Social Movements and World-System Transformation

Jackie Smith, MICHAEL GOODHART, Patrick Manning, John Markoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315458236
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

At a particularly urgent world-historical moment, this volume brings together some of the leading researchers of social movements and global social change and other emerging scholars and practitioners to advance new thinking about social movements and global transformation. Social movements around the world today are responding to crisis by defying both political and epistemological borders, offering alternatives to the global capitalist order that are imperceptible through the modernist lens. Informed by a world-historical perspective, contributors explain today's struggles as building upon the experiences of the past while also coming together globally in ways that are inspiring innovation and consolidating new thinking about what a fundamentally different, more equitable, just, and sustainable world order might look like.

This collection offers new insights into contemporary movements for global justice, challenging readers to appreciate how modernist thinking both colors our own observations and complicates the work of activists seeking to resolve inequities and contradictions that are deeply embedded in Western cultural traditions and institutions. Contributors consider today's movements in the longue durée—that is, they ask how Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and other contemporary struggles for liberation reflect, build upon, or diverge from anti-colonial and other emancipatory struggles of the past. Critical to this volume is its exploration of how divisions over gender equity and diversity of national cultures and class have impacted what are increasingly intersectional global movements. The contributions of feminist and indigenous movements come to the fore in this collective exploration of what the movements of yesterday and today can contribute to our ongoing effort to understand the dynamics of global transformation in order to help advance a more equitable, just, and ecologically sustainable world.

PART I

Disrupting hegemonic discourses and modes of thought

1

Modernity and the study of social movements

Do we need a paradigm shift?

Janet M. Conway

The notion of modernity is the dominant frame in histories of the present, both in the West and globally. Across competing intellectual traditions, including world-systems theory, the “social movement” is regarded as a distinctively modern phenomenon, appearing in Europe around the time of the French Revolution, stabilizing as a social form and diffusing with processes of modernization to the rest of the world. In this lineage, social movements are creatures of European modernity and the privileged carriers of modernity’s emancipatory traditions.

Central to dominant narratives of modernity are ideas of rupture and difference. The former involves a temporal break between the modern present and a traditional past; the latter associates the appearance of modernity uniquely with Europe and positions the West as the maker of universal history, setting the pattern of development for societies everywhere. This Eurocentric knowledge regime is marked by constructions of history that interpret events in Europe/the West as world historic in significance, singular in nature, and as having emerged endogenously in the West as a bounded space (Bhambra 2007: 4–5).

Social movements as a historical phenomenon and an analytic category, as well as the dominant traditions of their interpretation, are deeply intertwined with such Eurocentric narratives of modernity. This has myriad implications for what has been seen and valorized as a social movement, containing resistance and alternative possible futures to what can be countenanced within Euro-modernity. What are the implications of this epistemological condition for seeing, representing, analyzing, and understanding the array of social forces that are today contesting globalization, that involve “new” actors, from different world regions, deploying unfamiliar discourses, and claiming that “other worlds” are possible? Do we need a paradigm shift in the study of social movements, more able to contemplate this diverse array of resistances, their possible relations to each other and to the globalized past and present?

If the provisional answer to this is yes, then one path to this end must travel through the colonial, for there is no adequate way today, neither empirically nor ethically, of thinking the global without the colonial. Informed by the work of the Latin American research group on modernity-coloniality,¹ this paper departs from the premise that coloniality is the constitutive underside of modernity and is thereby constitutive of the modern world-system, from its inception in the 16th century to the present. With lineages in dependency theory and world-systems theory, reconfigured through post-colonial thought, the modernity-coloniality perspective provides an important alternative critical discourse of globalization and a source of critique and reconstruction in theorizing social movements.

In this article, I engage in a ground-clearing exercise while only pointing to starting points for the reconstructive project. I examine three major critical traditions of interpretation of social movements for the degree to which Eurocentric discourses of modernity structure their inquiry and thus our ways of thinking about social movements. I first elaborate the problematic of modernity’s relation to coloniality before turning to: (1) the contentious politics framework through the work of Charles Tilly; (2) new social movement theory through the work of Alain Touraine; and (3) world-systems theory’s approach to antisystemic movements through the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.

Modernity, coloniality, and contemporary globalization in historical perspective

Abstractly, the concept of modernity is associated with a sense of newness, of advancement over the past, and a capacity for rational-scientific and secular modes of thought. According to Anibal Quijano, these are possible emergences in all cultures and historical epochs. However, in European history, these coalesced at a time when Europe was also exerting imperial domination over the rest of the world. In the context of the colonial encounter, Europeans conceived their particular modernity and forms of rationality as singular and superior to the other worlds they encountered (Quijano 2000: 543).

