CFP – Interface Issue 3: Crises, Social Movements and Revolutionary Transformations

Interface – A Journal For and About Social Movements

Call for papers – Issue 3:

CRISES, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS

Interface is a new journal produced twice yearly by activists and academics around the world in response to the development and increased visibility of social movements in the last few years – and the immense amount of knowledge generated in this process. This knowledge is created across the globe, and in many contexts and a variety of ways, and it constitutes an incredibly valuable resource for the further development of social movements. Interface responds to this need, as a tool to help our movements learn from each other’s struggles, by developing analyses and knowledge that allow lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and translated into a form useful for other movements.

We welcome contributions by movement participants and academics who are developing movement-relevant theory and research. Our goal is to include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements – in terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form. We are seeking work in a range of different formats, such as conventional articles, review essays, facilitated discussions and interviews, action notes, teaching notes, key documents and analysis, book reviews – and beyond. Both activist and academic peers review research contributions, and other material is sympathetically edited by peers. The editorial process generally will be geared towards assisting authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all can be heard across geographical, social and political distances.

Our third issue, to be published in May 2010, will have space for general articles on all aspects of understanding social movements, as well as a special themed section on crises, social movements and revolutionary transformations.

CRISES, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS

“In every country the process is different, although the content is the same. And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking, for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of broad masses … or because huge masses … have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state”

So wrote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci from behind the walls of Mussolini’s prison, in his famous notes on “State and Civil Society”. His words aptly describe the trajectory of crises in modern history — these are periods when the wheels of economic growth and expansion grind to a halt, when traditional political loyalties melt away, and, crucially, when ruling classes find themselves confronted with popular movements that no longer accept the terms of their rule, and that seek to create alternative social orders. The clashes between elite projects and popular movements that are at the heart of any “crisis of hegemony” generate thoroughgoing processes of economic, social and political change – these may be reforms that bear the imprint of popular demands, and they may also be changes that reflect the implementation of elite designs. Most importantly, however, crises are typically also those moments when social movements and subaltern groups are able to push the limits of what they previously thought it was possible to achieve in terms of effecting progressive change – it is this dynamic which lies at the heart of revolutionary transformations.

Gramsci himself witnessed, organised within and wrote during the breakdown of liberal capitalism and bourgeois democracy in the 1910s through to the 1930s. This was a conjuncture when tendencies towards stagnation in capitalist accumulation generated the horrors of the First World War and the Great Depression. Movements of workers and colonized peoples threatened the rule of capital and empires, old and new, and elites turned to repressive strategies like fascism in an attempt to secure the continuation of their dominance.

Today social movements are once again having to do their organizing and mobilizing work in the context of economic crisis, one that is arguably of similar proportions to that witnessed by Gramsci, and a political crisis that runs just as deep. The current crisis emerged from the collapse of the US housing market, revealing an intricate web of unsustainable debt and “toxic assets” whose tentacles reached every corner of the global economy. More than just a destruction of “fictitious capital”, the crisis has propelled a breakdown of world industrial production and trade, driving millions of working families to the brink and beyond. And, far from being a one-off, this crisis is the latest and worst in a series of collapses starting with the stock market crash of 1987, the chronic stagnation of the once all-powerful Japanese economy, the Asian financial meltdown of 1997 and the bursting of the dot.com bubble.

The current conjuncture throws into question the fundamentals of the neoliberal project that has been pursued by global elites and transnational institutions over the past three decades. Taking aim at reversing the victories won by popular movements in the aftermath of the Second World War, neoliberalism transferred wealth from popular classes to global elites on a grand scale. The neoliberal project of privatizing the public sector and commodifying public goods, rolling back the welfare states, promoting tax cuts for the rich, manipulating economic crises in the global South and deregulating the world’s financial markets continued unabated through the 1980s and 1990s.

As presaged by Gramsci, neoliberal policies have whittled away the material concessions that underpinned social consensus. Ours is a conjuncture in which global political elites have failed in an undertaking for which they sought popular consent, and as a consequence, popular masses have passed from political passivity to a certain activity.

Since the middle of the 1990s, we have seen the development of large-scale popular movements in several parts of the globe, along with a series of revolutionary situations or transformations in various countries, as well as unprecedented levels of international coordination and alliance-building between movements and direct
challenges not only to national but to global power structures. The first stirrings of this activity were in the rise of the Zapatistas in Mexico, the water wars in Bolivia, and the protests on the streets of Seattle. On a global scale we saw dissent explode in the form of opposition to the wars waged by the US on Afghanistan and Iraq. In terms of sheer numbers, the mobilisation of against the latter invasion was the largest political protest ever undertaken, leading the New York Times to call the anti-war movement the world’s “second superpower”.

