Sustaining Oppositional Cultures in ‘Post-Socialist’ Times: A Comparative Study of Three Social Movement Organisations

This paper explores the efforts of three social-movement organisations in Vancouver, Canada, to advance oppositional cultures in what Nancy Fraser has termed a ‘post-socialist’ age, marked both by neo-liberal hegemony and by the primacy of cultural recognition over material redistribution in the framing of progressive politics. Based on in-depth interviews with activists in The Centre (a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual community centre), the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities, and End Legislated Poverty, we compare how these organisations frame and pursue three analytically distinct tasks, which we take to be integral to sustaining counter-hegemony: (1) community-building, in the sense of elaborating collective identities and ethical-political frameworks that are oppositional to dominant conceptions; (2) meeting needs of constituents in ways that empower them and prefigure alternative ways of life; and (3) mobilising and engaging in collective action to press for tangible changes in cultural discourses and social relations. The manner in which each group pursues these three tasks defines the horizons of its political project, including the extent to which the project involves ‘affirmative’ (reformist) or ‘transformative’ (radical) strategies of social change. Counter-hegemonic capacities thus depend in part on specific configurations of practice, which we compare across the three organisations.