after two years, a group of neo-fascists skinheads attacked the place, resulted in the beating and stabbing of some people who were spending the night 49 there after a party. This incident gave rise to a media scandal. The name of Rozbrat became well known to the citizens of Poznan.

The activists involved in maintaining the place decided to change its character and to make it an open centre for alternative culture. The squat itself, as a dwelling place was not the main aim anymore. Squatting and living there became a way of keeping the place which successfully enabled its inhabitants to take up a lot of various social, cultural and political actions. This opening for various countercultural environments and initiatives guaranteed support from all kinds of activists and made the place a lot more significant, influential and famous. Soon Rozbrat became an inspiring icon of polish counterculture for all kind of people -activists and members of various subcultures. It became a hub of great energy, ideas and activities. It was a home and a meeting space for anarchists, feminists, eco-warriors amongst others. It was a space for philosophical discussions, punk, reggae, or experimental music concerts, poetry or movie nights, artists' exhibitions, self-defence or wicker-weaving workshops. It was a space for sharing information, for coping and distributing anarcho-leftwing materials, for talking loudly about others oppression and for organizing solidarity gigs.

It was proof that we could create the world the way we wanted.

I was growing up in a town situated nearly three hundreds kilometers from Poznan (where Rozbrat was). When I was in high school I remember other pupils whispering and gossiping about Rozbrat or discussing the heard problems, or planning to pay a visit there. To visit Rozbrat, to know someone from there was cool, it was even somehow a thing of prestige.

I got my chance to meet some of the people involved in Rozbrat when I was seventeen. With some friends we had established a local group of Green Federation in our town. We were organizing fur-boycotting pickets, or collecting signatures against building a waste incineration somewhere in England. We were trying to support initiatives held by more significant polish ecological organizations. Suddenly someone from a three-member EarthFirst! group located in Rozbrat contacted us and informed us about plans of building a highway through our local landscape park, asking us if we were ready and willing to act. We were. They sent us detailed information about this planned highway; they also sent us petitions and leaflets. They organized workshops on direct actions for us which included how to build tree-houses and on legal aid. Most of them were the same age as we were -sixteen to twenty. Only a few were slightly older, I think up to twenty-five years.

This example shows that the people from Rozbrat had a mission. They were trying to animate the activities all around the Poland. They were encouraging people to act within their local communities, to organize themselves wherever they were. And they were giving support as well.

After this anti-high way protest was over, I found myself moving in Rozbrat. I felt like becoming a part of the icon. I saw the buildings which had been adapted as a dwelling house, library, bar, small concert hall, a few garages adapted as tool-sheds, waste goods depot, and a recycling centre. Some of the buildings were not adapted at all; most of them had leaking roofs. In the residential area there were twelve rooms and fifteen people living there. There were two toilets and a sink.

No common kitchen, no bathroom. No running water. The awful stink of dampness and rats instead.

Soon I found that living there was not easy. There were everyday routines which involved carrying barrels of water from a near-by car salon, never-ending clean up after gigs, getting rid of rubbish etc. On many squats all over the Europe, their inhabitants live off social welfare allowance.

People could spend all day on squats, repairing them, preparing for events or socializing. This is practically impossible in Poland, due to a very restricted and inaccessible social welfare system. This creates the situation where everyone has to take a job to support themselves. It means spending a day working somewhere, then going back home not to simply relax, but having to help with bringing water, collecting wood for stove or heating water for in-bowl bath or hand-washing. Everything, even preparing meals used to take more time than in 'normal' houses. When then were we supposed to find the time for activism?

To change anything we needed money. We -squatters and other activists involved -used to organize various gigs and fundraisers. However within relatively poor polish society we could gather some money for a barb wire for example, but not for big investments like 51 connecting water, changing gutters or repairing roofs. We, squatters, were getting frustrated.

Our activity was limited by our alternative way of living.

This was a problem. Some squatters moved out -went back to their parents or started renting apartments. They came back every week, or a few times a week to repair, organize, discuss, setting up new activists groups. After a while I realized that those fellows and their friends, various anarcho-activists actually were doing much more work for the place than squatters.

