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<h1>Feeling our way forward</h1>
<h4>Hilary Wainwright maps structures of feeling and resistance</h4>
<p>
Where there is oppression there will always be resistance, sometimes
overtly organised, sometimes deeply buried and undefined. Moreover,
where there is resistance there is invariably a sense, however implicit,
of values contrary to those of the oppressors, although these can be
ambivalent and fragile – oppressed people often accept the prevailing
values that sustain the social order because the vulnerable often feel
they need order.
</p><p>It follows, then, that strategies for change should pay attention
not only to overt resistance or refusal, not simply to fully
articulated opposing values, but also to feelings of unease arising from
the tension between official discourse and practical experience. Here
can be alternative values and institutions in formation.
</p><p> I want to map contemporary trends of this kind. They concern
values of solidarity, co-operation and fairness, and organisational
logics of openness, plurality and mutual inter‑connection. These trends –
and all I can offer is an impressionistic snapshot – undoubtedly
involve only a minority of the population, certainly in the UK. But the
feelings from which they are emerging are shared by a large proportion
of the public, across many different social spheres.
</p><p>I want to argue that they are fundamental for – among the many
challenges faced by the left – overturning the widespread public
acceptance that there is no alternative to sacrificing public services
to deal with debt; and for countering the persistent racism and
scapegoating of immigrants and claimants, a perverse sign of unease,
often expressed alongside revulsion with the political class, its
dishonesty and its self interest.
</p><p>To understand the emerging practical consciousness that could be a
basis for meeting these political challenges, I recommend a conceptual
tool from the work of Raymond Williams. An influential socialist
theorist, from the late 1940s until his death in 1988 he used critical
cultural inquiry to write about society.
</p><p>Social and personal
</p><p>One of Williams’ concerns was to overcome the way that
‘relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still
actively involved are converted into formed wholes rather than
[understood as] formative and forming processes’. Linked to this, he
argued, was a separation of the social from the personal that tended to
equate the social with fixed and explicit wholes, while all that is
moving and unformed – and to some degree unknown – is described as
‘subjective’ and ‘personal’. Williams was trying to capture the process
of change in the physical present, to understand the social and material
character of the process of emergence, implied by the idea of ‘forming
and formative processes’. He arrived at the idea of ‘structures of
feeling’.
</p><p>It is a deliberately contradictory phrase to convey that there is
a pattern recurring across social spheres and cultural forms – hence a
structure.
</p><p>But the structure is not of finished, articulated thoughts.
Rather it lies in the processes of creating ‘meanings and values as they
are actively lived and felt’ – summed up in the concept ‘feeling’,
which combines emotion, intuition and thought. Williams uses ‘feeling’
to emphasise a distinction from the more formal concepts of ‘world view’
or ‘ideology’.
</p><p>Williams differentiates between dominant and residual social
formations that are already formed and manifest and the emergent, which
is where structures of feeling come in. Here he distinguishes between
‘oppositional’ and ‘alternative’, the former posing an unassimilable
challenge to the dominant order, the latter restyling or otherwise
inflecting it. He adds that the latter can very often look like the
former at first.
</p><p>Williams recognises, therefore, that structures of feeling might
never entirely emerge but rather might be absorbed, incorporated into
the dominant social formation – sometimes, I would add, as a new,
‘outside’ source of innovation and renewal. This was, in significant
part, the fate of much of the undoubtedly distinct structures of feeling
of the late 1960s and 1970s. These were appropriated, and partially
absorbed, by the credit‑driven capitalist revival of the 1980s. Through
its idea of the ‘big society’, the government is attempting, crudely and
so far unsuccessfully, to carry out a similar appropriation of
long-established but now vulnerable traditions of radical community
organising.
</p><p>It is clear that Williams’ concept, or something very like it,
could be useful in understanding today’s ‘forming and formative’
processes of new social and political institutions. The concept seems
particularly useful at a time when there is widespread opposition and
unease around different spheres of capitalism, but no coherent
ideological or institutional framework for going beyond it. ‘Structures
of feeling’ can help us to understand the renewed unease at the social
consequences of the rampant free market system on daily life, and
provide insight to the lived experiences of co-operative, solidaristic
values and open, anti-authoritarian organisational logics that are in a
process of formation. Maybe, too, it can help us to ground new strategic
thinking.
</p><p>Lived mentalities
</p><p>Two such recurrent lived mentalities strike me as especially
important.
