booms & social movements

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Thu Nov 18 08:36:48 PST 1999



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prosperity and Protest
>
> During times of prosperity, social movements focusing on moral issues
> come to the fore.
>
> ERA ECONOMY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
>
> 1846-1857 Gold rush, railroad boom Abolitionism,
> communal living
> experiments
>
> 1896-1907 Gilded Age Progressive era,
> prohibitionism
>
> 1922-1929 Consumer buying spree, Nativism, anti-immigration
> stock-market boom measures
>
> 1950s Post-World War II boom Civil-rights movement
>
> 1960s Boom continues Vietnam War protests, youth
> rebellion
> Late 1990s Information-age economy ???
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Funny list in that it manages to ignore every upsurge of union and economic movements, from the 1830s takeoff to the 1860s post-Civil War boom to the Populist era to the 1910s to the Depression era. Pretty much muckup their analysis, wouldn't it?

It seems like very warmed over "new social movements" analysis which tried so hard to section off "social" from "economic" protest, which only worked then with a nice opposition between a conservative bread-and-butter union movement versus non-union based social protest.

This nice division is extremely hard to do with the convergence of protests over the WTO and globalization, partly due to the convergence of issues and partly because the labor movement is increasingly energized by a broader social set of concerns and the radical non-union movements are increasingly effected by economic justice concerns.

--Nathan Newman



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list