As I emphasised in the chapter on crises and long
kondratiev waves, see also here, channelling
resources into something useful does not happen by itself. No
government
would embark on such a far-reaching project without being forced
to. It takes something like the French Revolution, the revolutions
of 1848, the emerging trade union movement or the anti-colonial
movements to make it happen in earnest. Politicians are about
as comfortable as the rest of us and need a good blowtorch up
their arse to get moving.
In the 1930s, Sweden was one of the
pioneers of Keynesian policies, so for those who want to contribute
to change today, it may be
of interest to recall how it was that this small, remote country
was able to become a model for the whole world and, together
with the United States, inspire the post-war Kondratiev cycle
and the radical reform and restructuring policies that came with
it.
We had some advantages. The social pyramid was
fairly broad and low; since the successful peasant revolts of
the late Middle
Ages, the peasants had a mortgage on power, and both the aristocracy
and the bourgeoisie were poor by European standards. Popular
initiatives therefore did not meet with as much resistance as
in many other countries. Literacy was high, as was the relative
purchasing power of the peasantry, giving rise to a high-tech
industry around 1900 where it was relatively easy to organise
trade unions.
The mobilization wave of the early 1900s
Peasants
and the lower middle class in Sweden tended to be organised in
popular movements for temperance and freethinking since the
mid-19th century, and the labour movement that emerged with industrialisation
therefore had plenty of potential allies, including the peace
movement and the movement for universal suffrage. People
got used to setting their demands high.
Still, the beginning
was difficult. The first really big struggle, the Great Strike
of 1909, was lost by the workers. The trade
unions barely survived, and the Labour Party became extremely
cautious for a few years.
In the final stages of the First World
War, this became an impossible policy. Food shortages arose in
the warring countries and it
became more profitable to export food there than to sell it to
the Swedish urban population. Food shortages therefore began
to arise in Sweden too, at the same time as the profitability
of the war-exporting industry increased. As a result, trade unions
began to mobilise to avoid falling too far behind.
The first to take action were the workers in Västervik.
After the stone workers went on strike and demanded higher bread
rations, a general meeting of the people decided on 17 April
1917 to ration food in the town on their own and distribute it
fairly. In good Swedish compromise fashion, however, the regular
authorities were invited to the actions and all planning took
place in complete transparency. Shop stewards from the city’s
main trade unions were elected to the action committee. Among
the demands that were quickly met were increased rations and
free garden allotments.
The example from Västervik was well received
and similar actions were organised in about a hundred places
in the country,
with an estimated participation of around a quarter of a million.
In some places, things got much tougher than in Västervik.
In both Göteborg and Stockholm, street battles broke out
between workers and police. In Ådalen and Härnösand,
battles almost broke out between the military and workers armed
with dynamite, but Social Democratic leaders managed to calm
the atmosphere. In Västerås, conscripted soldiers
joined the movement. In Seskarö near Haparanda, the entire
community was occupied for a few days after a bakery was looted
as a jointly planned action and the police arrested individuals
at random.
At the same time, strikes spread among groups that
had previously been far removed from the labour movement, such
as farm workers
and women textile workers.
The movement wave was quite successful.
Influenced by this, as well as by the revolution in Russia, and
later in the winter
also in the whole of Central Europe, the government accepted
several demands that the labour movement had been putting forward
for years, such as universal equal suffrage and the eight-hour
day. Trade unions suddenly gained enormous prestige. Membership
rates, which had been around 10-20 per cent, increased rapidly.
And
the activist spirit from Västervik lasted throughout
the twenties. The strike wave of the twenties is the most powerful
in Swedish history.
Labour conflicts in Sweden 1903-2005. The strike wave of the
1920s is visible as a large block to the left. Source: wikipedia.
The longest strike lasted seven years, from 1924
to 1931, and was carried out by forestry workers in Burträsk
in Västerbotten,
who held out thanks to the fact that they also had small farms.
The strikebreakers did not last long in the villages. In the
end, the company accepted the workers’ demands. Almost
as long was the strike at Skyllberg mill near Askersund in 1925-30.
Most
of the actions were of course shorter, but could still be quite
dramatic.
Perhaps the most notorious was the mining conflict
at Stripa near Lindesberg in 1925-27. It even toppled a government
that
did not want to agree to the employment agency of the time providing
work during a strike, but was defeated by the Riksdag on the
issue. However, the strike ended with the workers' demands for
a wage increase being met to some extent.
