Cultures, Strategies, and Organizations for Mobilizing Social Movements: Divergence and Convergence Between Social Movements and Labor Movements

There have been few comparative studies of social movements and labor movements. Social movement studies have examined the conditions, development, and outcomes of social movements using various theoretical frameworks. In contrast, largely driven by Marxist and post-Marxist theories, labor movement studies have often focused on whether and how workers have organized themselves as a coherent force—i.e., as a class. In brief, in labor movement studies, workers’ movements have often constituted a sub-topic of the study of class, and the ways workers have organized as workers. But how exactly do these two movements differ? Or what do these movements share? By examining a Japanese social movement, the protest against the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (commonly referred to as the 1960 Anpo protests, named after the acronym of the treaty in Japanese), this paper explores divergence and convergence of movement cultures, ideologies, and strategies, and the organization of social movement and labor movement groups. I compare two groups that participated in the 1960 Anpo protests—the Bund, a new left student movement group that became prominent during the 1960 Anpo protests, and a new left faction of the Ōsaka Central Telegraph union that became prominent among new left labor unions in the 1960s. This paper argues that despite similarities in ideology between the two groups, external constraints on their organizations shaped different strategies for mobilization. Furthermore, the two groups never merged nor worked together, although they explored possibility, despite their common political goals and similar ideologies. This was due to intergroup culture differences, as well as problems with mutual trust acting as a wedge between them. The empirical data collected from interviews, for instance, show that while knowledge was a key issue for mobilizing student movements, trust was a key issue for organizing the workers’ movements.