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LSE: Public lectures and events
Social Movements in the US: From the American Revolution to Obama
01:18:41
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Hi.
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Good evening, everybody.
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Welcome to the second public lecture organised by LSE Summer School. I hope you're all enjoying summer school and this typical English weather. We laid it on specially for you. Just showing once again what the school can achieve. As I said in the first debate, which I had with Danny Quad, which I think many of you attended, one of the purposes of summer school isn't just to get you here at the lse, but also to bring you some of the speakers and some of the people we have here at the lse. And I'm delighted this evening to invite my boss, Professor Craig Calhoun. Craig is a world renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics and economics. As you will very rapidly appreciate as soon as Craig says one word. He comes from the United States of America where he worked for many, many years. University professor at New York University and then Director of the Institute of Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. Craig has a long and great relationship with this country. He did his DPHIL at Oxford and a Master's in Sociology at Social Anthropology at Manchester, where he picked up a very unpleasant habit supporting Manchester United. Thank you very much, Craig. I saw that. We'll talk later on. He co founded with Richard Sennett, one of the great American sociologists, the Nylon program, which brings together graduate students from New York and London for cooperative research programs. Craig, I think, fits extraordinarily well into the. What I believe are the core missions of this particular school of social improvement. To make a better society and, and to make social science accessible. He's written several books on Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors, and most recently the Roots of Radicalism. I want you to give an LSE welcome to the director of LSE who will be talking on Land of Social Movement from Revolution of Honor. Great. Over to you.
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All right. Now there's a logistical challenge. How do I make the slides move? Interesting.
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Okay.
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Ah, you pull out this thing. Brilliant. Got it?
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Yeah.
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Thank you.
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Yeah.
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All right, we're all set now. So you've heard that I'm American. I've been asked to speak on an American topic. I was going to talk about social movements globally, but the answer is that we need something American here. So this is it. You get something American tonight. Thanks to Michael Cox for the introduction. Richard Jackman has been leading this summer school. The summer school, now having its anniversary, is a great part of the lse. So let me extend my welcome back to you and launch into this. Social movements are a big part of what we hear about in contemporary news. So we hear about the Arab Spring. We hear about the question of will there be social movements that bring change in Iran? We hear about movements throughout Europe struggling with financial austerity and so forth. This is an attempt to look at a country that, as much as any other, has been shaped by social movements, the way in which movements have figured throughout American history. Now, let's see. All right, that didn't do anything. Let's see here.
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Ha.
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No, this is not working well there we have very attentive and helpful people.
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He's like that. He's very quick.
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I am an Apple user and forced to contend with the other technology here, which is, of course, a global plot. But never mind. The issue of social movements in America started before there was a United States, started really in Britain, and more than anything else with the Protestant Reformation. So the beginning of this process in which ordinary people exerted a shaping influence on the country from below, which has largely to do with. With religious movements and more or less simultaneous political and economic, more generally, social movements. So the Protestant Reformation Civil War era in Britain obviously has a religious content. It has a set of questions about the way in which the Bible is going to be taught, translated, the way in which religion is going to figure in national culture. Is Britain going to be a Catholic country with any sort of allegiance to the Pope and the regimes of Catholicism in the era, or is it going to be a Protestant country? But in the midst of all of this, some of what's happening is a discovery of society, of the idea of lateral interpersonal connections, of the connections among people in the country to each other as a shaping influence. So it's not just the king and the king downward. It's not just the church and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Part of the Protestantism of it is people read the Bible for themselves. They discuss and debate, they go listen to sermons by preachers. And the movement aspect of Protestantism is something that swells in large part from below, spreading through the society. There are rich patrons, there are people from above who support this, but it's largely from below, and it includes voice for ordinary people and literal voice. They do more public speaking and begin the tradition of standing on street corners saying, the world is coming to an end. Are you saved? Right. And this sort of communication can lend itself to have you joined the trade union movement? And a variety of other sorts of messages that follow from some of the same sort of. Of public speaking. And it extends into other kinds of questions the way in which the country begins to be Conceived as a commonwealth, right. The idea that it is here for the mutual prosperity of everybody, that we should think of the legitimacy of the crown, the king, even as something that comes from serving the well being of the people, rather than something that comes simply from having the right royal birth line. One issue that continues to the present day, or divine right of kings, it extends into economic life. And so the Civil War produces groups like the Levellers, a group who say that there should be inequality, equality that can be informed by early Christianity and relative equality among members of churches. But more generally, a movement against some of the social inequality of an increasingly property oriented society produces pilgrims and others who go to the US and transpose into that new context the spirit of a more equal era. And in this colonial setting in the United States, as the new colonies are forged, the settlers come, there is a wave of religious activism that gets called the Great Awakening, the 1730s and 40s. And I'm not going to dwell on all of this, but she'll walk through a history that before the country's been forged, there's not yet United States, there are just the colonies. But there's a revitalization movement, a religious movement that mobilizes lots of people. And as the picture shows, it has preachers, right, preaching like this to crowds of ordinary people in relatively rustic as well as in urban settings, mobilizing people around the country. And part of the path that will lead into the revolution is indeed this path of mobilizing people. And initially around religion. It's not unified, as though everybody in all the colonies believes the same. They have various different ideas that are enshrined in law as to what religion should be. But there's an awakening, an awakening in which a whole variety of people begin to say that this isn't a matter of just being a follower. This isn't a matter of, as it were, being conventional in your outlook and religion. This is a matter of actively shaping the nature of religious practice, getting inspiration from God and from prayer, and putting it to work in reshaping religious life. This is a very inconvenient way of doing it, but it works, I hope. No. All right. The movements that get started with this largely religious orientation extend into political and economic activity. And we get the Boston Tea Party and similar movements in part growing some 40 years or so after this Great Awakening in a continually more mobilized population. And they bring together a variety of economic interests, political interests, on this foundation of lateral ties among people in the population. So again, the society bit is in part that people are Connected to each other among relative equals in a variety of settings, the colonies and begin to organize clubs. It was actually a club that did this work in the Boston Tea Party. And societies, self organized societies among the people of the country. And this leads eventually to the empire and the sort of classical story. We know about the empire in various ways. And there are dignified pictures of it, not just the cartoon caricature that I was showing. And a story that begins to weave this