Wage labourers, farmers and peripheries are in a subordinate position within the world market system, by being peripheral links, exposed to competition in commodity chains dominated by monopolists whose power is maintained economically and politically. The point with these commodity chains is that they make it possible to divide labour in components, making it possible to transfer the surplus extracted in each link through purchases and sales to the most monopolized link. The subdivision of labour wouldn't serve any purpose if some links weren't rewarded less than others.

The different roles in the game, both the attractive ones and the unattractive ones, have to be distributed to a cast. They have to be distributed in such a way that those who have to play the unattractive roles accept them, and that those who play the attractive ones don't solidarize with the others.

In a system that is so complicated and so labour-divided as the world market system, there is a countless number of roles to distribute. Some of them are evidently much less attractive than others.

The most obvious division is the geographical one. The attractive roles are disproportionally collected in the system center, where most of the political, economic and cultural power is situated. This can partly be explained with the fact that it is important for the rulers of the system to be surrounded by relatively contented direct producers. But it can also be explained the other way around: it is the parts of the world where there are favoured direct producers that become centers, since their high remunerative level push for "modernization" of production, thus creating a basis for new center-creating monopolies, see chapter 2.

Resistance to this geographical labour division is the origin of national movements.

But there are also within each geographical zone large quantities of activities which have to be distributed. Gordon, Edwards and Reich describe the way the activities of an industrial country is divided in three kinds of work - independent core workers (higher employees in capital-strong enterprises and people with access to scarce and desirable knowledge), subordinated core workers (lower officials and skilled workers in capital-strong enterprises) and peripheral workers (unskilled workers in service and subcontractor enterprises. The technological and social foundation for this subdivision is that some kind of work, to be performed effectively, calls for knowledge about the whole working process, while others do not. The more knowledge of this kind that is needed, the greater are the concessions the enterprise has to give to get the work carried out. For that reason, it is favourable for the enterprises that this kind of work is isolated and given to only a few - and that the gaps between the different kinds of workers are big enough not to create any solidarity between them [1].

Gordon et al describe the way the US enterprises in the late nineteenth century learnt to distribute work according to sex, race and age. The unattractive works went to immigrants, blacks, youth and increasingly to women, while the attractive works went to native white men. This had nothing to do with different rates of qualification; black artisans in the Northern states of USA were as skilled as the white ones. Instead, it was a matter of dividing the budding labour movement. When the immigrant category was growing scarce in the thirties, the strategy worked less well and the workers were able to organise and work forceful peoples' movement mobilizations, but when the agricultural mechanization in the South freed millions of black land-workers in the fifties it recovered its strength again.

The hierarchy displayed in the North American worksites characterises the whole world market system. At the bottom, it is of course Charles Tilly's inequality creating processes that are at work - see chapter 1.

When the elite groups of the world market system, its most important opportunity hoarders, monopolizers and exploiters - capitalists and state bureaucrats, among others - are about to organise in-groups and out-groups to their own profit, it is easier to use existent categories and adapt these after the unequal relations following from the opportunity hoarding and exploitation. It is easier than to create new categories.

During the world market system, several categorisations are used.

Firstly, people are categorised after descent: those who originate from the center zones are valued higher than those who originate from the peripheries - even when they work in the center and have qualifications identical to native people. Secondly, people are categorised after sex: men are valued higher than women. Thirdly, people are categorised after age: this dimension is more unclear and depend to a certain extent on the class position of the valued person, but generally middle aged people is valued higher than young or old.

When an activity is moved between levels of qualification and remuneration, its direct producers are changed. For example, men took over sock knitting when the knitting machine gave a higher status to it in the seventeenth century, as well as type-writing when the computer did the same thing in our time [3].

The stratification would be less effective, and hard to maintain, if it applied only to the productive sphere. Through the history of the system, the state system has stratified people in to citizens (of different status) and non-citizens. In the early age of the system, citizens with right to make demands on the states were very few, and when the share grew as a consequence of successful peoples' movement mobilizations, people didn't get admission at the same time. To this day, a big part of the labour force, the so-called migrants, is kept without citizenship and has no rights at the site where they work (or are kept as un-employed reserve army) [4].

From the rulers' point of view, there were several advantages of such a caste-like system, quite apart from obstructing unionist aspirations, and apart from keeping aspirations of the most disadvantaged at a low level. It was also a way of buying support from people from the middle of the ladder, or even fairly low down; they could be persuaded to toe the line and be grateful for not being even further down. It was a way to get the direct producers to put up with parsimonious citizens' rights instead of demanding the whole world; they at least had some admission to the high society, and even rather meagre privileges have some value when they are not shared with all. The rulers have for this reason tried to keep the caste-system into place and often got support from middle-layer people. We use to call this kind of help fascist or liberal movements, depending of their appearing niggardly and mean or jovial and superficially kindly; if they suggest that the lower castes should be kept down violently or be appeased with partial concessions on the condition that they acknowledge the cultural superiority of the middle class.

Such repressive alliances between rulers and factions of the direct producers aren't just based in misunderstood ideology on the part of the latter, but also that the caste-system is of some short-run advantage for some direct producers. Men may benefit at least something from repression of women; natives may benefit at least something from repression of immigrants; and the middle-aged may benefit at least something from repression of the young and old. And even if they don't buy these arguments, direct producers often defend the few successes they have got, by preventing others from getting into their markets. Not only elites group together in resource-defending confraternities, so do also Turkish pizza bakers and male motor mechanics. The caste-system has for that reason tended to be defended within the civil society of the direct producers, which hade made successes of the challengers hard-earned. As Tilly contends, both resource monopolizers and their subordinates contribute to forming habituses to make inequality endurable, and thereby they also contribute to perpetuating the hierarchies.

Since the caste system is not only layered in above and below, but in qualitative biological or cultural differences which are attributed superior or inferior qualities, they cause many different resistances from the discriminated - women's movements, youth movements, pariah movements of different kinds. These may sometimes cooperate, but more frequently they try to assert themselves separately or sometimes against each other. It is thus reasonable to describe them separately, to tie them together in a final section.

Women's self-assertion against patriarchy

Subordination of women is of course much older than the world market system. The labour division between men and women, with women in the disadvantaged position, is arguably the oldest of all systematic inequalities.

In the hunter and gatherer society, there is a labour division based in women's care of small children; with this follow compatible tasks like gardening and artisanry. But we know no hunter and gatherer society where this labour division imply any difference of status and power [5].

The difference originated with agriculture and the state. In the oldest literate societies, the old Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, women were already subordinated to men, economically, legally and politically. Sometime close to the emergence of agriculture and states emerged in other words patriarchy, as this subordination is usually called. Several hypotheses have been put forth to explain how it happened structurally, and it is possible to see them as different steps in a development.

During the third and second millennia BOE, the patriarchal order is successively established, with absolute paternal power, female sexual slaves and concubinage, authorized by war and ruler gods and the sinfulness of Eve, and supported by disgracing of men who were not able to control the women of their family [9]. While the status of men is due to their property or government rank and is announced by the number of their subordinated women, the status of women is due to the rank of their men. The women retain however in many cultures a power over their home and domestic production, based in their own activity, while the activity of the men is related to society as a whole; the activity of the men is public and gives opportunity of cooperation, organising and a public culture, which is not the case with the activity of women.

The patriarchal model is strongest established in the high culture of the Old World, from the Mediterranean over West Asia and India to China. This is where agriculture and states has existed for the longest time. In the old peripheries, in Africa and North Europe, women has a stronger position and are able to bargain for independent dispose of their time, property and work [10].

Before the world market system, women's resistance to patriarchy took predominantly intellectual forms, according to Lerner. Faced with the massive pressure of the patriarchal worldview, women had to define themselves in a way that permitted them to maintain their self-respect. Since only men had the position to create a public opinion, this was incredibly difficult, and was usually pursued in an individual way. It was difficult to accumulate and build a collective cultural tradition, so the development was slow up to the nineteenth century [11].

There is however a peoples' movement tradition, where resistance of women makes an undercurrent since more than a thousand years: the Christian tradition.

The early Christian congregations were a refuge for women who felt suffocated by the Roman patriarchal order, and women got a strong position in the Christian movement. Particularly rich women who had become Christians, liberated their slaves and converted their property into Christian communes, were able to take a leading role until the patriarchal culture hit back by establishing a male bishop hierarchy in the third century. The female influence made itself known by traditions and theories emphasizing the importance of women. Such traditions were forbidden when the bishop hierarchy had monopolized power [12].

When the Roman empire had broken down, opportunities were opened again for women to assert themselves politically, economically and culturally in the emerging European society, based in their role as household managers. The particular kind of household constituted by monasteries was a base for powerful abbesses through the whole middle ages, but it was also eminently permitted for women to manage farms, estates, trading houses and countries when the men who strictly speaking should have done it were dead or absent. It was within a monasterial framework the earliest counter-identity and counter-ideology for a women's movement were formulated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when this relative female autonomy was threatened again. Principally, "female intuition" was used as an excuse for interference. This was for example the excuse Hildegard of Bingen used.

With the upswing for international trade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the scope for women was curtailed, beginning among the Italian merchants who had the pivotal role in this upswing. Supported by Roman law and Aristotelian philosophy, both formalizations of the Mediterranean patriarchy, exhumed again after half a millennium, the headmen of the trading houses began to assert their unrestricted power over their and their family's property. Their position would be attractive; as late as during the struggle for suffrage in the early twentieth century, Aristotle and his cocksure opinions about women was the main arsenal for the adversaries of the women's movement. It took time before these novelties reached people in general; as late as in the sixteenth century relations were traditional between the sexes in a farm or a workshop. But Roman law and Aristotelian philosophy were the foundation of the university system and the established wisdom, and for that reason difficult to sidestep [13].

The defence for a more egalitarian order was pursued primarily by the radical Christian movements. A more democratic form of Hildegard's argumentation was developed by the Beguine movement in Northwest Europe. The Beguines were a Christian lay women movement building on small artisan communes in the towns, which flourished in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The movement was broad; in Cologne lived for example more than three thousand beguines in 169 communes in the mid fourteenth century, or about three percent of the total population [14]. Due to the freedom they gave women to organise their own lives, and due to the agitatoric power developed by some Beguines, they were persecuted from the late thirteenth century as heretics, but despite this they succeeded in surviving for almost 200 years. But it is evident that not even they had the force to reject the patriarchal pretensions of superiority; what they demanded was right to have a saying, by virtue of intuition and the mystic divine inspiration.

In the gnostic Cathar movement in Southern France, women had also a strong position as long as the movement was strong, and many female leaders are documented. But when the persecution was set in from the thirteenth century, the movement turned nervously and conventionally patriarchal for self-defensive purposes.

The relative strong position of women in the radical Christian movements paid off when these movements achieved state power with the Reformation. For then, women got a principal right of education for the first time. In Protestant and Calvinist countries, women made the fastest progress during the world market system era, because their access to agitatory instrument is the greatest in these countries [15].

During the early modern era, there were two milieus where women were able to develop an anti-patriarchal habitus, ideology and tradition - the Protestant sects, particularly the Pietist, the Unitarian and the Quaker movements; and the literary salon. The former was a popular movement with a base among the urban artisans; the latter was an aristocratic and bourgeois tradition. Both traditions played a role for the emergence of the organised women's movement in the nineteenth century. But since the literary salons also played an important part for the emergence of the profane language of the French revolution and the literary Romanticism, these traditions have survived better in the present women's movement while the pious popular tradition has been obscured afterwards.

What these milieus emphasized as the foundation for female self-assurance and a motive for women's legitimacy in public society was motherhood. This was reasonably safe from the viewpoint of patriarchal culture, while it also was what most women had in common. And it could be seen as reasonable that those who educated future generations had access to some education and public experience themselves. Paradoxically however, says Lerner, those who maintained these demands had no time for motherhood themselves; the patriarchal female role permitted nothing but daily work for the survival of the family.

These forms of resistance are fairly uniform over the entire patriarchal zone. In the Islamic countries it was the Sufi movements which gave women an opportunity to play a public role, provided that they referred to intuition and mysticism. In India, Bhakti movements did the same service. And in China, women used the Buddhist monasteries and Taoist movements - but in China, the egalitarian and Taoist-inspired secret societies offered an opportunity to take part in interest politics and outright rebellion as well [16].

During the eighteenth century, the European women's autonomous identity creating was to pass a threshold. They had to.

With the development of the world market system, the women lost the position they had had in domestic production. A position restricted to managing the home may be endurable as long as domestic production has a value. But with the development of the world market, this value was undermined. Household-organised artisans and merchants were out-competed by industrial enterprises. Household-organised education was out-competed by the state. In both these fields, activities that had taken place in the home, and for this reason were open to women, were transferred out to the public sphere where men held monopoly - a monopoly asserted with increasing fervour into the twentieth century. If women were to be received it was at a disadvantage [17].

If women lost one role, they got another.

The characterizing pattern of the world market system is that production takes place in long chains of sale and purchase, where some links are more monopolized and profitable than others, and where those who control the links try to pass their costs over to others, see chapter 2. The direct producers within each link are organised into households, whose members contribute to their common survival by pooling resources from different sources. It has proved cheapest for the exploiters of the links if the direct producers are members in households where other members supply themselves outside the wage market. In such semi-proletarian households, the households in common take upon itself to provide for the education, adolescence, sickness care and old age care, among other things. This reduced the cost for the capitalist, see also chapter 5 [18].

