Sociology and Social Justice

Margaret Abraham, Margaret Abraham, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526464026, 9781526464019
• eBook ISBN: 9781526464170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Superbly conceptualises and contextualises social justice in and for our global age. The stellar cast of sociologists connect concepts to practices and outline the challenges we face, as well as providing necessary responses."

Gurminder K Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex"

A collection of brilliant essays by international scholar-activists, examining concepts and practices from diverse contexts."
Mary Romero, Professor of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University

"An excellent set of chapters bringing to the fore new perspectives on the social injustices and inequalities facing a world in crisis."
Kammila Naidoo, Professor of Sociology, University of Johannesburg

By using contextual global sociology, Sociology and Social Justice explores:

• Historic and contemporary sites and contexts around the world
• Sociological insights on topics ranging from social movements, to cyber space.
• International struggles, processes, and outcomes

Written by distinguished international scholars, this is an essential text for those looking at issues of: Human Rights, Public Sociology, Democratization, Gender, and Globalization.

1 A New Sociology for Social Justice Movements

Michael Burawoy ¹

Max Weber was clear that the rise of formal rationality, whether in the form of bureaucracy, law, or mass democracy, does not compensate subject populations for their economic and social oppression. Rather, formal rationality that extends equal rights to all perpetuates the injustices they experience. Weber argued that the only way this might be challenged was through informal means, what he sometimes called ‘Kadi-justice’ (Weber, 1946, p. 221). These informal means, however, whether they are public opinion or communal action, are often manipulated and staged from above. Weber was very suspicious of what today we call social movements, which he saw as arising from an ‘incoherent mass’ driven by ‘irrational sentiments’ (Weber, 1946, p. 221). His theory of collective action belongs to the first wave of social movement theory that stretches from Durkheim and Weber, to Smelser and Parsons for whom collective action was an irrational response to social change.

The second wave of social movement theory, drawing on Marxism, viewed social movements as rational in their pursuit of interests outside parliamentary politics, and they were successful insofar as they managed to develop resources, including an appropriate strategic framing, to achieve their goals. Here sociologists were in pursuit of a general theory of collective action – a theory true across time and space – that took the social, political, and economic context as a background variable. It was only ‘new social movement’ theory, associated with such writers as Alain Touraine, that considered the context – in his case postindustrial society or the programmed society – as defining the form of collective action.

Today, we need to move toward a third wave of social movement theory that centers on a new context, namely ‘neoliberalism’ – a nebulous concept that expresses the invasion of markets into all arenas of social and political life. In order to understand contemporary movements for social and economic justice it is necessary, therefore, to define ‘neoliberalism’. Here I will take Karl Polanyi’s (2001) The Great Transformation as my point of departure. But first let me explore the way marketization propels movements for social justice.

From Marketization to New Social Movements

Social justice and democratization are especially pertinent themes in Latin America, which for many years was ruled by military dictatorships. The transition to democracy, fought for bravely by so many, has been a major and indisputable advance. Democracy has not, however, fulfilled all its promises. Primarily, this is because the fall of political dictatorship has been followed by yet another dictatorship – the dictatorship of the market through structural adjustment. In its wake came wave upon wave of injustice and inequality that have inspired Latin Americans, sociologists among them, to battle for a deeper democracy. We see this, for example, in the schemes of participatory budgeting in Brazil, in the Piquetero Movement and factory occupations in Argentina, in the ethnic democracy of Bolivia, and in the student movement of Chile. There has been a relentless struggle to counter market fundamentalism with new forms of participatory democracy.

This Latin American history of the last 30 years is now being replayed across the world. Responding to the silent encroachment of markets, not least in the Arab world, where the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia on 17 December 2010, sparked uprisings across the region in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain. Calling for ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ these uprisings may have been revolutionary in their demands but they have not delivered the outcomes they sought. All eyes were fixed on Egypt, where national rebellion gave rise to a frail democracy that was then hijacked by the military. Difficult though it has been to overthrow dictatorships, the real problems only begin after their overthrow, problems that Latin America has been wrestling with for more than three decades.