Less well known to posterity
are, for example, the mining strike in Malmberget in 1920, which
was won by the workers, a strike
at Scania-Vabis in Södertälje in the same year, which
unfortunately led to the company's bankruptcy, and a series of
strikes among municipal workers in Sundsvall in the first half
of the twenties, which came to nothing due to the city's relentless
use of scabs. Construction workers building the central hospital
in Västerås went on strike in July 1924, a strike
that lasted into the next year. A strike that led to riots in
Malmö began
in 1926 at A W Nilsson’s pram
factory and lasted two years, ending in compromise. And in 1921,
bakers and waiters at Bräutigam’s posh confectionery
in Gothenburg went on strike. In total, 885
strikes were organised between 1915 and 1930, with a total of
182,000 participants.
However, this strike activity was only
the engine and the most visible example of a popular movement
culture that characterised
the whole of society. Co-operative enterprises ran everything
from supermarkets to power stations. Temperance lodges organised
recreational and youth activities in smaller communities. Most
politicians of the era were educated at folk high schools, many
of which were run by non-profit and interest-based organisations
and characterised by a populist spirit. And never have so many
self-taught people from working-class and smallholder homes dominated
the culture.
As
the Norwegian trade unionist Asbjørn Wahl
has noted, the Social Democrats’ long-standing position
of power after 1932 was not due to nicely asking business to ”participate
at the table” – it was due to the labour movement
having earned respect through mobilisation and struggle. As
has been shown elsewhere, workers’ strikes don’t
even have to pay off in direct terms to produce politically positive
results – it is enough for workers to earn respect.
The business and former elites realised that it was better to
try to reach an agreement than to continue with the highest level
of conflict in the world.
”Agreement” in this case meant that
the labour movement and the business community agreed on an economic
model where
the public sector promoted full economic activity via Keynesian
economics, that the business community took care of itself within
this framework, that wages increased in parallel with productivity – and
that the government and the leadership of the labour movement
ruthlessly cracked down on those who questioned the agreement.
The
long-term erosion of their own power in this way was of no
concern to them; revitalising the economy after the speculative
boom of the 1920s was the overriding goal, everything else was
secondary.
Some popular movement theory
Can something similar be done today?
Hopefully in a less devastating long-term way?
Firstly, a general
new cycle of conditioning based on radical reductions in energy
and raw material consumption must be global.
Not least because energy and commodity markets are global. However,
as already indicated in the introduction, the let-go politics
and the lack of popular mobilisation that is its precondition
are mostly concentrated in Europe and North America. It is in
Europe and North America that governments most ruthlessly support
the financial economy over the real economy. It is in Europe
and North America that trade union organisations seem unable
to rally to anything more drastic than one-day demonstration
strikes, and it is also there that other mobilisations most seem
to take the form of ”see us – we exist”. So
that is where change is most urgently needed.
Now, the actions
or inactions of central trade union organisations are not the
decisive factor. Both the strike movement in Sweden
in the 1920s and the strike movement in the USA in the 1930s
were initiated locally, often against the wishes of the central
trade union organisations. In both Sweden and the USA, the latter
were so overwhelmed by their theoretical knowledge that recession
and unemployment put workers at a disadvantage that they did
not dare to take industrial action. The rank-and-file members
did not have this knowledge, took the fight and won – at
least in the long run.
In doing so, they
were representative of a strong global trend. Major changes have never been implemented
by large, well-established
organisations, but by local initiatives. Land reform as a global
twentieth-century policy was initiated in 1910 by some peasants
in the Mexican village of Anenecuilco who sowed maize in a field
stolen from them by the sugar plantation and mobilised other
villages to do the same. The modern labour movement in Europe
was started by a bronze casters’ strike in Paris in 1867,
which mobilised a campaign against international strikebreaking
for its protection. The Indian independence movement, key to
twentieth century decolonisation, started in earnest as a delivery
strike by a few farmers in Champaran in Bihar in 1917. Since
then, it has taken organisations to sustain a viable movement,
but the initiative has always been taken on a local issue that
had a bearing on a general problem, and by relatively few.
This holds true even for modern times. Sidney
Tarrow concludes in his thesis on the Italian wave of popular movements
around
1970 that all important initiatives were taken by local people.