"Other members" implies, with the traditionally given pattern men/public - women/private, women, who got the thankless role to work unpaid to make the wage labourers profitable [19].

For this reason, it turned necessary for women to defend themselves also for economic reasons. Many women sought renewed protection by confirming the submission under patriarchal structures like the church. But others defended themselves more actively. Under the period between 1700 and 1850 they did so not in their capacity of representatives of an oppressed sex, but as representatives of their households, as responsible for family and purchases.

The most important peoples' movement repertoire during this time was the bread seizure. The form of the bread seizure was that the bread consumers in a town seized the bread of the baker or the meal of the miller as a protest against increased market prices. The bread or the meal was sold in the market place for the "reasonable" price, after which the money was left to the legal owner. Sometimes the people would give particularly incorrigible price-hikers a beating; sometimes the people would also have a fight with the military [20].

This form of action got popular at the time the traditional "reasonable" price was replaced by a variable market price, and it was a defence of the "moral economy" against the market economy. And the leading activists were often women, because they were responsible for the purchase of food.

Another kind of activity where women took part was collective, organised resistance to evictions. This was also a homely thing where female participation was permitted culturally.

During the most concentrated political event of the bread seizure era, the French revolution, women had a received a peoples' movement political repertoire to respond with. Not that they had a common political aim. But women took part in the political game and took initiatives which were decisive in several instances [21].

The final crisis for the royal prestige was for example when a women-dominated bread seizure of about 3000 participants decided to claim food provisions to a decent price before both National Assembly and king in October 5, 1789, and went off to Versailles. When the answers were evasive they forced both institutions to go back with them to Paris to be under popular surveillance and keep a better contact with realities.

Women were also the principal actors in the constant demonstrations which eroded the prestige of the Girondist government and made it possible for the Jacobins to take power. The demonstrations were also this time about food prices.

Women took also part in the public life of the clubs in the bigger cities, although they were never allowed the same political rights as men. Since they had no admission to the male clubs, they formed their own, officially derided but in reality necessary to ally with for anyone who wanted power. But the bread seizure technique was the base for their actions to the end - street demonstrations, seizure of food, sale of these in the market square, and public stigmatizing of speculators and politicians who didn't intervene. Some political leaders raised demands for female suffrage in some form, but this was never a main issue. Economic demands were always in the foreground.

And since no revolutionary government ever succeeded in solving the food issue, female agitation remained a threat until Bonaparte's dictatorship.

The Jacobin governments tried without success to get an end to the bread seizures by introducing a maximum price and a ban on female activities; then it fell. The following government tried to achieve the same thing by letting the price free, with equal lack of success. In spring 1795 Parisian women rallied for their last and greatest attack on state and speculators and occupied the National Assembly for two days. They seemed successful when several military detachments went over to them, but in the end they were repressed.

Although food matters remained the most important issue, the women learned gradually that food and power hung together. For that reason they voiced increasingly political demands, for example universal suffrage. The catchwords of the French revolution - liberty, equality, fraternity, and the republic of citizens - got an increasingly concrete social content.

The same thing happened in England in the 1810s when the demand for bread was politicized into a broad female participation in the movements for among other things parliamentary reform, see chapter 5.

Popular movement activity involving women during the first half of the nineteenth century almost never defended particular female interests, but popular interests in general. Bread seizure was a way of defending the household. Attacks on the English workhouses, where women took a leading part, intended to defend the poor against a new law demanding dissolution of families to get poor relief. And women's participation in the Chartist movement aimed at supporting their men's movement for male suffrage. But yet, local Chartist activities were dominated by women, organizing demonstrations and mass meetings to defend agitators against prosecution, apart from more typically "female" activities like sewing streamers or cooking public dinners. But few Chartist organisations demanded female suffrage [22]

Women organised also female trade unions, particularly during the two intense periods of unionist organizing in England in 1833-34 and in France in 1848. To be sure, women had a long tradition of unionist participation, if they were skilled artisans. But this tradition was threatened by new technologies and by ambitions of the capitalists to employ women in the least remunerated positions. And these unskilled workers were hard to organise, and often opposed by the skilled workers who feared that they would undercut them. The feverish unionizing in 1833-34 and 1848 were parts of a wave of organizing of unskilled workers generally, and they collapsed when the political circumstance that created them did, when the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union broke down and the French revolution ended in a massacre of workers.

With these efforts, the lively early nineteenth century female unionism disappeared. And more important than the conjunctural politics was in this case the long-run changes in the labour market. The women were crowded out from the core economic activities and were relegated to unorganizable and peripheral service work. Industrial labour was declared qualified and for this reason, according to old patriarchal tradition, male.

 

Nineteenth century feminism: charity and unionism

Instead, female politics became for a long time a privilege for the middle class, where the contrast between citizen men and non-citizen women was sharp.

The protestant sects who had produced so much female self-assurance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to take initiatives where women were active and often leaders: the movements for temperance and abolition of slavery. And middle class women were permitted to take part in charity. Such movements often behaved in a toffish way towards the people they pretended to support, but they at least gave women a public space and a practice of public work, which in the long run challenged the male monopoly and legitimated citizen's rights for women. They would work for schools for poor children, for support of women against their alcoholic men, for vocational education of prostitutes, for economic support to the starving, or for religious salvation. In England there were links to the labour movement through co-operation and utopian socialist associations where artisans took part, and in the 1830s a kind of middle class response to bread seizures took the form of a movement against food tariffs, with women active in financing and agitation [23].

But the most important of these movements, in this context, was the anti-slavery movement.

The anti-slavery movement was created by non-conformist people in the 1790s, with a demand of prohibition of slave trade, and when this demand succeeded thanks to the slave revolution in Haiti with a demand for total abolishment in the British West Indies. But this movement was not very extensive, despite its successes [24]. The anti-slavery movement in the USA was a broader affair, thanks to the flourishing peoples' movement culture in this country, and perhaps to having slavery nearer at home [25].

At the time of the Haitian revolution and the North American independence movement, the North American slavery seemed well on the way to its extinction. Blacks took part in the struggles and got their freedom as a reward, and slave owners organised associations for colonisation of independent black family farmers. But the growing demand for cotton in the early nineteenth century made slavery profitable again, while the decreasing economic weight of the southern states and of agriculture in general made slavery a necessary crutch for a landlord class threatened by lost power.

The abolitionist movement was created by Quakers in the late eighteenth century, in a climate of general benevolence. The great Christian revival in the early nineteenth century also created a spirit of moral reform of society, and slavery was seen as something evil, as an obstacle to salvation of the blacks and as an incitement to sin [26]. Struggle for liberation of the slaves became a center in a Christian peoples' movement milieu where also resistance to liquor, education of the poor, and a humanitarian mental health service were natural parts of a struggle for a better society. Radicals within this milieu experimented with agrarian communes, literary collectives and equality between the sexes. The base of the movement was the small town middle class in the north; the base this movement had had in the south melted away when anti-slavery became the core of it.

Within this milieu it was natural that women took on charity; the female character was seen as particularly suited for compassion. When charity towards slaves became political, even the women were politicized, although the first generation of anti-slavery activists took care to keep within the bounds of the accepted. All anti-slavery activists didn't like the activism of the women; this was the cause for a split in 1840, and most of the women never asked for power in the movement. But the participation in agitation, political petitions, financing by markets and other businesses, and smuggling of runaway slaves to Canada made it increasingly untenable to maintain that women were unsuited for politics and business. Particularly as women in many cases led the development, like Grimké sisters in agitation and Harriet Tubman in slave smuggling.

While anti-slavery had been a minority issue even in the north in the 1820s and 1830s, concern grew after 1840; the agitation had provoked politicians to introduce censorship and political persecution. But what made anti-slavery a mass concern in the north was the competition for land and work; the slavery institution, and the militant defence of it, appeared to threaten the economic survival of family farmers and artisans. While anti-slavery became an election issue and a way for northern politicians to assert the system career of the USA against the English-depending south, parts of the anti-slavery women networks began to assert the rights of women in society.

The seed for a movement of women's rights was sown when the anti-slavery world congress in London refused to acknowledge the right of speech for women, and half the American delegation left in protest. Eight years later some hundred anti-slavery women met in Seneca Falls in New York and adopted a declaration modelled on the American declaration of independence, and called for six demands: right to divorce, right to education and employment, equal rights in the church, abolishment of different moral standards for men and women, and female suffrage - the last demand with a slight majority. In addition they accused men for substituting themselves for God when they tried to define what was fitting for women. During the following years several congresses were summoned. The violent opposition they met stimulated a women's movement locally; for organisation however they relied in the structures of anti-slavery until the end of the civil war and the slavery institution [27].

Women's movement and anti-slavery movement, up to then being a unitary citizens' rights movement, split however shortly after. When the government proposed suffrage for black men, parts of the movement accepted this, not to be offensive, while others hold on to the demand for suffrage for all [28].

The demand for suffrage would remain the focus for the American women's movement up to 1920.

In Europe, suffrage was not granted even for men; for that reason other issues were the prominent ones for the women's movement - right to education, right to employment, right to property, right to divorce. Married women's right to property and women's sight to university studies were the first mobilization demands in both England and Sweden. As the demands hint at, women's movement was a middle class concern, growing out of Christian charity associations - this was the only milieu where women were allowed public responsibility. The first campaign to get some mass participation was a campaign against the contagious diseases act in England from 1869. The law decreed that anyone that could be suspected for being a prostitute would be detained for disinfection for an undefined time, and a group of feminists succeeded in allying Christian enemies of prostitution with poor people who risked arbitrary arrest, and demands for moral renewal and legal rights were linked to refusal of different moral standards for men and women. Such alliances were also built for campaigns for the right to divorce, but female interests had difficulty to attain hegemony within them. The campaign against the contagious diseases act was broadened to a movement against legalised prostitution but degenerated into hostility towards sex and demands for censorship and disciplinary power for authorities, and a movement just after 1900 for the right to contraception and, if necessary, abortion, was easily hijacked by doctors who wanted control over fertility [29].

The women's movement was strong in England and the USA, with their big middle class, their tradition of evangelical revival, and their relative unaffectedness by Mediterranean patriarchy. In the European continent this tradition didn't exist, and the urban middle class where women were assumed to be passive and domesticated was rather small. So women's movements were proportionally weaker.

In France, the citizen tradition from the literary salons and the revolution inspired the liberal Saint Simon sect to establish female lodges, and these organised female trade unions and cooperatives in 1848. After the coup d'etat of Napoleon III however, this tradition expired and the late nineteenth century middle class women's movement remained a debating society - since it was per definition was "republican" it refused to demand anything from the "republic". In Germany, women's associations demanded right to property, education and employment, and even for a short period suffrage, but after 1907 they was caught by the imperial vision, defined themselves as "national" and began to see its role as producing soldiers for the German empire. In South Europe women's movement found it even more difficult to cut through Roman patriarchy and Catholic patriarchal hierarchies; practically no women's movement existed there before 1965 - but young people's revolts against patriarchal power was a favourite literary theme during the whole nineteenth century.

To some extent, the political weakness of these middle class women is compensated by a women's movement flourishing in patches within the labour movements of the continent. In patches, because in other places nothing was permitted which diverted focus from the exploitation of the workplace. In France, for example, female socialist activists considered "bourgeois feminists" as their main enemies and even refused to defend women who were thrown out from trade unions because they were women, referring to the unity of the labour movement. Accordingly, they remained few and had no successes at all before 1944. And in Russia, social democrat women devoted themselves to organised disruptions of the meetings of the "bourgeois feminists". The conflict was real; the biggest profession among the women was domestic servant, but when the labour movement tried to organise them they met angry resistance from the middle class feminists who wanted to retain their absolute power as employers [30].

The strongest worker women's movements were the German and Italian ones. The Italian labour movement had, due to the lack of skilled artisans, a need for radical educated people which produced an openness for different citizen's rights issues, for example women's rights. There was also a militant tradition among north Italian rice-pickers dominating the land worker union and even sent women to the leadership of trade unions and socialist parties.

But the biggest and strongest was the worker women's movement in within the well-organised German labour movement. The women there had their own organisations, the so-called female workers' associations, since women were legally prohibited from entering political parties. The women turned this forced restriction into a source of strength; since men were excluded they were able to develop their own politics and meeting culture, in most cases according to orthodox social democrat norms but sometimes containing parts which were hard to put up with for social democrat men, for example campaigns for right to contraception and resistance to the "family wages" urged by the trade unions

Due to the fact that the middle class feminist movement was weak in Germany, the campaign for female suffrage there was organised by social democrats. From 1908 they arranged mass meetings and demonstrations in March 8, much to the chagrin of male leaders who saw a competition with the First of May. These campaigns were formalized as the International Day of Women (which began as an American initiative), but about the same time the prohibition against female participation in politics was abolished, so the male dominated social democrat party decided to abolish the unpredictable women's organisations to get their activities under control.

But the women's organisation was not only split between "feminists" and "socialists" as the terms were. From of old there was a conflict crosswise, between what Karen Offen calls relational feminists who pragmatically assumed that the sexes had different spheres but wished to develop the female sphere to make it less repressive, and individualist feminists who demanded equal citizen's rights for all [31]. The latter were a minority in the beginning but their share grew as increasingly more women got higher education and an interest in competing with men about the well-paid jobs. The conflict between the currents was sharpened with time, and concerned the worker protection legislation that was introduced in the late nineteenth century and considered women and men separately; women were excluded from some kinds of jobs but got particular rights in connection with childbirth. This was a red rag to the individual feminists but not unwelcome for the relational.

