Yet Power and Protest is also a narrative for different voices. There is the narrator who sympathetically evokes the various movements. There is also a voice that is sociological and detached, noting that an important consequence of protest is to force and permit dominant institutions to modernise their cultural outlook, as well as helping create new élites. The new movements do not try to bid for conventional state power, but they are always framing demands upon the state. In class terms, the supporters of the new movements are mainly those employed in the public sector, as teachers and academics, social workers, public servants generally, students; that is, the intellectually trained.

In talking of the women’s movement, we are alerted to the problem of differences among women – that western feminism has been race-blind. Black women feel that the white women’s movement is ‘simply a struggle between two white sexes that both oppress all black people’. Also, the early women’s liberation slogan of smash the family was meaningless to Aboriginal women who had ‘battled for two centuries against the white authorities who wished to break up Aboriginal families’. Overall, there is a tendency for the new social movements to represent the better off amongst the disadvantaged, for example, professional women rather than factory workers, white women rather than Aboriginal women.

There is another narrative voice that wishes to defend older left movements from the assumption that they are inferior to the new movements and are now obsolete because of them. Power and Protest does concede that the new movements have shown up a relative neglect in the old left and trade unions of issues not directly related to class – issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity.

But Power and Protest also points out that, with the exception of the gay and green, the new movements enjoy a long history, and are not simply post-World War II creations. Second wave feminism has clear antecedents in the first; there were movements for Aboriginal land rights in the 1870s; utopian socialists such as Fourier anticipated grass roots democratic organising; the anarchists and syndicalists of the tum of the century did not wish to bid for state power; workers’ movements of old were interested in non-productivist issues such as imperialism, war and peace, women’s and black rights.

Yet another narrative voice is much harsher on what it takes to be the historical pretensions, the hubris, of the new movements. This more impatient, even suddenly abusive, voice irrupts into the text to tell us that the members of the new movements ‘now arrogate to themselves the world-historic role in social transformation allotted by Karl Marx to the working class’. The new movements are a ‘voguish academic concern’, not least in the ‘postmodernist fad’ for downplaying the importance of class. There’s a sneering reference to new movement people as ‘blue-denim incorruptibles’ for distrusting the old politics of socialism and the labour movement. There is some disdain by this narrator for the new social movements for exerting influence upon the capitalist system but not power, in particular not being able to mount a fundamental, a revolutionary, challenge to the present order.

By contrast, the workers’ movement has the ability to harness ‘real power’ rather than ‘mere influence’. The workers’ movement, through united action at the point of production, can cause ‘disruption and chaos’, as in strikes, way beyond anything the new movements can hope to do.

The narrative voice here – it asserts itself most vigorously at the beginning and end of Power and Protest – calls for a marriage of old and new radical forces. The old workers’ movements for social equality, based on class and production, and organised by ‘anti-Stalinist, libertarian forms of Marxism’, should combine with the values and struggles of the new movements.

An ‘ideal-type labour movement’ (such as the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation of the ‘green bans’ period) can ‘mediate and connect’ the varying demands of the new social movements. At the moment, the ‘ruling classes’ take comfort from the very multiplicity of the new movements. But if they were united amongst themselves and with the labour movement into ‘one single, class-based challenge’, then such might constitute a well-directed and potentially ‘fatal stab wound’ against the capitalist system, creating some kind of libertarian socialist alternative.

There is a persistent desire in Power and Protest for a kind of putschism, a call for the death of the present ‘system’, the need for a ‘fatal stab wound’, to repeat that oddly violent image that might remind us of assassination; a vision of swift decisive action against the capitalist politico-economic order, a language of combat, confrontation, and battle. There is, ‘whatever new social movement theorists might say’, still a ‘productivist core’ to the capitalist system, hence the working class must still have the ‘central emancipatory role’ in fatally stabbing this core. In this putschist narrative, a base-superstructure model guides the analysis, edges it with anger and passion.

And such anger and passion are given extra force by a language of positivism, appeals to what really is, what is real life, real power, here are the ‘facts’, here is what is ‘true’, ‘the evidence suggests’, the truth of the matter’, ‘in the final analysis’, ‘in reality’, ‘in fact’.

Power and Protest is a reassertion, when so many of us are attracted to theories of the post-industrial and the postmodern, of the saliency of class and the utopian hope of alternatives to a capitalist society where exploitation and repression continue oppressively to feature.