---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 11:20 PM Subject: [Networkedlabour] Soumitra Ghosh on Kafila : Whither Social Movements ? Exploring the Problematic and Action Strategy To: "<[email protected]>" < [email protected]> Soumitra Ghosh November 12, 2014 tags: new imaginaries <http://kafila.org/tag/new-imaginaries/>, social movements <http://kafila.org/tag/social-movements/>, Soumitra Ghosh <http://kafila.org/tag/soumitra-ghosh/>, state <http://kafila.org/tag/state/> by Aditya Nigam <http://kafila.org/author/anigam98/> *Guest post by* *SOUMITRA GHOSH* http://kafila.org/2014/11/12/whither-social-movements-exploring-the-problema... *The context* One of the biggest and most visible problems plaguing the anti-capitalist social movements of today is the statist framework which conditions, shapes and governs their thoughts and actions. Thus the political praxis which should ideally be moored in a post-capitalist (hence post-state) vision of society, is seldom reached, and the movements are stuck in the morass of extremely limited actions informed by their purely normative and emotive thoughts about how the present society should function. The war-cry of justice is aired, millions take to the street demanding it, yet this ‘justice’ is rarely explained in terms of the real and the grounded. It is taken for granted that the state will be transformed from its overtly pro-capital avatar to a more radical one by this means or another because the movements want it to change: what is forgotten is that history has seen hundreds of experiments with such ‘changed’ states—each one of which failed in the long run, and led to a more coercive rule of capital. Also, today’s social movements are non-violent and democratic, which in reality means that they prefer working within the framework of parliamentary democracy, and where that is absent, fight for it. Once again, the history of the institution of parliamentary democracy is forgotten: willy-nilly, it’s ignored that historically—more so going by today’s neo-liberal situation—such democracy is intrinsically linked with capitalist production systems and the hegemony of capital in both our societies and polities. This belief in ‘democracy’ assumes a belief in the so-called democratic state—one guesses that this is largely due to the prevalence of welfare capitalism in the post 2nd world war era; it offered (to a greatly altered extent—still does in some parts of the world) mitigation of the more poignant excesses of capitalist profiteering in terms of glorifying and protecting labour, instead of brutally exploiting it, which in turn translated to increased wages for all, an all-encompassing social security net and so on. Though for the left, true democracy was only achieved when the state mutates to its socialist avatar, the institutional left operating within the democratic state systems started believing in it. In time, this naïve belief killed it—the trade union movements were the first victims. Capital mutated to the post-modern or the neo-liberal, the manufacturing sector was gradually dismantled and its centralized production processes disbursed all over the globe, and as to even the core rationale of capitalism’s being, its unbridled profiteering, it depended more on the little-understood and often obtuse hokey-pokey of speculations in the finance capital sector. Because capital mutated, the state mutated too, and the grand dream of a sustainable capitalism held perpetually in check perished—none but the government leaders and the international institutions comprising them remotely talk about it these days, and nobody believes in it any more, with the unfortunate exceptions of social movements. Among social movements, we do not include corporation-style NGOs which serve capital and help it in its corporate social responsibility tasks, or those which the state overtly and covertly floats or supports. By social movements here we mean only those movements and groups which critique the neo-liberal profiteering and the state’s mutated role as a crony supporting and facilitating that. _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/