Passive or active poland 2012

R. Yates.

International Animal Rights Gathering, Poland 2012.

Passive or Active: Reflections on Animal Advocacy via Social Movement Theories.

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“Get a ******* job!!!”

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“Reason” - the driving force in genuine democracies in which social movements play a

crucial role.

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• civil rights movement,

• feminist movement,

• animal advocacy movement.

“New Social Movements”

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New social movements are important because they demand that reasons be

given for social decisions…

Social policies critically questioned rather than merely accepted.

Habermas

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• Work

• Family

• Career

• Consuming

• [Celeb culture]

Key modern-day orientations…

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• Western capitalism impedes rationalisation processes

• Bureaucracy has developed far more than political democratic structures

• Science and technological rationality over “moral and aesthetic reason”

• “Colonisation of the lifeworld” - the system level, based on instrumental reason, “penetrates” the cultural lifeworld –

• Contamination of cultural rationality with system values

• A scientific-technical-administrative power elite

LIFEWORLD and SYSTEM

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1. Classical

2. New Social Movement Theory

3. Resource Mobilisation Theory

4. Politics of Identity and Social Commitment

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•‘any broad social alliance of people who are associated in seeking to effect or to block an aspect of social change within a society’ (Jary & Jary).

•Noun. social movement - a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals (on-line dictionary)

Social Movement definitions

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• Loosely organized but sustained campaign in support of a social goal, typically either the implementation or the prevention of a change in society’s structure or values. Although social movements differ in size, they are all essentially collective.

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• government

• political parties

• trade unions

• associations

Equilibrium mechanisms

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NO NEED FOR SMs

suggests that the people in social movements had something wrong with THEM

protestors were seen as • ‘exceptional’, • ‘abnormal’ • people with social and mental

‘difficulties’

SM = outbursts of unreason!

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1960s: and now for something completely different…

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The ‘movement’ appears to be neither class based, nor organised within the framework of standard national politics; it is not competing for control of the state, as an alternative potential ruling group or class, and to some extent it claims to speak for ‘everyone’, for universal rights and ‘participation’ or ‘liberation’.

Della Porta and Diani

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a fully developed movement is successful if it

1. identifies a social group whose interest it serves

2. defines its “enemies”

3. develops a vision of an alternative future

Alain Touraine

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What happens when social movement organisations get

• too big

• too bureaucratic

• too business-like

• too flabby

Greenpeace International/PeTA

Resource Mobilisation Theory

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“little communities”

“tribes”

On the basis of much recent discussion of new movements, we can characterise their aims broadly as bringing about social change through the transformation of values, personal identities and symbols. Alan Scott (1990) Ideology and the New Social Movements

Politics of Identity and Social Commitment

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These movements are identity involving and transforming, they self-consciously manipulate symbols and they challenged entrenched values. This can best be achieved through the creation of alternative life-styles and the discursive reformation of individual and collective wills.

Scott, 1990: 18

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their philosophical or spiritual rejection of the instrumental rationality of advanced capitalist society and its systems of control and co-optation... this cultural emphasis rejects conventional goals, tactics and strategies in favour of the exploration of new identities, meanings, signs and symbols. The ability to envision and symbolically enact new and different ways of organising social relationships can itself be a potential challenge to dominant social arrangements (p. 47-8)

Steve Buechler (2000) Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism

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We are a tribe in far more than name. We have a collective purpose and a cultural identity as the nomadic indigenous peoples of Britain - we have formulated our own customs, mythology, style of dress, beliefs and are evolving our own language (“Donga Alex”, in McKay, p. 137)Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (London: Verso, 1996)

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Social movements/countermovements – dyad

Social movements/countermovements/government

agencies – triad

Activity of SMs will increase interaction between countermovements and the state

Animal rights action = animal welfare reforms

Richard Gale (1986) Social Movements and The State