Then newly formed organisations could take over, primarily as
collaborations between such local initiatives.
These then pushed the large, well-established organisations ahead
of them, primarily because these were afraid of being overtaken
by the new organisations and/or because membership initiatives
broke through the inertial self-defence of ”this is how
we have always done it” and energised the organisations.
And the relatively well-organised Norwegian movement against
privatisation of welfare started as a local uprising to save
a hospital threatened with closure, which spread across the country
to protect other local hospitals threatened with closure, gradually
supported by more and more old, well-established organisations.
And so did the strike movements that resulted in
the post-war Kondratiev cycle. In Sweden, it was the very small
workers’ organisation
SAC that coordinated at least a third of the strikes and persuaded
a reluctant LO to join in. In the USA, it was the newly formed
Congress of Industrial Organization, CIO, that coordinated the
strikes and only afterwards persuaded the old trade union centre
AFL to welcome the initiative.
So the lack of initiative today
cannot be attributed to old, sluggish, bureaucratised organisations,
however obvious this
may be. Rather, it lies in weak grassroots initiatives, and poor
conflict organisation when initiatives are taken anyway and could
give rise to something lasting.
Poor organisation can be of three
kinds.
The first is elitism. Organising is carried out,
or attempted to be carried out, by people who are convinced that
they know
better than the average participants in the movement. Frances
Tuuloskorpi has described how a possible trade union revolt
against the neo-liberal model in the late eighties came unstuck
after
it was flooded with people from overwintered left-wing sects,
all trying to foist their (different) theories and strategies
on the participants. The whole thing felt as top-down as the
traditional trade union center model they were trying to transcend,
and people turned away in disgust.
The second, spontaneism, is
probably more common and could be described as ”it will
all work out”, i.e. nobody
organises anything at all, sometimes out of laziness, sometimes
out of exaggerated hopes that it will work out spontaneously.
Since the old ombudsman-driven organisations were discredited
by the popular movement wave of the 1970s, dissidents have tended
to take for granted that all organising is evil and automatically
leads to repression and stifling of all initiatives. Major mobilisations
such as the Occupy movement in the US, the Indignados in Spain
and the mobilisations against the Greek sell-off to the EU’s
enforcers have therefore tended
to fizzle out, or at least to
behave far less vigorously than their counterparts in Sweden
in the twenties and in the US in the thirties – or equivalent
movements in the South. And therefore easier for the powers that
be to ignore.
The third is perhaps the most common, the patronage
model, or ”go
home and vote the right way in the next election”, or,
even worse, ”buy the right goods” or ”donate
a penny”. It would not be worth mentioning if it were not
so internalised among us lay people ourselves, who tend to deny
our own agency and resourcefulness, and are content to blame
the problems on the authorities and companies that once helped
create them. This may take the form of limiting ourselves to
buying eco-labelled products, or writing letters to the authorities,
or petitioning or questioning the parties. There’s nothing
wrong with doing that, but in the current situation we also need
something that is perceived as a threat. Something that, in the
context of the global system, is comparable to the popular movements
that led to the end of speculation and the beginning of a period
of production in previous eras – something comparable to
the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the rise of labour
movements or the anti-colonial movements.
It is to be noted that
the patronage model is equally counterproductive whether we believe
politicians for good or bad. Even the social
democrats of the 1930s could not have achieved anything without
tangible help from their own base. The structural forces that
must be overcome are so great that a small number of parliamentarians
could not do anything on their own even if they wanted to. The
International’s words ”Our own right hand the chains
must shiver” are not an expression of revolutionary romanticism
but of down-to-earth realism. There is no other way.
What then
can be perceived as a threat? Anything that violates the order.
As
Johan Asplund has noted, in private life it is even perceived
as a threat if someone refuses to greet, because it violates
the established order.
In the public sphere, where the issue of society’s use
of resources is decided, a breach of the public order is needed
for it to count. At the same time, it is an advantage to demonstrate
in action new, better orders – it creates more respect.
Public
order offences committed by popular movements in order to gain
respect change
form rather slowly throughout history.
At any given time, they stick to a certain repertoire. This is
practical, because it is good to be able to take a collective
decision on the matter without much confusion, and that everyone
knows what should be done.
