African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
of theorists have argued that because such movements are inherently contradictory, they are unable to develop an ideology that would unite their varying strands. Colin Barker argues that groups within social movements are misguided if they seek to substitute their understandings for those of the entire movement. Rather, Barker reminds us, social movements are a muddle of competing and shifting layers and tendencies, working occasionally in harmony, often in striking opposition.6
Jeff Goodwin’s comparative analysis of revolutionary movements complements these arguments. He states that social movements are not the actions of classes, but coalitions, and that it is these coalitions that drive change and comprise new systems of government. Radical change in society is, Goodwin suggests, commonly achieved by coalitions of social interests rather than distinct classes. Any such coalition, however, involves cooperation and compromise between different interest groups, depending on the structural context in which they arise. The question of which interests come to dominate any such movement and which see their interests as subordinated is central to understanding the degree or type of social change they achieve. Goodwin argues that the success of any movement will be, in part, dependent on political ideas and that it “simply may not possess the sufficient leverage or ‘hegemony’ . . . that is necessary to take advantage of (or create its own) political opportunities.”7 This is particularly germane to the study of social movements in Africa: for example, when analyzing the influence of the popular classes in broader nationalist or pro-democracy coalitions (see chapter 3).
There is, then, a permanent contest between ideas and arguments within social movements. The outcome of such contests depends on both the actual and potential actions of the political and social forces in a particular social movement. The social movement is therefore the field in which struggle takes place and political hegemony is constantly contested. Implicit in the study of social movements are two questions: What is the potential for different, more radical projects to emerge? Could their outcome have been different from that which occurred? Unless analysts ask these questions, we can grasp little sense of the evolution of social movements or the import of their actual achievements. It also necessitates an open approach to the study of social movements that adopts a broad perspective as to what is and is not a “social movement,” rather than a strict definition that seeks to identify in advance what is and is not an authentic movement “of the people.”
Clearly, such a conceptualization rejects a narrow definition of social movements based on a functionalist model of pressure group politics, which enable the state to make limited policy reforms in response to specific demands by legitimate political actors. “Social movements” is a broader and less normative concept than liberal concepts of “civil society” or the more institutional notion of “interest groups,” both of which assume (tacitly or overtly) the desirability of containing conflict within existing political frameworks. Scholarship that limits social movement analysis to particular campaigns for (for example) civil rights, democratization, or peace needlessly limits its own capacity to understand both the broader context and the underlying nature of typically disparate and contradictory social movements. For example, while the civil rights movement in the United States originated largely as a respectable, non-violent movement located primarily in southern Black churches, it developed through student politics and organizations via the anti–Vietnam War movement, eventually incorporating a significant rise in trade union militancy in the late 1960s and 1970s.8 Central to these developments was a constant debate within the civil rights movement around a range of general and specific questions and issues. Such debates and movement trajectories need to be understood in their totality so as to analyze particular outcomes and whether they might have turned out differently.
Social movements, it should be understood, can manifest themselves in overt institutional and organizational forms—but they commonly take more amorphous and temporary forms, for example protest movements which coalesce briefly around a particular issue or initiative before dissolving into wider society. They may, of course, involve both such tendencies. Studying such movements therefore requires an understanding of social movements as relationships. As E. P. Thompson reminds us: “Like any other relationship it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. . . . The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.”9 The conclusion is clear: if we are conscious of the contested, disparate, and contradictory nature of the “social movement in general,” it becomes possible to identify the potential for more radical liberatory tendencies implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the social movements we analyze and study. We do not argue that all social movements evolve towards revolutionary transformation, but that only by understanding social movements as a differentiated and contested totality can we see the conflicts and potentials within them that can lead to revolutionary change.
Social movements are inevitably authors of their own construction, within pre-existing limitations. Intention and agency are not, however, simply at the mercy of determining “structural” forces. The core of social movement action is more complex and nuanced. As Barker has observed, certain revolutionary situations are concluded with the reassertion of existing power, others end in a stalemate, and some may actually become revolutions. Nevertheless, whatever the conclusion—retreat, stalemate, or revolution—it will have come about through conscious and organized effort.10
An important area of investigation is therefore the circumstances in which the aims and achievements of particular social movements are restricted to partial reforms by existing states, and where these develop into more radical transformative demands. In what circumstances do such movements evolve beyond the reformist aims of elites and develop the capacity for radical change? An essential, but by no means determining, factor in the capacity of social movements to envisage and develop emancipatory alternatives is the agency and intention of the classes operating inside these movements. How do particular social forces achieve political hegemony within the social movement? In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that the failure to develop and assert effective political alternatives to dominant nationalist and neoliberal ideas has helped to determine the shape, form, politics, and outcomes of the social movements studied in this book. Various circumstances have constrained the ability of these movements to realize radical or deeper change, but among them is the nature of the ideological tools available to and wielded by classes within social movements.
Movements may contain many contradictory intentions, but in certain situations, the common class membership of (at least some of) the movement’s participants confers a unifying material interest that leads them to organize together, provide united intent, and lead the broader movement to articulate an emancipatory alternative. What it is about classes, and not other groupings, that allows them to play this kind of role in a broader movement? It is not simply a matter of shared material interests, but rather that some classes, by virtue of their position in the production process, can lead a fight that can potentially reorganize the social relations of production (the ways in which a society organizes to meet its needs), thereby laying the basis to reconstitute society’s whole structure—including non-class relations such as family, caste, sectarian, or communal relations. These classes thus have the capacity, rooted in production relations, to attract allies for a broad struggle over all the conditions of subordination that make up the broad social question. However, a class can fail to live up to its potential in this regard, because the social and political context may prevent it from discovering what role(s) it can play. In that sense, the actual role that a class plays in a given movement is not structurally determined.
Therefore, we wish in particular to reject any attempt to identify social movements which are (and are not) authentically representative of “the people” or of a particular class: such a tendency is redolent of older structurally determined positions which prescribed to the working class or the “peasantry” a role in a preconceived revolutionary movement. Equally, we reject any attempts, fashionable though they are in social movement scholarship, to limit the potentialities of social movements to specific reforms and campaigns. It is evident that there is no such thing as a pre-formed radical social movement that is authentically “of the people.” In practice, such movements exist along a spectrum that reflects their origins, sources of funding, links to particular nation-states, ideological bases, and divergent social forces. While they may reflect or articulate in some way the aspirations of some of the poor and help structure and