The squatters were considered as lazy, problematic and not active enough. They were perceived as students who were looking for cheap accommodation, or no-future alcoholic punks. A kind of tension developed between squatters and activists because of this. And squatters became a minority within the place. Soon more and more conflicts arose.

Another difficulty was brought by another set of hooligans and skinheads raids on the squat.

They took place during nights, when no one but squatters were present -and we not necessarily were fighters. About half of Rozbrats inhabitants were girls, and for most of the time there were children living there as well. Raids, destroying bikes, breaking windows and attempts to set the place on fire were not regular occurrences but caused lots of stress when they did occur. Squatters had a network of supporters who were willing to come over and spend the night if necessary, however it wasn't too useful, as the time needed to get to squat was at least half an hour. Some activists were willing to spend a night or two a week on the squat, to be there just in case, but again, there was no spare relatively safe, warm and comfortable space to get a good sleep for few extra folks.

This only made the situation tenser. Squatters perceived themselves as those who risked their lives by living there to keep the space and called anarchists 'recreational activists'. Activists, according to the slogan 'work makes property' stopped asking for permission for organizing gigs, sometimes they didn't bothered even to inform that there was something planned. The terrain of Rozbrat became unofficially divided between squatters who were ruling the dwelling house and members of the Anarchist Federation who took care of their meeting club. We were not friends anymore.

To overcome this situation there were regular meetings established and forming a so called 'Collective'. Its members were both: squatters and 'outside' activists connected with Rozbrat.

Any gig planned, any investment, or anything else concerning Rozbrat had to be approved by both the activists and squatters. Even if discussions quite often turned into quarrels with various accusations flying back and forth, it was the starting point toward a positive change.

Over the years we managed slowly to adapt the remaining buildings into an anarchists' club, a big concert hall, another bar and a gallery. We managed to save enough money to buy pipes and connect water. In the dwelling house there was a living room, two kitchens and a shower created. In addition an outside shower and a few outside toilets were constructed. While these were being constructed, some of the other buildings roofs collapsed. C'est la vie.

Unfortunately it was not idyllic anymore. I realized that a sort of portrait of a 'real' activist appeared. A real activist was someone whose every single choice was 'active. Because every private choice is political, activists were expected to make the right choices all the time. To be perfect according to the ideology created. Various people had various expectations and requirements. A real activist had to act in a radical and non-conformist way using civil disobedience methods. He or she had to be at least a vegetarian, but it was better to be a vegan, because veganism was real anarchism. However it was cool to have a dog and buying meat for it was alright. Activists bought local products only, and if it was impossible to get e.g. a toothpaste which was produced locally and wasn't tested on animals they were trying to make it. They are not legally married, never visit supermarkets unless they want to steal something, didn't have bank accounts, didn't use petrol, didn't eat seedless grapes, didn't shave her legs… and worked illegally to avoid paying taxes. On the other hand it is alright to smoke cigarettes produced by some company which probably destroys Amazonian forests and drink excise taxed alcohol. We were watching each other. Those who were not perfect enough didn't deserve to be 'one of us'. Even, if the sense of 'us' was not clear at all. The 'alternativity' and 'free thought'were rotting from inside.

Personal conflicts, weird alliances or prejudices were stopping people from working together.

For example, an activist who was a vegan wouldn't operate with non-vegans while preparing a poetry night. The Rozbrat community was now dividing not only in two groups -squatters and anarchists, but into dozens of small low numbered groups. There were up to a few members groups like Anarchist Federation, Left-Wing Alternative, Anarcho-Feminist Group, Group of Anarchist Solidarity (sic!), mostly in conflict with each other, even boycotting events prepared by others. Broken relationships often ended the group activity. Again, things were frustrating, some people just burned out, many left.

Those who stayed, while looking for ways to create a new quality, turned their attention toward local marginalized groups.

The anarchists found it obvious and natural to cooperate with workers. Situation of overtaking local companies by a world-known concerns and making them redundant was a moment of beginning. According to the new world pattern, anarchists stand in solidarity with striking workers of a local metal-work factory. Then with the striking workers of chocolade factory just bought/seizured by Nestle. Then, with nurses made redundant as a result of being on strike.