It is possibly this mechanism that is responsible for the lame
defence of social rights in Sweden – there is no common
repertoire to follow, old repertoires are forgotten, new ones
have not yet developed.
So established repertoires are good. But
it is often when people invent new repertoires that they are
most successful – provided
they find favour with those who are supposed to contribute to
them. For old repertoires eventually become part of the ’order’ and
become less effective.
At the beginning of the new era, when bureaucratic
state organisations were consolidating and waging war with each
other at great cost,
the common model of action was tax
revolt.
The villages attacked the treasurer and burned his house, and
in serious cases marched together to the capital. They were often
beaten up, but just as often the tax was reduced anyway. This
method fell out of favour in Western Europe at the end of the
17th century, partly because wars actually became less devastating
and partly because villages were fragmented and the wealthy were
given government jobs. The
last such rebellion in Sweden took place in 1743.
In European colonies, they continued into the 20th century.
Instead,
bread
seizures became
more common. This was because food prices started to follow the ”market” and
therefore sometimes tended to to rise faster than people’s
incomes. The bread riots involved the townspeople confiscating
all the bread and selling it in the marketplace for a fixed traditional
low price. This practice persisted in Western Europe until around
1850. In Sweden, as shown earlier in this chapter, it was alive
until 1917 and in South America, for example, it still is to
this day. The method is strictly localised, but when many bread
riots occur at the same time, they can topple regimes as in France
in 1789, in Russia in 1917, and in Argentina in 2001.
In the mid-19th
century, strikes become
more common than bread riots in Western Europe, as it proves
easier to raise wages than
to lower prices.
The strike as a method only becomes really popular with big industry
and the assembly line, which makes it easy to organise and carry
out – basically you just need to turn off the power. In
the US this took place in the 1930s, in Western Europe in the
1960s, in Brazil in the 1970s, in South Korea in the 1980s, etc.
In China it is taking place today, and indeed strikes there have
hit record levels since 2005.
There are also plenty of sub- and
side-organised repertoires.
Boycotts of businesses to drive them
out of business are probably ancient but got their current name
in the context of the great
struggle for land reform in Ireland in the 1880s, when, incidentally,
it played a subordinate role to going slow with the rents. Boycotts
of segregated businesses were the main initial repertoire of
the American civil rights movement, and the boycott of South
African goods in the 1980s was perhaps the most geographically
widespread political action ever, successfully complementing
the strikes that took place inside South Africa.
Site occupations
have proved powerful as an adjunct to strikes, for example in
the US labour movement of the 1930s, as a means
of preventing strikebreaking and taking the expensive machinery
hostage. Occupation has also been widely used by environmental
and youth movements, but mainly as a way to gain a physical platform
in a campaign. Farm labour movements have also used squatting
to seize land that should be feeding them rather than lying idle,
and homeless people have done so to make good use of houses left
empty for speculative reasons. A special case of occupation is
temporary ones to prevent officials and politicians from leaving
or entering a premises; pioneers here were the Indian independence
movement who called the phenomenon encirclement, or gherao in
Hindi.
And in this context, it can be pointed out that
standard repertoires can also be infinitely varied. Strikes can
be ”rolling” i.e.
moving from one department to another, they can be limited to
overtime or certain types of actions such as taking payment,
or filling in forms, they can even be ”reverse” i.e.
doing what the management forbids you to do, in extreme cases
to keep a company going when the owner wants to close down as
in Argentina in the years around 2000. Boycotts and occupations
can be combined, as can bread riots and strikes.
Each of the repertoires
has a dual purpose. Firstly, to implement their programme – cut
taxes, lower the price of bread, raise wages. But also to gain
respect and establish their executors
as a serious negotiating partner. Repertoires are expensive for
the other party, both in terms of money and in terms of reputation;
ideally he would like to avoid them in the future and may therefore
be tempted to accommodate. But more importantly, they empower
participants as agents of change at the community level, as they
see what they can do. At best, this also makes them move on and
set higher and further goals – whereas before they probably
did not even think of themselves as public actors.
As in Anenecuilco,
Champaran and Västervik, where local
action determined much of twentieth-century history.
But such
a broadening of objectives is hardly possible without local actions
being coordinated by a movement publicity. Events
are just dust that quickly settles. They must be accumulated
in institutions to become effective.