into a story of how the people of the United States made the United States. They weren't the subjects on leave, a crown, they were previously subjects of the British monarch, but they take their lives in their own hands. It becomes a democratic country by virtue of popular mobilization. They throw the tea overboard, protesting what they regard as an illegitimate tax. They demand representation. They end up writing documents that begin with phrases like we the people of the United States, the country claims being made, being authored by popular voice, which requires movement in a certain sense. And always then social issues are entwined with the political issues, issues of inequality. So in pulling over a statue of George III in the Revolution, we see something among others that we've seen a lot of recently. We've seen statues pulled over throughout the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe in 1989-1992, for example. We've seen it more recently in other settings around the world. This movement that had an old regime that created monuments to itself, statues on into a revolutionary old regime in the former Soviet Union with statues of Lenin or Stalin and the pulling down of these statues as a popular action of several ordinary people against the regime. But we also have on the other picture, mobbing the Tories, that is, not everybody was a revolutionary. There were loyalists to Britain. The loyalists were often better off citizens of communities in which poorer citizens, middle class citizens united against some of the landowners and property owners. And mobbing the Tory is a bunch of people that sort of abusing the loyalist to the British crown, who's a loyalist partly because his economic interests dictate it. The British crown is working well for him. There's also a taste for enlightenment, this idea of science, philosophy and free thought that shapes the American colonies, which is also a sort of movement, a movement of self education, a movement of reading. So that both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson participate in an international movement. They're both recognized in Paris and London and elsewhere as intellectuals, as enlightened figures. And their understanding of the shaping of the country is partly that of the people, but of a people who can read, who will think. And on that basis will be able to assume leadership of a democratic society. So they're actively embracing a movement that is really an intellectual movement, that is spreading a variety of new ideas. We think of the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire, or of the Scottish moralist, Adam Smith and Ferguson and such figures widely and being embraced as part of the foundation of an educated society. So among the things that are distinctive about the United States at the point it gets formed is free public education. So you may think, ah, it's all politics and democracy. One of the very first things, the most distinctive things the US does is have free public education. Then there are debates about to what age and how do you extend that and what does it include. And you get public universities in most of the American states, often distinctively organized. Some of you may have come from these, often put down literally in the geographic center of the state. People measure and say, there's nothing here. I used to teach at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, which famously was located where they decided a particular tree was the geographic center. And under Davy Poplar they founded the university. Now these sorts of things are popular gestures. The University of North Carolina was founded, like the University of Virginia, exactly in this revolutionary context, to provide free public education to the citizens of the state. Something that was fought over two generations later by the Chartist movement in the uk, where it was still a sort of issue in the uk, where there was not yet free public education, where it remains a basic issue of class. So this intellectual issue entwined with this issue of social equality and access, and both of them paving the way for political change. But it turns out that Franklin and Jefferson are also remembered on our currency, of course. And this is also to some extent about money. America is created out of social movements. They fight for equality, but they are movements largely of the middle classes, movements of shopkeepers, movements of farmers who own small and medium sized farms, and sometimes larger ones like Jefferson Franklin, who's a printer. And money is always entwined in this. And so the country has these religious roots, these political roots, but it also has a distinctive economic system emerging at the same time in all of this. So the idea of a social movement, it's worth pausing to think about, starts with the idea that society matters, that social change can be produced by people who to some degree can take hold of their own lives and choose the institutions under which they're going to live rather than only adapt to what they've inherited from the past. And the social here is partly about their relations to each other. A bunch of individuals don't become the people. They have to be connected to each other in one way or another to become the people, to be able to act together. But there are also issues of material conditions of life. And part of what is meant by this phrase of a social movement is a movement that takes up not just abstractions of politics or indeed of religion, but the material conditions of life that's included in this. The phrase social movement is a phrase that comes into existence mainly in the 19th century, reflecting on such things as. As the American Revolution, which was a kind of social movement, and the French Revolution and other cases as we go on into it. So movement in the sense of change, social in its roots, mostly thought in the 19th century. In terms of an idea of progress, things are getting better. Social movements are how we get organized to push that process along faster. So a widespread belief in progress that eventually will be questioned because it turns out that people have contrary ideas of what's progress and they want to go in different directions. But there's a large sense that the world's getting better, lifespans are getting longer, people are living to an older age. There's less famine and hunger in countries. There are more opportunities. We have those public schools. There's progress, in a large sense that social movements are pushing along this story of progress. This is a particularly American theme because the country understands so much of itself in terms of starting afresh, breaking away from the example. Now, as I started out saying, that's partly mythological because the starting afresh is partly continuing some aspects of a history that has already started in Britain before the colonists arrive in the U.S. at one level, the American Revolutionaries of 1776 are being very militantly English. They're breaking with the king in the name of the liberties of Englishmen. So the colonies aren't just all saying, we're totally different. They're saying, hey, we're Englishmen, and yet we're not getting treated properly as Englishmen. Something Englishmen here would also say at various times. And figures like Thomas Paine, an Englishman who goes to the colonies and comes back to Britain, goes to France and so forth, says it in a lot of different settings, that the reason that everybody has a capacity for reason, and that using their reason, the people should be the basic owners of society, able to shape the way it works in all of the this. But this becomes part of America's story about itself. So just as there are stories about European countries centered on monarchs and wars that are fought between these countries, a very central part of the American story centers on this idea of the people, how the people take hold of it, and even the greatest tragedy of the American story, the Civil War and the massive bloodshed, will be understood in these popular terms. It is in fact the most democratic war that had been fought by its time in the sense of the massive loss of ordinary people's lives. Not mercenary armies, not battles that were fought between old fashioned ranks of soldiers at a distance from each other, but a sort of bloody internecine conflict not unlike Syria and places today. In many ways. Now, this notion of, of popular mobilization shaping the course of social change. What's society going to be? What are we going to make of it? Comes alongside and gets tied up with a variety of other very distinctively American themes. Immigration, for example. The colonists come to America to make a new life, to make a city on the hill, to make a new world. And they keep on making and remaking the society in a certain sense. But immigration is more complicated than that because there seems to be to be a pattern of every generation deciding we are now Native Americans and those other people are problems that have to be dealt with and regulated and managed and possibly kept out. And so immigration becomes a complex theme in that sense. Religion, which I started with, remains a central theme. And the United States is among the countries of the relatively rich world, the very distinctive in the number of people who go to church and believe in God. It is a very distinctively actively religious country. By comparison to Britain or continental Europe, for example, the proportion of