Reading Neoliberalism as a Social Movement from Above
Laurence Cox2017, Red Internacional de Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo
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Abstract
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This paper explores the intersection of neoliberalism and social movements through a Marxist lens, arguing that established social movement theories fail to adequately address the complexities of contemporary struggles. It proposes a re-evaluation of Marxism as a movement theory, emphasizing the role of praxis in understanding social movements and their impact on societal structures. The authors contend that neoliberalism's decline poses critical questions regarding the future of social movements and the forces that will shape society post-neoliberalism.
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On Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism
2015
My intervention this afternoon will attempt to summarize some of the main ideas put forward in We Make Our Own History – a book that it took my good friend and comrade Laurence Cox and myself well over a decade to write. We Make Our own History is intended, above all, to explore the relationship between Marxist theory and social movements, and in particular how this relationship works in the specific historical period that we are calling the twilight of neoliberalism. Or – put slightly differently – I’ll be talking about how we can reclaim Marxism as a theory that can serve activist purposes and knowledge interests in a context where neoliberalism appears to be undergoing a moment of organic crisis.
"At the heart of society burns the fire of social movements": what would a Marxist theory of social movements look like?
Social movement activists have their own theories of social movements, whose goals and structure often diverge radically from those of academic social movement studies. This paper explores the example of Marxism, as a theory developed outside the academy, primarily on the basis of the experience of the nineteenth-century workers’ movement in Europe. If society consists of socially organised human practice, then social movements contend to direct this “historicity”, in Touraine’s words: they are struggles over how society creates itself. This paper attempts to do two things. Firstly, it offers a rough-and-ready typology of how grassroots activists experience their opponents in “social movements from above”, the ways in which dominant social groups attempt to maintain or extend ways of organising human practice that sustain their power. We explore defensive and offensive movements from above, the political choices and alliances involved, and the ways in which movements from above impact on activists in movements from below. Secondly, we attempt to theorise the collective agency of subaltern social groups, making the links between their situated experience of their lifeworld, the conflicts between “common sense” and “good sense”, and the development out of these of militant particularisms, large-scale campaigns and social movement projects aiming to restructure human practice on a large scale. We are interested in particular in how this process is experienced and shaped by activists themselves. In conclusion, we use the categories of neo-liberalism and the “movement of movements” to discuss the current shape of the conflict between movements from above and from below.
Understanding Social Movements: A Marxian Approach
In the world where theories related to physiology and biology is studied to enhance the living of the people to bring hope for better health. On the other side, the theories within the social science discipline bring hope for better social ties and social relations to unveil the social realities. Marxist theory is one such theory which has inspired the people time and again in every aspect of life. 1 Karl Marx's most celebrated book ‗Das capital' has widened the horizon of thinking rationally for both his followers and even for those who never read anything from it. Marxist theory has been a quest for social change and distributive justice. It has been inspirational to reason the systems and the standards of living to study and to fight the oppression and encourage peoples' understanding and the worth of their being. Marxist theory has stemmed from and shaped its aura encircling the characteristics of social movements as such and yet there is dichotomy in its creation that it does not specifically talk about constituent parts of social movement. This paper works towards the nexus of Marxist theory (Marxism) with that of social movements and presents a lucid picture of -Marxist understanding of the social movements‖.
Review Essay of Colin Barker et al's Marxism and Social Movements
Marxists have sought to critically analyze and contribute to (left revolutionary) popular movements. Yet they have not explicitly theorized the term " movement " nor its relationships to other key Marxist concepts, such as class struggle and hegemony. This book seeks to fill that gap in a historical moment when there are worldwide " anti-systemic " movements against austerity, against inequality, against the " democracy deficit, " and to protect hard-won rights for subaltern classes, all within the context of the world's most important economic crisis since the 1930s. Analysis helpfully moves back and forth between theory and empirical cases, with a view to informing more effective revolutionary political praxis. The empirical scope is deliberately and usefully broad. Cases are drawn from a range of national contexts in the global North and South and concern movements from the 19 th century up to the present. The book's major shortcoming, however, is its failure to draw upon the whole range of historical materialist theorizing, including work by Black socialists, feminist socialists and Indigenous communists, among others. Nonetheless Marxism and social movements makes a useful, if radically incomplete contribution to both social movement theory and historical materialism.