</p><p>First, there are a number of trends clustered around resistance
to, or unease over, an expansion of commodification, or to what David
Harvey terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’. These mentalities, or
feelings, involve a common rejection of the official discourse of
efficiency, choice and competitive success justifying the privatisation
of public services, the casualisation and degradation of labour and
dominant forms of development, and with it patterns of consumption and
control over our cities. We must now, happily, add the way that anger at
the driving, predatory control of the media by corporate interests has
turned the concerns of a persistent campaigning minority into a dramatic
glasnost of the politics of the past 30 years, whose consequences and
depth are uncertain.
</p><p>Let’s consider each in turn. In struggles against privatisation
it is increasingly common to find a shift away from economistic trade
unionism focused only on jobs and conditions. This is being superseded
by a trade unionism shaped by public sector workers, who organise in a
way that draws explicitly on their knowledge and feelings about the
value of their work to service users and the harm that will come from
outsourcing to private businesses.
</p><p>A current example is the particularly sharp conflict over Barnet
council’s ‘easyJet model’ of public services. Unison’s ability to resist
– so far – is rooted in a determined insistence that there is a public
path to reform, based on improving the quality of services rather than
maximising contractors’ profits. This is guided by the knowhow of
citizens and staff. The Association for Public Excellence reports
workers across local government resisting outsourcing with public
alternatives. And anyone listening to delegates at this year’s Unison
conference would have witnessed trade unionists concerned simultaneously
– and integrally – with their jobs and with those whose needs they
were serving.
</p><p>Here are workers acting as citizens, mobilising their organised
strength to insist, against marketisation, on the use value of their
work as public servants. This structure of feeling is apparent beyond
the organised movements and experienced in day-to-day interactions
between patients and medical staff, pupils, parents and teachers and
other interactions on the front line, out of sync with the messages
coming over in the dominant media.
</p><p>The defence of meaningful jobs in the public sector is also a
rejection of casualisation and work without a future. This is a theme
with far wider echoes. It is another sphere of unease in the disjuncture
between the experience of degraded labour and the official discourse of
responsibility and empowerment.
</p><p>Corporate consequences
</p><p>A concern with the concrete consequences and often negative use
value of capitalist production is evident in campaigns against the
destructive environmental impact of corporate – and state – driven modes
of development. With regard to consumer products such as GM food and
the products of agribusiness more generally, petrol-driven cars or
clothes made with sweated labour, popular campaigns are in effect
challenging the profit-driven decision-making processes of capital
accumulation. And here again, as Kate Soper points out in relation to
dominant models of consumption (page 28), there is tension and unease
experienced beyond the world of campaigns, and an attraction to greener,
more sustainable patterns of consumption and development.
</p><p>Similarly, consider the kinds of struggles and alliances emerging
in relation to the cities. These are challenging the kind of
class-biased and speculative development that denies the mass of people
the opportunity the city provides for conviviality, accessibility and a
good life (see Red Pepper, Jun/Jul 2011). They are implicitly – and
increasingly explicitly – using whatever spaces can be won to experiment
with visions of how to organise a city to realise these values.
</p><p>Again, here are cases of lived experience out of sync with the
official claims of ‘world’ cities. And again, this practical
consciousness is echoed less politically but more broadly in all kinds
of complaints and objections to prestige, commercial developments that
disregard civic life.
</p><p>In all these spheres, newer values – for example, autonomy,
cultural diversity and harmony with nature, influenced by feminism,
anti-racism and green movements – are coming to the fore. They are often
emerging in combination with the enlivening and transformation of older
values, such as solidarity, public ethics, co-operation and things held
in common. These trends, pressing questions of social purpose and
relations with nature against the predatory forces of the capitalist
market, are frequently associated with innovations towards more
democratic, participatory forms of organisation.
</p><p>New organising
</p><p>Here we can discern the second cluster of under-the-surface
trends: around new organisational values and forms. These recur across
strikingly diverse spheres. Picking up where the rebellions of the 1970s
left off – cut off in their prime by Reagan and Thatcher, and failing
to produce much by way of lasting institutions – these new forms are
founded on a rejection of authoritarianism and hierarchy.