An institution is an enduring
thing that, by its very existence, guides our expectations, actions
and thinking in a certain direction,
even when nothing in particular is happening. For example, the
Swedish Worker’s Education Association ABF exists by organising
courses and programmes, but ABF also ’exists’ at
night when there is no activity going on. Our ancestors a hundred
years ago were good at creating institutions. Today we are bad
at it; today it seems that almost only the state and business
can do it.
This weakens us, because it steers our actions
and our thinking in the directions that the state and business
want.
Even movement public spheres and movement institutions require
active initiatives to be realised.
The simplest type of movement
publicity is the permanent organisation, usually a national organisation
with local groups. A permanent
organisation can have different focuses.
The earliest ones took
the form of what we now call campaigns, i.e. they were entirely
devoted to coordinating outreach activities
such as demonstrations, mass meetings, publicity, etc. on a particular
issue. Such campaigning organisations emerged in the mid-18th
century in Western Europe to complement boycotts; one of the
very first was the North American Continental Association in
1774 to fight what was perceived as illegal taxation by the British
government; early examples were also the Committee for Abolition
of Slave Trade in England in 1787 and the Catholic Association
in Ireland in 1823, which pushed for equality for Catholics and
invented the paid mass membership.
Campaign organisations still
exist, of course, and have expanded their presence dramatically
since the 1970s. Their
problem is the cherry-picking syndrome, i.e. they like to
focus on what attracts the most attention in the moment, tend
to be
parochial about
other movement initiatives, and often don’t care about
what is needed in the longer term and what is most important.
A greater focus on real permanence and comprehensiveness
in the form of a kind of parallel society first came with the
labour
and anti-colonial movements, although I suspect they owe some
debt of thought to Freemasonry, directly or via radical republican
groups such as the Carboneri in Italy in the early 19th century,
and perhaps also to churches, religious sects and in the case
of China to the traditional Chinese secret societies. However,
it was only when combined with mass membership that they became
effective, able to coordinate large campaigns, manage successes
and survive setbacks on a larger scale. Such organisations have
a greater capacity to act as movement publicity than campaign
organisations, but at the same time have a strong tendency to
bureaucratise, i.e. to devote themselves to what
is most beneficial to the paid agents and their job security and to sabotage, consciously
and unconsciously, any initiative by members that goes in a different
direction.
The latter has, at least temporarily, discredited such organisations
and they are no longer as powerful as they once were.
Effective
movement organisations can also be built around small institutions.
During the 1832-48 movement wave in England, the
privately owned Northern
Star newspaper served
as such by giving generous coverage to everything that happened
in the movement; however, this was due to the involvement of
the owner Feargus O’Connor and disappeared with his changing
interests. Such mini-institutions are also happy to appropriate
the very worst odours of NGO-ism.
Powerful actions tend to be
able to function as a public sphere during their duration. Both
the Elm
Battle and
Occupy Wall Street became centres of popular movements in their
respective places. And occupations of buildings can last long
enough to leave their mark, such as Amsterdam’s occupied
buildings in the 1970s and the archipelago of occupied cultural
centres in many Italian cities.
Since the 1972
UN conference in Stockholm,
parallel summits have acted
as movement publics, such as Cúpula
dos Povos in Rio de Janeiro in 2012;
however, such meetings are perhaps too sporadic to be really
effective.
Whatever their form, permanent movement public
spheres are needed where discussions can be held and initiatives
taken.
The shortcomings
of all their forms are problems to be lived with; if they do
not individually and collectively meet all the requirements,
new organisations will have to be created to fill the gap. The ”One
Permanent Organisation” that fixes everything is probably
obsolete; what is needed is perhaps a plethora of semi-permanent
ones that can cope with both cooperation and conflict, and which
can be supplemented by new ones as they relax. But even such
organisations must be built, actively.
And they must be built
with inclusion in mind. The neoliberal impulse, which unfortunately
includes the opposition to the neoliberal
programme, is to create brands and to compete. This only brings
minorities together and pits them against each other in a battle
of all against all for attention and prestige. And it will not
bring about the necessary social changes. These can only be achieved
with the help of majorities.
Something about identity politics
and majorities
Both the need to include majorities and the need
for co-operation and conflict argue against political parties
as movement publics.
Parties may be indispensable in turning movement mobilisations
into government policy – but there is a long way to go.