Partially inspired by these movements, the Indignados of Southern Europe have stood up to the regimes of austerity, imposed by ruling parties aided and abetted by regional and international financial agencies. In 2011 and 2012 we witnessed a wave of remarkable protests that might be allied to trade unions in Portugal, to more anarchist politics in Spain, to Grillo populism in Italy, and to a massive general strike in Greece. There has also been the rise of a neo-fascist Golden Dawn. All of these, however, can be seen as different responses to economic insecurity, unemployment, debt, and dispossession.

The Occupy Movement that began in 2011 made explicit this connection between poverty, capitalism, and the need for protest. Lodged in public spaces, it targeted the 1% that runs the world economy. The movement started in Zuccotti Park, targeting Wall Street, the home of finance capital, and spread across the US, travelled to Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In India, for example, peasantries fought against their dispossession by collusive arrangements between finance capital and the Indian state to form Special Economic Zones, many of which now lie moribund. In China today the engine of growth is no longer the flood of cheap migrant labor to the towns but land appropriation and real estate speculation for the urbanization of rural areas. Again protests, perhaps less known, are spreading across rural China even if they have not been very effective in arresting the formation of a rentier class. Similar struggles are familiar in Latin America, where the expansion of international mining has not only displaced populations but also polluted water and air.

Finally, we must pay attention to the student movement, most spectacularly emanating from Chile, that has been struggling against the marketization of education at all levels. Here, in this most unequal of societies, students are the vanguard of a society throttled by accumulating private debt. We see similar struggles in England, where students have faced soaring fees, also spreading across Europe as financialization and regulation begin to corrode what were once strongholds of public education. In Argentina, the heartland of the public university, the legacy of the Cordoba Revolution of 1918, which opened public education to all – open admissions, no fees, and democratic election of administrators – still holds strong. Elsewhere, in Latin America, however, student movements have had to grow and contest the degradation of higher education.

Should these and other contemporary movements be considered in isolation, perhaps reflective of local or national context, or can we say they all share something to make them global in character? Do they share common features that would justify considering them an expression of a particular historical epoch? In this chapter I answer both questions in the affirmative. Therefore, the first task is to identify a common set of repertoires that define a singular wave of protest that spans the globe.

Common Political Repertoires

These new social movements of the 21^st century are responses to various social injustices, stemming from the different forms and dimensions of marketization, but they gain expression and consciousness, not in the economic but in the political arena. The pursuit of political goals, however, is driven by economic deprivation and dispossession. Let us consider some of the features they share.

First, they have in common what differentiates them. They all have a national specificity, whether it be a struggle against dictatorship, against austerity or against the privatization of education. They are framed by their national, political terrains, which exhibit regional patterns – Southern Europe, Middle East, Latin America, South-East Asia, etc. Yet, at the same time, these movements are also globally connected through social media and even traveling ambassadors. Movements have become an inspiration to each other even if their frame of reference is usually national.

Second, they derive from a common inspiration, the idea that electoral democracy has been hijacked by capitalism, and more specifically by finance capital. Governments are beholden to finance capital, which effectively paralyzes electoral democracy – capitalist in content and democratic in form. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) terms, there is a separation of power and politics, so that power is concentrated in the hands of the capital–state nexus, while electoral politics is reduced to an ineffectual ritual.

Third, the movements reject formal democracy to adopt direct democracy, sometimes called pre-figurative politics that involve horizontal connections as much as vertical struggles. The General Assemblies of participatory democracy have been the cellular foundation of many of these movements. The challenge, then, is to bring unity and a broader vision to these autonomous, and often separatist struggles. They have had varying success in connecting themselves to wider publics and even when they do accomplish this it is only for short periods.

Fourth, while much has been made of virtual connections, these make concrete real space more rather than less necessary. To be effective, virtual communications requires its complement – the assembly points of public space, Zuccotti Park in New York, Catalunya Square in Barcelona, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Ankara, and others. These assembly points were crucial to establish dense and creative communities, and the planning of new and novel actions. Social media becomes an auxiliary if essential tool of communication.

