Storming the Millenium: The New Politics of Change - Softcover

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Tim Jordan works in Sociology at the Open University, and has written on new politics and cyberspace (Cyberpower: the culture and politics of cyberspace and the Internet, London: Routledge; 1999). He has been involved in do-it-yourself politics in the housing movement in Australia and childcare in the UK. Adam Lent is currently researching a history of post-60s social movements in the UK.

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From Tim Jordan's Chapter 1: The Hardest Question The times are always right for change. The times of a new radicalism, of new hopes, of a new politics of change are with us now. No matter the nostalgia of a left, the old bearers of hope, for the times when it knew the correct line and no matter the arrogant insecurity of a right that simultaneously declares dead and fears the life of demands from the grass roots, new forces for change have coalesced into a new politics. It did not arrive yesterday, our roots are in the civil rights movements, the anti-colonial movements, the New Left and feminist movements, and it has taken some time to be certain it would not evaporate, but now a new politics of change is here. We might tip our hat to ideas and organisations past but we know we are our own politics now. A new politics of change forms the only effective force for grabbing social structures and changing them so that people, the vast majority of people, might one day live liberated and unexploited. It is always a good time to stand up and fight for your life, Storming the Millennium tries to show how many are doing just that and tries to understand what it means.

What do ravers, the disabled, bisexuals, anti-roads campaigners, cyberactivists, and anti-racists have in common? And what do these six movements, all studied in this book, have in common with women struggling to redistribute society's resources, with those saving animals, with those resisting downsizing, flexibilisation, part-timeism, redundancy, rejection and decay? And where do all of these fit with those, sighted in the final chapter, who still make a good case for worrying about the word socialism? We argue they all fit together as part of the new politics of change.

Yet these hopes, these renewed desires backed by action for a different world, also pose many questions. If politics has changed. If the words, organisations, actions, signs and passions that have fuelled and informed the many desires to remake our world have changed. And if the indicators of this are many- the end of the cold war, the resurgence of non-violent direct action, the revision of political history- then we are left with some hard questions. Whatever relief might come from realising that radical, grass-roots social action is as vibrant as ever, if not more so, is quickly accompanied by questions about the meaning of these actions. Take the word 'radical' itself. Once it might have been assumed that talking about radical politics meant talking about 'harder' left politics, perhaps the extra-parliamentary or anarchist left, but in the last twenty years most radical change in Western societies has been driven by the right and the left has found itself defending, conserving, gains it once thought untouchable. Then, when we have only just become used to radical being right, the Prime Minister of the UK and the President of the US stood together in 1997 and declared themselves for the 'radical centre'. It is no longer clear at all, what being a radical means.

This is the hardest question that new politics poses. Not, is there radical politics?, but what would it mean to storm the millennium? This is the challenge of new politics understood in its transformatory sense; the belief that the field of radical, emancipatory political action has been torn apart and remade in the last thirty years. The emphasis of this collection is then not on the emergence of 'social movements', as if social movements have not always dotted the political landscape from the Levellers and Diggers in the sixteenth century (or others earlier) to the Chiapas in the late twentieth, but on a configuration of the political field that is different to the one that dominated the post-Second World War period. Nor is this a total break. A reinvigorated non-violent direct action movement carries with it a history that reaches at least back to many post-war anti-colonial struggles and the US civil rights movement, both of the 1950s. In addition, the feminist movement that began in the 1960s, second wave feminism, and the emergence of the New Left in the late 1950s are crucial to the development of new politics. These four struggles began the political fracturing of a certain way of conducting politics, a certain way of negotiating political solutions that became dominant after World War Two and that had at its heart negotiations between capital and labour. The Keynesian or corporate state of the post-Second World War period in the overdeveloped nations, ensured politics was ordered between the two great antagonists of capital and labour; an arrangement fought for not just by liberal capitalists such as Keynes and his followers but also by labour movements bargaining for higher wages and better conditions. This is no doubt something of a caricature, whose complexities could be argued over in great detaili, but it is also accurate enough to grasp the typical political conflicts that new politics has disturbed.

What followed the 1960s and 1970s was not just the intensification of the four political movements already mentioned, but a prolonged crisis and restructuring of socio-economies on a global scale that is only now beginning to look as if it may have settled into some recurring patterns. From the oil shocks of the 1970s, when hyper-inflation and economic chaos beckoned the West to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, world-wide human society became different. Always at work, within many other changes, were changes within the field of radical, politics. A different politics should not be solely read as the result (or epiphenomena) of a great capitalist restructuring, even though that may be partly true, but also as a cause of change. Tianamen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union posed almost unanswerable questions to Marxist radicals who have consistently sought either to lead new political movements or to integrate them within what they hoped would be a newly radicalised labour movement. As argued in many places, the Marxist or more broadly the class or labour-centred paradigm for radical politics has been brokenii. Settled ways of understanding and negotiating politics have changed not only between left and right, but within left and right.

The result of these changes has been the emergence of a new paradigm of radical politics, that this collection attempts to outline and develop. Looking over our shoulder to the struggles of the 1950s that, even as the previous paradigm formed, were refusing to bury all politics but the negotiations between capital and labour, we can see where this new paradigm began. We can see prophets, like Frantz Fanon or Simone de Beauvoir, who barely knew their work would ultimately help to undermine a framework for politics they also helped establish. It is only now that we can confidently see a new paradigm for liberation and can feel, as much as know, that a new politics of change is here. Storming the Millennium sets out to chronicle this new politics, both its practices and its theories, and to contribute to it, by helping to explore its nature. But, if we know this politics has arrived, we are less certain about exactly what it means. We are less certain what it is to liberate and be liberated. The hardest question new politics poses is not whether it exists nor whether it will succeed or fail, but what it means. Here, just after the dawn of a new paradigm of radical political emancipation, we are drawing breath to ask this hardest question and to name the new politics of change.