Partly to patch over the conflict and find a common aim, the women's movements focused increasingly on suffrage in the early twentieth century. The campaigns were most well-organised, not surprisingly, in England and the USA [32].

Suffrage had always been a focus in the USA; the women's organisations had organised suffrage campaigns since the 1860s, and the big mass organisation among women, Women's Temperance Union, pushed for suffrage as much as for temperance. They had successes insofar as they got it in the new states admitted to the union. It contributed to the success that so many women had begun to take part in the public as academics and social workers, the latter through the voluntary settlement house movement, that it appeared ridiculous to maintain the principle of different spheres.

But the breakthrough was late, and about 1900 organizations were established in England and USA, that tried a new strategy which was to be copied fifty years afterwards by the peace movements, the black citizen's movement, and the environment movements: maximum public provocation. They deranged election meetings, chained themselves to parliament buildings, hunger-stroke, smashed windows and committed arson, all for the purpose of being observed, arrested and sentenced. But the aim was not only to be noticed but also a way for women to raise respect and liberate themselves from the superficial paternalist benevolence that reformist liberals had used as an excuse for incapacitating women. The official women's organisations dissociated themselves cautiously without deprecating, and dared according to Raeburn to act more provocatively than earlier, multiplying their membership. The strategy was effective. When the rulers tried to reconstruct the world after the debacle of the first world war, the women in Northern Europe and Northern America got their suffrage, as a part of the concessions to the global peoples' movement system. Rights for women had, thanks to women's movements and other citizen's rights movements become a part of "modernity", something to adhere to for all regimes that wanted to appear modern, even if the rights in reality were meagre.

In the system peripheries and semi-peripheries, women's organisations had been established with the aim to promote the position of women, but primarily to contribute to the national independence - in about the same way as women's organisations had been established in labour movement milieus. Women's organisations took on themselves to educate new generations in the national culture and language. They were also involved in confrontations with the empires, for example they had to take the responsibility for the whole national movement in Ireland when most of the regular leadership was in jail after the land war in the 1880s. The Finnish women were rewarded for their struggle for independence with being the first to be legally equal with men in 1907, and the new East European states including the Soviet Union introduced female suffrage as a matter of course. In the global peripheries in Asia, Africa and South America, on the other hand, the women's movement were as a role restricted to the north-inspired urban upper middle class, and were incapable of achieving much.

There was one exception to this pattern. The Chinese women's movement in the twenties was perhaps the most effective women's movement ever, in the short run [33].

It grew out of the radical Fourth of May movement, for which all hierarchic patterns were a part of the despised Confucian structure that kept China down in poverty and dependence of the system center powers, see chapter 6. But there was also since centuries a feminist current within the tradition of the secret societies, where women had reached high positions in violation of the Confucian principles, see chapters 3 and 7. The movement began as a student movement manifesting itself by organising schools and evening courses for women to make them more independent of their families, but it was a mass movement only in connection with the so-called thirtieth of may incident in 1924 when the British police fired and killed striking workers in Shanghai. Schools and course organisations were then able to use their pupil contacts for mobilizing women to the national movement. When the national movement took control over the Guangzhou province, members of the women's movement flocked there to organise a mass movement. The first aim was to stop enforced marriages, and an instrument was organising escapes and a secure future for women who tried to get rid of their men.

With the "northern expedition", the conquest by revolutionary movements of the Yangtse valley, the women's movement expanded its scope and radicalized its aim. The equality of sexes was considered by many as an inseparable aspect of the national revolution, and young women gathered in organisations who made themselves a part of the new regime with power to prohibit forced marriages, foot-binding and concubinage, and administer divorces if the women wished it. Gilmartin suggests that this threat to the patriarchal order was a main cause of the split in the national movement in 1928; it chocked farmers as much as conservative officials and merchants. The subsequent violence hit the women's movement as hard as labour and agrarian movements. And although many of the aims of the women's movement were incorporated in the national and agrarian movements, the women's movement was not allowed independence henceforth.

With the end of the first world war what has been called the "first wave feminism" ended in Europe and North America. According to Johanna Brenner, this was due to the fact that the leaders of the movement - wealthy, university educated women from the upper middle class - had got their aims satisfied [34]. Others have emphasized how wars and authoritarian movements were able as patriarchal demonstrations of strength to relegate women into a subordinated position [35], while yet others put the blame with the irresolution of the women's movements themselves. For when the suffrage issue was settled, the movements had to agree if they asked for the same rights as men or other rights than men. And they couldn't. For example, the American Women's Party met their angriest opponents against their campaign for equal labour market rights in the twenties with NAWSA, the biggest American women's organisation, which was afraid to loose the small paid maternity leave they had achieved. Also the worker women tended to support different rights since their opportunities to compete for other than the lowest paid jobs was small; for them was even a housewife role was a step forward. So accordingly, the separate rights was included in the welfare legislation from the thirties in Scandinavia and the USA and from the fifties in Western Europe, within the framework of a Fordist production culture - men as unionized wage labourers, women as unsalaried, uncontracted household workers for life. This perhaps most rigid separation ever between wage labour and non-wage labour was supported by many relational feminists, not to speak of male labour movement activists. Child allowance was tied to the mothers, protective legislation and rights for child bearers made enterprises reluctant to employ women, and attempts at social childcare were never more than attempts before the sixties. Many women's movement activists engaged themselves in the welfare project and succeeded in Scandinavia and Britain to abolish the legal discrimination of women, albeit not the real one nourished by the inequality patterns of opportunity hoarding [36], while others tried to counter the militant interwar patriarchal thrusts by engaging in peace movements.

 

Post-Fordist women's movements

The long Kondratiev A wave and the integration mechanisms of the Bretton Woods program after 1945 changed the preconditions of the compromise. Industrial growth and national welfare policies cried out for salaried labour power, and the women of the system center began to fill the least attractive positions of the labour market. The themes of the women's movements became topical again.

The women's movement mobilized from the sixties, which have been called the "second wave feminism", was however more a result of the growth of the education system, the resistance to the social consequences of the dogmatic labour division, and the global peoples' movement upswing about 1970, than of subordination in the labour market. The principal source of inspiration was the black civil rights movement in the USA [37].

The direct initiative to this wave came from traditional feminists working within the welfare system, older women with experiences from the interwar movements. They used the opportunity when a law against discriminating of blacks was discussed in the US congress in 1965, and succeeded in adding sex as an unlawful reason for discrimination, and thus legitimated complaints for sexist treatment. A flood of complaints ensued under high publicity, and women began to organise. Organisation took two forms.

Mass organising of interest was expressed by the National Organization for Women (NOW), with time an organisation of hundreds of thousands of members, and by other smaller organisations. Their focus was concrete cases of discrimination, and they organised political pressure, legal cases and other public protests. Their members were generally professional career women and the organisations had a traditional structure, but members were expected to take an active part.

The feminist networks aimed more at strengthening women's identity and language as a struggling repressed group, through discussions, therapeutic talks and confrontations. It was these networks that popularized the catchword "the personal is politic". The members were primarily women who had taken part in the civil rights and anti-war movements and discovered that they were considered as second-class members due to their sex. The networks were radical-democratic, without formal leaders according to a model initiated by the black movement but later fallen in disregard there.

This division of labour occurred also in other system center countries. In France the career women gathered in Choisir and Ligue du Droit des Femmes while young women fed up by the patriarchal patterns that were recreated in the youth groups and radical leftist movements created the radical-democratic Mouvement de libération des femmes. In Denmark there was the same division between Dansk Kvindesamfund and Rødstrømpebevægelsen.

After some years, the differences between these two currents subsided while others grew in importance - between blacks and whites, between separatists and interest politicians, between professionals and lay women, and not least the old false conflict between equality feminists and relational feminists [38]. Some observers have complained that the women's movement identities have split in a host of identities while many of the standpoints of the movement have been adopted by official society, without influencing the material conditions of life for women the slightest.

Meanwhile, the movement grew increasingly professionalized. Instead of mass membership organisations and activist groups, NGOs came to the forefront - foundations or enterprises with employees managing campaigns on strictly limited issues, engaging lay people for yet more limited tasks without giving them any influence over the political frameworks. This development was most manifest in the USA, where lobbying and legal cases came to be the principal method to assert the interests of women, while mass mobilizing was left to the opponents.

At the outset, women's admission to employment was the most important issue for the movement - including public childcare and equal rights within work. Less important issues were protests against sexist stereotypes underpinning the segregation - often these protests defined the women's movement publicly, like for example the action against the Miss World contest in Atlantic City in 1969 or Rødstrømpernes much-published action in Copenhagen in 1971 against the necessity of being cute.

But increasingly, the right to abortion grew to the great focus issue in almost the whole system center. This was the main issue in France where thousands of well-known women reported themselves to the police, protesting against an imprisonment sentence against a poor woman, and achieved an amendment of the law. This was the main issue for the small and weak Irish movement which lost heavily against the Catholic church. This was the issue for an Italian referendum - where however the political parties took the main scene, increasingly as the campaign went on. And it was the women's movement issue that took the main public interest in the USA [39].

Afterwards, this priority can arguably be seen as a strategic miscalculation or perhaps due to the lack of any strategy at all. For this was the only issue where it was possible for patriarchy to mobilize a mass support against the demands of the women's movement, a support which in the USA grew so strong that it could be used against the labour movement, the blacks and other non-privileged,. The mass support didn't only consist of men, seeing their privileges threatened, but even more of women, heiresses of the women's movements of the nineteenth century who saw motherhood as the greatest asset of women. Meanwhile, it appeared difficult to mobilize any strong support for the abortion issue; the partial successes turned out to be highly formal in many cases, calling for resourceful people to use. And the issue was also primarily a symbolical one, and concerned rather few people directly.

But it is true that the abortion issue made the women's movement very visible.

After the failure of the abortion issue as unifying for the movement, different interests have in principle catered for themselves. Closest to the role as symbolic focus has perhaps been defence against violence. Rape and wife-beating show patriarchy at its worst, and it has been possible to produce a wide support also from conservative people against them, and protection centers have functioned as centers of organisation and culture for the movement. Sometimes, groups have demonstrated for right to the night, against legal machineries that often condone violence against women.

Defence for women's economic interests have however been out of focus most of the time and been maintained only by trade unions of female majority, without being officially parts of any women's movement. To be sure, the nurse strike in France in the early seventies, and the female auto-workers' strike for equal pay at Ford in England in 1968 were memorable feminist events, and Swedish nurse trade unions have also used feminist language sometimes. But apart from this, it's only in Italy that lay people based in women's movements have considered it important to work in trade unions for their aims. Which is notable, since women are a growing part of the workers, particularly of the poorly paid workers, and since the trade unions are increasingly dominated by women. The strong unionist connection in Italy is of course an effect of the very strong labour mobilization there between 1967 and 1975.

Defence against the phasing out of the welfare reforms after 1973 have been more a part of women's movement focus. In the USA and Britain, where the liquidation has been most brutal, resistance has often been constructed around women's interest - but as often around other interests.

And finally, defence against forced double work and against the demand of taking responsibility for non-waged work has almost never been an issue for struggle anywhere, despite being the reason for repression of women if the commodity chain argument is true. This issue was thematized only in the radical feminist networks around 1970 and to some extent in Scandinavia thereafter.

According to Threlfall, the women's movements of the system center have for this reason primarily favoured middle class women. It has become much easier for women to make a career in well-paid professions - but this hasn't favoured women in less well-paid professions. Women have filled academic professions and influenced these according to women's interests - but they have also filled the global proletariat. Women's work has been commercialized, been made official, regardless of what class it has belonged to. The dogmatic segregation between women/non-wage work and men/wage work has been broken, but this has often only implied that women have got double work. It isn't only the women's movements' fault that the favours haven't been more evenly distributed; this is a result of the poor successes generally of peoples' movements to assert the interests of the majority after 1973.

In the system peripheries, the priorities have been different. This is a result of the fact that women's movements there have a different base. Primarily, they emanate from work and the needs of the households.

In the system center, the non-waged work women have to take responsibility for consists primarily of household work, i.e. subsistence work. In the system periphery, it also consists of small businesses, production of commodities and services for the market. This is a consequence of the fact that wages under peripheral conditions are so small that they have to be supplemented by cash, and under peripheral conditions there are few public transfer payments with this purpose. The need for supplementary production has risen fast and radically during the Kondratiev B phase and the business-liberal government programs of the late twentieth century, when wages and transfers have been curtailed, and it has even began to appear in the system center [40].

A main current in the women's movements of the system peripheries has for this reason been defence of non-wage work [41].

But like in the system centers, women in the peripheries have been increasingly involved in wage labour since 1973. Earlier, they worked primarily in agriculture and home industry, like the West European women until early nineteenth century. When industry began to be localized out from the system center in the seventies, women were recruited to unqualified assembly line production, since they were purchasable for lower wages. While the female part of the global industrial working force has risen to about a third, they amount to about 90 percent in the transnational enterprises' subcontractors in the free zones of the "new industrial countries". Meanwhile, the female part of the public servants increases over the whole world, concurrently with the diminishing public salaries.

A consequence of this is that women engage more and more in trade unions.

