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Book Review
| Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006. pp. xiv + 284. $39.95 paper.
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| Instead of seeking to show what armchair academics might teach activists, Maddison and Scalmer have produced a book in the opposite spirit: one that aims to learn from political campaigners in a range of contemporary movements and thus take knowledge from the streets back to the academy. |
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That is its main purpose, but Activist Wisdom succeeds nonetheless in taking knowledge from the academy back to the academy. For those who have struggled with the theoretical debates around the study of social movements, the first chapter in this book on Theory and History is a most informative guide. It even manages to make entertaining its discussion of American sociology between the 1920s and 1950s, which promised to explain disorder and dissent, and observed reality with painstaking precision. The mood across the Atlantic, as this book notes, was very different, as students yelled for Althusser on the streets of Paris and rebutted Touraine at Nanterre. The neat categories and cost-benefit analyses of the Americans were out of place in a society where change really seemed possible. Theoretical labours had a practical point, because intellectuals sought to serve the movement. European theorists treated activists with respect and argued that political militants possessed real knowledge of the social situation. 'They intervened in order to liberate that knowledge, promote reflection, and bring new social movements to complete maturity.' |
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Nowadays, according to Maddison and Scalmer, the tenured radicals of the academy largely ignore tactical questions, preferring to translate practical concerns into theoretical conundrums; and with grants to win, papers to publish and vain enemies to puncture, the accumulation of knowledge has become an end in itself. This book revolves around a defence of the concept of 'practical knowledge': why it is important, how it is passed on. 'It is a mode of acting and reasoning, a particular kind of relationship between theory and practice.' How do you organise a demonstration? Contact the media? Sniff out a potential ally? These tasks require skill, knowledge and flair. They are the mechanics of successful campaigning. And yet lovers of abstraction rarely think about them. The field of 'social movement studies' falls almost silent in their presence. |
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In interviewing a range of activists, Maddison and Scalmer discovered a commonality of political tensions, despite the wide range of causes they were involved in. The eight tensions they explore in particular are the tensions between: organisation and democracy; unity and difference; expressive and instrumental action; revolution or reform; counter-publics and the mainstream; the local and the global; redistribution and recognition; and hope and despair. The tensions explored are not necessarily in opposition, as Maddison and Scalmer reveal. The examination of practical knowledge is enriched by the reflections of the academy, but these reflections are skilfully interwoven into the text, interspersed with frequent use of the words of the activists themselves. |
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A particularly interesting tension explored is that between hope and despair. While academics write about cycles of protest and so on, this book engages engagingly with this literature but asks and finds answers to intriguing questions, such as: how do you keep going in the bad times? Australian activists have offered much to the world. Australians formed the first democratically elected Labor government. Our unions were the first to use their industrial power to protect the environment. Jack Mundy coined the term 'green ban' and inspired Europeans to adopt the label 'The Greens' as a political noun. Tasmanians who defended the wilderness can claim to have established the first Green Party in the world. Australian radicals developed the 'open source publishing technique' that allows would-be journalists to post their own stories on the web, and is used by indymedia groups all around the world. <http://www.indymedia.org> |
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As African American anti-slavery and women's rights campaigner Frederick Douglass wrote in 1849:
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted either with words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Academics have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. This book is a valuable contribution to both interpretation and practical efforts at change. |
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| University of Melbourne |
VERITY BURGMANN | |
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