</p><p>The emerging forms of collectivity are collaborative as well as
deliberative in their decision-making. Their methodologies stress
solutions drawing on the computer software metaphor of ‘open source’ –
opening up the process of problem solving. Their notions of
co-ordination stress enabling platforms and facilitating centres and
above all the democratisation of the means of communication. Such
features are common to the movements resisting corporate globalisation
since the late 1990s – from the anti-capitalist mobilisations at the end
of the last century to the World Social Forum and the networks it
spawned and encouraged, through the ‘free culture’ movement in its
self-consciously plural form to the movements now reaching a high point
in Spain and Greece against the imposition of austerity (see page 33).
</p><p>These structures of feeling also have a wider reach, producing an
everyday refusal of authoritarian behaviour and hierarchical
institutions, and a positive desire for co-operative and egalitarian
relationships.
</p><p> The concept of structures of feeling stresses the formative,
emergent or pre-emergent character of these lived values. They are
experimental, problematic and unfinished, mostly unconsolidated in
completed institutions. How then can they be strengthened in the face of
the political challenges outlined earlier?
</p><p>Beyond the
</p><p>traditional left
</p><p>A first suggestion is stimulated by the way that applying the
concept of structures of feeling draws attention to potential allies way
beyond the organised movements of the left, even in its broadest terms.
Here we can learn from modest but effective initiatives such as UK
Uncut. These tap into and give material expression to such structures of
feeling. And it’s important to note that they combine culture and
politics in ways that relate to masses of people’s everyday lives.
</p><p>How can such initiatives at every level be more widely supported,
enabled and multiplied?
</p><p> Here the positive support of the PCS and Unite, both for the
campaigns of UK Uncut and, learning from initiatives of their own
branches, to encourage more decentralised forms of organisation,
reaching out to communities, opens up hopeful possibilities. In
particular, it raises the question of whether and how far organisations
that have been part of an older, previously dominant and to a
significant degree defeated or exhausted institutional framework can
leap – or be pushed – into an emerging institutional frame. As social
democratic institutions fracture and weaken, this issue’s interviews
with Len McCluskey and Mark Serwotka (page 16) indicate that something
in this new direction is stirring. This is a result of both the
imperatives of organisational survival and a recognition that the
interests of working people require unions to remake themselves as
agencies of radical change.
</p><p>The importance of this new openness in the unions and elsewhere –
in the co-operative movement for example – lies in the possibilities
for promoting and linking up otherwise isolated and marginal instances
of collective democratic initiative. So many of these exist but as yet
are almost invisible.
</p><p>Some emerge in the course of resistance. One example is the
speech therapists in South London who, with no experience of strike
action, brought together a whole community by organising their strike in
such as way as to involve everyone from grandparents to children to
defend a service valued by all. Others struggle to create spaces, in
schools or community centres for example, for co-operative projects that
provide a daily challenge to the forces of competition and austerity.
The new spirit of practical alliance‑building needs to extend in a
generous-minded way to include the full range of those working to create
inclusive, collaborative and democratic forms of collectivity.
</p><p>There is an impressive variety of sources reinforcing the new
structures of feeling associated with alternatives to commodification
and exemplifyng open, co-operative forms of organisation. This points to
the importance of a democratic infrastructure of communications as a
condition for the emergence of new social formations. Here I’m thinking
of the ways in which the burgeoning media initiatives associated with
these structures of feeling, online and offline, blurring traditional
divisions between culture and politics, can reinforce each other and be
supported by unions, radical NGOs, student and community organisations.
</p><p>The objective is to improve collaboratively our ability to reach a
wider public and also to strengthen our arguments and vision through
the creative debate that can accompany collaboration. This process is
already underway; we need to make it more concerted. The means are there
without having to come under anyone’s umbrella.
</p><p>These trends are taking place in a context in which the
institutions associated with the state – and hence political parties as
we have known them – have failed as the prime agents of change. As a
consequence, new forms of unity are being built from below, with
organisational hubs or centres acting as means of facilitation and
support – and posing for the future new questions about how to engage
with states. Here, communication is central in building cohesion out of
plurality and diversity.
</p><p>In this way, the spreading of the lived experience of alternative
values – presently fragmented and dispersed – will help structures of
feeling to develop. These, in turn, can prepare the way for new
institutions and breaking points in the old institutional order. n</p>
<a href="http://www.redpepper.org.uk/by/hilary-wainwright">Hilary
Wainwright</a> is a founding editor of Red Pepper and research director
of the New Politics programme at the Transnational Institute (TNI).<br><br>
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