FRAGMENT FOUR: COLLECTIVE AGENCY AND RESISTANCE
When individuals come together to act in concert we can refer to collective agency. Collective agency can function to defend the status quo or to oppose it. At any given time and in any social formation there are forces for order, stability and the status quo and forces for change. Although capital monopolists fight amongst themselves like cats and dogs, they retain and instinctively recognise a common interest in preserving rentier capitalism and can be said to exercise collective agency to this end. Importantly, this need not involve conspiring. In his discission of the American power elite in the 1950s, C Wright Mills emphasised that conspiring is rarely necessary when those involved share a ‘tacit understanding’ of what is required. In fact, there is evidence that in the UK just such a tacit understanding embraces not only capital monopolists and the managers and supervisors that serve them but also governing politicians, civil servants and lobbyists, MI5 and MI6, plus a range of other private school and Oxford-educated professional and cultural elites. It is always a matter of degree, but for all their individual differences they typically share what Pierre Bourdieu called a ‘class habitus’, which roughly translates as a set of predispositions to see the world and act in it in a certain way. In this fashion the prevailing structures of society are absorbed from infancy, accommodated and ultimately promoted and imposed.
Collective agency can take different forms and be found at any point in society, from the capital monopolists to those inhabiting organisations far more modest and limited in reach and effect. The discussion in this fragment will focus on the potential of collective agency as a mechanism of resistance to rentier capitalism, to its ubiquitous ideology of neoliberalism and to the insistence from on high that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA).
There are countless historical examples of local acorns of collective agency taking root and growing into formidable oak trees. A single example will have to suffice here. Consider the case of the agricultural labourers of East Kent, who on the night of 28 August 1830 crept into a farmyard to smash what has been called one of the most threatening and divisive innovations of the industrial revolution, namely, a threshing machine. Their action was a response to extremely high levels of unemployment and low wages for farm workers, leading to extreme poverty. The threshing machine had come to symbolise the oppression they experienced. In the succeeding months hundreds of threshing machines were destroyed as this initial rebellion spread through the country. Agricultural labourers turned on landowners, smashing machinery, burning farmhouses and demanding both higher wages and the restoration of common lands that had been ‘enclosed’ by powerful landowners. Nearly 3,000 instances of revolt were documented, making it the greatest example of contagious insurrection in British history.
‘Captain Swing’ was put forward as the leader of the Kent rebels, though he didn’t exist: he was a convenient fiction. Yet his very name alarmed rural elites. Disguised rebels in Otmoor, Oxfordshire, tore down fences to reclaim farmland enclosed by local aristocrat, Lord Abingdon. Forty protesters were arrested but subsequently freed from their soldier escorts by sympathisers. Writers like William Cobbett took up the labourers’ case, calling for an overhaul of the country’s political system. The electoral franchise should be extended to include more working people, and ‘rotten boroughs’ (parliamentary constituencies with handfuls of voters that were largely controlled by the Tory establishment) should be eliminated. So, what began as a small-scale exercise in collective agency rapidly developed into a movement for parliamentary reform. The ruling class of the day was running scared. In the elections that took place in 1831 the Whigs, who were receptive to reform, defeated the Tories. In the absence of the Captain Swing riots, this would not have happened. And in 1832 the Reform Act was passed, heralding the most far-reaching reforms for over a century. In December of 1832 another election saw the Tories (minus their rotten boroughs) wiped out, allowing the Whigs to pass the Slavery Abolition Act.
What this case study shows is that what starts as a small-scale grassroots or popular rebellion can become a tipping-point event. Collective agency within a single rural setting, or organisation, can be a catalyst for significant institutional, cultural and even structural change. What I have called reverse causation, ‘upwards’ from an organisation, may be far rarer than ‘downwards’ causation from social structures, but it does happen.
A Possible Route to Transformative Change in the UK
It would have been difficult if not impossible to predict the Captain Swing rebellion, let alone its consequences. This same restraint applies today. In what contemporary circumstances might localised grassroots or organisational collective agency lead to anything other than an institutional tweaking within rentier capitalism and its progeny, the fractured society? Predictably, significant social change is dependent on stripping capital monopolists of their sway over governments and policy. But individual capital monopolists are replaceable. What matters is that they surf enduring social structures to their advantage. And they reproduce them even as they surf them. It is social structural change, then, that needs to be targeted. But how? As the data and arguments from the previous fragments have made clear, the omens are not good. The remainder of this fragment is devoted to clarifying one possible route to structural change. And I suggest it is the optimum route, however overgrown and awkward it will be to take it.