people actively engaged in religion is about four times as high. And movements remain very much caught up with religious spirit throughout this. It's also a very entrepreneurial country, and it remains so to the present day, much more shaped by people who start new businesses and whole waves of entrepreneurship which weave in and out of the religious story, the immigrant story and other parts of this story, but on through to Silicon Valley, a very entrepreneurial country, and it keeps expanding westward. It's a country which has the unusual feature of expanding its contours for nearly 200 years of its history as it moves westward and eventually to Alaska and Hawaii. And then there are the themes like urbanization and capitalism that are common with many countries that take place. So the US moves from being an overwhelmingly rural society to an urban society. And it is from early on a society of business people. But it comes a society that is shaped by larger scale capitalism, not just small businessmen, but large corporations in a different system than that. Now there are recurrent evangelical revivals in this. Religion doesn't go away as a theme and it never becomes just the source of authority and conventionalism. Constantly it's a source of movements to change society to make it better. Methodist and Baptist conversion movements, Methodist and Baptist spread through the United States as social movements, converting often whole counties at a time. If you, you go around parts of the south in the United States, for example, there are Methodist counties and Baptist, Methodist majority counties, Baptist majority counties. There is a pattern of conversion in which traveling preachers went out. The Transcendentalists, the famous New England Transcendentalists, Emerson, most famous that we know. Mostly another sort of offshoot of this Americanisms religion side circuit riders in camp meetings, people who rode around evangelists on horseback to different towns and organized meetings. If you watch old western movies, you will see versions of these camp meetings and call people to salvation. Well, an aspect of this calling people salvation always is the question is that only about what happens afterwards, after we die? Or is that something where we make a better life on earth and there's a continual religious mobilization of people to the idea that some society has to be made more moral, it has to be made better in various ways. So religion remains deeply tied up with this. And then there are new movements. We have the Methodists and Baptists, both of which originate in Europe and spread in the US more than they ever did in Europe. We have Mormons, an indigenous American religion which along with the Christian church Disciples of Christ are the two large American indigenous Americans religious movements that take place in this period. Of course, the trek of the Mormons from their origins in upstate New York westward becomes a movement story and in many ways building some of the new society on the way in Utah. So there are these evangelical renewals calling people to reawaken. And this shapes other movements because it's the evangelicals in many ways in another great Awakening, the so called second great awakening of the US 1820s, 30s, early 40s, who shaped the anti slavery movement. Methodists are the heart of the anti slavery movement, but a variety of other Christians are key. Now there are certainly Christians who say, oh, we can find a justification for slavery. And there are plenty of people preaching that slavery is justified. But much of the opposition, particularly the white opposition to slavery, but some of the black opposition to slavery as well, is caught up with evangelical Christianity. The notion am I not a man and a brother? The most famous slogan of the anti slavery movement, suggesting this mixture of a sort of humanistic and a religious brotherhood message about the end of slavery and the organization of anti slavery meetings, the sort of social movement call as this spread through the country became more of an issue, obviously, particularly in the north in this. And movements that flourished included the early women's movement and the women's movement shaped by and connected with, simultaneous with the anti slavery movement. So you have in the early 19th century, this is the decades before the Civil War, the growth of a huge movement condemning slavery. It's tied to religion because part of the message is slavery is a national. By just living in a country that practices slavery, you're participating in the sin of slavery, so you must rise up and eradicate it. So there's movement from religion to the opposition to slavery, and then there's women's movement. It turns out that the anti slavery movement had a very large female following. Many women had their first experience of speaking in public as orators, in the context either of religious preaching or of the anti slavery movement. There's a large scale action where women write books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, which becomes a celebrated part of this and it's tied. But there's also increasingly a women's movement that says, wait a minute, are we being treated as somewhat less than full citizens, not entirely better than slaves, told that we are property of men, and what is the situation of women in society? So the organization of the Seneca Falls meeting, which is a pivotal point in the women's movement in the United States in 1848, comes and one of the biggest questions is, should we go ahead and pursue the cause of women or should we work on the anti slavery cause and wait, say the women's cause will come later, after we've dealt with the slavery cause. And the day is decided in part by Frederick Douglass, who speaks at Seneca Falls. The great freed slave abolitionist leader, major black leader, who among other things was a brilliant orator and a key intellectual in the period, thus giving the lie to the notion that blacks were slaves because they didn't have the intellectual ability to be free. This great leader comes as a major leader of the abolitionist anti slavery movement and says, this is about freedom, this is about liberty, and we cannot any of us be free and not recognize the freedom of others. The freedom of women and the freedom of the slaves have to go together. The country has to eliminate its willingness to tolerate gross inequalities and move forward. The temperance movement comes at about the same time a rise of arguments that drink was the villain and that the problem in society was drunkenness and so their people needed to sign the temperance pledge. And this is a recurrent theme in America, a different kind of moral movement, also with religious roots, but now, not seizing on the issue of race or on the issue of inequality, but on the issues of moral failures and lapses. It's drunkenness. It's men who go out, take the Friday wages they get and spend them all on long drunken binges over the weekend that are creating the problem. We have to end this. And the United States repeatedly has a major temperance movement, first in the early 19th century and later and then on in the famous Prohibition era in the time between the world wars, the Depression. But a moral movement seizing on and even creating a sort of panic around the issue of alcohol calling on God. And again entwined with the women's movement because of the very disproportionate female role in the temperance movement, which is about its participation between 3/4 and 80% women seeing drunkenness is a male sin that women had a reason to want to free themselves from. But then that draws women into politics. And once in politics, they start saying, why should we be treated as inferior to men? Now, not all the movements that arise that shape things are in any sense progressive. Remember I suggested a sort of idea that's bound up in this notion of movements is somehow this is driving progress forward. But lots of the movements are in fact defensive. Some of them are outright reactionary. There's a major anti Masonic movement in the United States. Masons are foreign infiltrators. They're often Catholic. We have to watch out for them. They are separate secret societies that are manipulating things. Some of the things that will often be said about, like the Elders of Zion later about Jews as people who are foreigners, who have secret societies and plots for the world are said Masons. It's worth remembering later. The Ku Klux Klan is founded initially to confront the problem of Catholics. Right. It takes up the issue of race as a second issue after its initial founding issue of Catholics in the United States. And this same sort of anxiety about people who are different, people who are problems for the country comes forward. And so the anti Masonic movement is a large scale movement and it's a worry that will run. Now, it's immigration in part that's fueling this. It's the beginning of southern European immigration that's feeling anti Catholic concern that will occur over and over again. Right. And this issue of watching out for dangerous foreign influence would be an issue as late as when President Kennedy was elected in 1960. And this was a widespread charge against the problem of having a Catholic president who would bring this foreign influence to the United States, eroding the power of Native Americans. Well, the less democratic, the more reactionary side, the less progressive entwines with, mixes with some of the more democratic sides of