Women being contented with low salaries turned out to be a temporary occurrence. The unionist movement developed by women's employments in the sweatshops of economic free zones has been best documented for the pioneering South Korea. The unionist movement of the female textile workers may put its birth date to the day the women of Dongil Textiles elected a female leadership of their union in 1972. They began the tradition of militancy and alliances with students and churches against the enterprises and the military dictatorship characteristic of the South Korean labour movement. With this unionist power base they have engaged in more traditional women's movement issues like the power in the family and legal protection for the victims of American soldiers [42]. During the nineties, organization has begun in the Mexican maquiladoras, and Moghadan reports about organization among female assembly line workers in Southeast Asia.

Defence of non-wage labour may be expressed as defence of natural resources or organisation of informal businesses. The Indian Chipko movement defended the forest as a source of food and firewood, and the Bangladeshi savings association has been an example for savings associations over the world. But mostly such projects are too small to figure in Western media. Odoul and Kabira have registered 27.000 women's groups just in Kenya working with savings, land purchase, house-building and redistribution not managed by the state, meanwhile struggling for women's right to own land [43]. The aim is, except the economic one, to create a space outside the traditional patriarchal structures. Due to a weak organising at the overarching level, these groups are however sometimes a gateway for new patriarchal power groups in the forms of national politics and international aid, and they are generally not related to feminist politics.

Since the limits between wage and non-wage labour are not razor-sharp, movements tend to mix with each other, according to Dickinson. Renana Jhabvala tells in Rowbotham's and Mitter's book about the way street-vendors in Ahmadabad in Gujarat have been acknowledged as a trade union by the ICFTU, despite their being formally business women - employers don't treat them as employees but as subcontractors. But they seem so far as an exception.

Defence for non-wage labour, household and civil society mechanisms have sometimes been a base for "politics" in its traditional meaning. The street-vendors of Ahmadabad have for example intervened in the turf squabbles between Hindus and Muslims, referring to women's solidarity. Women in Mexican shantytowns have organised defence for commons like water and electricity from the eighties, utilizing their status as mothers like European women in the nineteenth century, casually organising a movement that challenged the political monopoly of the PRI. The most famous examples are women's resistance to South American military dictatorships in the seventies and eighties. Their traditional invisibility made them never appear as a competitor to the regimes and gave them a space to lead the emerging democracy movements. For example, women in the shantytowns around São Paulo, organised in Christian congregations, began struggling for water and electricity, went further to publishing the falsifications of the consumer's price index regulating wages in Brazil, and initiated the labour movement which destroyed the dictatorship [44].

Gradually, the role as defender of the family against violence and economic misgovernment, which has genial in the struggle against repressive dictatorships, has appeared somewhat problematic particularly to urban middle class feminists; isn't this the role women want to escape, asks Jaquette. So these economically based resistances have had difficulties to come to terms with north-influenced feminism. For example, they refused to break with traditional female roles and they have refused to see any conflict with men. But beginning with the UN year of women in 1975, they have had to discuss common platforms and at least in one issue they have had to find a common base of action and discussion - the issue of patriarchal violence which hit at women of all classes.

In Brazil, such issues were raised by the shantytown networks about 19980 because the men tried to prevent women's organisation [45]. But the most published movement is the Indian one, perhaps because they work within the most patriarchal culture of all. Middle class women have taken up struggle against so-called bride murders while under-class women have mobilized against the sexualized violence of employers, and the gap between different traditions have slowly begun to close [46].

Because of the "feminization of global wage labour", linked to remaining division of work, where women are responsible for a non-waged labour that continues to be necessary, some researchers see women's movements as the most important peoples' movements of the twenty-first century [47]. But what are their opportunities?

First a certain reservation. With reference to women's presence in wage labour, we may remember that wage labour in the system center in the early nineteenth century was also to a great extent dominated by women, but that they were squeezed out gradually from the key businesses and made defenceless. The structural need for someone to be responsible for non-wage labour was stronger than the need for women in wage labour. It is possible that the "feminization of wage labour" is a passing phenomenon this time also.

On the other hand, wage labour is spread to increasingly more links of the commodity chain. And during a hundred and fifty year of women's movements, some successes have accumulated and made it politically sensitive to squeeze out women this time. But it is certainly not impossible.

Historically, women's movements have, since the time of Beguines, Sufis and secret societies, used a lot of energy to build identities and to struggle for publicity. One may call it a struggle against the cultural capital; a struggle seemingly the fate of all marginalized categories. I will return to this in the end of this chapter.

The cooperation that was a central feature in the early phases disappeared strangely, only to return in the present southern movements. Obstruction has all the time been difficult to use in the issue I have supposed to be the core issue, because the forced non-wage labour doesn't imply any clear adversary. But the Icelandic women's strike in October 24, 1975 also covered household work, and in 2000 the idea was taken up again for the Eighth of March manifestations, supported by among others COSATU in South Africa. It is possible that the increasing female participation in trade unions may make such unionist actions easier, even for non-wage labour.

Through its weak focus on economic matters, women's movements have missed many opportunities to create hegemony among the women struggling for such issues, which are the majority. Women forced to non-wage labour, and women forced to badly paid industrial labour, have been neglected while upper middle class women in or without professional NGOs have appropriated the right to define their issues as the most important ones for the women's movements, as "Feminism". Probably, though, it is a matter of time until trade unionists and cooperatives of non-wage labourers gain hegemony within the women's movement universe. Perhaps they do already - Nancy Saporta and Yvonne Corcoran describe the way north-influenced middle class feminists lose power within South American women's movement networks to the benefit of shantytown women and their more universal experiences [48].

On the other hand, women's movements have a clear advantage. Because of its peripheral position during the twentieth century, they are rather unspoilt by the breakdown of the government power strategy, and should for that reason be rather privileged in participating in the construction of the new popular movement strategy of the twenty-first century.

Pariah movements

Wage labour and non-wage labour are however not the only kind of labour divided according to pseudo-biological criterions.

According to Tilly, the easiest way of distributing attractive and unattractive tasks is to link the different kinds of work to different pre-constructed kinds of people, no matter which. Different kinds of waged work are also distributed according to pseudo-biologic criteria. We remember Gordon's et al dividing of work into independent core work, subordinated core work, and peripheral work. Tilly uses the terms loyalty systems, contract systems and control systems - loyalty systems being work you are entrusted to draw up as you like, contract systems being work ruled by a strict unit prices, and control systems being work supervised strictly by a foreman. Of course, the two latter are those reserved for people from categories with a low attributed value, where sex is one dimension of division while "ethnicity" is another and age is a third [49].

This section focuses on "ethnicity" while age and other criteria are conceived later.

What is "ethnicity"? Apparently, it has nothing to do with geographical origin per se. Like national movements arise only in regions which are somehow treated negatively by a center, ethnicity arises only if categories are treated negatively by other categories. For with the special treatment, the treated category responds by adapting itself to the discriminating situation to do it endurable, and thus develops a habitus and an identity as a category. Not least, new generations are imparted a self-image and ambitions which may seem "realistic" but are an adaptation to the unequal conditions they for that reason contribute to maintaining [50].

Such "ethnic" divisions of work exist and have existed in many kinds of systems - we may think of the Jewish merchant networks in medieval Europe, which maintained themselves through cooption, or the clans in the peripheries of society in medieval India to whom was relegated the most unrewarding tasks. Tilly contends that it is almost universal to do so, because it is so simple and convenient for people with power to distribute tasks. But since the world market system builds on such an overwhelming amount of labour distribution, and whose distribution extends to such vast areas, the ethnic principle becomes generalized in a quite different way than in systems building on subsistence and/or local markets.

The overriding ethnic layering is of course the global one, the one implied from the center-periphery or North-South division. But an interesting factor is that this ethnic layering remains in local labour divisions; people from the center - the North - are assigned core work in loyalty systems, while people with an origin the periphery - the South - are assigned peripheral work in control or contract system, irrespective where they happen to live.

While the ethnic layering tied to territories generally has been combated by national movements demanding independence, see chapter 6, ethnic layering within countries or regions have often (but not always) been combated by civil rights movements.

The citizen concept has its origin in the medieval European peace movement and its creation of the commune as a community to defend the city against ravaging barons, see chapter 9. But only the artisans of the French revolution raised citizenship as an antithesis to the subject concept of the royal dictatorship, and its ramifications of unequal privilege, and they succeeded in getting it acknowledged at least in theory in the compromise presided over by British liberals after the end of the Napoleonic wars. According to their version, not all were citizens, only those with enough property to be, as it was called, economically independent. But the extension of the egalitarian citizenship without any privileges to an increasing part of the population was a common theme for all popular movements of the nineteenth century, and the labour movement which was to be hegemonic within the peoples' movement family claimed that it should be extended to all. Suffrage was understood as the symbolic seal of citizenship, and the more the government power strategy was to dominate after 1900, the more important appeared suffrage. Resistance to privileges played a less predominant role, since also comparatively unprivileged people may have some privileges to defend, but at least one kind of "pseudo-ethnic" privilege system served in the peoples' movement discourse as an example of radical evil: aristocratic privilege.

For the pariah movements [51] of the twentieth century, this was a tradition to draw from.

 

The pariah movements of the plantation complex

The pariah group within the world market system that was most visible at the earliest time was the group created by slavery in the plantations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see chapter 4. The formal slavery was abolished during the nineteenth century along the American Atlantic and replaced with wage labour or sharecropping, through a cooperation between the Haitian revolution, the Barbados rebellion, several small rebellions in the USA and Brazil, organised escape from the plantations, religiously motivated anti-slavery movement among the middle class, economically motivated resistance to slavery among the artisans and farmers, and - in the USA - enthusiastic participations of black slaves at the Union side of the civil war, in the form of strikes and volunteering. But this didn't imply that the slaves and their descendants became equal citizens. Even henceforth, people of African descent were relegated to the most unrewarding tasks. In the part of the earlier plantation territory where there was most to exclude them from, in USA, Tilly's usual inequality mechanisms was reinforced by a formalised rule system forbidding a lot of activities to the blacks, for example education and voting. The aim was to supply the comparatively poor southern states with cheap labour and prevent its comparatively peripheral economy to be knocked out by the stronger enterprises from the North. To do away with this rule system was the primary aim for the movement emerging among the blacks in the early twentieth century [52].

Political organising began among educated and wealthy blacks in the north. The first big organisation, NAACP, was originally uninterested in mass organising, but acted as a lobby among politicians and courts, to declare the southern discriminating rules unconstitutional. They had some lesser successes but these didn't affect the lives of people in general.

The black majority, the southern sharecroppers, shyed away from political organising, being burnt by the post-war backlashes. They gathered in separatist Christian revivals, which would get importance in the fifties. Otherwise, mass movements would grow only in the twenties. There were several reasons for their growth then.

One was the excesses of the white establishments. According to Raymond Gavins, NAACP grew to a m ass movement in the south as a self-defence against white lynch gangs, who waged an erratic terror regime to keep the blacks in their place [53].

Another was urbanization among the blacks. Only at the time of the first world war, blacks began to work in the industry and in urban services, sometimes after having served at the front. The new experiences brought a new pride, among other things manifesting itself in the so-called Harlem renaissance, a cultural movement among blacks in the north, and one may remind of the strong position blacks had in popular music at the time. But it also manifested itself in organisation for interest.

Both Franklin and Davis emphasize the importance of the labour movement upswing in the thirties for black mobilization. Traditionally, trade unions within the AFL had refused to admit blacks, except the Miners' Federation. But in 1935, the Miners and some other federations founded CIO to organize the assembly line workers, where blacks were abundant. The radical popular culture inspired by the labour mobilization moved also the blacks. And black workers organised themselves in businesses where they were in majority, for example the sleeping-car staff, whose trade union become a backbone in the black civil rights movement. For example, they organised a threat of a demonstration in 1942 that was enough to make the government legislate against segregation in industries producing for the army.

The post-war boom strengthened the blacks even more. The proportion of blacks with education increased, and the educated accepted no more than black soldiers to be discriminated against. In 1942, the Congress for Racial Equality, CORE, had been organised in Chicago by students to challenge discrimination with sit-ins. Other black students copied their methods in the south as early as 1947, but with little success.

The catalyst for a broad black movement was the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955. It was well prepared, organised through the black churches, and got mass support. What made it a success was, except the economic loss for the bus company, the appeal to white sympathisers in the north about improving the city by eradicating a bad practice, and never to degenerate into hate of whites.

The dissemination over the country was also initiated by the black churches, organised in Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC. But the foot-soldiers of the movement were students who copied the CORE sit-in actions with increasing success: they acted as if segregation was abolished and demanded to be served at cafés and boarding-houses. When they were arrested they helped to fill the prisons. Business after business desegregated rather than risking fuss and lost revenues. The youth movement was the third of the great civil rights movements of the fifties, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC.

But the successes were isolated to the economically forward states in the southeast. An attempt of CORE to test desegregation in the poorer Alabama and Mississippi in 1961 was met by murders. A grand campaign to register black voters provoked a state of terror with dozens of murders and constant maltreatment from the police. It was evident that the tactics from Montgomery didn't work.

Instead, the movement chose another: to provoke the racists to overreact and cause massive disorder. This was the reason why King and SCLC chose Birmingham for a demonstration for a law against discrimination in 1962 and Selma for a demonstration for black suffrage in 1964. Both were known to have brutal racist chiefs of police, and when these acted according to character before the TV teams it caused a wave of indignation over the world - not least in the new independent African states. The president was forced to back legislation according to the wish of the movement not to lose the reputation as leader of "the free world".

The tactics worked bad for the voter registration in Mississippi, despite the fact that the movement recruited white high-status students as shields, for the murders took place out of sight for the TV public. Instead, the escalation of violence caused bitterness in the movement, over treachery from the liberal establishment and from trade unions. This bitterness would later be one of the causes for split in the movement and relative defeat.