Capitalism and European modernity are indistinguishable in their historical origins but both must be understood as mutually constitutive with the emergence of the modern world-system, which began to form with the conquest of the Americas. The change in material relations made possible by mercantilist capitalism, a new model of global power premised on European military-technological and political-economic domination, and the integration of all peoples also characterized a historical epoch, and it was decisive that it was centered in Western Europe. This Euro-modernity was globalizing and colonial from its origin and modernity today involves the totality of the global population, the history of the last 500 years, all the worlds articulated to this global model of power which originated in the West (Quijano 2000: 545–546). Coloniality refers to the colonial character of the world-system that persists in the present in global hierarchies of power, knowledge and being that privilege the modern West. The modern world-system is better characterized as the modern-colonial world-system, one in which the coloniality of knowledge is central to securing Western hegemony through its claims to universalism and its silencing of the colonial other.

The European conquest of the Americas was central to new perceptions about time and history, which have also come to be associated with modernity. The singularity and superiority of European civilization was understood as in a temporal relation to its colonial others, in which modern Europe was conceived as the present forging a new human future, while its others, their knowledges and ways of life were consigned to the past – as primitive, backward, destined to disappear or, at best, in a perpetual state of trying to “catch up.” Radical European thought, past and present, although anticapitalist and even anti-imperialist, has not been immune to these Eurocentric assumptions. Because social movements figure so centrally in radical thought as the privileged carriers of popular democratic aspirations, of national, and indeed global, emancipation, claims about social movements powerfully shape political imaginaries – and these claims are deeply implicated in the modern-colonial knowledge regime.

Since the 19th century, Eurocentric thought has organized societies on an imaginary chronological line from nature to culture (W. Mignolo 2005) or, in another formulation, tradition to modernity (Dirlik 2007). Chronological narratives are at the heart of modern-colonial systems of oppression (Vázquez 2009: 1) and have underpinned doctrines of progress, development and modernization into the present. Modern chronological narratives deeply structure social movement studies, as we shall see.

In intra-European discourses of modernity, this temporal construct is understood as characteristic of Western modernity in relation to its own past, understood in intra-European ways, without reference to the significance of the Conquest or Europe’s relation to colonial others in shaping its own modernity and associated subjectivity (Escobar 2004). According to Alain Touraine, for example, at the heart of the idea of Western modernity is an attitude to the past as the realm of tradition, that is, of local, bounded cultures, in which order and hierarchy are maintained through the constrictions of religious thought. The realm of tradition radically constrains individual freedom – even the notion of the individual. In Touraine’s narrative, modernity is valorized as rebellion against tradition in the name of freedom, the individual, and the rational (Touraine 1995). Such modern freedom-seeking subjects populate most accounts of social movements.

Anti-colonial movements of the 20th century have successfully discredited claims of Western civilizational superiority and disrupted universalist teleologies of progress and modernization based on Western historical experience. The anti-colonial critique has opened up epistemological space to acknowledge the possibility of different historical and cultural trajectories in the unfolding of modernity (Dirlik 2007: 80). Under conditions (both epistemological and political-economic) of contemporary globalization, there is no single center or source from which globalized modernity is produced. The zero-sum modernity–tradition distinction that historically spatially demarcated the West from the rest has broken down.

However, many contemporary discourses of globalization reintroduce capitalist developmentalist teleologies that had earlier underpinned the tradition-to-modernity thesis and subsequently the post-war global project of development with its scientistic rationalization in modernization theory. In continuing to assume that the advanced capitalist West sets the pattern for human futures, the putatively culturally neutral discourse of globalization reinscribes a form of Eurocentric thought. Keeping in mind this critical discussion of modernity-coloniality and its relation to contemporary globalization, I now turn to the histories and theories that condition our study of social movements in the globalized present.

The contentious politics tradition

In the contentious politics tradition explored here through the work of Charles Tilly (Tilly and Wood 2013), Tilly argues for the need to specify the “social movement” as a particular, identifiable, historically specific political form. In keeping with dominant social scientific modes, Tilly seeks to produce a general theory which will predict and explain social movements. While the social movement should be understood in relation to other forms of contentious politics, it also must be analytically separable from such phenomena as revolutions, uprisings, riots, strike waves, nationalisms, or terrorism. Tilly also understands the social movement as having displaced “pre-modern” forms of collective action, such as shaming or tarring and feathering. In Tilly’s work, “Britain is brilliantly portrayed as a model of the shift from traditional to modern repertoires,” according to Sidney Tarrow (Tarrow 2008: 242, my emphasis).

Through in-depth historical studies, first of England and later of France, Tilly holds that the social movement as a stable form appeared around the end of the 18th century in both England and the United States. The social movement involved a limited and standardized repertoire of behaviors anchored in the development of formal associations that engage in public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment (i.e., “WUNC” displays). The core repertoire consists of public meetings, petitions, declarations, demonstrations, and shared symbols of membership that are combined in campaigns aimed at political institutions. When this repertoire becomes widely available to social groups and endures over time, the social movement as a stable political form is judged as having appeared in any given society.