this in movements like the populist movement in the United States, where the name of the people becomes core to the name of the movement. The movement is about those rich people on the east coast, those magnates of industry who are manipulating the system at the expense of farmers and of ordinary people and the people that need to rise up and take control of institutions for themselves. Democracy is being destroyed. Now, this is a recurrent theme. Jacksonian democracy had it in the early 19th century, comes back in the late 19th century populist movement, and it includes this sort of negative side of being against the unfamiliar and threatening. And the populist movement fails in elections despite coming pretty close in the 1890s, partly because there's never an alliance effectively between the WASP white Anglo Saxon Protestant populists, largely agricultural, and the European, southern European, ethnic Irish, Italian and other working class, to some extent German working class movements of the cities. So the two big groups that both think of themselves as the people are split, and both of them are split largely from blacks. And so the big struggle for the people is that the people keep undercutting themselves by these exclusionary identifications, but struggling. And various people struggle throughout all of this to get the people more unified in various ways. This is neither left wing nor right wing in our contemporary period. It has elements of each. It's complicated. Williams Jennings Bryan is the great orator of populism. And we shall not be crucified, he says, on a cross of gold and say, well, what's this story about I smear, it's a boy or something? Well, it's about the gold standard for currency and the extent to which that was being manipulated in a way that was disastrous for farmers who had credit. It was the financial system. It's a direct ancestor of Occupy Wall street in a variety of great critiques like this, because it is about a set of financial institutions that are going to manipulate interest rates and currency, in this case the gold standard backing the dollar in a way that is at the expense of farmers. And the short version of the story is just farmers often have to borrow money and then they pay it off and the harvest comes in and they borrow seasonally over and over again. High interest rates drive farmers into bankruptcy. So a call to retain gold standards is part of this, and he finds it now. He also is the great orator, of course, of the Scopes trial and the anti Darwinian evolutionary movement at the Same time. So again, you find these different ideas from different parts of the political spectrum entwined with each other. And this is also the ancestry not just of Occupy Wall street, but of the Tea Party. And so you have a sort of common ancestry and populism for each of these two big movements of our current period, which call for shrinking the government, a populist call. The ordinary farmers didn't want to pay taxes, to have the federal government become bigger and bloated and more tied up with the financial industry. And there's an anti corporation lower tax argument. The labor movement becomes a big part of the US too, yet never as strong as it becomes here in Britain, but relatively strong in the late 19th and early 20th century. And a very significant part of this American story heavily linked to immigrant populations. So the successive ways of immigration, Germans, Irish, Italians and so forth, play a central role in the labor movement, but they're by no means the whole part of it. And there's a, a whole series of elections. The US has its brief period of having successful socialist candidates in the early 20th century. Something then shifts away from the US but has this idea of the working man and the right of the working man to the full fruits of his labor, which becomes a central and key theme that runs through the movement. Now again it gets tied up with immigrants. So you get things like this, attention working men, mass meeting, you know, Achtun ar meiter. Right. That will be in two languages. Right. Because it's appealing to an immigrant population. You also get the complication that is introduced by immigration and race, which keeps splitting the workers. Right. Well, I may really be getting screwed by the capitalists, but at least I'm better off than those black people. Right? And you get the, this division within the ranks of the working class, which doesn't fully ever overcome it. Now movements, part of the message of this is seldom succeed instantly. There are very, very few cases where people go out, they have a series of protests and they win. Usually there is some pattern of flourishing, fading, coming back and flourishing again over and over again. You've already seen a bit of this in my story and finishing up there will be a bit more. So it may take 100 or 200 years before a core issue gets worked out. US history is a history of returning over and over again to certain core issues in many ways. And other countries have their own sort of recurrent core themes in this secularism in France, class in Britain and others, and the time between phases of high mobilization. So you get Occupy Wall street and then it disappears well, what happens between one peak of mobilization and the next often determines the nature of the movement, its staying power. And what will be the particular twist that get given to the issues at each period and there keeping new additions to this. So back in 1848, the feminist movement, one of its early phases, right, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton saying to deny political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self respect. And so here we have this sort of grandmotherly character who's leading the 1848 women's movement. But then again in 1920, we have the suffrage movement. These people are celebrating on the very passage of women's suffrage in 1920. And notice that their sign immediately refers back to two previous waves. So we had 1848, 1872, 1894 and now 1920. Women have been fighting through all of this period repeatedly, simply to get the vote, which the US Constitution gave only to men initially, only to property owning men, and on into 1969. And we have the women's liberation campaign. So the issue of gender inequality, the issue of the way in which women are presented and treated as inferior citizens, or not even citizens, is a recurrent issue that goes through the whole history of the country and takes a very long time to be worked out, if it has indeed been worked out today. Now, lots of different movements often flourish at the same time. We've seen this with race and gender, for example. But it is the pattern that movements often come with a several different things happening at the same time, all influencing each other in ways and creating a big ferment in the country that sort of dies down. Lots of activism in the 60s, not so much activism in the 80s, back and forth in these kinds of movements, as I suggested, some of the same major issues recurring to shape American history. The movements never have everybody mobilized. People my age all remember the 60s as a time when all students had long hair, were opposed to the draft, were smoking marijuana, were doing a variety of things. And of course it was mainly students on certain university campuses, not the whole population. And after all, some people our age were joining the army and going to Vietnam. So it was not ever quite so universal. There are always counter movements, there are always people opposed, like this movement of people opposed women. So suffrage, a whole headquarters for men to get mobilized to fight against those women who wanted the right to vote, or George Wallace and others who got organized in a sort of new kind of movement of southern whites against blacks, like against Martin Luther King here marching in Selma. And we see the hints of all of the panic over The United nations that will follow in succeeding decades as a variety of Americans worry that there is some sort of global conspiracy to rob them of their rights. Now, protests are only a visible face of movements. They're not the whole story of movements ever. They're the bit we see that gets on tv, that gets reported in the newspapers. There's always lots of other things going on. Protests are in part about people getting out in large numbers to communicate to the whole society, but also to themselves to communicate we are worthy, right? We are united, There are lots of us and we're very committed. This is the sort of core message of almost every protest that goes on, but they're relatively short, ephemeral events. That's why you can get a huge march and still have the invasion of Iraq immediately afterwards or other kinds of events. Protests are moments, they're not whole things. And Occupy Wall street, just like this. Occupy Wall street in the end, is a moment in a larger movement history. It's not an enduring 10, 20, 30 year movement in itself. It's a phase in recurrent sets of struggle over issues like equality and inequality. The women's movement, right, continues on into 1980s with the 70s and 80s with the struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment, which sounds pretty innocuous, right? There should be an equality of rights under law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. This failed. This is not an amendment to the US Constitution, because although it was passed by Congress, it never was passed by the required