[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Soumitra Ghosh on Kafila : Whither Social Movements ? Exploring the Problematic and Action Strategy

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
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: "<networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>" <
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>


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-problematic-and-action-strategy-soumitra-ghosh/

*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.



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