A singular focus on labour movements misreads modernity’s multidimensional dynamics

Evidence

As modes of radical engagement having a pervasive importance in modern social life, social movements provide significant guidelines to potential future transformations. For those who have associated modernity above all with either capitalism or industrialism, the labour movement is the social movement par excellence. Authors who have followed Marx see the labour movement as standing in “the vanguard of history”; their critics have concentrated their attention upon showing that the labour movement only has transformative impact in the early phases of the development of an industrial order, subsequently becoming one interest group among others. To be sure, capitalism remains a class system, and the struggles of labour movements are still relevant to what might lie “beyond” it. But a single-minded preoccupation with labour movements, though at one time largely justified by their strategic importance early in the development of modern institutions and capitalistic expansion, reflects the onesided emphasis upon either capitalism or industrialism as the sole significant dynamic forces involved in modernity. Other social movements are also important and can be connected to the multidimensional character of modernity outlined earlier. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 374

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the multidimensional-institutions framework that locates social movements (labour vs. free speech vs. peace vs. ecological) in distinct institutional arenas — useful scaffolding for the reader’s mapping of where Darlington’s authority sits.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar affluence and mass culture threatened Labour’s class base; Habermas over-weighted Weber and under-weighted Marx in diagnosing modernity — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 458; De-industrialisation fragmented labour and replaced class struggle with identity politics — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 672

Related

• Habermas over-weighted Weber and under-weighted Marx in diagnosing modernity (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar affluence and mass culture threatened Labour’s class base (similarity 0.79)
• Modernity names real novelties of capitalism even though it cannot explain them (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalist modernity cannot be understood from its internal dynamics alone (similarity 0.78)