majority, 2/3 of the US states. And notice the pattern, the pattern that would be familiar to say, the fights over immigration today or a variety of other sorts of, of issues in the justice. Or again, the race issue has not gone away and comes back in the age of Obama in different character with a new set of debates. As a political issue, movements seldom win complete victories, but they shape political agendas. A large part of what it means to be a movement in the country is that ordinary people mobilized in action out in the streets, changed the agenda for politics. It becomes something that the more conventional political leaders have to contend with. They have to have positions on those issues, they have to make statements. The parties adapt in various ways. So the movements hardly ever win in the sense that they can call the shots, but they influence the agenda and they influence the culture. So something like the women's movement over 200 years helps to change the whole way in which people think about the relations between men and women and the proper gender roles in society. Even enough that they can be taken for granted, that it's hard to think of how people could imagine that women couldn't vote or couldn't own property in their own names under some circumstances. So we have on into the era of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The community movement of this that is now a bit of ancient history, just like seneca Falls in 1848, but is a very recent fight over women and again entwining political representation. Will there be any significant number of women in Congress economy? Women were paid 69 cents on the dollar to men's salaries. Right? These sorts of issues keep going. Or again, there are media moments that stand out, that become symbolic of whole eras. This is the Kent State shooting in the spring of 1970, when National Guard soldiers shot into a crowd of protesting students on a university campus in Ohio. Or the Black power protest Kalil Smith at the Mexico city Olympics in 1968. There are iconic moments, but the message here is these issues, like the fact that the United States got founded saying it was a country of we the people, but excluding blacks and women from full participation in the people are worked out recurrently over a long time. So it becomes a country of movements dealing with deep core issues in it. Changing popular culture, reshaping, but also then being vulnerable to commercialization and being remade. Hey, I can sell you a peace symbol and make money at it. Not just advocate for the end of the war in Vietnam or whatever. It's actually at that. Jimi Kendrick's concert, for what it's worth, the 60s is a great example of a wave of movement activity where it's affecting all kinds of issues. This is the time period of the rebirth of evangelical Christianity that will produce what was called 15 years later the new Christian Right, but which has much of its birth at the same time as the peace movement. So not all homogenous, but lots of mobilization, lots of searching, lots of getting out and movements continue, as I've suggested, in the present day with Occupy Wall street among others, and a variety. And I'm sticking just to the US examples, but Occupy allows me to make the point. Point, of course, that the movements are very international, right? That what goes on because of those media links is less and less national, more and more internationally linked, in many cases, not everything. Tea Party, very distinctively American, but Occupy echoes in London, echoes around the world, and Mr. Anonymous who shows up all over the place. Now part of the movement story over and over again is repression, Haymarket riot back in the 19th century, but onto the Occupy movement as the police Help to make a story. And the capacity to produce media images of repression is a big movement benefit. It's almost as though the police are working for the movement organizers in order to generate these sorts of photos that attract attention. This is the University of California, Davis, the famous pepper spray incident where the campus police sort of gratuitously pepper spray these students who are sitting there, leading to an investigation that just issued a big report about two weeks ago. It's still been going on as an issue helping to mobilize people. So here are a small group of students saying authority is unjust, there is inequality on campus, and here are the policemen saying, let me prove it for you. And it becomes self reinforcing. So movements are always a problem for the people in power because it's very tricky to be able to control the movements and not come out as so harsh that you actually fan the flames of the movements. Movements, in sum, reflect the development of a highly participatory society. This is part of a story of a society in which people can read, in which people work in jobs, in which they participate in organizations. They don't just follow orders in which they're able to move from one place to another in the country. They're not tied to any one original location. It's a more and more participatory society. Religion helps to lead the way in a lot of this. But an open market economy is just as important to produce in this kind of participatory society in which movements are, among other things, like consumer options. And you can support the environmental movement or the women's movement movement, or make your choice of what it is you want to do. And you get a definition of society as more and more about the ordinary people and this constant search. Where are the ordinary people? Are they in Peoria, Illinois? This used to be the place that US TV journalists said the ordinary people were. Go interview them before every election. And there's this search for the voice of the ordinary person because the country embraces the idea that that's who it's about and not simply about elites and their welfare. But that makes equality and inequality a big issue. So the 99 and the 1% become a slogan. The level of inequality becomes something problematic because of the very idea that everybody knows each other. The very pioneering movement in America, which has now to some extent been embraced in Europe as well, where every waiter is your best friend and comes to the table and says, hi, I'm John, I'll be your server tonight. And you have the conversation with John and You find out before the evening's over about John's girlfriend or boyfriend and everything else that is going on in his life. This is an egalitarian society where the egalitarian social norm are not matched by the income distribution. And it matches the idea of social movements more than just protests, it's about participating, about being able to participate in society. Movements come on different sides of issues, right or left, like Tea Party and Occupy. That's not the issue. The issue is being able to participate and shape society. Conventional politicians can embrace a movement style as Abraham Lincoln, particularly in his second election, and Barack Obama in his first election, embrace a very movement style of organizing, use the new social media, get people out, but then they ultimately are nonetheless conventional politicians and you get people disappointed. Where was the change we can believe in with Barack Obama and a debate about this? It wasn't in the end of movement. It was an election. And, and he does contend with all the usual pressures in Washington. Movements are never completely contained in conventional politics. One of the many movements I didn't touch on in this gay rights movement is a good example. Exactly what is the left right politics of the gay rights movement? It's very hard to tell. It's shifted over time. The gay population of the United States is very largely middle class, votes significantly Republican in some areas. It's not easily mapped onto that. It's hard to fit a cultural issue like this into conventional political categories. And so movements, right, are always going on changing the culture, despite the fact that at the same time we go to elections and we vote and we have ordinary politics as well. Thanks.
- [49:23]
A
Okay.
- [49:24]
B
And I'm going to leave her up.
- [49:26]
A
Do you want to stand up there, Craig, or come and sit. Come and sit down. You're happy. Go. Okay, let's.
- [49:33]
B
Yeah, you really are.
- [49:34]
A
I know, I know, I know, I know. Could I just kick it off, Craig, just very, very quickly with a particular point, I mean more general point. You could argue, could you not, that the American Constitution, which still stands at the very heart of the American political order in a way was a reaction against the people. That there was a sense in which one should fear. I mean, you've talked about popular movements from below, but within the Constitution, which moved from the Original Convention of 1776, there's a very strong sense you can't trust the people, the masses, you know, they're dangerous. Even your electoral system for president in a sense is an expression of that it isn't a president who directly elected. It goes through the college itself where you can, as we found out in 2000 get a different result in the Electoral College as you get in the mass movement. So is there also not a sense in which elites still matter and that there is a lot more fear of the people in the United States than perhaps came out in your lecture? Or is an additional aspect of thinking about popular movements fear of these popular movements as much as. Absolutely, yeah.
