Neoliberalism and The Future of Social Movements (Studies)
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12368 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
Neoliberalism and The Future of Social
Movements (Studies)
Brecht De Smet
Ghent University
Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary
Social Movements by Aziz Choudry . Toronto: University of
Toronto Press 2015. 216 pp, $66 hardcover 9781442607910,
$29.95 paperback 9781442607903, $23.95 e-book
9781442607934
Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capi-
talism Back into Protest Analysis by Donatella, della Porta.
Cambridge: Polity Press 2015. 216 pp, £55 hardcover 978-0-
7456-8858-9, £17.99 paperback 978-0-7456-8859-6, £16.99
e-book 978-0-7456-8862-6
The recent resurgence of social and political movements,
both in the Global South and in the West, has challenged
some of the methodological premises and approaches of
social movement theory (SMT). In her book Social Move-
ments in Times of Austerity, Donatella della Porta, a leading
scholar in the field, addresses the shortcomings of SMT by
emphasizing the importance of class analysis and political
economy in the study of contemporary social movements.
She conceives of the current wave of protests as ‘anti-aus-
terity movements’, which become increasingly politicized
due to a global crisis of democratic legitimacy. This institu-
tional crisis is, in turn, connected to global shifts in the
structure of neoliberal capitalism.
In trying to explain the impact of transforming capitalism
on protest movements, della Porta moves beyond the
framework of SMT and established authors such as Charles
Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, Alberto Melucci, Alain Tourraine and
Jack Goldstone, drawing on an impressive array of social sci-
entists and theorists from divergent disciplinary back-
grounds, including J€
urgen Habermas, Karl Polanyi, Immanuel
Wallerstein, E.P. Thompson, Antonio Negri, and Zygmunt
Bauman. Moreover, the work is based on an expansive body
of research, which integrates a host of quantitative and
qualitative –survey-based and ethnographic –studies.
However, the book falls short in offering a clear, innova-
tive, and profound understanding of contemporary protest
movements. Although the interdisciplinary outreach is com-
mendable, there is a fundamental problem of methodologi-
cal commensurability with the different concepts and
approaches that are deployed throughout the book. As an
example, Wallerstein’s notion of ‘world-system’is discussed
alongside Marx’s‘mode of production’and Negri’s‘Empire’,
but these divergent concepts are not confronted with one
another and their contradictions are left unresolved. Further-
more, the rationale behind the selection of thinkers and
paradigms is unclear. If SMT has to draw from current
critical political economy, why not engage with, for example,
the work of David Harvey and his notion of ‘accumulation
by dispossession’, which has inspired many authors writing
on the underlying causes of the ‘Arab Spring’? Hence della
Porta’s promising interdisciplinary outlook turns into a theo-
retical eclecticism that does not offer a coherent method-
ological approach to understanding current ‘anti-austerity
movements’.
Moreover, despite the author’s insistence on incorporating
such critical and radical notions as class and capitalism into
SMT, her choice of concepts remains surprisingly conserva-
tive: choosing, for example, Habermas’s notion of legitimacy
over Gramsci’s explicitly class-based concept of hegemony.
With regard to the case studies, the radical experience of
the Arab uprisings is flattened by lumping them into the
overall category of ‘anti-austerity movements’. In fact, della
Porta does not reflect on the theory and practice of revolu-
tion and its relation to SMT, or how experiments such as
Kurdish Rojava challenge traditional conceptual boundaries
between social movements, armed rebellions, and processes
of (non)state building. By neglecting the role of imperialism
and (neo)colonialism as key forces that continue to shape
the Global South, the universalist moment of the ‘anti-aus-
terity movements’is reduced to a particular, Eurocentric
experience.
In contrast to della Porta, Choudry develops a well-written
critique that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of SMT,
both philosophically and methodologically. Choudry reflects
on the type of knowledge that SMT scholars produce. Inves-
tigating a plurality of cases from the Global South, he rejects
the Eurocentric and ahistorical outlook of traditional SMT
approaches by stressing the continuity of imperialism and
colonialism within contemporary global capitalism. Further-
more, he criticizes SMT for constructing theories about social
movements that are largely external to the movements
themselves, without engaging with the forms of knowledge
that activists produce about their own activity. As a disci-
pline SMT takes too little into account how transformations
in capitalism affect its own intellectual development, or
what part the knowledge that SMT produces plays within
the reproduction or contestation of capitalist hegemony.
Choudry argues that social movement scholars should focus
more on processes of learning and knowledge production
within activist communities, which, in turn, requires a much
more embedded, dialogical, and ethnographic methodology.
Through brief story vignettes and quotes from activists, his
©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2016) 7:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12368
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 4 . November 2016
584
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