Anarchists were trying to work as community development workers. The only difficult was that they had to establish the community first, as there was none to begin with. They were trying anyway. To reach the workers was not easy. Workers -usually middle age people working to support their families, didn't see to have too much in common with anarchistscarefree students.

Step by step anarchists were trying to recognize those people's needs and respond accordingly.

Metal-work factory workers needed legal advice and some support on strikes, which was relatively easy. Ex-nurses desperately needed jobs, which couldn't be provided. Instead, anarchists took care of making sure the redundant nurses were not left alone and received at least some ordinary human support. Regular meetings were organized for striking nurses and the redundant ones were invited over as well. The meetings were designed as a time for talk and respecting each others dignity only, The only result of these meetings was the establishment of a small voluntary fund for redundant nurses. Soon after, some activists were giving free English lessons for nurses and their kids. Thanks to cooperating with WSM in Germany and Norway it was possible for a few of them to go for a foreign conference, for some of them -to go abroad for the first time in their lives. Putting a little faith in them gave them enough strength to believe once again in themselves.

54

Most of the time activists were meeting workers in their spaces. Workers picture of anarchists was often quite tendentious and sometimes-right. We knew that to make our cooperation fuller, we needed to socialize with these people. To show them that even if we look a little strange, we are not that exotic. It wouldn't make much sense to invite them over for a grindcore music concert. But the right opportunity appeared soon. While preparing an annual Childrens Day picnic, squatters also invited the workers as well.

During the picnic young workers' and activists' children managed to play together. Adults of both groups were rather watching each other from the distance. Some of the anarchist activists were trying to encourage workers to approach the kitchen which was serving free food. There were some vegetables being grilled. One of the workers put some sausages on the grill. This turned into a kind of scandal. On the one hand everyone understood we cannot demand for THEM to be sensitive and understanding enough to be vegetarians (which reveals a kind of superiority in thinking). On the other hand -we wanted to have our party the way we wanted it and wanted them to accept our rules. I can imagine, in Ireland probably someone would tell a joke, someone would feel 'very sorry' and the party would go on. But this is Poland, the land of frustration and aggression. Some people ostentatiously left the kitchen. Some were talking loudly behind the guy's back saying that they hate 'fuckin idiots and meat eaters' some were showing their displeasure by reporting the story very loudly to others. The girl who was in charge of the kitchen told the guy -we don't prepare meat here.

The guy went back to his family, they left soon later.

Once again, the inhabitants of "counterculture" showed that either you are one of us or you are not welcome any more.

In spite of various conflicts and other difficulties, Rozbrat has existed for the past 13 years.

The place constantly needs money and energy. Rozbrat is not as popular as it used to be; now there are some scratches on the face of the icon. It still attracts people who want to create something or take up various socio-political actions but there are much less of them than earlier. It is a center for an alternative culture for the whole region. The activities undertaken here couldn't be realized anywhere else within a Polish commercial reality. The people who are maintaining Rozbrat say that the place is based on independent social and cultural 55 activity -without any grants, subsidies, and donations. It is for activists, for spreading free thought, for building social awareness. But the world doesn't seem to be interested any more.

Activists are trying to be animators of local culture and community workers and it is a great chance for a real change -change of social attitude, change towards building community and solidarity. This is a situation of a new beginning. Especially that the same things happen all over Poland. Over the years, other squats and other cultural centers were created, and they work closely with local groups of people -feeding homeless, organizing sport activities and giving free circus shows for children, helping domestic violence victims, supporting strikers, blocking evictions. No one knows if it is gonna be a success, this is still at the beginning.

However I can't see a real change coming as long as activists remain ridiculous requiring toward each other and full of prejudices and refuse to work with people who don't share all of our views.

There are many conclusions which can be drawn from this. In my view there are two which should be highlighted and taken to heart by activists everywhere not only in Poland. Firstly, that there is huge importance in the creation of social spaces. These can act as the catalyst in awakening ideas and as hubs of creativity. Secondly and most importantly, there is a real danger that unless attitudes change the ideas of counter culture will always remain on the margins. What I mean by this is best highlighted in the section I mentioned regarding the Children's Picnic which was held in Rozbrat. If we continue to remain aloof and even elitist to a degree in our attitudes regarding how people should conduct their lives, it will always deter others from listening to us and our ideas.