- [50:44]
B
No, you're absolutely right. From early on, this is in the US a kind of back and forth process. You get a popular mobilization, you get elites who want to tame it are domesticated if it can support the things they believe in. Like, yes, we want to be independent from Britain. No, we don't want to abolish private property. And you get compromised solutions. I think the Constitution is a document that reflects that exactly as you say, that it has a bunch of safeguards against the people running amok, but it also reflects the idea that the people have to be engaged. Right. So it's a culture compromise decision between a more pure form of popular democracy and a system that would give special safeguards against it. And the reason for the safeguards isn't only that elites want to enshrine themselves in power. It's a fear of the instability of the crowd, that people would be swayed by the heat of the moment around some issue and would make policies that are bad and destabilize the country. So ideas like the structure of the Senate with relatively long terms and the House with short terms reflect a compromise on this. You will get a stabilizing Senate, which will sometimes be at odds with the House of Representatives, precisely in order that the shorter term and the longer term represent. It's also, of course, not perfect, doesn't work right all the time. But the Federalist Papers are in many ways a debate around the question of how can you have a fair amount of popular participation, which I think pretty widely the founders thought was necessary, and still have stable government, not have it destabilized by these popular crowds that would rise up around someone. Issue.
- [52:45]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's open it up. Okay, who wants to go first? Come on, come on. I've got two. One here. Yeah, in blue. Yeah. Wait for the mic. Yeah. And then there'll be. Somebody got another mic over here. Just. Okay, Just one at the bottom.
- [53:00]
B
Yeah.
- [53:01]
A
Okay. Please. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
- [53:04]
B
So the issue of race is, I think you had a good point that it kind of is quiet and then something happens like the trademark Martin issue, and then it really pops up. Is that something that you think will the issue will ever go away or do you think it's something we've kind of stuck with forever?
- [53:22]
A
Okay, just take one at a time.
- [53:23]
B
Okay. Forever is a long time, but we've been stuck with it for hundreds of years and it's not going away fast. So there are bits of progress. Slavery does get abolished. There is a pretty substantial defense of black voting rights, although there's controversy over the recent Supreme Court decision to basically nullify the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act. There is a large level of independent black organizations, so that from the days of the NAACP to the Urban League and so forth, the organizations aren't crushed by the military or closed down. So there's movement for considerably greater. But I think each time that people feel they've won on one of the issues, it turns out there are more and more complicated issues. And so it does come back over and over again. And there's real debate. I don't know the perfect answer. Some say it won't go away until mixed race marriage is the norm and we can't see race when we look around. There are others who say we can in fact address, achieve it by good laws and rules that say people will be paid the same, educated the same, treated the same, able to buy houses in the same neighborhood. And some of the same questions come up. What's the balance between freedom and a rule about, say, treating people equally? And we wrestle with that. And as long as some people want to use their freedom to treat people unequally, then you've got a tensioner around it again. So my own sense is we're nowhere near the point where it's going away, but it's pretty huge progress. Right. We have a black president. We actually have a pretty wide open set of economic opportunities. We have unequal structures. And what I think is happening is that the race issue is losing some of its complete distinctiveness as a special thing and becoming part of the issue of inequality and partially merging with class and other inequality issues. Not completely yet. And the Trayvon case is an example of this. Right? This was not a class issue.
- [55:34]
A
Great. Chairman Red on the back there. Yeah.
- [55:36]
B
Professor Calhoun, I was wondering if you could talk briefly about the America first movement during World War II and how that may be similar or different to the movement later on with Vietnam.
- [55:47]
A
Perhaps you could explain what the America first movement was.
- [55:51]
B
So there are multiple movements during each of this, and we have some coincidence and different things going on at these different times. And the America first movement was essentially an isolationist movement in relation to the war. And the America has recurrently been isolationist in times of war that has decided let other people fight these battles that are not our battles. We have things to worry about here. And it's easier to do that when you are a continental country than, you know, it's easier to resist being drawn in for a while. Although in each case, America ends up being drawn in. Largely part of what makes these world wars, and there is an element of continuity with Vietnam, as you suggest, that is part of the opposition to Vietnam War is simply peace and a sort of pacifist orientation. Part of it is an idea that this is a bad war, that in some sense the idea of trying to block communism by defending the crumbling South Vietnamese regime against the north is a sort of fake, fatally flawed strategic idea. And part of it is a lot of people saying, I don't have a stake in that. I'm much more worried about inequality, about race, about American cities, about a variety of other issues than I am about whether Ho Chi Minh wins in Vietnam. And that last one is the continuity, in a way, of the America first movement. I think the First World War also has not only the America first movement, though, but a significant pacifist movement too. And conscientious objection law gets largely ironed out in the context of World War I. And so at each of these times, there are various issues people raise with warfare. On minor note, I'll add the World War I struggle over this brings the creation of the American association of University Professors and the modern articulation of the idea of academic freedom in the United States because of fights at universities. For example, at Columbia University, where the President ordered the faculty not to speak out on the war, saying that in a time of war the ordinary ideas of academic freedom were suspended and various professors like John Dewey said, wait a minute, no, you can't say that this is essential. That's part of what you have universities for is to debate these questions, which need to be debated all the more when there are high stakes issues like war.
- [58:31]
A
Could I follow up on that, Craig? Just bring it right up to date. One of the things that strikes me, and I don't know if it struck you as well, is that you could say the Vietnam War movement and the mass mobilization on the streets in the end played a significant impact in what the United States could then do or not do in relationship to what was going on in Vietnam, namely Nixon was constrained and in the end pressured by that movement on the streets. What I find really significantly different today is that America has been at war, rightly or wrongly, since 2001, it has engaged in two pretty obviously big ground wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. President Obama, whose picture we saw earlier on, has vowed to bring Americans home. But the movement of opposition on the streets, your social movements, doesn't seem to have played a very big role in that. In other words, is it America's changing or is it that there's more patriotism and more support for the military? Or because it's not a conscript war, it's a professional. It's very interesting to see the real difference. There wasn't a massive social movement as there was back in Vietnam.