The fetishisation of parties as the ultimate form of movement
organisation and movement publicity probably has more to do with
the successes of the early twentieth century acting as a filter
between us and today's political world than with serious reflection
on what we need. There is nothing more misleading than old successes.
From
the late 19th century until around 1968, the world of popular
movements was dominated by broad mass movements with a broadly
overarching goal. In the developed countries of the North, the
labour movement was hegemonic; in the developing countries of
the South, the national liberation movements were. With their
alignment with state power and the world market, and the rebellion
against this by large parts of their base, they have lost their
hegemonic position and life has become more ”normal” – many
movements with sometimes diametrically opposed goals emerge without
anyone being able to gain the upper hand. As a result, they can
easily be played off against each other and the supremacy can
remain unchallenged.
Much ideologising has taken place around
this phenomenon. Supporters of the status quo have of course
applauded it and declared it
inevitable. But representatives of many popular movements have
also understandably defended the narrow interests of their movement
and asserted the supremacy of their ”identity”, thereby
implying the purity and incompatibility of all ”identities”.
This
is particularly true of the North Atlantic countries, where the
situation has so far not been entirely desperate, and where
movements have tended to be represented by ideologues. In the
South, where practical considerations and interests have dominated
and movements have been represented more by mass organisers,
it has often been easier to reconcile these interests, and there
has been less focus on ”identities”. For example,
at the Cúpula dos povos in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012,
it was not difficult to come up with reasonable joint action
programmes.
Focusing on interests and not on identities would
also help here in Sweden. Interests can be formulated to benefit
many, even
a large majority; identities must of necessity separate into
ever smaller coteries. We cannot do anything about what we are,
and it is therefore pointless to argue about. What we do, on
the other hand, can be influenced and made into policy. And as
an
unprivileged underclass, there is only
quantity to put behind the words. Anything less than a majority – and
a fairly large majority at that – is insufficient.
Building
majorities is therefore the only way to satisfy who you are.
***
The
popular mobilisations that led to previous Kondratiev cycles,
or ”good times”, hardly had these in mind when they
mobilised. They were fighting for justice and bread. The Kondratiev
cycles were an outcome, one that depended on the response of
elites to these mobilisations, and aimed to entice the more established
members of the movement to defect, or were at best compromises.
That
is how it will be now too.
There are endless injustices to mobilise
against, endless deprivations. From stingy pay deals contrasted
with what the bosses grant themselves,
to sell-offs of council housing and ore deposits to so-called
venture capitalists, to institutionalised humiliation when looking
for work or falling ill. The mobilisations will be about such
things. Around this, semi-permanent organisations will be formed,
large and small, which together will contribute to a popular
movement culture that creates a hegemony, which forces the authorities
to negotiate.
Negotiate on the issues at stake in the mobilisations,
but also on the long-term direction of society.
In general, it
can be said that the ability of the lower classes to extract
something from these negotiations has grown over time.
The first cycle, around 1800, based on canals and textile machinery,
gave citizenship to the middle classes but very little to ordinary
people. It was only the next one, around 1850, that began to
allow even skilled labourers into the fold. And only the one
around 1900 that recognised the citizenship of all (Europeans).
The
latest cycle, the one that took place after 1950, yielded the
most of all so far – citizenship for everyone worldwide,
at least in theory, and social rights both in the old industrialised
countries and new industrialising countries. But unlike in the
past, the results do not seem to have been lasting. I have argued
above that this was because the compromise was, if not overreaching,
at least on the wrong issues. That the compromise meant demobilisation,
and that the leaders of the popular movements set themselves
the task of ensuring that this demobilisation took place. Which
in itself meant that they had already acquired such a position
within the movement that this was possible.
A future compromise
must not be so short-sighted.
A future compromise must fulfil
the boundary conditions of the popular majority. And these boundary
conditions include the ability
to protect the gains made.
But also to maintain the ability to
move forward when necessary. For no Kondratiev cycle lasts forever,
and we were ill-prepared
for the end of the last one. Partly because the people’s
movement’s need for self-renewal was hampered by concern
for the smooth administration of the system.
Such care can usefully
be left to minions. The rest of us will have to move on. Left
to its own devices, a new Keynesian-inspired
investment policy will run amok and/or end in a new wave of
speculation worse than the last. It happened last time, it will
surely happen
again. Therefore, popular movements need to lead the development,
not become nice helpers as they were then.