56

Terry Dunne

Agency and strategy in radical ecological thinking

Agency and Strategy in the New Left.

In Green Political Thought Andrew Dobson identifies as a central problem with ecological thinking on social change the absence of a theory of agency or class analysis, which is to say an idea of who will bring about the desired change. (Dobson: 2000: pp. 112-62.) I think he has a case, though he overstates it. I should stress at the offset that what both Dobson and myself are addressing is ecological or green politics which is a program to radically transform the existing society. So environmental lobby groups or conservative Green parties are outside the scope of this paper. What I'm going to do here is trace back different conceptions of agency, or lack of any such conceptions, to the New Left of the 1960s. This is because a large slice of what became the green or ecology movement had its origins there. This happens to also be the slice which is most interesting and as well as this the American New Left at least had intense debates around agency and strategy and class analysis.

The classical socialist movement which had a very clear cut class analysis and comparatively uncomplicated strategy had been eclipsed. The New Left had mostly been inspired into being by the black revolt, it was mostly campus based, it looked to nationalist movements in the Third World it saw as revolutionary, and it nestled not always comfortably alongside a youth counter-culture.

One of the main American New Left groups, Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), was, by 1969, riven by rival factions and competing theories, all of which saw the epicentre of the struggle against capitalism in different places.

Murray Bookchin, later a prominent left green theorist, was a contributor to these debates.

All this said we should be cognisant with the fact that not all of the ecology movement had 57 New Left origins, there were strands arising elsewhere such as from the 60s and 70s counterculture, from militant conservationism, or from a radicalised right.

The advantage of shifting back to the terrain of the New Left is also that it allows a consideration of a broader debate.

The two figures whose perspectives I'm most interested in comparing are Murray Bookchin and Martin Glaberman, both of whom were not typical of the New Left in that at the time they were middle aged former Trotskyists. I'm going to look at some of their writings from the late 60s, and early 70s, but will also be citing later works where appropriate, that is where they continue and build upon earlier themes.

Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin's political perspective from the 1960s onwards can be put into one context by looking at the differences between 1935, roughly when he started to become politically involved, and 1965, roughly when he started to articulate the particular theories associated with his mature life. To that end lets look at what another middle aged former Trotskyist of the time had to say.

In 1964 Cornelius Castoriadis wrote:

"As an organised class movement explicitly and permanently contesting capitalist domination, the workers' movement has disappeared." (Castoriadis: 1997: p. 106) Castoriadis saw two central factors leading to this, one being the "bureaucratisation of parties and unions" and consequent "distancing of these organisations from the mass of labouring people" (Castoriadis: 1997: p. 129) and the other factor being the post-war affluence and the consumer society. If you look particularly at Bookchin's partly autobiographical work, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left, you can see this was an issue central to Bookchin's political development, the disjointedness between the situation of his youth, and that of the 1960s. (Bookchin: 1999) He uses the term 'post-scarcity' both to refer to the fact that the productive capacity exists to allow a transition to a libertarian socialist society, and to refer to the fact that the living standards of the working class of the 1960s and later was far removed from that existing in previous periods. Clearly part of this new epoch, was, to Bookchin, not only affluence and the decline of the classical workers movement, but also the development of what were ostensibly new arenas of struggle, first in the student movement and counterculture, later in feminism and environmentalism. Secondly holding that class struggle, or at least its revolutionary potential, was determined by poverty or affluence. Indeed he seems to hold that class struggle is wholly about material or economic demands, he later seemingly rejects this position, but his argument only has internal coherence if he in fact holds to it.

Thirdly the idea that seeing the working class as an agency of revolutionary change is contingent on the extent of class consciousness.

It is worth mentioning, but beyond the scope of this paper, but an at times interesting, at times inaccurate, reading of history, also shapes his position.

It might be said of Bookchin that he throws the baby of class struggle out with the bathwater of traditional socialism.