Fifth and finally, the occupation of public space has made these social movements vulnerable to a severe and repressive backlash from police, often backed by the military. This repression is consistent with the more general destruction of the public and valorization of the private, but it has prompted a continuing cat and mouse game between movements and police. These movements, however, will not go away. They are a form of ‘liquid protest’ that disappears here only to reappear elsewhere. We have to look at them as part of a connected global movement, connected by social media that provide the vehicle for continual reorganization and flexibility. The fear of coercion has been replaced by despair and anger.

The conjecture of this chapter is that these social movements can, and indeed must, be understood in terms of their differentiated responses to the marketization that has become a defining feature of our era. This requires a new sociology of movements that attends not only to the political repertoires they deploy but also to the pressures of marketization to which they are a response. Such a sociology should advance a unifying vision for these movements, a vision they so badly need, and one that knits them together in a common project – a new sociology for social movements. Moreover, the very context and practice of sociology now finds itself subject to pressures of commodification. Sociologists can no longer pretend that we are objective observers, outside society. We are part of the world we study and, therefore, we cannot avoid becoming an interested party, taking sides in social conflict even as we study it. If not, sociology will become irrelevant and disappear. Marketization is undermining the conditions of our own existence just as it is destroying society, and we need to connect the two before it is too late – sociology itself becomes a social movement. We take up each of these challenges in turn.

A New Sociology of Social Movements

To better understand this connection between today’s social movements and unregulated marketization, I turn to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Written in 1944, explaining the continued existence of capitalism but without denying its problematic character, The Great Transformation can be considered a revision of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, written a century earlier. Polanyi argues that the experience of commodification is more profound and immediate than the experience of exploitation, which, as Marx himself argued, was hidden from those who were supposed to rebel against it. In effect Polanyi takes Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, namely that market exchange obscures its ties to production, more seriously than Marx who thought such illusions would eventually dissolve in the class struggle. For Polanyi, the source of destruction lies with the market rather than with production. The expansion of the unregulated market threatens to destroy society, which then reacts in self-defense. This is what Polanyi (2001, Chapter 12) calls the ‘double-movement’, and what I will refer to simply as the ‘counter-movement’ against the market.

One of the virtues of Polanyi’s theory, like Marx’s, is that it ties the micro-experience of people to world systemic movements of capitalism. The lynchpin of the connection lies in the idea of the fictitious commodity (Polanyi, 2001, Chapter 6) – a factor of production, which when subject to unregulated exchange loses its use value. For Polanyi labor is but one such fictitious commodity; the others are land and money. Today these factors of production are subject to an unprecedented commodification that even Polanyi could not anticipate.

When labor is subject to unregulated exchange, i.e. when it is commodified, when it is hired and fired at will with no protection, when the wage falls below the cost of the reproduction of labor power and when the laborer cannot develop the tacit skills necessary for any production, so the use value of labor also falls. Polanyi writes:

For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. (2001, p. 76)

The issue, therefore, is not exploitation but commodification. Indeed, as Guy Standing (2011) has eloquently demonstrated, the problem today is the disappearance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Introduction Sociology and Social Justice
• 1 A New Sociology for Social Justice Movements
• 2 The End of Liberal Democracy Inequality in Post-democratic Capitalist Societies
• 3 Social Justice, Inequalities and Democracy in India Issues and Challenges1
• 4 Gendering Human Rights in the Pursuit of Social Justice
• 5 Beyond Charters and Conventions Human Rights Through the Lens of Social Justice and Peace
• 6 Whistleblowing and Social Justice The Influence of Ubuntu on Whistleblowing Intentions
• 7 Equal Schools, Global Power and Hungry Markets Sociology in the Long Struggle for Social Justice in Education
• 8 Suicide or Murder? Apple, Foxconn, and China’s Workers
• 9 Protest Suicides, Social Justice, and Public Sociology1
• 10 Engaging Society How Public Sociology Contributes to Overcoming Inequalities and Injustice
• 11 Struggles for Social Justice in the 21st Century The Breakdown of Normality and the Practice of Citizenship
• 12 Social Justice Perceptions, Class, and Institutions in the Contemporary Russian Context
• 13 Re-Discovering Justice Some Insights from Research on Societal Development and Care in Contemporary Capitalism1
• Index