Anyone who was in a rural area of Britain in the summer of 2002 would have had trouble avoiding the stickers, banners and loudspeakers publicising the Countryside Alliance march in London for liberty and livelihood well, liberty and livelihood as the Countryside Alliance conceives them. This might seem a classic rural versus city and covertly a Conservative versus Labour confrontation reviving some of the older political categories and slotting neatly into a left versus right confrontation.
However, such an understanding is glib. It condescends to the variegated rural movement by assuming its members are all Conservative (even if it is true that many are), and it somehow repositions the third way confusion that is New Labour as left. Instead, as we view the march in London it might be better to reflect on whether such categories work any longer in relation to popular political action.
But the attempt to move beyond left versus right is a morass of contradictions and confusions. We have all seen the difficulties there are in defining the administrations of those such as Clinton or Blair as beyond left and right and thinking on these issues itself remains uncertain. In terms of popular politics, we have seen a series of movements that might relate to the leftright polarity but can hardly be contained by such categories: feminism, antiracism, decolonisation, environmental politics and more. To take one example, it is hard to imagine where animal liberation might fit on this axis.
To complicate matters further, it is clear that the political categories of left and right still exist and are active. Trade unions, employer associations, strikes and attempts to drive down working conditions all continue and are the obvious signs of the class conflict that lies behind left and right. Popular protest can no longer be contained within our old political categories but neither can we ignore these categories.
The past, present and future of political action
To think both within and against our existing political categories, I suggest that we might turn to time and, in an exploratory way, think about popular politics and how they relate to the three great categories of time: past, present and future. How do popular movements create their ethical basis or collective identity in relation to time? To understand this we need to first recognise that all movements aim at a different future; they call for cultural, economic and/or political change. The question is on what basis are these calls issued? Where do the visions of change come from? And, how do they relate to time?
First, let us take the present. In what ways can a movement be based on the present? All movements seek change of some sort or another; how can a movement seek a change that also reestablishes the present? A campaign such as the Snowdrop campaign for gun law reform is an example here. This followed the massacre of schoolchildren and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane in 1996. It was a campaign that sought legislative change to restrict ownership of handguns. And it was successful. The Conservative Government of the time restricted access to large calibre weapons, and then the 1997 New Labour Government widened restriction to small calibre. A social change was effected.
Yet, by appealing through established channels, this campaign actually reinforced the existing social order. Parliament and the judiciary were shown to be ways of creating social change that yet left the same social order in place. Parliament was, through this process, legitimated and the present confirmed.
Secondly, let us look at the past as another source of visions of social change and a better society. Here we find movements that literally react. They look behind themselves all the time, hoping to navigate to a future from their imagined past. This is an odd kind of politics, like the British Prime Minister John Major imagining a place of village cricket and warm beer, or the constant references in the USA, particularly in the Patriot movement, to their founding fathers as though Thomas Jefferson were still ambassador to France. These pasts are always, necessarily, imaginary but are also often the subject of significant historical work.
Here we find movements such as the Countryside Alliance, a movement basing itself on a conception of the rural that looks determinedly behind itself. While its demands may sometimes be about jobs in rural areas, it is the imagined rural life that lies behind these jobs: a life of redcoated squires and helpful villagers. While all movements think of the past and use it, what is going on here is somewhat different. The past is not a tactical resource in the countryside campaigns as much as the foundation of their vision of social change.
Third, we can think of movements that base themselves on the unknown future. Here are dreamers prepared to hope for the unimagined or barely imagined rather than relying on a (known) present or conjuring a (fantasised or imagined) past. Remarkably, almost foolishly, we find here people willing to generate whole movements based, in principle, on the unknown. Among them are movements for the rights of indigenous peoples, from Australias Aborigines to Canadas Inuit, who are seeking more to escape the past than to return to it. Their struggles accommodate the reality of their colonisation and the immense loss it entailed, to envision a new accommodation that will be necessary for justice to be done.
An example here is land rights struggles for Australian Aborigines. They call for the reconciliation of indigenous and nonindigenous Australians through recognition of and (limited) reparations for the invasion and seizure of Aboriginal lands. The potential here (and potential is key for these proposals are bitterly fought by those devoted to their colonial past) is for an as yet unknown future, one that can reconcile equal citizenship with claims to land based on the cultures and beliefs of indigenous peoples.
The country is another past
Three different bases for popular politics are before us. It may look as if we have a simple correlation between centrist or reforming (the present), right (the past), and left (the future); but any such equation would be a lazy refusal to think in other than old terms. Popular politics, social movements, have already moved beyond the left/right axis, even as such an axis remains a politics in itself.
Where does that leave the march of 22 September? The Countryside Alliances campaigns, such as the defence of foxhunting, rely on a vision of rural England past. They defend virtues that were once strong and are now passing. Like all popular movements that look behind them, they react rather than proact; they seek to turn back and away; they pitch the resurrection of the past over the unknown future or the known present.