Marxism and social movements
2013
Three chapters available under "Papers", below. ""Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberalism and austerity. Exploring struggles on six continents over 150 years, this collection shows the power of Marxist analysis in relation not only to class politics, labour movements and revolutions but also anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, community activism and environmental justice, indigenous struggles and anti-austerity protest. It sets a new agenda both for Marxist theory and for movement research." Download flyer for 25% discount offer."
Review Essay of Barker et als Marxism and Social Movements
Marxists have sought to critically analyze and contribute to (left revolutionary) popular movements. Yet they have not explicitly theorized the term " movement " nor its relationships to other key Marxist concepts, such as class struggle and hegemony. This book seeks to fill that gap in a historical moment when there are worldwide " anti-systemic " movements against austerity, against inequality, against the " democracy deficit, " and to protect hard-won rights for subaltern classes, all within the context of the world's most important economic crisis since the 1930s. Analysis helpfully moves back and forth between theory and empirical cases, with a view to informing more effective revolutionary political praxis. The empirical scope is deliberately and usefully broad. Cases are drawn from a range of national contexts in the global North and South and concern movements from the 19 th century up to the present. The book's major shortcoming, however, is its failure to draw upon the whole range of historical materialist theorizing, including work by Black socialists, feminist socialists and Indigenous communists, among others. Nonetheless Marxism and social movements makes a useful, if radically incomplete contribution to both social movement theory and historical materialism.
Social Movement Research and the 'Movement of Movements': Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization
Sociology Compass, 2007
This article explores the state of research on the 'movement of movements' against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and its own knowledge production. It explores some effects of this failure and locates the reasons for it in the unacknowledged relationship between social movements theorising and activist theorising. The article then discusses the possible contributions that can be made by Marxist and other engaged academic writers, as well as the significance of the extensive theoretical literature generated by activists within the movement. It concludes by stating the importance of dialogue between activist and academic theorising and research in attempting to understand the movement.
"The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part": understanding social movements from above
‘From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press’, Raymond Williams writes, ‘any ruling class, in variable ways though always materially, produces a social and political order’. This productive activity constitutes the essence of what can be referred to as social movements from above. This paper explores social movements from above as the organization of multiple forms of skilled activity around a rationality expressed and organized by dominant social groups, which aims at the maintenance or modification of a dominant structure of entrenched needs and capacities in ways that reproduce and/or extend the power of those groups and its hegemonic position within a given social formation. Starting from a theoretical conception of social structure as the sediment of struggle between social movements from above and those from below, the paper discusses the relevance of a conception of social movements from above to activist experience – in particularly as a way of avoiding the reification of exploitative and oppressive social structures. The paper moves on to an outline of a model of the fields of force animated by movements from above and below in understanding the major ‘epochal shifts’ and ‘long waves’ in capitalist development. This model is then put to work in a prolegomenon to an analysis of global neoliberal restructuring as a social movement from above aiming to restore the class power of capital over labour. This analysis aims to discern the hegemony of neoliberalism not as an accomplished and monolithic state of affairs, but as an unfinished process riddled by internal contradictions which the movement of movements might exploit in its efforts to impose an alternative direction and meaning upon the self-production of society.
Moving beyond the toolbox: Providing social movement studies with a materialist dialectical lens
2018
Numerous studies within critical political economy try to make sense of the (post-)crisis period by focusing on top-down analyses of capitalist hegemony. They appear to ignore the proliferation of social movements that emerged in that period. In contrast, social movement studies tend to lack a theory of capital and thus, missing the class struggle, inadequately addresses questions of the state, power relations, and what movements may mean for our current capitalist conjuncture. To provide an analysis that can benefit from both traditions, we propose to re-embed methods employed by key social movement scholars such as Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow into a critical social theory centred on class struggle, by a non-dogmatic use of a materialist dialectical lens. Consequently, cognitive, relational, and environmental mechanisms are repurposed as cognitive, organizational, environmental, and institutional dynamics. This reformulation focuses on processes and relations rathe...