Each country has had its own movements, and a particular character to how they have moved against the neoliberal project. And for some time many have observed that these campaigns, initiatives and movements are not isolated occurrences, but part of a wider global movement for justice in the face of the neoliberal project. An explosion of analysis looking at these events and movements has occurred in the academic world, matched only by extensive argument and debate within the movements themselves.

In this issue of Interface, we encourage submissions that explore the relationship between crises, social movements and revolutionary transformations in general and the character of the current crisis and how social movements across different regions have related and responded to it in particular. Some of the questions we want to explore are as follows:

• What are the characteristics of the current economic and political crisis, what roles do social movements – from above and below – play in its dynamics, and how does it compare to the political economy of previous cycles of crises and struggle?
• What has been the role played by social movements in moments of crisis in modern history, and what lessons can contemporary popular movements learn from these experiences?
• What kinds of qualitative/quantitative shift in popular mobilisation we might expect to see in a “revolutionary wave”?
• Are crises – and in particular our current crisis – characterized by substantial competitions between different kinds of movements from
below? How does such a dynamic affect the capacity to effect radical change?
• What goals do social movements set themselves in context of crisis and what kinds of movement are theoretically or historically capable of bringing about a transformed society?
• What are the criteria of success that activists operate with in terms of the forms of change social movements can achieve in the current conjuncture?
• Is revolutionary transformation a feasible option at present? Is revolution a goal among contemporary social movements?
• What are the characteristic features of elite deployment of coercive strategies when their hegemony is unravelling?
• How have global elites responded to the current crisis in terms of resort to coercion and consent? Have neoliberal elites been successful in trying to re-establish their legitimacy and delegitimizing opponents?
• Are we witnessing any bids for hegemony from elite groups outside the domain of Atlantic neoliberalism?
• How is coercion in its various forms impacting on contemporary social movements and the politics of global justice?

The deadline for contributions for the second issue is January 1, 2010.

Please contact the appropriate editor if you are thinking of submitting an article. You can access the journal and get further details at http://www.interfacejournal.net/.

Interface is programmatically multilingual: at present we can accept and review submissions in Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. We are also willing to try and find suitable referees for submissions in other languages, but cannot guarantee that at this point.
We are also very much looking for activists or academics interested in becoming part of Interface, particularly with the African, South Asian, Spanish-speaking Latin American, East and Central European, Mediterranean, Oceanian and North American groups.

On Subaltern Studies – In Norwegian …

The link below takes you to an article on Subaltern Studies which is forthcoming in the journal Agora. It is in Norwegian, and aims to put forward a critique of the theory of subalternity and subaltern resistance as an autonomous domain …

Makt og Motstand i Indisk Historie og Samtid

Interface – Call for papers, Issue 2: Civil Society vs. Social Movements

Interface is a new journal produced twice yearly by activists and academics around the world in response to the development and increased visibility of social movements in the last few years – and the immense amount of knowledge generated in this process. This knowledge is created across the globe, and in many contexts and a variety of ways, and it constitutes an incredibly valuable resource for the further development of social movements. Interface responds to this need, as a tool to help our movements learn from each other’s struggles.

Interface is a forum bringing together activists from different movements and different countries, researchers working with movements, and progressive academics from various countries to contribute to the production of knowledge that can help us gain insights across movements and issues, across continents and cultures, and across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. To this end, Interface seeks to develop analysis and knowledge that allow lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and translated into a form useful for other movements.

We invite both formal research (qualitative and quantitative) and practically-grounded work on all aspects of social movements. In doing so, we welcome contributions by movement participants and academics who are developing movement-relevant theory and research. Our goal is to include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements – in terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form.

We are seeking work in a range of different formats, such as conventional articles, review essays, facilitated discussions and interviews, action notes, teaching notes, key documents and analysis, book reviews – and beyond (see details in the guidelines for contributors). Research contributions are reviewed by both activist and academic peers, other material is sympathetically edited by peers, and the editorial process generally will be geared towards assisting authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all can be heard across geographical, social and political distances.

Our first issue, published in January 2009, focussed on the theme of “movement knowledge”: what we know, how we create knowledge, what we do with it and how it can make a difference either in movement struggles or in creating a different and better world.

