Abstract
‘What are movements?’ – this seemingly simple question is by no means easily answered. Movements had been regarded as extraordinary uprisings under revolutionary conditions or as inferior forms of political actions which should be absorbed into a party system, by historians and political scientists. Even after social movement studies established its own field in academia, its research has tended to be immersed in how and why movements emerge, which yielded two prominent schools of social movement theory – Resource Mobilisation Theory and New Social Movement Theory. Why Social Movements Matter brings the fundamental question back into the field – ‘So, what are movements?’.
Laurence Cox strongly criticises the intellectual tendency in which movements are reduced to activists or organisations and, at the same time, are marginalised and subordinated by institutionalised politics. From a Gramscian perspective, he accuses ‘traditional intellectuals’ of this tendency who think about social movements in caricatured ways. In other words, traditional intellectuals tend to have little acquaintance with movements in their personal lives, identify ‘society as a whole’ with ‘society as it is’, and discourse upon ‘what we should do’ based on appeals to a conservative ‘we’, such as a national ‘we’, a right-thinking ‘we’, and an imagined cultural ‘we’ (pp. x–xi). In this vein, Cox suggests a wider understanding of movements characterised by the networks which people are collectively involved in, conflicts over the shape and direction of society, and ultimately the creative thoughts which move society towards a better world.
Given his broad definition of movements, it is unsurprising that Cox’s book aims to ‘engage in a conversation’ with readers struggling in their daily lives, not to ‘drag them onto the intellectual field’ (p. xvii). Specifically, he explicitly clarifies the readership of his book, including people who are outraged but uncertain of what to do, the left who are not directly involved in social movements, and furthermore academics and students outside social movement studies. Through the whole book, Cox enthusiastically invites those readers to engage with social movements. This wide range of invitation is successfully achieved in that it is accessible to follow without any background knowledge about social movement theories. However, it also requires further understanding of Marxist tradition to fully engage with the book epistemologically and ontologically.
With diverse examples of the ‘everyday nature of social movement activism’, he insists that all creative collective responses to questionable situations out there could be movements, which ultimately enable people to achieve ‘self-creation’ labelled as ‘praxis’ in the Marxist tradition (p. 11). In the bigger picture, he also points out that social movements, such as Britain’s Chartist movement, the US Civil Rights Movement, and The Long 1968, have made the world we live in. Therefore, Cox concludes that social movements research is a conversation revealing how human beings struggle together and create a sense of ‘we’ as a collective agency.
Undoubtedly, Why Social Movements Matter is a timely work in the era of neoliberalism. As Cox convincingly demonstrates, a wider global ‘movement of movements’, ranging from the Occupy movements to anti-austerity movements, has arisen against the neoliberal order (p. 33). However, the neoliberal project consistently attempts to neuter the effects of the big wave of collective challenges by denigrating its political meaning and by fragmenting it into individually disconnected movements. Under this circumstance, Cox’s project is obviously an effectual strategy to build a movement-based coalition resisting to neoliberalism in the political sense.
However, in the theoretical sense, his optimistic view of the ‘movement of movements’ overlooks widespread far-right movements which have been rapidly increasing during the last decade. While he clearly states that ‘movements are everywhere’ in different ways, far-right movements seem to be insufficiently explained with his encompassing definition of movements. In addition, as Cox confesses in his book, his arguments are mainly supported by Eurocentric cases, omitting abundant cases in the Global South.
Nevertheless, the book successfully develops ‘the conversation’ with a wider audience outside the field of social movement studies. This matters because, as Cox rightly notes, social movement theorists have often isolated themselves from ‘everyday movement activism’ in an obsession with an anatomical analysis. Furthermore, Why Social Movements Matter is a significant contribution both politically and academically, in that it not only encourages people who are struggling to change something in their daily lives but also urges intellectuals to transform themselves from ‘traditional intellectuals’ into ‘organic intellectuals’ creating ‘good sense’ through experiences of movements. Therefore, this book would definitely be beneficial to both scholars and activists, to whom social movements matter.