Notes towards a politics of knowledge

Hillary Wainwright

 

We are at a distinct and historically significant moment in the politics of knowledge - in the relation, that is, of understandings of knowledge to the transformation of political and economic power.
It is a moment when social movement activists, including activist researchers and also movement activists who are at the same time members of political parties, have become conscious of social movements – including potentially the trade union movement – as producers of knowledge. More than this, we have become conscious that this process of knowledge production is essential to the role of social movements as transformative subjects. As a consequence more and more movement activists are developing tools – of investigation and survey, of communication and exchange of ideas and information, of data collation and presentation through which the full potential of movements as producers and disseminators of emancipatory knowledge is realised. In this process, we are becoming more critically aware of both different kinds of knowledge (the practical, the theoretical, the intuitive, the systematic) and of the different social conditions involved in their production. Important questions remain unanswered about how, if we are critical of the conventional understandings and organisation of knowledge by traditional left political parties, social movements not only co-ordinate and systematise knowledge but how they take strategic decisions and effectively realise their power.

One way of understanding the political importance of this new self-consciousness of social movements as producers of knowledge is to highlight its origins. Also a sense of where this new political mentality has come from will give us a clearer idea of the distinctive political role of activist intellectuals. The creation, in practice at any rate, of a new politics of knowledge can be traced back to the late 60’s and 70’s and the new kind of social movements which began to emerge at this period - across the world in some form but most strongly in the US and Europe. In their diverse ways, the student and anti-Vietnam war movements, the radical militancy of workplace trade unionism, and perhaps most innovative of all, modern feminism, were in good part a response to the dead ends of previous historic paths to social progress: whether the model of the Soviet Union or the model of social democratic Sweden, or welfare Britain. These movements in their resistance to imperialism, to Fordist production, to gender subordination were also struggling to go beyond, transform or caste aside `actually existing’ institutions of social reform. Consequently, they found themselves transforming society without any precise directions or recipe. As a result they became, more or less self consciously engaged in a continuing process of experimentation, comparable to the scientific process.

Moreover in practice, if not in theory, they developed a new understanding of knowledge and a recognition of different forms of knowledge. In their different ways they challenged the dominant – but philosophically widely challenged – positivist paradigm of knowledge as exclusively scientific laws based on observed statistical regularites. Without going into detail: it was a paradigm taken from a particular interpretation of natural sciences and applied to social science and both to public administration and to corporate management (cf the `scientific management’ of F.W. Taylor followed by Henry Ford on the one hand and Lenin on the other.) It allowed for one kind of knowledge and dismissed everything else as superstition, folklore, or as merely derivative from scientific laws.
Applied to public policy, the presumption was that social scientific laws about the workings of society could be codified and centralised and thus state and party institutions could know and adequately plan for the needs of the people.
Against this the new movements (To summarise schematically):

1.Stressed the importance of the knowledge arising from experience; knowledge that might be tacit, ephemeral, not necessarily possible to codify and yet an important clue to understanding how society worked. In their ways of organising – whether feminist `consciousness raising’ groups or networks of workers across factories – they attempted to share and to `socialise’ this practical knowledge, combining it with more systematic forms of knowledge as a basis for understanding both how the power structures work and their own policies and strategies. In this way the movements paid close attention to practical knowledge and at the same time sought to go `behind’ immediate experience, to understand what produced the injustice against which they struggled and how it could be overcome. Hence their interest in critical theory: creative Marxist traditions in particular but also in the case of feminism psychoanalytic theory too. In this way the movements understood knowledge as differentiated. (An understanding paralleled by new developments in philosophy of science)

2.This in turn led to a recognition of the differentiated nature of reality: people’s immediate experience of oppression and subordination was as real as the structures of class and or gender domination that produced them. Social movements of that period sought to act in a way that acknowledged all levels of reality, seeing people’s direct experience as important clues to understanding the hidden, structural causes of oppression and valuing their practical insights as vital sources of knowledge about the solutions. The new movements paid attention to language, culture and the expression of distinct identities but understood these as related to underlying structures of power. (This is in contrast to political parties dominated by a positivistic paradigm who tended to reduce reality to one level or one structure e.g. reducing gender to class, to regard direct experience as merely `proof’ or an `instance’ of a general theory; and not to value practical insight or skill as a distinct source of knowledge not anticipated by some general law and a source of potential power in the process of social transformation. It is also in contrast to the later development of a post-modernism which focused exclusively on language, discourse and meaning, denying the existence of material realities independent of our knowledge of them – I will discuss this briefly later).

3. Their origins as self-organised movements arising from their own experiences of subordination and exploitation led to a strong sense of themselves individually as well as collectively, as agents of social change – in contrast to the traditions of parliamentary socialism or party socialism more generally in which a culture of delegation, or deferred action was established: of simply `putting demands’ on others – leaders, governments, officials – to take action. There was a strong sense of taking personal responsibility: that people were faced with everyday choices of either being complicit in oppression – including their own – or acting to transform it. Implicitly, the movements had what is now understood as a `relational’ view of society as consisting of enduring but transformable relations that individuals either reproduced or resisted. ( Rather than the supra-individual wholes of bureaucratic collectivism or the sum of individual action of dogmatic, atomistic individualism).