There were also other causes.

One was the Vietnam war, breaking unity between trade unions and civil rights movement. The trade unions supported the war since it increased demand of skilled labour - while the blacks were not qualified but were hit by cuts in the social budgets. Parts of the black movement belonged to the pioneers of war resistance; King belonged to the earliest opponents, and the provocative action models and the radical democratic, flat structure of the Mississippi movement was also the model for the war resistance.

An attempt to save the cooperation with a joint campaign for full employment came to nothing; the unionists lost interest when the big city slum people took revenge for a life of humiliation in a wave of unplanned revolts in 1966-67, usually provoked by police outrages, and when King left the scene in 1968 there was nobody with enough stature to make them interested again.

Another was that cooperation within the movement ceased. During the phase of mobilization up to 1964, different organisations and groups were able to practice a far-reaching creative disunity concerning the means because they agreed on the goals [54]. They wanted to do away with segregating laws and have equal rights of all Americans, and militant street activists and conservative businessmen were able to cooperate for this aim. But those who were victims of white violence in 1963-64 lost interest in integration. For them, the American dream turned into a nightmare, and the goal for them was separatist black power instead. This was an attractive goal for the underclass of the slums; their living standard didn't increase at all just because legal restraints disappeared since it depended on Tilly's inequality functions [55]. King's and SCLC's policy of integration had been carried by the growing black middle class, whose position was strengthened.

But perhaps the most likely explanation for the relative failure is that it is easier to mobilize against a discriminating law than to mobilize against a discriminating routine in a complete economy and culture. When the laws disappeared, new alliances would have been needed to struggle against discrimination.

The blacks didn't find any other focus when the laws were abolished. They fuzzied out in hosts of campaigns against rack-renting, for equal rights to jobs, for fair food prices, against discrimination in school, and against expressways - in 1970 there were 400 campaigns against expressways designed to destroy the homes of poor people. Many of these campaigns were successful but they couldn't change the picture nationally and they couldn't prevent the poor from being yet poorer [56].

In the rest of the old plantation territory from the Caribbean to Brazil, movements for self-assertion of black people have been missing, probably because no laws have forbidden them anything. Their subordination has depended on routines, copied between businesses and supported by inaccessible cultural routines and world order principles. And these are much more difficult to mobilize against. In some Caribbean islands, there have been political movements, but only in for example Trinidad and Jamaica where blacks are "the nation". These have later pioneered African self-assertion in other areas - Marcus Garvey from Jamaica organised the first, short-lived black mass organisation in USA in the early twenties, George Padmore from Trinidad organised the African Bureau in London during the second world war as a gathering space for putative African liberation leaders, Aimé Cesaire from Martinique introduced the literary current in Africa called négritude, and Frantz Fanon from the same island became an ideologist for the liberation movements in the French colonies [57].

In other places, for example Brazil, black organising has exclusively been cultural and generally taken the form of religious cults and carnival organising [58]. It has become a politics of interest only after 1973, generally beginning within congregations of liberation theology [59].

 

Pariah movements of the settler colonies

The other great complex of local category building is what was created in European settler colonies. As described in chapter 4, settler colonies began to appear with the plantation economies in America, but their great age of multiplication was the nineteenth century when Europeans emigrated and established themselves as new upper classes in America, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Algeria and, somewhat later, Palestine. By force of their global organising, the Europeans deprived the original inhabitants of their land and forced them to manual, low-waged labour for the Europeans, and this pattern has survived. Because of the often numerical superiority of the original inhabitants, the Europeans have been forced to underpin the caste system with rigid laws, giving the original inhabitants strong goals for their mobilizing against subordination and exploitation.

In several of the enumerated cases, the resistance has taken the form of national movements. The Europeans have been few enough to make it realistic to force them to "go home" or stay as ordinary citizens. These were the cases in Algeria and Kenya. In other areas, resistance has perhaps begun this way but with time been forced to see forward to a future co-existence, and taken the form of civil rights movements. These were the cases in South Africa and America. Palestine may be in the transition just now.

The people displaced by settler colonies in America survived in two kinds of environments [60].

The rest were chased away by land-hungry Europeans

It took five hundred years for all these people began to identify themselves in common and discover common interests. During all this time, they had tried to defend themselves locally - or in some cases nationally as peasants. The peasant movements struggling for land reform in Mexico in the tens, in Peru in the fifties and sixties, and in Guatemala in the seventies were mostly Indians but defined themselves politically as peasants or country people, campesinos.

But during the post-war boom, their societies were drawn into changes resulting in a common popular movement mobilizing. Indians were engaged increasingly as workers in the towns and came into contact which each other and with the global peoples' movement culture. It was during the popular movement upswing about 1970 the modern so-called Indian movement was born.

It may for the sake of pedagogics be divided in two segments: the Andean peasant movement and the Amazonian/North American movements against exploitation of their resource base.

The American peasant movements of the twentieth century had a strangely subaltern position. They were sometimes strong locally, but in national context they played the part of the poor cousin from the country to the urban middle class; while the urban middle class challenged the export bourgeoisie for power they needed a popular image as representatives of the people, so they emphasized the peasants in a paternalist way, stating the importance of Indian culture for the identity of the nation, see chapter 6. Land reforms in Mexico (except in Morelos), Bolivia, Peru and Chile were carried through by city people who kept land distribution, credits and food markets in their own hands. So while the deputy role acknowledged the importance of the Indian peasants, and flattered their self-esteem, it refused them all power and autonomy.

It was the failure of populist politics that gave rise to the Indian movements in the Andine world; the campesino movements in Bolivia and Ecuador became Indian as the land reform had left the peasants as poor as they were before, in Mexico the Chiapas rising broke out when the land reform had got stuck, in Guatemala peasants in the north began to identify themselves as Maya when the land reform movement had been repressed by a five year long massacre.

The wilderness peoples were subjected to an increasing pressure during the post-war boom, from mineral exploiters and from states aiming at demarcating territory with different development projects.

Not surprisingly, the North American Indians were first drawn into resistance; this happened already in the late nineteenth century when Indians organised into "tribes" to defend their territories. A common identity began to appear in the late forties when the government experimented with abolishing the reservation to where the Indians had been pushed, for so-called developmental reasons. It was also North American Indians who first got a had an impact in the public as Indian resistance, when American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz Island in 1968.

Except this, the first Indian organisations were founded locally in the fifties and sixties, supported by liberation theology missionaries. The Shuar Federation in Ecuador is considered as the first successful organisation, educating children on the radio since 1964, owning cattle farms, having negotiated themselves into the position as Ecuadorian border authority, and having got a key position in the peoples' movement federation CONAIE.

But also during later mobilizations, forest people have had much support from allies, according to Brysk who mentions Christian networks, environmental movements and researchers. While the highland Indians have mobilised in local and national contexts, the forest Indians have needed global support because of their small numbers.

The first common Indian movement mobilization was catalyzed by the somewhat pompous attempt of the Creoles to celebrate the quincentenary of the Spanish conquest in 1992. They weren't able to do it anywhere. Because of the visibility the Indian movement had gained it was able, the years after, to appear as the "representative of the nation" in several countries - Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala - when new constitutions were drawn after military dictatorships and other breakdowns, and been granted ownership to their lands or regional autonomy.

The different regional Indian mobilizations are rather different.

The strongest movement, in Ecuador, defines itself very broadly: if you are a peasant you are an Indian, and the borders to other underclass people is permeable. The Indian confederation CONAIE has led national rebellions against corrupt governments on behalf of all Ecuador. In Bolivia, the movement has been rather separatist and accepted rough neo-liberal cuts for non-Indians for factional gains - until it rebelled in the early twenty-first century when the cuts went to far. Factionalism wasn't anything the movement chose; the perhaps most culturally separatist Indian movement, the Guatemaltecan one, was forced by a genocidal politics to abandon all other ways of action than cultural separatism, and the zapatists of Chiapas have to pay dearly for appealing to a Mexican identity when claiming civil rights for all.

South Africa was established as a half-way station on the way to India, and settlers were encouraged to produce food for the crews of the East Indiamen. From the beginning, competition grew between them and the primarily cattle-breeding African peoples, and during the nineteenth century the Europeans took over most of the present country; successive colonial administrations moved forward the line between "white" and "black" land, usually after armed conflicts. At each redrawing, Africans were faced with the choice to move or take an employment as land worker to the Europeans. At the end of the nineteenth century the former opportunity began to dry up; at the same time gold was discovered at the present Johannesburg and the need for cheap labour increased. The Africans established themselves increasingly as a working class [61].

The class differences were legislated from the outset. Blacks were forbidden to own land in "white areas" by the Natives Land Act in 1913, and shortly after also to lease land. Black miners were forbidden to leave the mining area and their families were forbidden to enter it. In Natal, the governor was entitled to transport black people forcibly at any time and expose them to forced labour in the 1890s; this was extended to all South Africa in 1927. Compulsory passports had already been introduced. Blacks were barred from all qualified jobs in 1900; an attempt to reclassify led to a strike among the white miners in February 1922 under the battle-cry "Workers of the world, unite for a white South Africa". And the right of employers to physically punish black workers was confirmed legally in 1927 after having been praxis all the time.

The resistance took a long time to be organised, though.

Trade unions had been organised among the dockers in Durban in the nineteenth century. But the impulses to organising didn't get any speed until the global labour movement upswing after the first world war. They met, as stated above, with violent resistance among white workers who saw their privileges threatened, and the black miners who were to become the core of black workers in South Africa had a slow start. Instead, the refuse collectors, dockers and primarily land workers made the first unionist thrusts. The land workers were ex-tenants who had been prohibited from leasing and had to adapt to the repressive servant regulations. They made up the core of the Industrial and Commercial Union, the union center of the twenties. In addition, the textile workers succeeded for a long time to defy the racial legislation and recruit both blacks and whites, thereby protecting themselves against the repression.

The political organisation of the blacks, ANC - originally South African Native National Congress - was founded with Indian inspiration in 1909, during the debates on suffrage in the new South African Union, and for a long time it was like its Indian model a lobbyist organisation. Except an early movement in East Cape (where M.K. Gandhi made his first experience), there was almost no mass mobilizing before the second world war.

The changed power balance in the mid-forties - the difficulties for the colonial empires, the successes for the Indian national movement, the fall of the nazis - bred new hopes in South Africa. During the war, price hikes and shortage of commodities had stimulated bus boycotts and squatter movements which police repression hadn't been able to quell. These had been organised locally, without involvement by national organisations. But meanwhile ANC, where a new and more activist generation had come to power, had contributed to a new miner's trade union for blacks in 1941, and this together with an equally new national trade union center challenged the rulers with a general strike in 1946. The mining companies were inclined to compromise as was also the government, but this came to nothing. In 1948, the most rigid white suprematists won the election and began to build in a most fundamentalist way a society of separation, of legal ranking of all inhabitants, supported by an increasingly repressive security police.

It has been discussed, not least within the South African resistance organisations, why a majority of whites supported a system which in the end turned out to be counterproductive for their own living standard and against the interest of business. It is true that the apartheid system for a while supplied cheap labour to the mines - but it prevented also the companies to recruit skilled people by reserving the qualified jobs for too few whites, who probably were the only ones to profit from the system. Probably the system was initiated to guarantee both cheap labour and middle class privileges, but in the end the necessary coercion authorities run the system in absurdum by their own.

The apartheid system called for complete separation between what their architects considered as "peoples". This called for dissolved marriages, forced removals, doubling of public spaces and authorities, and ban on organisations. These things had happened before, but apartheid called for mass measures; four millions are estimated to have been forcibly removed, from cities to external townships, from township to township, from township to the so-called homelands, land which was distant or bad enough to be possessable by blacks.

The resistance was concentrated from 1950 in a disobedience campaign with strikes and organised offences against the apartheid laws. The campaign was directed on one hand against laws harassing individuals - evictions, passport rules, and forced slaughter of cattle - and on the other against the general coercion in the form of ban on organisations and the restricted suffrage. The protests were best organised around Port Elizabeth where the trade unions were strong, and East London where the activist ANC youth had its base. And in the countryside, in the areas which were still owned by blacks, people resisted government encroachment; in Pondoland they refused to acknowledge the local authority imposed by Pretoria and elected an independent one which operated from the forest. It took three years for the government to defeat it by air bombing.

During the disobedience campaign ANC grew to a mass movement of a hundred thousand people. As common program all participating organisations adopted the Freedom Charter in 1955, written in a simple language combining political and social rights violated by Apartheid.

In 1960 a mass demonstration in Sharpeville against the passport laws was repressed, killing 69 people to the horror of the world. A state of emergency continuing to 1990 succeeded in defeating ANC whose activists were imprisoned or escaped abroad where they began to argue for armed resistance. Instead, the initiative went over to the traditional aristocracies in the "homelands". Some of these succeeded for many years to keep the government agents at a distance and keep a degree of autonomy. Most notable was the KwaZulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi who gathered the Inkatha mass organisation against the apartheid regime on a federalist program, until a new movement didn't content itself with entrenchment in homelands but demanded civil rights in all South Africa.

The beginning was the Black Consciousness movement, BC, from the late sixties. Its background was an original form of Christian liberation theology, and most of the leaders were priests and students. They maintained that the best tool of the oppressor is the self-contempt of the oppressed. Since it didn't incite to rebellion it was tolerated by the government, but since it appealed to the self-respect of the blacks it met with an enormous response among the youth. The movement went on for a while without formal organisation, but established itself in the early seventies as a student organisation, organisations for social welfare in the shantytowns, and a political front for the BC ideas. It didn't succeed much before being repressed in 1974-75 [62].

