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PARTISAN REVIEW
conflict of interests and plans to be found in any society-and a one–
sided vision that perceives things only from the rulers' point of view
and deplores that society as a whole does not yield to their interests
and the case which they present.
Isn't the difficulty of forming social and political movements
one of the newest and most important problems of our time? In the
days when a group of peasants resisted the royal tax collector or the
increasing burden of feudal claims; when colonized peoples rose up
against colonizers; when a whole mining or industrial town went out
on strike against unemployment and destitution; popular forces of
opposition had no trouble organizing, even
if
they had plenty of
trouble making themselves heard, or obtaining the right to negotiate,
or winning a victory over a much more powerful adversary.
Nowadays, the power of central structures shatters the social
bases of resistance like a bulldozer, uprooting everything in its way
and throwing the debris to the sides of the path it hollows out.
Marcuse is wrong in thinking that protest can emerge only on the
fringes of the social order, but his reaction is profoundly in accord
with a society which tends to marginalize conflict and to confuse it
with deviance, which seeks at the outset to locate the roots of protest
in deviance.
It
was not long ago that the forces of opposition
presented themselves as defenders of the majority against the ruling
minority. Today, in both the East and the West, the authorities base
their power on the support of the silent majority, which consists of
all those "good" citizens who support segregation, regret imperialist
wars when those wars are lost, condemn the excesses of youth, and
trust that the authorities will maintain the threatened order. Protest
movements seem to address themselves to minorities, even when they
speak in the name of groups that are at least as numerous as were
the industrial workers when the labor unions took shape in the second
half of the nineteenth century. Because power touches every aspect
of society, its adversaries find it more and more difficult to unite and
ro generalize their protests.
This problem is not insoluble, but we are still experiencing only
the beginnings of a major cultural and social transformation. Con–
sequently, social conflicts cannot be experienced at this point in-