Our second issue, to be published in September 2009, will have space for general articles on all aspects of understanding social movements, as well as a special themed section on “civil society versus social movements”. By this we mean the increasing tension between officially-approved versions of popular participation in politics geared towards the mobilisation of consent for neo-liberalism – the world of consultation and participation, NGOs and partnership – and the less polite and polished world of people’s attempts to participate in politics on their own terms, in their own forms and for their own purposes – social movements, popular protest, direct action, and so on. In drawing this distinction, we realise that civil society organisations and social movements often have complex and contradictory practices and relationships which do not fit into two clearly distinguished categories. One of the objectives of this edition is not therefore to impose a straightjacket on reflections and analysis of these different types of participation but rather to open up discussion and strategic thinking between activists, movement participants and researchers working in different contexts and with different experiences.

The types of questions and experiences we are interested in exploring include (but are not limited to):

- To what extent do social movements and civil society organisations exist in an antagonistic and conflictual relationship?

- Are there examples in which this relationship can become constructive for the struggle for popular democracy and social justice?

- What can particular experiences of these types of participation tell us about the possibilities and limitations for the development and strengthening of popular resistance to neoliberalism?

- How can we develop theory and practice that overcomes the often idealistic notion that NGOs are always actors that foster social justice?

- How can we overcome the often simplistic critique of NGOs as the ‘trojan horses of neoliberalism’?

- What can the experiences of workers and participants in civil society organisations tell us about the nature of domination and resistance?

The deadline for contributions for the second issue is May 15th, 2009. Please contact the appropriate editor if you are thinking of submitting an article. You can access the journal and get further details at http://www.interfacejournal.net/ .

Interface is programmatically multilingual: at present we can accept and review submissions in Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. We are also willing to try and find suitable referees for submissions in other languages, but cannot guarantee that at this point.

We are also very much looking for activists or academics interested in becoming part of Interface, particularly with the African, South Asian, Spanish-speaking Latin American, East and Central European, Mediterranean, Oceanian and North American groups.

Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects

One of my articles on the Narmada struggle was recently published in the Journal of Historical Sociology – you can access it here:

 

Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power

 

The Relevance of the World Social Forum to Struggles for Social Justice in India

REFLECTIONS ON THE SYMPOSIUM “STRUGGLES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN INDIA TODAY: HOW RELEVANT IS THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM?”

(ORGANIZED BY CACIM, DELHI, AUGUST 2008

ALF GUNVALD NILSEN

 

On August 30/31, I participated in a symposium organized by CACIM (Critical Action – Centre in Movement) in Delhi, which aimed to reflect on the state of struggles for social justice in India today, and the relevance of the World Social Forum to these processes. The symposium offered a welcome chance to reflect on a theme of considerable importance and urgency, as well as to listen to and engage with interesting presentations from seasoned activists and scholars such as Gabriele Dietrich, Vinod Raina and Uma Chakravarty, as well as research papers on the WSF presented by CACIM’s Forum Fellows of 2007-8. In these notes I present a slightly elaborated version of my summary and discussion of the main streams of the arguments that unfolded during the symposium.

 

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The context of CACIM’s symposium was set in a brief discussion note that drew up a broad-brushed picture of the context in which struggles for social justice unfold in India. Contemporary India, it is argued, is witnessing a great intensification of popular struggles for social justice, which is often reactive in character – that is, reactions by particular communities against the depredations of neoliberal restructuring and the upsurge of communal and fascist forces. Simultaneously, popular struggles are encountering an increasingly repressive response from above, which further reinforces the reactive character of many of these struggles. However, India is also witnessing “greater collaboration and convergence of different movements and campaigns for social justice, as a part of this rising assertion”. This scenario parallels with “the invention and the institutionalization of the World Social Forum” as a potentially crucial development in the crystallization of resistance against neoliberalism and for an alternative world order. CACIM notes that the WSF was heralded in these terms in India since its inception there World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. Nevertheless, something seems to have gone wrong – not only was there significant criticism against the WSF from radical quarters when it was introduced in India, but more recently, activity around and interest in the WSF and the wider Forum process has been at a low, thus raising the question as to how relevant the Forum actually is to popular struggles for social justice in India today.