Some excerpts from Bookchin's Listen Marxist! will illustrate the conclusions drawn from these premises.

Listen Marxist! is a sharp polemic which was distributed at the final national meeting of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, and which is very long on claims and very short on evidence.

According to Listen Marxist! :

"We have seen the working class neutralised as the 'agent of revolutionary change', albeit still struggling within a bourgeois framework for more wages, shorter hours and 'fringe benefits'. The class struggle in the classical sense has not disappeared; it has suffered a more deadening fate by being co-opted into capitalism." (emphasis in original) (Bookchin: 1986: p. 202) "The factory serves not only to "discipline" "unite" and "organise" the workers, but also to do so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory capitalist production not only renews the social relations of capitalism with each working day, as Marx observed, it also renews the psyche, values and ideology of capitalism." (Bookcin: 1986: pp. 205 -06) In a later defence of Listen Marxist! he contends that this "denatured" the proletariat and actually made it one of the less radical forces in society. (Bookchin: 1986: p. 249) The first half of Listen Marxist! is concerned with rejecting a class struggle orientation, the second half, to which I will turn later, is focused on arguing against a vanguard party and state based conception of socialism.

At the time of Listen Marxist! Bookchin was advocating an orientation towards youth revolt, this later changed to an orientation towards what he saw as the trans-class new social movements of peace, environmentalism and feminism.

Bookshin's ire against class struggle perspectives was such that he even had disdain for the new working class theories which were briefly current within S.D.S. and which sought to interpret the youth revolt as class struggle.

Martin Glaberman

Martin Glaberman was, in the period under discussion, associated with the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, and later on the editorial board of Radical America, a journal which was a spin off from S.D.S..

Glaberman argues that:

"What is the source of the revolutionary capacity of the working class? It is the fact that workers are at the point of production, that their work itself teaches them how to run production, and that the conditions of their work force them to struggle against the existing relations of production, and therefore against capitalist society. The fundamental indicator of revolutionary capacity is not political belief, much less demands and slogans, but rather the capacity to organize production and to defend the new social relations from attack." (Glaberman: 1973) There are two contentions there, one centred on role in production, and one centred on the conditions currently associated with that role.

Glaberman worked in the auto industry. The situation in that industry in the U.S. at that time doesn't bear out Bookchin's analysis, as the following extracts from the pamphlet 'The Lordstown struggle and the real crisis of production' show:

"Every day at GM 5% of workers are absent 'with no explanation whatsoever' -On Mondays and Fridays the percentage doubles, 10% are out (Fortune,June,1 970 The struggle really began to bite. Substandard Vegas began to reach the dealers who screamed like stuck pigs. The media got hold of the story (Cleveland Plain Dealer February 20. 1972). By January, GM estimated that they had lost production of 12,000 Vegas and 4,000 Chevrolet trucks, worth 45 million dollars."

(Weller)

The thing is Bookchin goes someway towards recognising this in Listen Marxist! in a short passage which talks about young workers carrying out sabotage or going on wildcat strikes.

Strangely he sees this as a rejection of class consciousness and class interests. This isn't just a terminological question though.

There is a difference between himself and Glaberman which can be summed up as Bookchin seeing this as a matter of the colonisation of young workers by the counter-culture and Glaberman seeing this as wage workers self activity which is a response inherent to the conditions people face, and which will always occur, given a necessary period of time for networks and tactics to adapt to whatever new production situation people experience. This is an important difference to which I will return.

An ironic thing about comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Glaberman and "What are these specific local grievances? They involve production standards: the speed of a line, the rate on a machine, the number of workers assigned to a given job, the allowable variations in jobs on a given line. They involve health and safety standards : unsafe machines, cluttered or oily floors, rates of production which prevent the taking of reasonable precautions, the absence or misuse of hoists or cranes, protection from flames or furnaces, protection from sharp, unfinished metal, protection from welding or other dangerous chemicals or flames, the right to shut an unsafe job down until the condition is changed.

