Learning from each other’s struggles

Sociology has always been in dialogue with social movements, from Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim to Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Frances Piven and Toni Negri. As a young activist, wanting to understand the movements I was involved in and see how we could take them further, sociology was the obvious starting-point. I had grown up around human rights and anti-apartheid, the peace and ecology movements. Travel and study around Europe showed me whole movement scenes and subcultures – feminist, libertarian, socialist – with roots in the 1960s and 1970s and still generating new movements in the 1980s and 1990s. I started to research where these shared histories and cultures had come from, and how we could draw on them to build new alliances. My PhD, on the potential for radical alliances developing the everyday popular rationalities expressed by these cultures, was written against the background of the Zapatistas and submitted just in time to see the Seattle protests against the WTO validate its conclusions and change the movement landscape across the industrialised North. Writing the thesis went hand-in-hand with editing an activist magazine which tried to make those links in practical ways, and with small gatherings of activists from different movements – around the possibility of a new left, networking independent media, reviving the older alternative movements and trying to create cross-movement dialogues