Towards a Critical Theory of Social Movements: An Introduction
Why have social movement studies mostly ignored the concept of capitalism as an important factor explaining the rise, the decline, and even the absence of social mobilizations? Our thesis is that the silence of social movement research on capitalism is anything but strange. We contend that social movement studies have arisen and come out from the rejection of Marxist and capitalist explanations of societal transformations, which were relatively popular and relevant in the 1960s and 1970s. The institutionalization of the field of social movement research has been founded on a sort of “epistemological bias” vis-à-vis capitalist (and Marxist) analysis. The time seems ripe to broaden the scope of the analysis of movement studies to the macro-structural perspectives of (critical) political economy. The scarce scholarly attention devoted to the connection between the economic structures of society and the political conditions affecting the emergence of mobilizations has caused the diminished capacity of mainstream social movement research to fully understand the recent wave of protests. For us, the reception of some aspects of political economy may be helpful to grasp the variety and timing of the recent wave of protests, arisen in distinct regions of the world with different temporalities in opposition to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. How can we interpret and translate these important intuitions for the study of capitalism into social movement research? The main lesson that we can derive from them is that it is not possible to come out with an explanation of the rise, development, and decline of social movements without taking seriously into consideration the dynamics of transformation implied in the never-ending process of capital accumulation.
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Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction
Marxism and Social Movements, 2013
On the one hand, Marxism is a body of theory that developed from and was crafted for social movements. The work of Marx and Engels represents a distillation of the experiences, debates, theories and conflicts faced by the popular movements of the nineteenth century, that sought in turn to contribute to those movements' further development. Subsequent developments of Marxist theory in the twentieth century were intimately linked to the development of oppositional political projects across the globe, ranging from revolutionary struggles against imperialist wars and capitalism itself to anti-colonial movements and the emergence of new forms of popular assertion in the post-WWII era. On the other hand, if the main figures of 'classical Marxism' all used the term 'movement', none seems to have developed any explicit theorization of the term. Moreover, while Marxists have produced groundbreaking studies of specific movements, they have apparently not produced an explicit 'theory of movements'-that is, a theory which specifically explains the emergence, character and development of social movements. Nor have they explored how the concept of 'movement' might be interwoven with other foundational concepts in Marxist theory like class struggle, hegemony and revolution or human species being, alienation and praxis. There is, in short, a distinct lack of work-scholarly or activist-devoted to thinking through what an integrated Marxist theory of social movements might look like, and what its impact on Marxist theory itself might be. This situation is compounded by the fact that mainstream social movement theory-whether it emerges from American or European academia-consistently avoids debate with Marxist perspectives, although they constitute by some margin the largest alternative body of research on popular movements. Instead, what can only be described as caricatures or straw-man versions of Marxist theory are as widespread in scholarship as in some forms of anti-Marxist activism.
We make our own history: Marxism and social movements in the twilight of neoliberalism
2014
We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North. From this movement of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. 'We Make Our Own History’ responds to this crisis. The first systematic Marxist analysis of social movements, this book reclaims Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.
The Authors and the Actors of Their Own Drama: Towards a Marxist Theory of Social Movements
Capital and Class, 2009
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On Marxism and Social Movements
Text of a talk given at the Marxist Education Project (Brooklyn Commons) on 18 October 2016 (http://marxedproject.org/event/we-make-our-own-history-on-marxism-and-social-movements/)
(2014) BOOK REVIEW Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, Alf Gunvald Nilsen, (2013) (eds.) Marxism and Social Movements, Brill: Netherlands, 473 pages, ISBN 9789004211759, Hardback
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2014
2013) Marxism and Social Movements. Brill: Netherlands. 473 pages. isbn: 9789004211759.
Social Movements in the Twilight Years of Neoliberalism: A Marxist Perspective
This is the text of a talk given at a book launch at Ike's Books and Collectables in Durban, 4 June 2015.
Resurrection of the Dead, Exaltation of the New Struggles: Marxism, Class Conflict, and Social Movement
Historical Materialism, 2019
This 'editorial perspective' offers reflection on Marxist theory in the narrow domain of social movements and social-movement studies. It offers a brief survey of international class struggles over the last few decades to situate the discussion. It then focuses on the problem of capitalism for social-movement studies, and the particular issue of capitalist totality. It argues that an expansive, processual, historical and temporal conception of class struggle needs to be at the centre of any adequate Marxist approach to social movements, and shows why and how this is so by delving into some contemporary debates over dominant forms of collective action-strike and riot. It also highlights the dialectical relations between production, reproduction and social reproduction, and how the latest revivals of Marxist feminism might guide us through the morass. Finally, it suggests that struggles across these interrelated domains can be linked through an 'infrastructure of dissent' .
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