Non-Parliamentary Opposition in Italy: The New Social Movements

The character of the opposition within any political system cannot be explained or even described without reference to the nature of the government, including the party system, its ideological basis, and the socio-economic foundation on which it rests. This is a particularly important admonition in the case of non-parliamentary opposition, for most of the explanations of the new social movements, such as feminism, the ecological movement, and the peace movement, have not been sensitive to these factors and to the national differences to which they give rise. For Inglehart, for instance, these movements are primarily the result of the spread of ‘post-materialist’ values in affluent Western societies where immediate material needs have been satisfied. ¹ Offe, on the other hand, sees them as the defensive reaction of those threatened by the encroachment of the state and the economic system on previously private spheres of life. ² Like Offe, Habermas lays stress on the dissolution of traditional value-systems as a precondition for the emergence of the new social movements, and notes that the need to combat the crisis-tendencies of modern capitalism has forced the state to open to discussion issues whose solution was previously taken for granted, because they were regulated by these traditional value- systems. ³ None of these theories leaves much space for consideration of the governments and party systems the new movements are facing; furthermore, as we shall see, they are inaccurate in important respects even as descriptive accounts of the new social movements.