- [59:39]
B
No wonder why there's never been a comparably massive movement against the more recent wars. And I'm sure there are many different aspects of this. I think the all volunteer versus conscript army is a huge one because what the draft and conscript army meant was that a variety of relatively privileged people, middle class, upper class kids at university, universities, were being drafted and it became a personal issue to these people. In a way, the all volunteer army has produced an interestingly effective army. Probably the most successfully integrated institution in the United States is the military. So an interesting feature of this is it has successfully merged people integrated in race, ethnicity, immigrant status, a whole variety of things. But the military military is overwhelmingly not the middle and upper class people who are attending elite colleges and universities. And we've introduced almost a caste like differentiation between those people who go to elite and selective universities. And those people end up in the military. Now, not perfectly, there are ROTC programs, there are different things, but to a huge extent. And so the issue of war doesn't, it doesn't become personal as an I might get drafted kind of issue for most people, nor even as a my next door neighbor got killed. My next door neighbor did get killed in Vietnam. And so, you know, that sort of level of personalism doesn't happen because there are whole neighborhoods and whole universities in which people don't know anybody who's fighting in these wars. Even though we have the most soldiers in university and deployed overseas than any time since the Vietnam War. It's a very significant segmented group. To say a little more on it. Same issues entwine. I mentioned race and all this. We decide that we will actually officially have a policy of allowing immigrants to become citizens by serving in the military or dying, after which if they're killed in the military, their families have a fast path to citizenship. So as quasi mercenary relationship to immigrants in military service. So that has the effect of muting the protest In a way, it creates a sort of ethical dilemma, but also it praiseworthy characters. The military is actually far more successful than universities are at actually producing integration and cooperation across race and ethnic lines. It's a complicated question around that. I think there's two other things that need to be said in relationship. One is your point about the pressure in the Vietnam era is worth connecting to the present in a different way. One of the roots of the financial crisis is the opposition to the Vietnam War. What on earth do I mean by that statement? It is when President Nixon faced this huge opposition, the Vietnam War, one of the ways it played out was that it was very difficult for him to raise terror taxes to pay for the cost of the war. And the last five or seven years of the five to seven years of the Vietnam War were financed overwhelmingly on credit. From the time that Richard Nixon was elected. They were not financed based on tax raises, but on credit on issuing bonds to pay for the Vietnam War. And this is one of the sources of the growing financialization in the world. There's also OPEC and sovereign wealth funds as long as more to the story. But a significant bit of this, this is also the shift of the US into permanent deficit financing and a sort of major change. So the politics of one issue become another issue because war is not cheap. And you know, to find some credit, as European kings often did throughout history, becomes a challenge. And it sort of plays out then this other set of events later because we get this shift from. From in the middle 1970s, about 25% of US wealth being held in the form of credit of some kind of financial asset to about 75% by the time of the financial crisis. So a transformation that shapes something later with these earlier roots, the high connectivity theme. The second thing I'd say though is not only the wars haven't gotten protests. The occupied was a short, relatively narrowly based focus. But by and large, considering how deep the financial crisis has been, there's been remarkably little social movement opposition. So there's a question about what are the bases for social movement opposition and why does it not flourish more? There's been huge hardship. There has been, you know, a big action. People have lost their homes and their jobs. Lots has gone on and it hasn't been met by anywhere near the kind of mobilization that even somewhat smaller downturns earlier saw. And it may be that some of the decline of the trade union movement is one factor or various other things. But it's interesting how little mobilization there's been really since the big 60s 70s mobilizations.
- [64:38]
A
That's great. Chairman Reddy here, please. Anybody upstairs? Yep. Well, there's lots of people upstairs.
- [64:45]
B
Do you think that the media tends to sensationalize social movements and protests a bit too much for, you know, ratings in business? And if so, you know, how should we deal with that? What sources should we use to sort of think critically about them? Yeah, great questions. The media. You can all hear me without the microphone. Yeah, the media sensationalizes. Exactly. And it distorts in multiple ways. One is that it is drawn to the newer, different and bigger event so that it creates a pressure on social movements to produce something more dramatic. Okay, you had a march with 100,000 people. Can you get 200,000 people or can you produce something violent? Because violence will attract the TV cameras. And so there is a pull towards violent confrontation. There's a pull towards spectacular things and some kind of set a fire, do something that is partly driven by media. There's from the point of view of movement organizers, therefore, an issue of how do you maintain discipline? How do you keep people non violent? How do you keep people from damaging poverty? Because you don't want to have your movement tarred with that brush. There's also the issue of the way in which this need to produce something bigger hits a threshold for movements. And so repeatedly, the peace movement in the 60s 70s was an example in which it got bigger and bigger and bigger crowds. It became less and less disciplined and coherent in its internal structure. And eventually it hit, hit sort of the maximum organizing capacity. And it looked like it disappeared overnight. What happened was it went from being able to mobilize a million people to only having three quarters of a million people. And so the media lost interest.
- [66:39]
A
It didn't.
- [66:40]
B
Three quarters of a million, it's still a lot of people. But it was then on the way down and it sort of changed in all of this. Another thing about the media influence quickly is the media love league leaders, spokespeople. And so movements often have a variety of different people. They're all about participation. So the person mobilizing in Chicago is not necessarily following the person mobilizing in New York, but the media, A, are headquartered in New York and B, they want somebody. So the media tend to play up the differences between a few leaders and everybody else in movements more than real would warrant.
- [67:19]
A
Okay, I got a couple. There's a lady up there and was there somebody down here? Yeah, and Pastor, look, I'll take two. One up there and the one person in the moment, in the middle there has had your Hand up a long time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, please. Thanks.
- [67:32]
C
Thank you. Since we're talking about, you know, the voice of the people and also the role of the media, can you maybe speak to the Edward Snowden case? You know, and how does the United States response to that fit in with your themes of kind of promoting equality but also having this other side to it?
- [67:48]
A
Perhaps you could explain what the case is.
