One of the oldest and most difficult analytical problems within the social sciences has been the obscurity and apparent idiosyncrasy of processes of drastic social and political change. These processes are most famously theorised in broad terms by Marx. The posited historical pivot of any number of possible contradictions or tensions within the social system of capitalism provides in practice, however, little more than a tabula rasa for actions either coming as a great surprise (in the case of Czarist Russia) or long expected but never realised (in the case of the heavily industrialised Western states). The most conspicuous and elegant attempt to theorise revolution of the last century was Skocpol’s characterisation of the conditions of revolution as hinging on disappointed expectations. In these terms, revolutions are held to correspond to periods of interrupted economic growth and/or socio-political reform. The evidence in support of this thesis is unfortunately far from conclusive.


A more promising approach seems to be to set aside the extraordinary phenomenon of wholesale revolution (including its conceptual difficulties) and focus on the well-springs of social resistance per se. Such a focus is most promising in so far as it takes full account of the many ways the social and political order militates against effective resistance. Here, the context is provided by the work of writers such as Gramsci, Ralph Miliband and Robert Cox on the ways in which hegemonic orders employ wealth and other resources to shape the discursive space of politics in the narrowest and most status-quo-friendly terms. The nature of modern social life as a subtle but profound discipline, deconstructed in the famous work of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, is also relevant in this respect. If such a process can be thought of essentially as socialisation into finding an appropriate role within a relatively conformist mainstream social order, the roots of social ‘deviation’ let alone resistance must be found in the discovery and/or generation of alternative cultural reference-points. The roots of resistance must be found, in other words, in counter-currents of alternative socialisation.


These were easy to find, for example, in the archetypal industrial communities of 19th-20th-century Britain, close-knit and radicalised in their physical proximity to factory or coal-pit. Such communities have subsequently dissolved, however, in the divisive haze of a complex dis-aggregation of industrial processes. The relative autonomy of higher education institutions provided a clear source of things ‘alternative’ at the centre of the non-conformist activism of the late 1960s. Such autonomy from market or mainstream policy considerations, however, has been significantly eroded by the succeeding neoliberal policy environment. Despite such inauspicious developments, compounded by the growing reach and aggression of commercial media, a robust nexus of non-conformism and social protest persists across many Western industrialised countries. It is evidenced in such phenomena as new age travellers, rave-culture, and squatter communities. These seem to have provided the participatory and organisational backbone of recent waves of anti- road, capitalist, globalisation and war protests. George McKay argues in his important overview of late-20th-century counter-cultural movements in Britain, that such phenomena are the fruits of an enduring tradition of non-conformism and resistance which periodically renews itself with the influx of another generation of more or less disenchanted youth.

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