Week 2: Extremism and social movements

In this lecture I focused on the way that extreme ideas and forms of action can become mainstream. To do this I used some concepts from the sociology of social movements.


The life cycle of a social movement, I argued, goes something like this. A social movement forms in response to system blockage; it uses innovative tactics and puts forward new frames. It then keeps up the pressure until some of those new frames and tactics get adopted by mainstream forces. The movement's supporters see that they've got at least some of what they wanted, and the movement subsides.


In a bit more detail:

1. Social movements are broad groups united by a cultural identity, opposition to the status quo and autonomy from the political sphere
2. Movements form in response to system blockage: i.e. they can't get what they want through legitimate political routes (think women agitating for the vote 100 years ago)
3. Movements use new and innovative tactics: new ways of protesting and getting noticed
4. They put forward new and modified frames: ways of 'framing' issues so as to make the movement's position more persuasive. (A movement to liberalise the drug laws might 'frame' cannabis as a less dangerous drug than alcohol.)
5. They then keeps pushing (while the political mainstream pushes back) until...
6. Some of the new frames and tactics get adopted, usually in the form of political reforms
7. The movements then subside as people see no reason to support them any more

There are three really important points here, which can easily be overlooked. Firstly, while the movement is on the rise, it will attract both support and opposition. In particular, it will be opposed by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream - and the way that they will oppose it is to label it as extremist, unacceptable, criminal, violent etc. 'Extreme' is a position on the political spectrum; it's also a label applied by mainstream parties to discredit their rivals.

Secondly, towards the end of the life of the movement its innovations get adopted by the mainstream - but only some of them. Some of them are rejected - and labelled as unacceptably extreme, violent etc. As Charles Tilly said, before strike action was legal in the USA it took a far wider range of forms than it did after it was legalised: legalising strikes meant legalising a certain way of taking strike action, and criminalising all the rest.

Thirdly, stages 6 and 7 above aren't the only way a social movement can come to an end. What can also happen is that all of the movement's innovations are rejected, and the movement is repressed out of existence. In this situation, as I've argued, disappointed activists are far more likely to resort to violence than if the cycle had ended well. What's more, in this situation everything the social movement had to offer has effectively been dismissed and labelled as 'extreme'. In hindsight, this creates the impression that the social movement genuinely was unacceptably extreme, and that its new tactics and frames never could have been adopted. The repression of a movement both makes violence more likely and gives future historians a job of archaeology, digging out the more hopeful possibilities from beneath the dismissive labels that were applied to them.

One other bit of unfinished business from the session: those names on bits of paper. For anyone who's interested, here are all forty names, with the odd note:

Adolf Hitler
Gregor Strasser - also a Nazi; an early ally of Hitler, who had him killed for being (a) a potential rival and (b) too left-wing (as Nazis go)
Benito Mussolini
General Agosto Pinochet - Chilean dictator, who took power in a military coup in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was an admirer and a personal friend.
General Franco - Spanish Falangist (quasi-Fascist) dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975.
Margaret Thatcher
Ian Paisley - prominent and highly vocal leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant community; strongly anti-Catholic and quite right-wing in other areas.
David Cameron
George Osborne
Winston Churchill
General Charles de Gaulle - like Churchill, a great anti-Fascist war leader who was also well over on the Right of domestic (in this case French) politics
Angela Merkel - leader of main German right-wing Christian party, and of Germany
Aldo Moro - leader of main Italian right-wing Christian party in the 1970s; kidnapped and assassinated by the Red Brigades (more about them later in the unit)
Vince Cable
Nick Clegg
Tony Blair
David Miliband - Ed's more right-wing brother
Gordon Brown
Neil Kinnock - leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992
Justin Welby (Archbishop Of Canterbury)
Ed Miliband
Michael Foot - leader of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1983
Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) - another relatively new religious leader, also sounding remarkably left-wing at the moment
Clement Attlee - UK Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951; oversaw the building of the NHS and the welfare state
Martin McGuinness - former Chief of Staff of the IRA; now Northern Ireland's deputy First Minister. Quite moderate politically, if you set aside the whole IRA thing.
Nelson Mandela - suspected Communist guerrilla turned elder statesman
Palmiro Togliatti - leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death in 1964

Alexander Dubcek - reformist leader of Communist Czechoslovakia, who came to power in 1968 and was deposed in 1969
Mikhail Gorbachev - reformist leader of the Communist USSR, who came to power in 1985 and was deposed in 1991, after which the USSR dissolved
Ralph Miliband - Ed's more left-wing father 
Antonio Gramsci - Italian Communist intellectual who did much of his best work in a Fascist prison
Leonid Brezhnev - leader of the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982
Chairman Mao Zedong - leader of Communist China from 1949 until his death in 1976
Paul Foot - Trotskyist writer, nephew of Michael
Karl Marx

These 35 are listed more or less from Right to Left. The other five names are a bit harder to locate:
Mikhail Bakunin
Buenaventura Durruti - both Bakunin and Durruti were anarchists (in nineteenth-century Russia and twentieth-century Spain respectively). Does that make them very, very left-wing, or are anarchists neither left nor right? More on this later.
Kim Jong Un - the North Korean dictator is hard to locate on any sort of political spectrum; you could equally plausibly locate him on the extreme Left and the extreme Right.
Osama Bin Laden - is a global Islamic caliphate, to be brought about by unremitting war on democratic and secular nations, a right-wing demand? It's certainly not particularly left-wing...
Emmeline Pankhurst - leader of the Suffragettes, who campaigned for allowing adult women to vote in elections. This demand was seen as quite extreme at the time, although nobody opposes it now (apart from this one bloke I used to work with).