BC failed as an organisation, but this didn't matter because it had been a movement of ideas, and the ideas were taken up by the youth in the enormous shantytown Soweto. In June 16, 1976 they demonstrated against a decree that mathematics should be taught in Afrikaans, a language they didn't understand, and police violence was met with new demonstrations. What had been a youth revolt grew during the autumn to strikes and rent strikes which made the appointed government of Soweto to resign. During the autumn similar revolts broke out in townships all over the country with youth influenced by BC as leaders. There was not much leadership involved however, so when the young BC activists were thrown into prison people organised themselves and begun local struggles for welfare aims. This movement was given a structure by people who were interned after the Soweto revolt and were released after 1978. During a few years around 1980 a broad movement grew of local committees for electricity, water and sewer, cheaper bus fares and lower rents in all South Africa, not only in the big townships. The movement had short-term economic aims and was tolerated by the government as an alternative to the violent ANC and BC. After a few years in 1983, the movement was organised into the United Democratic Front, UDF, with a common aim to encompass all anti-apartheid forces.

The pretext for UDF was to oppose a government scheme of giving small advantages to Indians. But UDF also coordinated economic struggle; in 1984 its base in the so-called Vaal triangle organised a rebellion against rent rises and it spread over the country. Around rent strikes, consumer boycotts and labour strikes, organised in neighbourhood committees where "each family was a part of the movement", an alternative power structure grew up with courts of their own which even the police was forced to take into consideration to be able to keep some order. UDF activists talked euphorically about "double power". But after 1986 UDF began to crack by the joint effects of police violence, crime and police-supported revenges from organisations passed by the development, like Inkatha and the BC offshoot AZAPO.

So the lead passed over to the trade unions. They had begun to organise in mass scale in the early seventies in industries localised out from Europe, see chapter 5. They had a narrow economic focus in the beginning and was tolerated as the lesser evil, like UDF had been. But when UDF went to pieces the trade unions took anti-apartheid programs, launched political strikes and took responsibility for the remaining UDF neighbourhood committees.

In 1990 the government gave up. The cost for violence, for control authorities, for flight of capital and for irrational sorting mechanisms in the labour market had become too high for the voters. The legal apartheid system was abandoned surprisingly easy, and the black leadership was coopted into the state. Blacks are still almost only workers (or unemployed) but the labour center COSATU belongs to the leading labour organisations at a global level.

The pariah people in Palestine has so far been less able to find a successful strategy for its struggle. According to Edward Said, elitist romantics of violence has blocked the way for an effective mass movement [63], and one may also argue that a separatist nationalism has blocked for an appeal to a general global peoples' movement identity in the same effective way as the South African and the Indian movements were so good at.

Of course there are causes to these failures. One is of course the interest of great powers to support their adversary economically and maintain a strategy of suspense. But there are also internal causes.

The early phases of the Palestinian conflicts are described in chapter 6. When the Israeli state was founded in 1948 and the Palestinian land and people were divided in three, their resistance was so also [64].

The Palestinians who stayed in Israel were gradually converted into wage labourers in Israeli industry. The authorities were skilful to prevent organising with measured terror and cooption until the war in 1967, when the need to take sides was acute. The leaders then were municipal politicians, who from 1974 built a civil rights movement claiming that Arab citizens should have the same rights as Jewish citizens. In March 30, 1976 a general strike was called, the Land Day, which remained a tradition. From the eighties Islamists also began to organise a kind of reciprocal welfare system since the Arabs were excluded from much of the national welfare system.

For the refugees, the prospects were even darker. Some were absorbed in the growing oil economy in the seventies and many of these supported the Palestine movement economically. The majority, living in refugee camps, were free to organise but had nothing to act for as they lived on charity. In desperation, youths began to organise symbolic armed "returns" into Israel, and this soon became organised through Fatah, an organisation created by exiles in Kuwait. Armed attacks were no end in itself, only an action for want of something better.

However, Fatah and other refugee camp organisations grew to the organising force within the camps, supported by enthusiastic youth and petrodollars. But their militant exile politics was embarrassing for the host states, and they were chased away, in 1970 from Jordan and in 1982 from Lebanon, and had to take up quarters in Tunisia, far from their constituency, where they were increasingly dependent on petrodollars and increasingly corrupt and bureaucratized.

The core area, the West Bank, had no popular movement at all before 1967 since it was incorporated into Jordan. After the Israeli occupation, much the same course was followed as for the Isreali Palestinians: political initiative against the Israeli discrimination and military high-handedness was canalized through local administrations, sometimes against the wish of PLO. They organised youth organisations, trade unions, women's organisations, and organisations for mutual aid.

Increasingly, the focus in the conflict with the occupation power was the Israeli settlements which not only stole land from Palestinian farmers but also made the most of their privileged position as herrenvolk. This, together with the shrinking economic opportunities during the eighties, ended the wait-and-see mentality that had been prevalent since the forties. The Intifada rebellion broke out in 1987.

The Intifada - Arab for shake off - took the initiative from the professionals and put it in the civil society organisations. The strategy was boycotts and strikes against Israeli activities and enterprises, and the success was striking. The Palestinian power over their own economy increased along with the Palestinian self-confidence while the Israeli economy was wrecked. In 1990, the Israeli had to bargain for the first time and recognize the Palestinians as a part.

However the bargaining body on the Palestinian side was not the peoples' movements taking part in the Intifada - they were at that time hard pressed by Israeli military terror - but the PLO which was content in being a recognized part and able to slip away from the exile in Tunis. They accepted a settlement which made themselves a "homeland" government according to South African precedence but conceded preciously little to the Palestinians in common. Accepting this solution also gave the PLO an interest in helping Israeli authorities in curbing continuing struggles which were now likely to direct itself against the increasingly corrupt PLO administration as well as against the Israeli occupation.

For a long time since 1990, the only resistance to survive this onslaught were the elitist and militarist hit-squads and desperate individual revengers, while popular organising took the form of mutual aid and organising of everyday life again, mostly done by Islamist organisers. It is just possible that the PLO loss of office in 2006 will offer more favourable conditions for organising the struggle for equality with the settler colonists.

 

Movements of traditional pariahs in a new era

A third complex of pariah categories are those who have appeared within earlier systems and still remain because they also satisfy the world market system's demands for low wage labourers. In Europe there are for example Romas and Travellers, in Japan there are Eta or Burakumin, but the most systematized example is of course the Indian Dalits. Their movements are also the most developed ones [65].

Dalits is an omnibus concept for those Indian clans and guilds who are attributed a particularly low status. They have traditionally worked in despised professions like cleaners or land workers but work today as low wage or casual labourers in general. The low status is in local jargon termed "impurity" but this implies only that the Dalits, to retain their self-respect, refuse to accept the ritual purification norms of the traditional elites.

Traditionally, Dalits have either engaged in Hindu reform movements, so-called Bhakti movements, see chapter 3, or been converted to Buddhism or Islam to evade their repressive conditions. This has generally not been effective, since these efforts have been led and dominated by others than Dalits.

Modern Dalit movements began contemporaneously with the national movement in the twenties. The center of such movements was Bombay, where some Dalits had made a career within the textile industry or the British administration, and demanded a corresponding status. Large parts of the textile workers' union in Bombay was Dalit dominated. They succeeded in getting a share in independence, particularly by playing on the National Congress's fear of splits. In the new constitution, written by the Dalit B.R. Ambedkar, Dalits were granted citizenship and some guarantees.

The formal citizenship changed little for most, and around 1970 a new generation Maharashtra Dalits were inspired by the global peoples' movement wave and proclaimed the Dalit Panters in 1972. This was a movement of a first generation of university students, and their thrust was almost exclusively against the cultural capital; they challenged concepts and customs they thougt humiliating for Dalits, often in a provocative manner, but their immediate range was short. Other movements spread later however: the Dalit party Bahujan Samaj was successful for a while in the eighties in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and in Karnataka a youth movement resisted humiliating practices.

But the most successful Dalit movements have not expressed themselves as Dalit but as peasant, labour or environmental movements. Dalits have mobilized for land reform, from the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab in the twenties to the violent clashes of Bihar today, they have mobilized against dams and forest clearances.

 

The absence of migrant workers' movements

Descendants of plantation slaves, traditionally impure castes and people subdued by European settler colonists are few and hardly enough for manning the lower layers of the labour hierarchy of the world market system. Migrant workers - people who move temporary or permanently from a poor and peripheral place to a richer and more central one - are however potentially countless. Globally mobile people, "cosmopolitans", are of course of many descriptions and may be both privileged and unprivileged. The privileged ones don't need to defend themselves, but which are the opportunities for non-privileged migrant workers to defend themselves through peoples' movement mechanisms?

Migrant labour is from the viewpoint of the capitalists a kind of supplement to relocation of production sites. In both cases, the aim is to wring production out of the grip of strong unionist movements and rely more on unorganised and unpretentious workers. As a matter of course, migrant workers are unorganised and comparably defenceless; that is what makes them exist. And the difference between migrant workers from North Thailand to Bangkok (or Sicily to Torino) and migrant workers from Anatolia to Germany is primarily that the latter cross a state boundary on their way and are not citizens in their new site of work. For that reason they are deprived of some formal privileges or protection other workers have; they are deprived of integration.

Experiences from the massive immigration to North America between 1880 and 1914 suggests that migrant workers don't organise to defend themselves through popular movements but through other mechanisms of civil society like religious congregations, friendly societies, cultural associations and paternalist client networks organised by their countrymen for political and economic profit. The latter kind of organisation is often developed into mafias, i.e. business which defies the legality of the majority society and keeps a coercive apparatus to defend itself. The absence of popular movement confrontation with the discrimination they are subject to - except some turf-defence of the youth - is a consequence of that most migrant workers see forward to returning to their country and don't care about getting a position in the country of work. Migrant workers who aspire to a position try to assimilate as quick as possible and don't solidarize with their countrymen, except perhaps for profit reasons [66].

After a generation however there appeared in the USA an organised resistance against the results of discrimination. The children of the immigrants became the leaders of the regular labour movement and to a great extent the leaders of the uniquely successful labour mobilizing in the thirties. There were also examples of ethnic metropolitan enclaves defending themselves collectively against discriminating city halls. A particularly famous one was the Chicagoan colony of East European slaughter-house workers in Back-of-the-Yards who organised a durable campaign during the forties and fifties where trade unions, churches and small businesses cooperated about confronting the authorities for small improvements of all kinds. Their successes inspired countless local community movements over the USA but their sheer successes probably precluded an overaching strategy for the minority movements during the seventies and thereafter [67].

Such movements don't however change the picture of migrant workers as relatively defenceless; it is symptomatic that the initiative to the struggle in Back-of-the-Yards was taken by the trade union organiser Saul Alinsky in cooperation with Chicago's Catholic bishop, and not by the workers themselves. It is rather a task for the peoples' movement society to rely to the migrant workers. And this has been done by the peoples' movement society in different ways.

It is usual that direct producers turn against migrant workers because they see them as (potential) blacklegs. The organised trade union movement in USA was for example against immigration about 1900 and refused, to their own ruin, to defend immigrants, see chapter 5. To some extent this is rational - the aim of migrant labour is to increase the supply of labour, and it contributes to rendering organisation more difficult because of confused habitus and language. On the other hand, conscious efforts to break with such pettiness has led to great victories. The breakthrough of the American assembly-line workers in the thirties was a consequence of the anti-racism of CIO and their insistence of organising all. And Stockholm's artisans contributed to an active and successful thrust of union organising in Sweden in the 1880s through their conscious repudiation of anti-immigration policies [68].

The odds are that only unionized workers can organise immigrants to defend themselves and to prevent a rise of subproletariats and layered labour markets. Probably, a labour movement on the offensive can do this, as a part of a global mobilization, and doing so they will also reach out to the labour markets of the South. A defensive labour movement focusing on defending their privileges locally are likely however to miss the opportunity.

A summary - identities or social movements?

The peoples' movements upswing in the sixties inspired to mobilizing among other out-groups who had never tried things like that before, for example youths, homosexuals and disabled.

Youth movements are generally not peoples' movements in the meaning of this book - aspirations of categories to change social conditions. A youth generation is too short to develop from a category to a movement. Youth movements are rather habituses or identities created with an aim to escape the final subordination under a soul-destroying capitalist work discipline as long as possible; this is at least the core of the identity of middle class youth movements. For underclass youth another feature is added - to defend the local territory and the local "we" against outsiders; this was the signification of the Irish "public gang", see chapter 6, as well as suburban ethnic gangs of today. Furthermore, there is a bite against authorities and not least school [69].

But all the same youth identities are resources for peoples' movements. Brake emphasizes that worker youth identities often supply strike movements with their most dedicated and militant activists, and the peace movement of the fifties and the environmental movement of the seventies were a kind of anti-commercial middle-class youth-culture identities in themselves.