 

I share in much of CACIM’s diagnosis of the state of popular struggles in India today. However, possibly as a result of the bias that flows from my own research over the past six years, I would add that popular struggles in India have also witnessed some crucial defeats in recent times. A key example here would be the Narmada Bachao Andolan; despite its many substantial achievements – the empowerment of adivasi communities in relation to an unresponsive and coercive local state, the politicization of dams and displacement, the successful campaign against World Bank funding of the Sardar Sarovar Project and corporate investments in the Maheshwar Hydroelectric Project – the movement nevertheless failed to achieve its key goal, which was to stop dam-building on the Narmada River (see other posts on this blog). The very fact that the strategies of a movement that had so much going for it, not just in terms of organizational strength and impact, integration into transnational activist networks, and international attention, but also in terms of the burden of proof against its opponent, ultimately foundered should indeed be an issue of concern to activists everywhere as dispossession assumes increasingly virulent and violent forms in India. This is the context, then, in which the WSF has to render itself relevant – on the one hand, an intensification of struggles, but on the other hand also defeats and increasing levels of state repression.

 

How has the WSF tried to make itself relevant to popular struggles for social justice? By being an open space – that is, a space in which movements, activists and other progressives can come together and share their experiences of struggle. Now, in and by itself, there is nothing new in this; it is quite simply what activists and movements tend to do per definition. It is through such sharing of experiences that movements come into being, and if they extend their reach and scope beyond the immediate locale of resistance and come to fight wider struggles for social justice, this is the activity which drives that process. Indeed, it is through such sharing of experiences that movements come to build the capacity to change the world – as they have done at several conjunctures in history, even when they have been defeated.

 

Yet, there is a crucial difference between the sharing of experience as a part and parcel of activist praxis and the way that it is practised by/within the WSF. When activists come together to share their “lessons learnt”, this tends to happen with a view towards “joining the dots” between issues and struggles so as to facilitate joint action. In other words, such sharing is done with a view towards figuring out who the common enemy is, defining a common identity, and chalking out a common strategy. In its refusal to do just this – i.e. to work towards the development of political platforms and strategies – the WSF stops short of this kind of action-orientation, and in listening to the various presentations at the symposium, this seemed to be key to the concerns expressed about the relevance of the WSF to struggles for social justice in India today.        

 

For example, Gabriele Dietrich argued that whilst there was substantial enthusiasm for the WSF initially, it had gradually waned as it became clear that the practical impacts and implications of the process were relatively limited. In her view, the WSF often worked in such a way as to secure a degree of attention around issues that activists are engaged with, but little more – issues become known globally, but they are left unresolved locally as the power relations from which they stem remain intact. Vinod Raina pointed out that one of the great promises of the WSF was that it would facilitate greater horizontal integration between movements at a time when it was highly needed. Although a certain level of horizontal integration had been achieved, it had, however, proven to be transitory and had not been sustained by the Forum process. Finally, Uma Chakravarty criticized the kind of “rainbow coalition” mentality that tends to be fostered by the open space strategy for failing to provide an analysis of how issues of class, caste, gender and imperialism are interlinked, and how single issues are integrated into a greater structural totality.

 

Similar themes emerged in the papers of the CACIM Forum Fellows. Mamata Dash’s paper on how movement groups view the WSF pointed out that in the case of the struggles of forest people, the Forum had contributed to the initiation of dialogue amongst movement groups both inside and outside India, resulting in greater coordination of campaigns for the right to the forest and forest resources. This was a rare example, however – the exception rather than the rule. As movement activists see it, there have been few practical outcomes of the WSF, and its ambit of active participation has often been restricted to leaders and movement intellectuals rather than the grassroots “rank and file”. Mayur Chetia’s paper on the relationship of the left to the World Social Forum raised similar issues in pointing out that much of the left perceives its operational mode as limiting the ability to craft common perspectives and strategies between movements. Finally, Susanna Barria’s paper on the main debates around the 2004 WSF argued that one of the reasons why the Forum has had limited resonance among movement groups in India is quite possibly that its mode of operation and its ambition to craft a “new politics” is quite alien in the Indian context, where “old” forms of oppositional politics still remain strong.

 

Now, there is of course an obvious rejoinder to such arguments, and that is that the perceived lack of relevance stems from movements and activists expecting to be the WSF to be what it ostensibly is not – a kind of co-ordinating committee for action. Consequently, the question of relevance can be resolved with a readjustment of expectations, so to speak. But I think this would be an inadequate and indeed unfortunate response to the WSF. Whereas a rejoinder of this kind is valid on its own terms, it would nevertheless, I think, amount to turning one’s back on activist needs and concerns, and, moreover, to an abdication of accountability and responsibility towards the strategic imperatives of the hour.