It is a route that owes much to the enduring and imposing potency of objective relations of class. However, it has to be admitted from the outset that there seems little prospect of class-based collective agency fermenting rebellion. Subjectively, class has lost much of its influence on how people see themselves and who they identify with. It doesn’t promise solidarity. People’s very real but lingering awareness that class divides and punishes those who are already struggling is tempered by the fractured and fragmented nature of society and by the emotional fatigue and lack of hope that permeates the lives of so many. I have used the term ‘disconnected fatalism’ in this context. On top of this is the phenomenon of cultural relativity. So why do I emphasise the importance of class here? I do so because there are strong indications that only class-based resistance carries the potential for structural change. Only if substantial numbers in Wright’s classes (3), (4) and (5), perhaps with a creeping contribution from those experiencing precarity in class (2), can undo the ever-tightening knot tied by the class/command dynamic. But there is another qualification to be made. Over the postwar decades working-class political leadership in the UK has been usurped, most obviously in the House of Commons, by professional and managerial careerists aspiring to ‘represent’ them. This has opened up a gap between the working class and an often-privileged network of well-paid MPs who know little of the everyday realities of life on or hovering just above the breadline but who nevertheless aspire to lead them to the promised land. Little wonder trust has been lost. The issue of working-class leadership will be revisited again in the next fragment.
So in what circumstances might the working class become what sociologists call a ‘collective actor’ in its own interests? How might life be breathed back into its membership? I will list here a handful of preconditions, some closer to realisation than others. The first of these is public anger, even hatred. Citizens are angry and with good reason:
- Significant and increasing wealth and income inequality, with no attempt to rein in the greed of the super-rich or by dealing with abuse through non-dom tax status or the use of tax havens.
- Encouraging the super-rich and wealthy donors to buy policies from the government of the day that favour capital accumulation over responding to population needs.
- The opportune discovery of ‘magic money trees’ to rescue private banks in 2008-9, and under Starmer’s premiership in 2025 to arm for war, while denying their existence when it comes to helping people struggling to get by.
- Executive abuse of parliament to circumvent scrutiny and accountability with the passive connivance of parliamentary officials, including the Speaker of the House of Commons.
- Undemocratic musical chairs leading to a succession of ‘unelected’ Conservative Prime Ministers, culminating in Johnson’s prevarications, the implosion of Truss-economics, the anointing of multimillionaire Sunak, followed by the election of Labour’s Starmer on an historically low turnout.
- The calamitous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, extending to the corrupt awarding of multiple contracts gifting public funds to unqualified and unsuitable private providers, often Conservative Party friends and donors.
- Continuing support for the leading ‘public schools’ and the Eton/Oxford route to high political office.
- Cutting back on welfare support through the introduction of Universal Credit and subsequent benefit cuts.
- Failing to control energy prices, effectively allowing foreign owned private energy companies to enjoy levels of profiteering reflected in obscene CEO salaries and dividends to shareholders.
- Allowing private monopoly service providers to exploit their customers, as in the transport sector.
- Accepting business cuts to labour forces, even at the cost of public safety, backed up by sanctions against people made unemployed if they fail to pursue any part-time, zero hours ‘bullshit jobs’ in or outside the areas in which they live.
- Legislating to reduce trade union rights, notwithstanding the evidence that strong unions are associated with more equal societies.
- Legislating to threaten and criminalise any citizens protesting the removal of their rights or campaigning against unjust or oppressive government policies.
- Tolerating the continued existence of a corrupt police force, readily available to repress the people on the government’s behalf.
- The governmental privileging of profiteering over the futures of the people they purport to serve and the environment we and future generations share.
- Failing to build public or even affordable housing and condemning more and more people to substandard and hazardous accommodation and homelessness.
- Voting down Bills to ensure that all housing is ‘fit for human habitation’ and to reintroduce rent controls.
- Defunding the NHS to create public dissatisfaction with the health service, a subterfuge that would then allow the government to send for for-profit providers.
- The lack of any effective parliamentary opposition to the neoliberalism of the Conservative and Labour Parties.
There’s more than enough here to sustain anger in those most precariously placed in UK society and well into the ‘squeezed middle’. And anger against ‘the system’ amounts to anger against the structures that comprise the system and against those whose actions produce and reproduce it. Anger can turn into hatred. Who could blame slaves for hating slaveowners, or serfs their masters? And when anger transmutes into hatred against the system it can predispose to wilful political engagement and action. Anger/hatred are simmering.