Although youth have been a low status category in earlier eras and earlier systems, the prolongation of education, incomelessness and exclusion in the system center in the post-war era has widened the base for youth movements, and probably also the reason for them. The emerging youth identities and the upswing of peoples' movement after the mid-sixties created a kind of occasional contemporaneousness alliance. In Europe, the labour movement was the core but the revolt of the middle class youth against the work routines supplied a great deal of the utopian appeal to the movement resurgence. In USA the revolt of the middle class youth was itself the core of the resistance against the Vietnam war. The base was the beat culture and its resistance against subjugation to a puritan middle class career; in France the situationists formulated the same opposition against the post-war Fordist consumer society as "the is a life after birth" [70]. Tarrow describes the manner in which several mobilizations during the movement resurgence around 1970 were tied together by youths who moved from one to another and created communication, solidarities and common languages, which sometimes would be liberating but as often were strait-jackets for the popular movements [71].

For youths have, because of their lacking experience, as a rule found it difficult to create languages. They tend to catch ready-made ones, created for and by others, and create their identities from the languages instead of the other way about. As Maoism of the seventies, as Anarchism of the nineties, as all the identities of rock cultures.
The focus on hedonism and "free time" of youth cultures has opened them to exploitation of show business, which has to some extent disarmed them as critical resources - but as late as in the late nineties the English rave culture was one of the main forces behind the resistance to motorways, and youths have always created new identities when the old ones have become too exploited.

A category whose mobilization has been conspicuous after 1970 is the homosexuals. Bisexuality seems to have been a norm in parts of the Mediterranean culture some thousand years ago as it is in some other cultures, but it seems to have been unknown in Europe until wage labour grew in importance in big cities in the eighteenth century. Despite the dislike of the church, the homosexual milieus were left more or less in peace until the late nineteenth century when an angry campaign began, with a base in the perfectionist evangelical circles which created the women's movement, and forced them underground [72].

Adams and Cruikshank don't explain why this happened at just that time. It is probable however that the Fordist household regime forced through then, with a male breadwinner in a compulsory partnership with a female housekeeper, made all who didn't fit in the pattern controversial. For this reason it seems logical that their self-asserting power regained as soon as the Fordist model broke down between 1965 and 1975.

The modern gay movement appeared in the USA in the mid seventies as a defence movement when the evangelicals tried to exclude homosexuals from the labour market once more. But the fall of Fordism, together with inspiration from blacks and women caused a joint movement instead of fear and complaisance. From the beginning, solidarity with other marginalized was a dominating strategy. Lesbian women's engagement with women's movements was an obvious example; they supplied them with their most indefatigable activists but this also tended to make women's movements strange to many women. Homosexuals also began to advertise their disposition; this also spread over to Europe despite the fact that there was no mobilization for a strict gender-organising of society there. All in all, the successes of homosexuals have been quick a far-going - perhaps because there is no economic reason to discriminate them. Perhaps they don't fit into Tilly's pattern.

The economy-based discrimination is however very topical for disabled people. They have historically been reduced to a few professions or to the role as labour reserve, and sometimes also been attached to the role as an object for charity, so that the non-disabled would feel good. Local organising for mutual aid has been ubiquitous, and it has grown in the twentieth century. In the system center it have grown in a dialogue with growing social states and in the system peripheries it has been a part of the peoples' movement wave that followed on independence [73].

Inspired by the peoples' movement contemporaneousness of the sixties, and particularly by the black movement in USA, disabled people began around 1970 to go beyond their traditional program - mutual aid, consumer control of social services - and make demands for adjustment of the whole society to the conditions of the disabled. Some disabled students at the Berkeley University in USA during the Vietnam war era were pioneers, when they occupied social service offices to get their civil rights. Ten years after, in 1980, it got an international breakthrough; when the disabled's organisation organised globally it was as a protest against the paternalist approach of the welfare institutions. Mutual aid is still the principal aim for the disabled movements in the system periphery while consumer control is the principal aim in the system center, but even these aims are interpreted in civil rights terms.

I have earlier in this book described the action methods of peoples' movements as obstruction against repressive structures, infiltration or invasion of power organs, cooperative and non-repressive production of the necessities of the civil society, and tying together this with a popular culture. But the movements of discriminated categories have often had a weaker repertoire.

While women's movements almost never and pariah movements very seldom have attacked state and capital through obstruction of their functions, they have attached great importance to assaults of the prevailing cultural capital, by asserting the value and entitlement of their own habitus. This has been considered necessary to break the self-contempt in the discriminated category. Women have pursued feminist research or feminist theologies, blacks have maintained that "black is beautiful", dalits have ridiculed high-caste purification rules, and youths have grouped together in countercultures.

Cultural capital may be defined as power over the cultural codes, power to decide which habitus is the correct one - which habitus that has a high status as the saying goes [74].

The power over the cultural codes is partly detached from the power that arises from positions within state and capital. Power over the cultural codes is not as rooted in distinct institutions as are power over production and violence; the institutions that come closest like schools and media have not the extent of monopoly as have state and capital. Power over the cultural codes is also exercised within the civil society.
Generally, the cultural power is disproportionately exercised by upper classes, and there are certain upper class segments that have specialized in it, so-called intellectual elites. But since this power is less institutionalized and protected than economic or political power it is also more vulnerable, and both women's movements and pariah movements have been rather successful in making inroads.

Three factors have made these movements to consider struggle over cultural capital as particularly important.

Firstly, discriminated categories have a need to assert their own habitus and refuse to accept the opportunity hoarders' habitus as superior - because it is by disgracing the habitus of the discriminated categories they make their own monopoly legitimate. For that reason it seems reasonable to attack discrimination by primarily attacking the legitimation, and this is done most easily by trying to raise the status of their own habitus.

Secondly, the decreasing integrative ability of the society - see the end of chapter 2 - makes it less attractive to struggle for the equal citizenship in a welfare state in a nineteenth century manner. Instead there is a kind of renaissance of group identities or "group citizenships". Since the state seems unable to guarantee security, categories try to strengthen the borders to other categories, thereby creating protection for their members. What they might have strived to be integrated in appears increasingly irrelevant [75].

Thirdly, the present strategy of the world market system - commodification of language and life - is arguably a cause of making identities terrains of contention. The more capital tries to integrate symbols and language into its metabolism, the more important is it for categories to keep control over symbols and languages for what they see as priceless.

If such a cultural strategy has appeared as attractive, it has also has a price.

Firstly, the concentration on cultural struggles has resulted in elitism within the movements. Those who have a middle class education are more able to struggle for cultural capital than people without education, so women, blacks, indians, dalits etc from the middle classes have had greater opportunities than others to take part in this kind of practice and assert themselves within the movements.

Thereby, they have arguably strengthened middle class interests within the whole peoples' movement system. And it is possible that this has contributed to the marked disability of the peoples' movement system to defend the interests of the popular majority after 1973; the ability of the direct producers to use it to their defence has been weakened to the same extent that the ability of the middle class has been strengthened.

Secondly, it has resulted in a strong tendency to essentialism - to the closing of the frontiers of each category separately and their asserting that only their own category has a particular quality that the others don't have. And this has resulted in competition, treachery and in appealing to rulers and elites to consider the own category more than others; the rulers have of course used this as an opportunity to play different discriminated categories against each other [76].

Some would formulate it even more grimly. Because representatives of the discriminated have tended to demand culturally motivated particular rights for themselves instead of equal access to the rights of all, it has been easy for those who profit from discrimination to mobilize the majority against them. It has been easy to convince the majority that particular rights have been a threat to the interests of the majority [77]. And because representatives of the discriminated have emphasized what sets them apart from others it has been easier for upper classes with a need for discrimination between privileged and unprivileged to go on with that.

Thirdly, one may put in question that the cultural achievements women, blacks, dalits etc have made are substantial enough to justify practices with so dubious side-effects. As Tilly maintains, it is not the cultural status, the "prejudices", that decide the position of discriminated categories in society; it is the aspiration of discriminating in-groups to retain their profitable monopolies. The "prejudices" are a consequence, a way for the people included in the system to maintain the hierarchies and make them endurable. Only to try to change the cultural status would according to this approach not have any more lasting effect than a plaster - even if it may facilitate a breaking down of discrimination that is going on for other reasons. Perhaps a one-sided cultural struggle has no other effect than facilitating the cooptation of the leading representatives of a discriminated category into a mental apartheid, euphemistically called "multicultural society" [78].

But yet, one should not depreciate the need for a discriminated category to make its own habitus legitimate. The trick may be to do this as a less emphasized part in a many-sided strategy primarily aiming at political and economic self-assertion? When direct producers - discriminated or not - have asserted themselves economically and politically, they have also tended to assert themselves culturally, irrespective of their attaching any importance to it or not. Their habitus has simply been worth more when they have been economically and politically successful, at least in their own eyes, and they have then dared to behave more self-assuredly than before. The uniquely successful Nordic labour movement was able to dominate also culturally during the twenties and thirties, not by striving at it, but by asserting themselves through strikes, cooperation and electoral gains. Respect for the ability of the labour movement bred a respect for their habitus as well.

But for the moment, it is group assertion that dominates, which is a source of weakness for the peoples' movement society as a whole, and suggestions for cooperation has never reached farther than a list of desiderata. There is a common need with all discriminated to turn against the ability the privileged minorities to classify and sort out. But this hasn't so far got any expression in the form of programs, organisations or actions.

 

Footnotes

 

[1] David M. Gordon, Theories of poverty and underemployment, Lexington Books 1972; David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards & Michael Reich, Segmented work, divided workers, Cambridge University Press 1982.

[2] Charles Tilly, Durable inequality, University of California Press 1999

[3] Merry Wiesner, Spinning out capital, in Renate Bridental et al, Becoming visible - Women in European history, Houghton Mifflin 1998.

[4] Immanuel Wallerstein, Integration to What? Marginalization from What?", Scandinavian Political Studies XX, 4, 1997

[5] Gerda Lerner, The creation of patrarchy, Oxford University Press 1986.

[6] Marshall Sahlins, Tribesmen, Prentice-Hall 1968. According to Lerner however, it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who came up with the idea.

[7] This explanation has been forwarded by Claude Meillassoux, Maiden, meal and money, Cambridge University Press 1981.

[8] According to Robert Adams, The evolution of urban society, Aldine 1966.

[9] Men's and women's different power is also reflected in different legal rights. According to §6 of the mid-Assyrian law, for example, a man has the right to kill his children while a woman who makes an abortion is impaled. Killing as such is not punishable, just the woman's appropriation of it.

[10] Deniz Kandiyori, Islam and patriarchy, in Nikki R. Keddie & Beth Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History, Yale University Press 1991.

[11] Gerda Lerner, The creation of feminist consciousness, Oxford University Press 1993.

[12] Jo-Ann McNamara, Mater patriae, matres ecclesiae, in Renate Bridenthal et al, Becoming visible, Houghton Mifflin 1998. The literature about this is plentful; women in early Christianity is a favourite field for feminist research according to McNamara.

[13] Susan M. Stuard, The dominion of gender - How women fared in the high middle ages, in Renate Bridenthal et al, Becoming visible.

[14] Malcolm Lambert, Medieval heresy, Blackwell 1977.

[15] Lerner leaves out of consideration that patriarchy had had less time to root in North Europe than in the old agrarian empires. Sweden for example didn't even had a state until the mid thirteenth century. For that reason, women probably were more self-reliant in this region than further south.

[16] Leila Ahmed, Early Islam and the position of women, in Keddie & Baron, Women in Middle Eastern history; Barbara N. Ramusack & Sharon Sievers, Women in Asia, Indiana University Press 1999. About China's secret societies see Jean Chesneaux (ed), Popular movements and secret societies in China 1840-1950, Stanford University Press 1972.

[17] Dorothy Thompson, Women, work and politics in the nineteenth-century England; the problem of authority, in Jane Rendall (ed), Equal or different, Basil Blackwell 1987; and Merry Wiesner, Spinning out capital, in Renate Bridenthal et al, Becoming visible.

[18] The system has been described by Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical capitalism, Verso 1983, and more extensively by Joan Smith & Immanuel Wallerstein (ed), Creating and transforming households, Cambridge University Press 1992, and Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, meal and money.

[19] The principal proponent of gender specifiers of the commodity chain argument is Claudia von Werlhof, in for example The proletarian is dead, long live the housewife, in Joan Smith et al (ed), Households and the world-system, Sage 1984, and Wilma Dunaway, The double register of history, in Journal of World System Research VII:1. The "double register" is private/public, or household/market, or the small and the great.

[20] E.P. Thompson, The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, Past and Present, 1971; Malcolm I Thomis & Jennifer Grimmett, Women in protest 1800-1850, Croom Helm 1982. The bread seizures as a driving force in the development of peoples' movements are described by Charles Tilly, The contentious French, Harvard University Press 1986.

[21] Shirley Elson Roessler, Out of the shadows - women and politics in the French revolution 1789-95, Peter Lang Publishers 1996.

[22] Malcolm I Thomis & Jennifer Grimmett, Women in protest 1800-1850; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists, Pantheon 1984.

[23] Jane Rendall, The origin of modern feminism, Macmillan 1985; Karen Offen, European feminisms, Stanford University Press 2000.

[24] The slave revolution in Haiti and the almost successful revolt in Barbados in 1816 had greater impact in convincing the planters that slavery was unprofitable in the long run. And British capital was at this time less interested in slave trade than in exploiting West African palm oil which called for a labour market in West Africa.

[25] Louis Filler, Crusade against slavery, Reference Publications 1986; Julie Roy Jeffrey, The great silent army of abolition, University of North Carolina Press 1998.

[26] It never appeared to the abolitionist movement to appeal to the economic and political self-interest of the non-slave owning majority in the southern states to challenge the power of the planters. Liberation was and remained a moral concern. For that reason, the movement was easy to co-opt into the north side of the conflict against the south, instead of becoming a part of a popular self-assertion against the upper class.