4. This understanding of society implies a strong relationship between knowledge and action, between facts and values. It points to the value-laden character of our knowledge of the world, daily illustrated in the way that we reproduce or transform social institutions. New knowledge about the consequences of passive acquiescence in these institutions can lead people to take transformative action in their own lives. The reproduction or transformation of society depends on actors’ understandings of the relationships and structures in which they participate.
This implies that knowledge and action are inextricably bound up. If it is taken together with points 1 & 2, (1:the importance and social character of practical knowledge and 2: the differentiated nature of reality), it indicates a potentially powerful and radical dialectic between knowledge and action: on the one hand new knowledge can lead people to move from passive reproduction of oppressive relations to transformative action; this action can reveal deeper realities behind the immediate experience of injustice, leading in turn to new directions for action directed at the deeper causes of injustice.
The approach to knowledge here is a radical move beyond the conventional approach to knowledge in which knowledge is used in simply to understand constraints and possibilities. Here knowledge is generated through acting to transform constraints, action is understood as producing knowledge which if it is absorbed and somehow systematised then acts as a guide to further action.

Of course there’s nothing automatic about this logic but activist researchers can play a vital role in strengthening it. Instinctively this is the role that many activist researchers, whether in independent, movement oriented research projects or in academia, or through movement forms of investigation, played in the movements of the 1970’s. In fact this role for the movements was more important than activist research about the movements – though they often went together. Activist intellectuals sought to be in a close involvement with the movement and thereby to be in a position for their research and their intellectual labour to contribute to the process of political experimentation implied by this idea of the role of knowledge in deepening resistance. In this way they were/are able to follow up the insights of frontline activists and with systematic investigation deepen knowledge of the power structures and their points of vulnerability and strength, as a resource for the movement planning the next stage of strategy.

There are wider implications of this approach to the politics of knowledge and of the movements becoming aware of the importance of the knowledge they produce for the efficacy of their power to transform. First is the importance of organised moments of reflection, on what movements have learnt in the course of their resistance, on studying the reaction of the power structures, on the insights of those at the frontline, ensuring that the new knowledge sheds light for the working out of their next strategic steps. There is also the importance for movements (and for innovative, `movement – oriented parties) of surveys, investigations, consulta, that could ensure that strategic discussions are rooted in the practical knowledge and insights of those engaged in resistance; including those involved in struggles and networks beneath the surface, without a public, political expression.

These could be understood as two of the functions of the World Social Forum and Social Forums more generally. Certainly, this is the direction in which the developing methodology of the WSF – and hopefully the ESF – is moving. There is growing self awareness of Social Forums as useful contexts in which practical and theoretical knowledge can be shared in order to identify the next action to be taken. Enhancement of the movements’ role as producers of emancipatory knowledge – knowledge integral to the work of social transformation - provides a useful criteria for the workings of the methodology. For it implies a mobilisation process that reaches out to all those involved in struggles for social justice, grass roots movements – not simply co-ordinating groups and NGO’s; it implies open, democratic and empowering discussions through which there can be a real exchange of different kinds of knowledge, from different sources – not simply speeches to a more or less passive audience; it implies ways of organising the event which reveals connections, commonalities and differences between movements so that knowledge of power structures and strategies of transformation from different angles are debated and compared – not simply parallel, separate themes; it implies a tough mutual interrogation and debate of each others knowledge, imbued as it is by values and politics – not simply the co-existence of different perspectives. Only these kinds of activities will move the dialectic of knowledge and action on.

But by discussing the future of the World Social Forum I am going ahead of myself. The reason why it is necessary to summarise what we can abstract with hindsight from the practice of the earlier movements is because these movements went through a significant defeat. As a result many threads of thought were broken and forgotten. (What I’ve said here is only a fraction of relevant thoughts). Not only did they suffer a significant defeat this but this defeat produced a distorted legacy. I’m thinking here of the legacy of a post-modernism which separated the movements’ concern with language and culture from their roots in resistance and action to change the material realities which language describes. Defeat also halted a half-finished process of new thinking and the emergence of subjects of socialist or radically transformative change. The movements rarely had the infrastructure and resources to survive, other than in memory, writing, scattered personal networks and the occasional project. There are exceptions which prove the point: for example Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has been able to maintain some political continuity between the innovative movements of the 70’s and the equally innovative movements of today and is as a result very different – in many but not all ways – from most conventional parties of the left. But generally, a weakening or defeat of the social movements left a vacuum and in many places, the traditional left, whether a warmed up Leninism or a defensive parliamentary socialism, moved back into an influence disproportionate to their size and political credibility with their limited and stifling approaches to knowledge.

The new movements, however, which exploded on to the streets of Seattle in 1999, and gathered in Chiapas in 1995 re-connected the dialectic of knowledge and action. The development of the web enabled them in a more effective way than ever before to establish the idea of social movements as producers of emancipatory knowledge.
It became self-consciously part of their/our work. Mayo Fuster’s paper maps out very well, the different forms this takes. The implication, however, of my stress on the interactive connection between knowledge and action this would imply a special emphasis on the various forms of co-research in which I would include the organisations like State Research, European Corporate Observatory, many of the researchers connected to the TNI and many small research centres working closely with different social and trade union movements, following their struggles and working with them to research the power structures their actions reveal and resisting and collaborating on the development of strategy and alternatives.
This process of knowledge production in a process of resistance linking action, knowledge and power is perhaps the most important continuity between the new movements of the 70’s and the movements of today. In a context where the web, amongst other factors, makes the plural nature of knowledge, along with decentralised forms of co-ordination, commonplace apolitical, or cross political, ideas, this location of knowledge in the context of power and resistance is vital to the political radicalism of social movements and activist researchers within them.

Hilary Wainwright. Editor Red Pepper.
(Also for a longer discussion of some of these arguments see `Arguments for A New Left; Answering the Free Market Right’. Blackwells 1994)