Utopian manifestos can provide both reasons to act and tangible hope for better futures. It is helpful to distinguish between ‘utopian blueprints’ and ‘utopian realism’. Utopian blueprints tend to be the work of professional middle-class (‘ivory tower’) intellectuals, while utopian realism is expressed in manifestos ‘under construction’ by political activists as part and parcel of the struggles in which they are engaged. Utopian realist narratives are important as a focus and channel for public anger and collective action. They point the way to viable alternate futures, as Shelley put it, ‘for the many’.
The context in which vigorous, sustained, and ultimately class-based, collective action for change is most likely to occur, I suggest, is when there is a crisis of state legitimacy. As the modern state takes ever more responsibility for managing the economy, so it must accomplish this without losing the faith and trust of the electorate. If the trust the electorate invests in government is severely compromised, for example in the event of a prolonged cost of living crisis issuing in growing joblessness and precarity, substandard housing and associated forms of psychosocial hardship, like we’ve seen since 2010, then what is called a ‘rationality crisis’ is on the cards. This is frequently accompanied by a ‘motivation crisis’ when citizens no longer feel there is much point in responding positively to the capitalist imperative to work. There is evidence that the UK’s failing state is at imminent risk of the fallout from just such crises as these. To put it more boldly, a crisis of state legitimacy may well be a firework waiting to explode.
So how might this high-powered firework be lit? How might working-class solidarity and leadership belatedly emerge, if against the odds? And how might these combine with public anger-to-hatred both spark and take advantage of a legitimation crisis? My money is on what has been called a ‘spontaneous mass mobilisation’, the firework being set off by an unpredictable ‘trigger event’. There are many instances of grassroots collective action after the manner of the Captain Swing case mentioned earlier. It must be admitted that most have fizzled out. It is also apparent that these are risks attached to all popular rebellions. Given the present mix of a cost living crisis, increasing state authoritarianism and knee-jerk warmongering, the open pursuit of racist votes by the leading political parties and the emergence of a neophyte proto-fascist party in Reform, a further swing to the right is not unforeseeable. But we are dealing here with an optimal or aspirational scenario. The idea of a specific event triggering a spontaneous mass mobilisation is not fanciful. But the timing and nature of the event and its long-term consequences are unpredictable. A trigger event must catch the moment. The trigger might be the passing of a Bill to facilitate further landlord exploitation of tenants, the imposition of a new regressive form of taxation, yet another political corruption scandal, a local street protest about a groundless eviction, the police ‘execution’ of a black suspect, the unjust and ‘political’ imprisoning of a dissenter, and so on.
Such a revolt might stay at the level of civil disobedience, or it might turn to violence. Context is once again important here. It is vital that class-based state violence is recognised for what it is. Symbolic violence, or ‘soft power’ as it is sometimes called, is part and parcel of day-to-day governance, even in countries that hold regular parliamentary elections. This is another case of structural-to-cultural-to-institutional-to-organisational-to-agential causation. Through processes of what sociologists call ‘primary socialisation’, in infancy and childhood via our families and schools, and of ‘secondary socialisation’, in our workplaces, social networks and via the mainstream media in adulthood, we are introduced to and assimilated into society. As I have made clear, this is not always fatal, but exercising agency against this causal flow is no mean feat. So, the point to make is that these multiple influences add up to a kind of violence that typically goes unnoticed but which should nevertheless be seen and categorised as violence. There is little doubt as well that if a people’s revolt were to get sufficient traction, the state would not hesitate to deploy the police and the courts – indeed we are already seeing them deployed against climate change and pro-Palestine protesters – and, ultimately, the armed forces. So, the question then arises: can last-resort violent anti-state activity be both warranted and effective as part of an agenda to reverse the causal flow to agential-to-organisatioal-to-institutional-to-cultural-to-structural? It is reasonable to hypothesise that violence in such circumstances will enhance the risk of what are often termed ‘unintended consequences’. Yet the status quo is untenable.
The tentative scenario painted in this fragment is largely dependent on galvanising a more-or-less organised working-class in societal circumstances that are propitious for mass mobilisation for change. Widespread anger and disaffection in the UK have been documented. There exist also a multitude of draft utopian realist manifestos, although these are at present largely the outputs of specific radical, socialist or campaigning organisations and have yet to impact institutionally or culturally. A strong case can be made that there is a distinct possibility of an imminent crisis of state legitimation. Potential trigger events crop up on a regular basis.