[27] Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the women's movement, Routledge 1992.

[28] With a certain reservation. The American women's organisations often maintained that they deserved suffrage better than immigrants from Italy and Poland, and in the south women's organisations often used racist arguments. This is obviously an example of marginalized people easily trying to climb in the system at the expense of other marginalized people.

[29] Olive Banks, Faces of feminism, Martin Robertson 1981; Barbara Caine, English feminism 1780-1980, Oxford University Press 1997; Karen Offen, European feminism, Stanford University Press 2000.

[30] Charles Sowerwine, Socialists, feminism and the socialist women's movement from the French revolution to world war II, and Richard Stites, Women and the revolutionary process in Russia, respectively, in Renate Bridenthal et al, Becoming visible; Charles Sowerwine, Sisters or citizens?, Cambridge University Press 1982 deals with the (lack of) women's movement in France; Richard Evans, Comrades and sisters, Wheatsheaf Books 1987, deals with the strong social democrat women's movement in Germany; and Bianca Beccalli, The modern women's movement in Italy, in Monica Threlfall (ed), Mapping the women's movement, Verso 1996, touches also upon the Italian worker women's movement before 1914.

[31] Karen Offen, Contextualizing for theory and practice of feminism in nineteenth-century Europe, in Renate Bridenthal et al, Becoming visible.

[32] Barbara Caine, English feminism 1780-1980; Antonia Raeburn, The militant suffragettes, The New English Library 1974; and Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the women's movement.

[33] Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese revolution, University of California Press 1995.

[34] Johanna Brenner, The best of times, the worst of times: Feminism in the United States, in Monica Threlfall (ed), Mapping the women's movement.

[35] The conservatively authoritarian regimes in Central and Southern Europe, with their unequivocal hostility to the aims of the women's movements were less destructive for the self-assertion of women than the equally authoritarian development despotisms in Eastern Europe after 1945, with their official support for women's rights combined with an extremely selective implementation through paternalist reforms and prohibition of independent movements. In Central and Southern Europe, women's movement aims became a natural part of the democratic resistance. In Eastern Europe, women's movements are still, two decades after the fall of the communist parties, almost non-existent.

[36] An example is the Swedish social democrat women who succeeded in reformulating the old aim "how married women should be able to work for a salary" to the more acceptable "how working women should be able to rear children" - which muted resistance substantially although it is exactly the same.

[37] Flora Davis, Moving the mountain, University of Illinois Press 1999, is a comparably non-academic and detailed history of the American women's movement since the sixties. Her point of departure is however not the black citizen's movement but really an issue of labour market subordination - the strike of the airplane cabin attendants in 1963 against the low retirement age and the sexist motivation for this. For Denmark, Drude Dahlerup, Rødstrømperne, Gyldendal 1998, is even more detailed but confines itself to the period 1971-1986.

[38] Expressed as focus on equal legal rights - without considering that law doesn't decide the way opportunities are hoarded - versus focus on particular privileges for women - without considering that this would place women in a kind of clientship with those who guarantee the privileges.

[39] Monica Threlfall (ed) Mapping the women's movement, Verso 1996, deals with the "second wave" feminism in the system center. An older and more nearsighted book is Drude Dahlerup (ed), The new women's movement, Sage 1986.

[40] Joan Smith & Immanuel Wallerstein (ed), Creating and transforming households, Cambridge University Press 1992. - Ingrid Palmer has coined the expression "reproductive tax" to cover the burden laid on women in connection with government cuts of transfers and business cuts of wages. See Haleh Afshar & Carolyne Dennis (ed), Women and adjustment policies in the Third World, Macmillan 1992.

[41] Torry Dickinson, Preparing to understand Feminism in the twenty-first century, in Journal of World-System Research IV, 2/1998; Valentine M. Moghadam, Female labor and women's mobilization, Journal of World-System Research V, 2/1999, Amrita Basu (ed), The challenge of local feminisms, Westview Press 1995, and Bonnie Smith (ed), Global feminisms since 1945, Routledge 2000, are somewhat impressionistic overviews over the global women's movements.

[42] Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Minjung feminism; Korean women's movement for gender and class liberation, in Bonnie Smith, Global feminism since 1945, Routledge 2000; and Hagen Koo, Korean workers, the culture and politics of class formation, Cornell University Press 2002.

[43] Wilhelmina Odoul & Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira, The mother of warriors and her daughters; in Amrita Basu (ed), The challenge of local feminisms. You can get a picture of the manifoldness in Sheila Rowbotham & Swasti Mitter (ed), Dignity and daily breads, Routledge 1994; Ann Leonard, Seeds, The Feminist Press at The City University of New York 1989, and Seeds 2, ditto 1995. Regrettably, the two latter have a perspective of "we", the clever people in the north, helping "them" to "development".

[44] Jane S. Jaquette (ed), The women's movement in Latin America, Westview Press 1994; Kathleen Logan, Women's participation in urban protest, in Joe Foweraker & Ann Craig (ed), Popular movements and political change in Mexico, Lynne Rienner 1990; Yvonne Corcoran Nantes, Female consciousness or feminist consciousness; women's consciousness rising in community based struggles in Brazil, in Bonnie Smith, Global feminisms since 1945.

[45] Sonia E. Alvarez, The transformation of feminisms and gender politics in democratizing Brazil, in Jane S. Jaquette (ed), The women's movement in Latin America.

[46] Gail Omvedt, Reinventing revolution, M.E. Sharpe 1993; Radha Kumar, From Chipko to Sati, in Amrita Basu (ed), The challenge of local feminisms. Bride murders refer to the growing habit within the urban middle class to let sons marry girls to get the dowry and then kill the girls. - It's strange that Islamist fundamentalism has got such a bad reputation while few seem to have noticed that one of the program points of the Hinduist fundamentalists is the right to burn widows alive.

[47] For example Peter Waterman, Globalisation, solidarity and new social movements, Mansell/Cassell 1998.

[48] Nancy Saporta Sternbach et al, Feminisms in Latin America: From Bogotá to San Bernardo, in Arturo Escobar & Sonia Alvarez, The making of social movements in Latin America, Westview Press 1992; Yvonne Corcoran Nantes, Female consciousness or feminist consciousness; women's consciousness rising in community based struggles in Brazil, in Bonnie Smith, Global feminisms since 1945.

[49] David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards & Michael Reich, Segmented work, divided workers, Cambridge University Press 1982; Charles Tilly, Durable inequality.

[50] Joan Smith & Immanuel Wallerstein (ed), Creating and transforming households.

[51] I have used a concept that was popular a hundred years ago at least in Sweden, and called pseudo-ethnically downgraded people "pariahs". This word derives etymologically from the name of a South Indian low status group, pariya, assigned to scavenging.

[52] The classic among black historians of the USA is John Hope Franklin, From slavery to freedom, Alfred A Knopf 1967 (first edition 1947); this is however rather white-washed. Supplementing histories are Cedric Robinson, Black movements in America, Routledge 1997, and Michael L. Coniff & Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas, St. Martin's Press 1994. The civil rights movements are documented in Jack E. Davis (ed), The civil rights movement, Blackwell 2001, Charles Eagles (ed), The civil rights movement in America, University Press of Mississippi 1984, and Harvard Sitkoff, The struggle for black equality, Hill & Wang 1981.

[53] Raymond Gavins, The NAACP in North Carolina during the age of segregation, in Jack E. Davis (ed), The civil rights movement.

[54] Nancy Weiss, Creative tensions in the leadership of the civil rights movement, in Charles Eagles (ed), The civil rights movement in America, University Press of Mississippi 1986.

[55] The overwhelming majority of the two million convicts in USA are blacks, sentenced for possession of marijuana, according to Punishment and prejudice: Racial disparities in the war on drugs, Human Rights Watch 2000. Whites also use marijuana but are not convicted for it. And ex-convicts lose the suffrage in all states except four.

[56] Thomas F. Jackson, The state, the movements and the urban poor, in Michael B. Katz, The underclass debate, Princeton University Press 1993.

[57] C.L.R. James, The black Jacobins, Allison & Busby 1994.

[58] Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Black movements and the "Politics of identity" in Brazil, in Sonia Alvarez et al (ed), Culture of politics, politics of cultures, Westview Press 1998.

[59] Michael L. Conniff & Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas.

[60] The literature on Indian movements have a strong bias to "identities" and tend to pass by politics. Alison Brysk, From tribal village to global village,; Indian rights and international relations in Latin America, Stanford university Press 2000, has the most encompassing coverage for Latin America; it may be supplemented by Stephen Cornell, The return of the native, Oxford University Press 1988 for North America. Greg urban & Joel Sherzer (ed), Nation-state and Indians in Latin America, University of Texas Press 1991; Kay Warren, Indigenous movements and their critics; Pan-Maya activism in Guatemala, Princeton University Press 1998; Silvia Rivera Cusicanque, oppressed but not defeated, Peasant struggles among the Aymara and the Qhechwa in Bolivia 1900-1980, UNRISD 1987; Diego Cornejo Menacho (ed), Indios - Una reflexión sobre el levantamiento indigena de 1990, Ildis/El Duende/Abya-Yala 1991, and Marc Becker, My land is Cayambe; the role of Ecuador's modern Indian movement, unpublished, cover different regions.

[61] Rodney Davenport & Christopher Saunders, South Africa - a modern history, Macmillan 2000 has details for 800 pages; Robert Ross A concise history of South Africa, Cambridge University Press 1999, says as much in a fraction of the space but is almost too laconic to be intelligible.

[62] Anthony W. Marx, Lessons of struggle - South African internal opposition 1960-1990, Oxford University Press 1992; Tom Lodge (ed), All, here, and now: black politics in South Africa in the 1980s, Hurst 1992; and William Cobbet & Robin Cohen, Popular struggles in South Africa, Review of African Political Economy 1987.

[63] Conveyed in several articles, for example in Media Monitors Network 23.4.2001 and in the article The only alternative, published in several places, among others at Zmag.

[64] Baruch Kammerling & Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians, the making of a people, The Free Press 1993; Christopher Parker, Resignation or revolt? Sociopolitical development and the challenge of peace in Palestine, I.B. Tauris 1999.

[65] Dalit movements before the twentieth century is described by T.K. Oommen, Protest and change, Sage 1990; modern Dalit movement by Sion Charsley & G.K. Karanth,m Challenging untouchability - Dalit initiative and experience from Karnataka, Sage 1998 and Gail Omvedt, Reinventing revolution, M.E. Sharpe 1993. Dalit peasant movements are described in Ronki Ram, Untouchability, Dalit conscioushess and the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab, Punjab University without year, and Arvind N. Das, Bihar's lawless ways, Unesco Courier 2/1999.

[66] Humbert S. Nelli, From immigrants to ethnics, The Italian Americans, Oxford University Press 1984; Timothy Walch (ed), Immigrant America, Garland 1994.

[67] The methods are described by the leader Saul Alinsky in Rules for radicals, Vintage 1971, and the movement history by Donald Reitzes & Dietrich Reitzes, The Alinsky legacy, alive and kicking, Research in social movements, conflicts and change, JAI Press 1987.

[68] Tage Lindbom, Den svenska fackföreningsrörelsens uppkomst, Tiden 1938. Mass movement organisation was seen as the only way of countering the decreasing wages of due to increased supply of immigrant workers with no expectations of a decent life.

[69] Mike Brake, The sociology of youth culture and youth subcultures, Routledge 1981.

[70] Simon Ford, The Situationist International : a user's guide, Black Dog Publishing 2005. The most widespread situationist inspired youth movement was however probably the Dutch Provies, see Teun Voeten: Dutch Provos, High Times, jan 1990.

[71] Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and disorder, protest and politics in Italy 1965-1975, Clarendon Press 1989.

[72] Barry Adam, The rise of gay and lesbian movement, Twayne 1987, Margaret Cruikshank, Gay and lesbian liberation movement, Routledge 1992.

[73] Diane Driedger, The last civil rights movement - Disabled People's International, Hurst & Company 1989; Joseph P. Shapiro, No pity - People with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement, Times Books 1993 is about USA.

[74] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, Routledge 1979.

[75] Immanuel Wallerstein, Integrating to what?, Marginalization from what? Scandinavian Political Studies XX, 4, 1997.

[76] Slavoj Zizek suggests that essentialist "ethnic" movements may even contribute to a strengthening of categorization and casteness; they are forced in their aspiration to mark their own exclusivity to appeal to rulers for guaranteeing this exclusivity and make thereby themselves into clients. Zizek's alternative is to assert the equal rights of all, for example expressed as citizenship (Slavoj Zizek, Class struggle or postmodernism - Yes please, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau & Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, hegemony, universality, Contemporary dialogues on the left, Verso 2000. Boris Kagarlitsky raises the same critique in The return of Radicalism; reshaping the Left institutions, Pluto Press 2000, as does Charles Tilly in Social movements 1769-2004, Paradigm Publishers 2004. To appeal to category differences is to strengthen them, says Tilly, and this enfeebles the democratic impulses which always feed from weakened category differences.

[77] Brian Barry, Culture and equality, Polity 2001. Barry points particulary to the USA with its weak tradition of equality demands and strong tradition of culturally motivated particularisms which has been an easy prey for elitists mobilizing on fear for the culturally aberrants to get a mandate to pursue benefits for the rich.

[78] Charles Tilly, Durable inequality, University of California Press 1999.