These questions are at the core of contemporary political and historical sociology, which, as one observer has said, asks: "To what extent does the world have to be the way it is?" What are the historically-inherited, institutional norms (economic, political-legal, and social) which shape the efforts of individuals and groups to make history? How are these institutions and relationships themselves changed by actors? What transforms individuals and their experiences into agents of collective projects to change the world, sharing a common understanding of what needs to be changed, and how? What roles do organizations play in creating collective actors, or in obstructing their formation? These are the dynamic, dialectical relationships which this study of environmental politics in Canada tries to illuminate. In attempting to better understand "the puzzle of human agency . . . in terms of the process of social structuring," I make use of the tools of political economy, discourse analysis, feminist theory, and participant-observer sociological method.
The problem which motivates -- or rather, haunts -- this work is the prophesy of an emancipatory social movement, and the question of its discursive elements, and its social agents. Since the 1970s, Marxists have been debating with feminists, ecologists, the black liberation movement, and other subjects of the new social movements about the relationship of all these forms of oppression to the struggle against capitalism. The arguments between socialists and new social movement theorists are reviewed in chapter 1, and are returned to in the conclusions. Political struggles about the desired ends of a society's path of development are at the heart of both socialism and ecology as social movements. Historically, socialism has been the radical project of industrial workers and their middle-class allies to transform capitalism's inefficient, inhumane, and inegalitarian organization of production and social relations. Ecology encompasses the radical critiques of modernization associated with the new middle classes. These include counter-cultural perspectives rooted in the destruction of pre-industrial social relations and human-nature relations, modern critiques of capitalism drawing on Marxism and humanism, as well as "post-modern" critiques of the modes of rationality and domination which characterize modern thought, including Marxism.
Thus, while there is no simple opposition between socialism and ecology (and, indeed, "social ecology" may be viewed as a synthesis of their radical perspectives), the relationship is often ambivalent and sometimes conflictual. The widely observed differences in the compositions of their social bases of support, the relative numerical decline of the industrial working class in the West, the crisis of the social democratic paradigm and the decline of political support for socialist discourse, the dissolution of the traditional party systems in the West, and other phenomena have given rise to some very broad generalizations about the passage from one historical era to another, from one social movement to another, and so on. All of these theories choose to focus on differences and ruptures, rather than similarities and continuities in the historical projects of socialism and ecology.
A reader of the "orthodox Marxist" versus "post-Marxist" interpretations of the relationship of trade unions to radical social change, or of the historical meaning of the new social movements, cannot but be struck by the general absence of analyses of actually existing social movements. New social movements and unions have been much theorized about, but little studied from "ground level." This study seeks to examine questions about the agency and discourse of a counter-hegemonic social movement in a historically contextualised and comparative manner. Moreover, the participant-observer approach captures the complexity of the competing discursive tendencies and practices within actual social movements.
I do not attempt, in this work, to address all aspects of new social movement or union politics in Canada, but instead focus on the ways in which two industrial unions (representing different strategic orientations) as well as citizens' groups and environmental organizations have engaged issues related to the central conflicts of societal development. These are located in the environment-economy nexus which necessarily shapes, and is shaped by, the strategic perceptions and choices made by union and environmental movement actors. More specifically, this book investigates the obstacles to, and the potential for, a "convergence" of the projects of socialism and ecology, along with other alternative movements, in the form of a new counter- hegemonic social movement. The term "convergence" is used intentionally to signal that what is at stake is not an ecological socialism, but a new project which will be profoundly transformative of pre-existing identities. The key to advancing counter-hegemonic politics today, in my view, is a discourse which links human needs and conceptions of the good life to egalitarian, participatory, and pluralist democratic demands. The subject of such a discourse may turn out to be simply, the citizen.
In addition, this work compares the responses of two industrial trade unions to environmental regulation of industry and the growing influence of the environmental movement. These are: the Energy and Chemical Workers Union (ECWU) and the Canadian Auto Workers Union (CAW). The ECWU's responses to environmental issues affecting its membership are studied in the context of the union's relations with petrochemical industry employers during expansionary and recession eras. Among the issues affecting the ECWU, this work examines: air pollution in Sarnia in the 1950s and 1960s; mercury contamination of the St. Clair River; leaded gasoline and lead smelting; and toxic chemical pollution. The ECWU provides a case study of a union which has maintained a largely passive, and at times hostile stance toward the initiatives of the environmental movement. The political economy of the petrochemical sector, as well as corporate management approaches, the ideological perspectives of union leaders and rank-and-file members, and the views of unions adopted by environmentalists, are among the factors examined in order to explain this union's orientation.
The CAW has adopted a more activist and alliance-oriented approach to the environmental movement, including the creation of local environmental committees in the mid-1980s. The development of the environmental committees is examined in depth in the cases of six CAW locals in Essex county. The CAW case study focuses on the limitations and possibilities suggested by the "social unionism" strategy. The factors outlined in the ECWU case are also examined with regard to the CAW in order to explain the differences between the two cases. The ECWU merged with other unions in 1992 to form the Communications, Energy, and Paper Workers union (CEP), and the research on the ECWU ends at this point (although some observations are made of subsequent CEP interventions). Developments in CAW strategy, however, are traced to 1996, and thus permit an analysis to be made of that union's transition from social unionism to "movement unionism" in the 1990s, and the implications of these changes for theoretical claims regarding the potential of trade unions to provide counter- hegemonic leadership.
Deriving general theoretical conclusions from the empirical evidence and interpretations of these cases is a complex task, indeed, not to mention one fraught with risks. In my view, the contributions of this study lie mainly in the questions it raises about the limitations of structuralist approaches such as traditional political economy, or grand historical narratives like Touraine's transition to "post-industrial society," for helping us to understand the processes of social change. In a sense, I have tried to bring the actors back in, to listen to the many layers of their constructions of "the way the world is," and to understand how these perceptions change through interaction with other subjects, and in the context of the processes of social structuring. Admittedly, this approach stems from an obstinate optimism of the will, which, for Gramsci, never meant faith in the inevitable collapse of the hegemonic order, but rather belief in the capacity of humans to change the way the world is.