[ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] role of small businesses under the general heading  the agents of change (Porritt, 1984a, p. 139). He goes on:  In the kind of long-term economy that we envisage, small businesses would not just be a useful adjunct to the world of corporate big business: they would be the mainstay of all economic activity (Porritt, 1984a, p. 139). The problem with the notion of small businesses as agents of change is that their success, and even survival, depends on their producing and reproducing the products and values demanded by the system within which they operate. In the name of efficiency, such businesses may  have to cut the workforce, deunion- ize it, hire temporary labour with no security and provide poor condi- tions of work. There is no guarantee whatsoever that small businesses, far from acting as agents for social change, will not rather be vehicles for the reproduction of the system they seek to overcome. Indeed, in the absence of any strategy for disengaging from the system, the latter is far more likely to be the case. Beyond the middle class, one sometimes reads that the  new social movements represent new forms of political activity that anticipate new forms of society (Doherty, 2002). Fritjof Capra, for example, writes of a  winning majority of  environmentalists, feminists, ethnic minorities etc. , and then that  the new coalitions should be able to 142 Green Political Thought turn the paradigm shift into political reality (Capra, 1983, p. 465). More explicitly, Murray Bookchin refers to  the new classes and argues that they are  united more by cultural ties than economic ones: ethnics, women, counter-cultural people, environmentalists, the aged, the déclassé, unemployables or unemployed, the  ghetto people (Bookchin, 1986, p. 152). Similarly Jürgen Habermas has theorized a  new politics centring on  the peace movement, the anti-nuclear and environmental move- ment, minority liberation movements, the movement for alternative lifestyles, the tax protest movement, religious fundamentalist protest groups and, finally, the women s movement (Roderick, 1986, p. 136). Habermas goes on to make an important distinction that helps us to make some sense of the social pot-pourri offered up by himself, Capra and Bookchin. He argues that not all of these groups have the same emancipatory potential, and suggests that we distinguish between those that seek  particularistic change and  those that seek fundamental change from a universalistic viewpoint (Roderick, 1986, p. 136). This ought to remind us of the quotation from Marx cited earlier in which he argued that the source of social change must be found in  a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system . Roderick continues: For Habermas, at the present time only the women s movement belongs to this latter category to the extent that it seeks not only a formal equality, but also a fundamental change in the social structure and in real concrete life situation. (Roderick, 1986, p. 136) This is a very important observation, particularly in the context of the most typical critique of social movements as agents for social change: i.e. that they have no common interest and therefore cannot act coherently. As Boris Frankel has written, for example,  women, environmentalists, peace activists, gays, etc., do not have a ready formed identity as a social movement (1987, p. 235). This is undoubtedly true, but with reference to Habermas distinction it is hardly important. The crucial project would not be to manufacture an identity between het- erogeneous groups, but to identify that group (or those groups) whose project most profoundly questions the presuppositions on which cur- rent social practices depend. Only such a group can already be in a sufficiently  disengaged position to resist the attempts at colonization by the system it seeks to overcome, and even then, of course, success is Strategies for green change 143 by no means guaranteed. I shall pick up the suggestion that women may constitute such a vanguard shortly. The point of all this is to suggest that a possible strategy for the green [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl blacksoulman.xlx.pl