Abstract
The fundamental economic, political, and cultural reality of today has been the ascent and now domination of neoliberal globalization, which has on the one hand created vast wealth through market deregulation, privatization of resources and services, retrenchments of benefits and entitlements, financialization, and the relatively free global flows of products, financial instruments, and information throughout the deterritorialized world market. But at the same time it has produced vast immiseration through inequality (often life-threatening for those at the bottom), massive displacements of peoples (often coerced by war, climate, or expulsion), satanic sweatshops, draconian slums, and planet-threatening environmental degradation.
But systems of domination typically produce resistance. Perhaps the Zapatista movement marked the beginning of a new stage of global, anti-systemic mobilizations. Since that time we’ve seen a variety of progressive mobilizations, protests, and occupations against neoliberal globalization, variously termed “social justice movements,” “alternative globalization,” or “anti-globalization movements.” While such movements have been noted by many sociologists, there is surprisingly little actual research, especially by social movement scholars.
I would suggest that one reason for this lack of research is that the dominant frameworks of most social movement research—Resource Mobilization in the United States or New Social Movement Theory in Europe—have generally avoided consideration of political-economic factors and crises, especially on a global scale, while, at the same time, classical Marxist analyses of working-class or party-led mobilizations, typically national, provide little help in understanding current forms of inequality, human-rights activism, environmentalism, or trafficking and the like. Many, if not most, current social justice movements consist of youth, women, the precariat, and/or indigenous peoples.
Quite often social movement studies (SMS) research consists of surveys of activists at protests and demonstrations, giving us good demographic and attitudinal information but little in the way of larger social context or the mediations between macro social structures and processes and consequential mobilizations and occupations. While marching, chanting, and occupying may make participants feel good, forge bonds of solidarity, foster or reinforce progressive identities, and even influence larger populations, SMS research often ignores the ongoing role of organizations, especially various progressive NGOs and SMOs that, although often small and local, face the effects of neoliberal globalization; and there has been little research concern with the ongoing activities of a vast number of Transnational Alternative Policy Groups (TAPGs).
It is for this reason that Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice, a large-scale study of TAPGs by William Carroll, is so essential and illuminating. Carroll has provided us with a great deal of information about thevarious knowledge-producing, policy-making organizations involved in critical, emancipatory research producing alternative frames, understandings, and pedagogy and networking, formulating strategies, and affecting media and leaders in order to foster a “globalization from below” based on global justice for the majority of the world’s people.
One is reminded of what Weber said about politics being like “a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible” (1946:128). TAPGs engage in long-term attempts to develop counter-hegemonic discourses and critical pedagogies and to foster networking with other groups engaged in similar struggles. While such groups may or may not be SMOs per se, their work is absolutely necessary for various SMOs and NGOs to challenge domination and the “received wisdom” that normalizes such domination and naturalizes the historically arbitrary “common sense.”
Carroll’s analysis rests on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, the processes by which ruling classes systematically foster ideological frameworks and cultural (mis)understandings that justify, if not celebrate, domination and displace or distract attention from the political through escapist amusement. For Gramsci, political transformation first required long-term “wars of position” in which various “organic intellectuals” tied to the people yet well trained in the philosophical, cultural, and sociological critiques of domination systematically challenge, deconstruct, or otherwise undermine the ideological cloaks, barriers, and mystifications that sustain domination disguised as “common sense.”
Neoliberalism has led to vast inequality, not prosperity for the many. It has transformed citizens into apolitical consumers and has given us immiseration rather than freedom, democracy, or fulfillment. Vast populations have been displaced, often involuntarily, often through trafficking. Unbridled, unregulated use of fossil fuels, together with vast industrial pollutants and wastes, threaten human health, animal species, and the very existence of humanity. Informed by Gramsci’s analyses of hegemony, Carroll’s work fills major lacunae in “mainstream” SMS perspectives that have given little attention to the economic and ideological domination and legitimation crises of political economy.
What makes Carroll’s work especially salient for understanding resistance to neoliberal globalization and its production of social injustice is that he shows how vast numbers of “organic intellectuals” in the many TAPGs engage in counter-hegemonic activities. His systematic research project based on 90 extensive interviews with various scholar-activists (or “organic intellectuals”) working in ten such TAPGs illuminates activities that are most often behind the scenes and little noticed while much more attention is paid to mass mobilizations, demonstrations, and occupations.
These scholar-activists are engaged in a variety of tasks, beginning with producing alternative knowledge based on systematic research into the consequences of neoliberal domination and its toll in human suffering and misery. He provides the reader with a wealth of information regarding the many centers where TAPGs are working toward securing “agency from below” to attain social justice by providing critical education, formulating strategies, and articulating alternative visions of what might be possible to attain social justice. Moreover, despite limited funding and resources, such groups have had many victories, often unseen in the popular press, yet showing that struggles often succeed. But with success, these groups must guard again NGOization.
As Gramsci might suggest, we are now at an interregnum, a transitional period in which neoliberal capital has become dysfunctional, riddled with crises and contradictions while fostering ersatz solutions through reactionary polices. Yet a new system has not arrived. In what direction might we be heading? Thomas Piketty suggests a neo-feudalism based on inherited wealth. But there is also a progressive possibility, spearheaded by popular mobilizations, informed by the painstaking work of the growing number of TAPGs with visions of sharing, caring, fairness, freedom, democracy, and harmony among people and between people and nature. Scholars of globalization and social movements will be informed and inspired by Carroll’s study of TAPGs. The very existence of such groups, the research they do, the pedagogy they provide, their impact on mainstream media, and their leadership provide us with hope that is especially needed given the present moment.