<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Orsan</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 11:20 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Soumitra Ghosh on Kafila : Whither Social Movements ? Exploring the Problematic and Action Strategy<br>To: "<<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>>" <<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>><br><br><br><div dir="auto"><blockquote type="cite"><div><h1><span style="font-weight:normal"><font size="4">Soumitra Ghosh</font></span></h1>
<div>November 12, 2014</div>
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<div>tags: <a href="http://kafila.org/tag/new-imaginaries/" rel="tag" target="_blank">new imaginaries</a>, <a href="http://kafila.org/tag/social-movements/" rel="tag" target="_blank">social movements</a>, <a href="http://kafila.org/tag/soumitra-ghosh/" rel="tag" target="_blank">Soumitra Ghosh</a>, <a href="http://kafila.org/tag/state/" rel="tag" target="_blank">state</a></div>
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<span><span>by</span> <span><a href="http://kafila.org/author/anigam98/" title="View all posts by Aditya Nigam" rel="author" target="_blank">Aditya Nigam</a></span> </span> </div>
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<div><p><em>Guest post by</em> <strong>SOUMITRA GHOSH</strong></p><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:6.0pt"><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="http://kafila.org/2014/11/12/whither-social-movements-exploring-the-problematic-and-action-strategy-soumitra-ghosh/" target="_blank">http://kafila.org/2014/11/12/whither-social-movements-exploring-the-problematic-and-action-strategy-soumitra-ghosh/</a>
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</div><p><strong>The context</strong></p><p>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.</p><p>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.<span></span></p><p>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 2<sup>nd</sup> 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.</p><p>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.</p></div></blockquote><br></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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