- [67:49]
B
So this is Edward Snowden is the person who leaked many files from surveillance and has then fled to Hong Kong and now to Moscow and so forth. And this is of the piece with WikiLeaks and a variety of other efforts to use access through electronic media to expose either surveillance being done by electronic media, that's the Snowden issue, or other kinds of information which has been being kept secret by governments and other people in power. So there are a variety of versions of this. Mr. Anonymous, whose picture I had out there, is, among other things, a symbol for part of this kind of opposition. The idea of popular voice, the idea of enlightenment that I stress, that people can reason, that they can understand and therefore they can participate in democracy assumes that people can know what is going on. And so to the extent that governments are not transparent and do not share information with their citizens about how they work, it is then much harder for those citizens to have an informed public opinion in this. In the Vietnam era, things like the publication of a set of secret papers, the Pentagon Papers, that revealed some of the extent of the way in which they planned to bomb Vietnam and other changes in the Vietnam War had been made contrary to the official statements of the government was another example of this. It didn't involve computer files the same way, but it involved a leaking of documents. So this is actually a relatively old story. You know, the British Parliament, which founded on principles of free speech and all, didn't allow the publication of parliamentary debates until well into the 18th century. And it involved fights, the John Wilkes Battles, and other sort of demonstrations to get the representatives to allow what they said in a public debate to be recorded. So this issue runs through all of democratic politics. You can't have democratic democracy if you don't have some level of transparent, shared knowledge of the issues. Now governments say, well, but in a time of war or terrorism or whatever, we need to keep something secret. And so you have attention. How much secrecy? And are the government officials abusing their ability to keep something secret? Do they have procedures that fairly determine what should be secret or what level of surveillance they should have on citizens? So in Britain, we have the interesting feature that There is a lot of objection to this kind of surveillance. There would be deep opposition to identity cards. The idea of having a national identity card seems a huge intrusion. Having closed circuit television cameras on every lamp post seems to be accepted watch out as a national pattern. Right. So that you can be filmed doing anything. But you would feel abused to have your information recorded with a single national identifier number like an American Social Security number. And so different countries have different tolerance. The US in the last years of so called war against terrorism has dramatically accelerated the extent to which it gathers data, data on ordinary citizens and indeed on others in its hunt for terrorism from the Patriot act and so forth. And this is surprisingly little debated through most of the period that is University president spoke out early in the Patriot act saying we don't want to be in the system of situation of being asked to report on our students or faculty because the Patriot act contains provisions where for example what books people look at in the library should be reported. There was some opposition and various people spoke out but it never became a popular issue. The public was much more worried about terrorism than it was worried about this issue of surveillance. Is that changing? I don't know. My sense is that there's been a massive loss of privacy and introduction of surveillance without much of any movement. So what we have is precisely not a large scale popular movement but a relatively small scale network of computer hackers and leakers and others who try on behalf of the public to do something the public doesn't do for itself.
- [72:15]
A
Yeah, Kristen, now.
- [72:17]
C
Yeah. I would like you to maybe give your view on the potential of social movements ability to enable social change through finance because as I said that could be maybe a new way of faster than through the slow democracy, especially in the states get some results through critical shareholding. But there's definitely also problems in coordination among the principals who delegate.
- [72:50]
A
Could you pass Mike along which take a second question as well? Yeah, well, yeah, pass the mic along. Yeah, sorry Craig, just take a second. Yeah, please. Yeah.
- [72:58]
B
Okay.
- [72:58]
C
Mine was just. Well, first off, as a blue devil I had to say go do but.
- [73:03]
B
Oh yeah, always one. There's always one.
- [73:05]
A
There's always one.
- [73:06]
C
But I wanted to thank you for this because I think it's really great. In the beginning you talked about the American Revolution and how it was a very homogenous population and there was kind of one thing that they were fighting for. Now we see a massive array of movements and it can become of overwhelming for the general population. You talked briefly about kind of how one movement can Crowd out other movements. And I didn't know if you had any thoughts on how we can overcome that, what ways that can kind of be dealt with.
- [73:30]
A
Okay, great.
- [73:30]
B
Okay, let me take the two of those in reverse order. I actually don't think there was just that much unity. There was unity and more unity maybe than we have now. But there were also people who thought the big issues were religious, people who thought the big issues were about the freedom of small business that should not have to suffer taxation without representation, People who thought that it was independence. There were various different issues. The colonies at the beginning were not united in the idea that they wanted to be democratic. That's something that happens during the course of the revolution that spreads more and more. The determination when we get out of this thing, we want to be strongly democratic. Tom Paine helps with all of that. So I think it's usually the case that there's more than one thing going on at once. It's very seldom the case that one movement successfully dominates, though to some extent. They can crowd out or take over at a particular period, but they tend to take over in the media and in the national eye more than on the ground, where there are always different things going on, I'd say. And I think that what we should be happy to see is diversity of activity and look for connections like those connections between the women's movement and the abolition movement, the 1840s, rather than the sort of perfect one. Answer, okay, it has to be all this one. I think every time people try to impose that level of conformity, then movements almost turn against their own spirit. Becomes a problem. On corporate mobilizations and the world of finance, I think there's lots of potential. And it goes all over different things, from consumer movements and boycotts and Project Red and these sorts of things, through to shareholders campaigns and the way in which minority shareholders and sometimes institutional shareholders, pension funds, churches and so forth, can influence corporate policy, can raise issues about things. Things management's doing call for disinvestment from a particular country or get out of the tobacco industry or whatever it might be. So I think that there is significant potential there. It's limited, of course, by the fact that the insurgent protesters very seldom have more money than the people they're protesting against. So it depends on a kind of jujitsu, a sort of martial arts move in which the those with less bulk can potentially have an influence on those with more. And I think that's indicative of the movement world generally. Although movements are often about majorities, the people and most of the people, they are not. They're precisely not about the people with the most power. And so movements almost never can win a straight clash of power or a straight clash of wealth, which is another form of power. What movements can do is exercise influence by changing attitudes, by changing people's willingness to go along with the policies that are articulated by the powerful. And that's what happens in corporate mobilizations. It's very seldom the case that the activists in these things actually command the votes to win outright. What they usually do is create enough bad publicity and unhappiness that it seems worthwhile to the corporation to change some of its policies. And if they succeed, it's more often like that than by the outright takeover. I do think it has potential, but limited.
- [76:58]
A
I know a lot of hands are still up there, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to call it to an end now. We're at seven o'.
- [77:03]
B
Clock. You obviously weren't at the same SDS meetings I was. Where the principle is, you had to keep talking to the.
- [77:09]
A
Yeah, I know, I know. Life moves on. You know, I mean, the sex drug and rock and rolls of the 1960s got to me in the end, so I became boringly bourgeois. Anyway, I like to personally thank the audience for a set of really great questions, by the way. I really thought that was terrific. And always a good sign of a good audience, I always think is you've got more questions to ask and you can end on a. On a high note. I'd also like to thank you, Craig, once again proving intellectual leadership of this school, not just administrative one. I'd also like to congratulate Craig. He's just nearly coming up to his first anniversary here at the lse. Actually, you look a bit younger now.
- [77:51]
B
It's that kind of school.
- [77:52]
A
It's that kind of school. But no, you brought great energy and great leadership to the school, Craig, and I think you've demonstrated it here tonight. Craig is also a persistent and consistent blogger and Twitter. So if you want to go onto his blogging and twitting line, you can find him up there. No, no, no. It really, really shows You're a groovy, groovy, kind, cool guy at the lse. That's exactly what we appreciate. Enjoy the rest of your week here. It's been a very sunny and sweaty one and a hot one. I'll probably see many of you. I think it's the party on, on Friday, so I will mingle with you all. I'll see you all there. I wonder if you could just give a final thanks for pause to Craig.