In Tilly’s studies, the appearance of the social movement is associated historically with the expansion of capitalism and concomitant proletarianization, increased state capacity for and engagement in war, and parliamentarization. War-making demanded that the state increase in size, capacity, and reach for management and taxation purposes. At the same time, Tilly argues, there was an expansion of channels and mechanisms to make democratic claims on the state. In Tilly’s work and in the contentious politics tradition more generally, these processes are all understood as specific to and contained within the boundaries of particular nation states, developing virtually autochthonously.

In Tilly’s narrative, social movements emerge within and are closely conceptually related to the expansion of civil society. Civil society is understood to be non-violent, accepting the legitimacy of the social order in which it appears, while also seeking reform and inclusion. Within this framework, the social movement is understood as a cross-class phenomenon that functions to demand civil and political rights from authoritarian regimes and to continually expand rights and representation as societies liberalize and democratize. Social movements thus become a routinized, even institutionalized, feature of modern(izing) societies.

Tilly’s account of the history of popular contention in England has become the paradigmatic story of the appearance and dynamics of social movements everywhere. It has produced a general theory which is regularly applied to other national contexts to test the presence of the social movement as an instrument of democratization and harbinger of liberal modernity. In keeping with the tradition-to-modernity thesis, English democratization sets the pattern that societies everywhere will ultimately follow. Assisted by this interpretive framework which has become hegemonic in social movement studies, social movements have come to be understood as modernizers: harbingers and agents of liberal modernity and democratization.

Tilly recognizes that the social movement is associated with a specific set of socio-historical conditions, and that as a particular political form it may eventually disappear. In other words, in his narrative, the social movement as concept and form is unintelligible apart from its being embedded in the emergence and development of liberal democratic modernity. This order is also, by definition, capitalist, although this remains largely unmarked and unproblematized in Tilly’s work. In contemporary social movement studies, where liberal capitalist modernity is normalized as already existing or emergent everywhere, the social movement is understood as an objective and universal political category rather than a context-specific construction (Osterweil 2014).

Thus, according to this framework, the social movement was invented in Britain and subsequently diffused, with some cultural adaptation, to other countries. It is a story of diffusion from its point of origin, where new appearances are judged against the original creation. Moreover, its appearance as an identifiable form in the Anglo-American mold, becomes a harbinger and measure of democracy/democratization and with it, modernity and modernization. This theoretical perspective is underpinned by the thesis that societies everywhere are converging (McDonald 2006: 20). Social movement studies in the contentious politics tradition becomes the search for conditions and causes, prediction and explanation of social movements, within a paradigm of spreading modernization. The spread of social movements is the story of the spread of liberal democratic (and capitalist) modernity. A causal relationship is posited between democratization and social movement activity, in which social mobilizations of popular classes are perceived to be a feature of modernization. Tilly’s work, and this understanding of social movements, is thus situated in a liberal pluralist framework, which takes capitalism and liberal democracy for granted and understands social movements as functional to this social order. It reduces the content of the category “social movement” as well as the scope of its possible meaning to that which can be countenanced within liberal pluralism.

In studies of 20th century social movements anchored in this and related analytical traditions (resource mobilization; political process), the social movements under study are those in Western liberal democracies, formally institutionalized and making claims on the state for greater rights and representation. The political institutions of the modern state constitute the political opportunity structure that conditions their shape, scope and trajectory. As Osterweil (2014) has observed, this is a politically and epistemologically limited conception which screens out many aspects of collective agency in the West and beyond, both historically and currently.

Premised as it is on methodological nationalism, it is also ill-equipped to deal with the newness associated with transnational social movements. With regard to transnational social movements, scholars working within this tradition have essentially projected its assumptions globally, assuming the conditions that pertain at the national scale in liberal democracies also pertain globally. International institutions replace the national state as the global political opportunity structure and global civil society becomes the transnational domain of social movements.

New social movement theory

New social movement theory (NSMT) takes as its object of study the “new” social movements of the late 20th century, which it distinguishes from earlier forms based on class or nation, and as also expressive of macro-historical, structural transformation. If, for Tilly, the social movement is a form produced in the cauldron of early European modernity and continues to appear today in the context of its continuity and global expansion, then for Alain Touraine and other NSM theorists, the novelty of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was in their signaling a rupture in the history of modernity in the context of a structural shift from industrial to post-industrial society. Underlying NSMT as an account of historical-structural change is the primacy of the mode of production in establishing the terms for contestation of the social and the conditions of possibility for new su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: Unthinking the world-system
• Antisystemic movements, yesterday and today
• PART 1: Disrupting hegemonic discourses and modes of thought
• PART II: World-historical perspectives on emancipatory struggles and organizational logics
• PART III: Practices and challenges in contemporary organizing across diversity
• PART IV: The politics of making life possible: towards buen vivir?
• Conclusion: Social movements and world-system transformation
• Index