Abstract
Geoffrey Pleyers’ new book comprises 12 chapters written at different times and published in various media outlets across countries and languages. It is divided into four parts. In the first part, the author focuses on social movements, setting the bases and theoretical instruments for the analysis. The second part broadens the scope with a counterpoint between the experience of the World Social Forum and the basis for a global sociology of social movements. In the third section, the author explains the front lines of struggle in Latin America and goes further into the violence and resistance in Mexico. Finally, the profiles and professional trajectories of two sociologists with whom Pleyers interacted are presented: Alain Touraine and François Houtart. The preface is written by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, known Portuguese intellectual, and the epilogue is written by Brazilian sociologist Breno Bringel.
The guiding thread of this book is the question of the new social movements emerging at the end of the first decade of the new century and their different appearance: ‘How “new” are these movements? Is it a global movement or a series of national movements? . . . Are they Facebook revolutions? . . . How are they organized without organizations? . . . What do they understand by “democracy”?’ (pp. 26–27).
With this general issue in mind, the book presents an analytical proposal that focuses on ‘a particular activist culture’ (p. 16). The essence of its perspective lies in three characteristics of the new social movements that together form an explanatory matrix. The first theoretical object is, we are told, the activist culture, ‘understood as a version of the world, of change and movement and ways of organizing itself’ (p. 17). The subject and its subjectivity are the centre of attention, and even more than the traditional spaces of collective action (party, union, etc.): the movements seek spaces that ‘allow actors to live according to their own principles, establish different relationships and express their subjectivity’ (p. 57). According to the author, subjectivity is understood as ‘the will to think and act for oneself, to develop and express one’s own creativity, to build one’s own experience’ (p. 56).
In the second place, the writer proposes to overcome the dichotomy between ‘the construction of oneself and activism and between private life and public life’ (p. 17). For the actors, their political practice does not separate the traditional spheres but rather calls on daily life as a place of realization of politics. Everyday life and ‘small acts’ form a fundamental part of mobilization (p. 59).
The third aspect deals with the space of experience: ‘instead of concentrating on the search for a political impact, these movements defend and build their experience, understood as double entendre: lived experience and experimentation’ (p. 56). Current movements seek to ‘build distanced places from capitalist society, which allow actors to live according to their own principles, establish different relationships and express their subjectivity’ (p. 57).
In the last part, the author introduces the analytical tension between the global and the local. He has taken the precaution of not to fall into the analytical subordination of the one over the other, and not to assume a ‘methodological globalism,’ but to use it as an instrument that leads to a better understanding of these global experiences in a constant swing between empirically situated data and general theoretical reflections.
The sociological portraits of Alain Touraine and François Houtart are of paramount importance, both for their influence on Pleyers himself, and for their interest in the theme of social movements. The former opened the way to detailed analysis of the actors and developed a theory of subject, historicity and intervention, as a successor as well as a innovator; and Houtart, apart from being the professor emeritus of the same academic institute as Pleyers, studied the problem of the liberation of the people, with special interest in the peripheral countries, looking for the utility of sociological thought to consolidate the worldwide resistance to capitalist globalization .
The book is a document that refreshes the theory of social movements and puts the problem of the militant individual, his/her subjectivity and experience, as a support for the understanding of social movements in the global world. Although several of the examples analysed are drawn from the struggles of Latin America, the theoretical scheme emerges from the analysis of multiple contexts of activism and becomes a key tool to explain the reasons for contemporary mobilizations. The format, the writing and treatment of the subjects make the document accessible beyond the scholarly and academic borders and reach precisely the actors that are at the base of the current militancy in different parts of the world.