They involve the quality of life in the plant: the authoritarian company rules which treat workers like a combination of prison inmate and kindergarten child, the right to move about the plant, the right to relieve yourself physically without having to get the foreman's permission or the presence of a relief man, the right to reasonable breaks in the work, the right to a reasonable level of heat in the winter or reasonable ventilation in the summer. And on and on.

The grievances that crowd the dockets of General Motors and of other companies cover the total range of life in the factory. The fact that they are called grievances helps to conceal what they really are-a reflection of the total dissatisfaction of the workers in the way production is run and of the desire of the workers to impose their own will in the factory." Elsewhere Glaberman points out that auto workers were of the more affluent section of the American working class, which would stand as a critique of Bookchin. They were also obviously quite subject to factory discipline, but this did not have the impact that Bookchin claimed.

Glaberman makes cogent arguments against new working class theorists, who, in short, argued that much of the expanded university intake were destined to white collar occupations. He argues that the experience of alienation is very much different and more intense in factories and in some, but only some, white collar positions, than elsewhere. He also correctly argues that some sectors of the economy can be considered strategic and action there counts much more than elsewhere. He makes an interesting point about some strikes having far more of a practical impact on the war effort than many anti-Vietnam war protests.

All this is true. It could be argued though that this seemingly leaves Glaberman with a very narrow conception of the working class and a focus which scarcely leaves the factory, some protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Bookchin's great strength is the fact he sees the potentials in feminist, environmentalist, and peace movements. On the later for instance consider how it, during the 60s early 70s period, expanded to include enlisted men, something which both constrained the military capacity of the American state, and which involved, as Bookchin points out, a sector one really needs on side. After all the other part of the context which shaped the perspective expressed by Bookchin was the fact that 1960 onwards saw the dawning of new forms of struggle which were perhaps a little harder to fit into a class struggle paradigm than those of the 1930s.

In Deep Ecology, Anarcho-Syndicalism, and the Future of Anarchist Thought, Bookchin argues that historic working class movements like those in Red Petrograd or anarchist Barcelona were civic based movements as much as workplace ones, workers apparently are civic beings as well as class ones. (Bookchin et al: 1997: pp. 47 -58) Bookchin looks to a resistance across life.

His ultimate argument is that the central contradiction of capitalism has proved not be within society, but between society and the natural world. This is all good, and Bookchin's writings on ecology are an important contribution.

What then do Glaberman's writings have that Bookchin's don't. Is it just Bookchin went a bit too far in his rejection of traditional socialism and ended up downplaying resistance in the workplace?

In a 1997 interview, outside of the New Left timeframe, but the perspective doesn't change, it is just more succulently expressed, Glaberman argues:

"And the one thing that I think is an absolute given: workers will resist, because work sucks.

Until someone can tell me that work has become real nice under capitalism, whether in the United States or anywhere else, I say that is the fundamental basis of our theory and our practice.

Work sucks. and sooner or later workers are going to resist it in whatever way they can." "Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We're not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You've got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class." (Glaberman: 1997) That could be criticised for being very objectivist, for overlooking how culture, politics, tradition, ideology, can shape class struggle. Perhaps this would be rightly placed criticism.

Nonetheless one thing Glaberman very clearly has is a theory of agency, a conception that there is a class which resists the existing state of affairs and moreover that this resistance can be the basis of a new society. This is just what Bookchin doesn't have. Consider the following quote from Bookchin, about white collar workers, "often among the most exploited and oppressed, can be enlisted to support our anarchist communist ideals on the basis of the larger environment in which they live and the larger issues of their sovereignty in a world that is racing out of control" "They can be mobilized to support our anarchist communist ideals because they feel their power to control their own lives is diminishing in the face of centralized state and corporate power."

(emphasis in original)

It is clear here the "mobilising" and "enlisting" is being done by small groups of social ecologists, or greens, or anarchist-communists, a perspective that tends to puts 'party' way before 'class'. Similarly The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl is the most extensive exposition of social ecology's political strategy. Social Ecology being the term coined for the Bookchin world view, and the book in question was written in cooperation with Bookchin. Disappointingly it is entirely focused on proposed actions for small political groups, who are seemingly the sole active agents of this political strategy. (Biehl: 1997)