 

The World Social Forum came into being at a time when open spaces were highly needed. Two decades of defeatism and fragmentation had passed, in which the powers that be rejoiced in the mantra that “there is no alternative”. With the emergence of the WSF it was again possible to say that “we are everywhere” and proof was in hand that “another world is possible”. But where are we now? There is no doubt that the global alterglobalization movement has been crucial in eroding the legitimacy of institutions such as the WTO, the G8, the World Bank and the IMF, and that the neoliberal state is experiencing a crisis of hegemony. It is the lack of popular consent that leads the neoliberal state to resort to surveillance, gagging, imprisonment and liquidation – precisely because it has so little else to offer social majorities after decades of daylight robbery of social wealth and public goods. In spite of this, we are facing a powerful enemy, and this is evident in the ever-widening scope and intensity of dispossession and imperialist warfare. Hence, perhaps it is time to get beyond the celebration of another world being possible and our presence being everywhere and move towards more fecund forms of theoretical production and strategic propositions that can move us beyond what is arguably a stalemate and towards a viable plan for progressive oppositional action. And if the WSF wants to be relevant to such a process, there are several issues that could be usefully discussed and reflected upon.

 

One of those issues is the very obvious and very simple fact that being perceived as relevant often flows from being perceived as effective. I say this partly on the basis of my experience with research on the Narmada movement. The Narmada Bachao Andolan was of course one of the main drivers behind and participants in the National Alliance of People’s Movements in India – a network that united several hundred movement groups around an agenda for alternative development. Although this was a significant achievement, what struck me in interviewing activists in adivasi villages was how faint the NAPM was to their lifeworld – the NAPM was somewhere the leaders went to hold discussions, it was not something directly relevant to them and their everyday plights. What would be talked about in great detail, though, was their participation in the trade union Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath, a precursor of the NBA, which struck at the heart of the everyday tyranny exercised over these communities by local state officials, and which did so with considerable success. In other words, a grassroots experience of relevance is likely to flow from a grassroots experience of being able to win victories that modify or transform power relations in a tangible way. Without such impacts, the reach and relevance of networks, alliances and indeed open spaces is quite likely to remain limited.

 

Another issue relates to the WSF’s ambition of crafting a “new politics” and how this relates to the issues and forms of power faced by movements. The basic point is that many of the issues around which struggles for social justice crystallize are ostensibly “old” in character. If anything, it is dispossession which occurs again and again as a theme in these struggles – dispossession not only of land, but of forest and water resources, of agricultural livelihoods and factory jobs, of squatter housing and coastal zones, and of hard-won rights and entitlements. And dispossession is as old as capitalism itself; indeed, it is the dispossession of social majorities of the productive resources that sustain their livelihoods that the fires of accumulation are fed – there is nothing new about this. Moreover, the state is deeply implicated in advancing dispossession – not only by promoting neoliberal agendas and policies, but also by smothering popular opposition through the deployment of the coercive apparatus at its disposal. The state, then, is blatantly a capitalist state, and there is nothing new about this either. I am neither saying this in an attempt to argue that there is nothing new under the sun, nor in an attempt to absolve the “old” politics of its shortcomings, but in an attempt to encourage, perhaps, a greater degree of humility amongst those who argue for a new politics and an ability to recognize that “old” forms of politics may not be completely devoid of virtues. What is more, I think it would be regrettable if the convergence of contemporary struggles for social justice, and with it the WSF process, was to descend into trench warfare over the supposed fault lines between “old” and “new” social movements. Such a development can only be detrimental to popular resistance, and the option of dialogue and cross-fertilization between political traditions is a far more preferable avenue to pursue.

 

Perhaps, then, it is time to re-think the mode of operation of the WSF in relation to activist needs, concerns and ambitions. Perhaps it is necessary to consider whether it is possible for the Forum to move from being an open space to being an infrastructure of resistance that is capable of supporting and sustaining engagements in theoretical production, strategic propositions and practical action. If the World Social Forum is, as it purports to be, a process, then surely the possibility of such change should not be inimical to its character.

 

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Notes towards a Marxist Theory of Social Movements

Does Marxist theory have anything to offer us in our efforts to make sense of social movements – both our own and those of others? In the two articles below I argue that it does, and try to unearth some of the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements …

[These two articles have served as raw material for shorter pieces that have either appeared or are forthcoming in Sosiologisk Tidsskrift and Capital and Class]

Notes towards a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Part 1

Notes towards a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Part 2