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Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s.
... Inefficiency could be tolerated as long as a group was small, poorly-funded, and low in political profile. When opportunities for genuine impact opened up, however, movement groups found themselves torn between participatory democratic purists and those who would give up some democracy in order to get things done (Clecak, 1973;Epstein, 1991;Starr, 1979;Stoper, 1983). ...
... During the same period, however, portions of the antinuclear movement retained a commitment to radically democratic decision-making and developed a model of affinity groups and spokescouncils as a way to make decisions in large groups (Epstein, 1991). The antinuclear Clamshell Alliance famously reached consensus with more than a thousand people participating (Downey, 1986). ...
... In her compelling account of global justice activists' prefigurative politics, Marianne Maeckelbergh (2011) rejected the opposition between prefiguration and strategy that scholars like Breines (1989) and Epstein (1991) had taken as unavoidable. Activists in the global justice movement were not seeking to advance a single set of goals, Maeckelbergh argued. ...
Activists have long justified their egalitarian organizational forms in prefigurative terms. Making decisions by consensus, decentralizing organization, and rotating leadership serves to model the radically democratic society that activists hope to bring into being. Our comparison of consensus-based decision-making in three historical periods, however, shows that activists have understood the purposes of prefiguration in very different ways. Whereas radical pacifists in the 1940s saw their cooperative organizations as sustaining movement stalwarts in a period of political repression, new left activists in the 1960s imagined that their radically democratic practices would be adopted by ever-widening circles. Along with the political conditions in which they have operated, activists’ distinctive understandings of equality have also shaped the way they have made decisions. Our interviews with 30 leftist activists today reveal a view of decision-making as a place to work through inequalities that are informal, unacknowledged, and pervasive.
... Globalization spurred an increased focus upon issues and struggles worldwide about which other activists were previously unaware or unconcerned. Institutions that drove the processes of economic globalization, particularly the World Trade Organization, World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Group of Eight (G8) became the target of protests in which anarchists played a central role (Epstein 2001). This globalization of local enemies drew anarchist protest at high-profile meetings and summits that were popularly represented in the media as events overrun with the most radical of critics (anarchists) who dramatically faced the state and its repressive forces (the police). ...
... For example, the major New Left organization in the US was Students for a Democratic Society, which by the late-1960s splintered into a smattering of various Leftist, non-anarchist sects (Balser 1997, Bookchin 2004, Sale 1973. However, the anti-authoritarian impulse of the New Left remained and found a place within other burgeoning movements outside the student movement, especially the feminist, anti-nuclear, and environmental movements, such as the organized called Movement for a New Society (Cornell 2011, Epstein 1991. ...
... In fact, the current wave of anarchism can be traced back to the New Left's insistence upon "participatory democracy", as opposed to "democratic centralism" (as offered by the Soviet bloc) or "representative democracy" (in the West). The New Left's eventual rejection of formal leadership was not an immediate one, but emerged most clearly with the rise of the anti-nuclear and radical feminist movements (Epstein 1991). Here, the tactical emphasis upon cooperation, consensus decision making, and direct action are key anarchist contributions. ...
The anarchist movement utilizes non-statist and anti-statist strategies for radical social transformation, thus indicating the limits of political opportunity theory and its emphasis upon the state. Using historical narratives from present-day anarchist movement literature, we note various events and phenomena in the last two centuries and their relevance to the mobilization and demobilization of anarchist movements throughout the world (Bolivia, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Greece, Japan, Venezuela). Labor movement allies, failing state socialism, and punk subculture have provided conditions conducive to anarchism, while state repression and Bolshevik success in the Soviet Union constrained success. This variation suggests that future work should attend more closely to the role of national context, and the interrelationship of political and non-political factors.
... Some researchers (Van Dyke and McCammon 2010;Von Bülow 2010;Wood 2005) have looked in detail at the role of framing ideas as strategic tools used by transnational activists against their foes and/or how a shared set of beliefs strengthens transnational coalitions, but not the issues of organization and strategy, particularly as they relate to worker empowerment, that I focus on here. Several scholars (Downey and Rohlinger 2008;Epstein 1991;King 2008;Williams 2016Williams , 2020 have argued, however, that ideology is an important component in how movements strategize, shaping not only the goals for which social movement organizations strive, but what they think is the best means to get there. For instance, Maney (2012) looks at the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and the way activists split along ideological lines in response to concessions on civil rights issues offered by the British government. ...
... In this paper, I explored why anti-sweatshop activists chose their particular strategy, emphasizing their ideology of worker empowerment and the strategic consequences of this for the success and failure of transnational campaigns. A number of scholars (Downey and Rohlinger 2008;Epstein 1991;King 2008;Maney 2012Williams 2016, 2020 have emphasized the importance of ideology in shaping activists' strategy. What I add here is the way the anti-sweatshop movement's ideology of worker empowerment shapes the organization of their transnational networks-and how the resulting decision-making structure also informs their strategy. ...
I explore the ideology of worker empowerment among U.S. anti-sweatshop activists, particularly United Students Against Sweatshops, and its strategic consequences for transnational campaigns. This ideology is central in shaping the movement’s transnational strategy and organization, fostering communication and accountability, particularly to organizations representing sweatshop workers. Such organizational choices, in turn, shape how transnational networks strategize. For example, the anti-sweatshop movement rarely uses the familiar tactic of boycotts, due to opposition from workers. The more empowered sweatshop workers in such networks, the more informed decisions their allies can make, and the more strategically effective the movement can be.
... Normative regulation is about the reconstruction of the normative structure of society, which happens informally through socialization, social institutions, and cultural discourse. Elements within the existing and hegemonic version that underpins violence are challenged and transformed into more nonviolent ones through institutional reforms and developments, training, the setting of moral examples or role models (see, e.g., Epstein 1993Epstein , 2002Lakey 1973;Martin 1984), or use of strong cultural symbols, cultural replacement, or renewal (Sörensen and Vinthagen 2012). ...
... Normative regulation is about the reconstruction of the normative structure of society, which happens informally through socialization, social institutions, and cultural discourse. Elements within the existing and hegemonic version that underpins violence are challenged and transformed into more nonviolent ones through institutional reforms and developments, training, the setting of moral examples or role models (see, e.g., Epstein 1993Epstein , 2002Lakey 1973;Martin 1984), or use of strong cultural symbols, cultural replacement, or renewal (Sörensen and Vinthagen 2012). ...
... Normative regulation is about the reconstruction of the normative structure of society, which happens informally through socialization, social institutions, and cultural discourse. Elements within the existing and hegemonic version that underpins violence are challenged and transformed into more nonviolent ones through institutional reforms and developments, training, the setting of moral examples or role models (see, e.g., Epstein 1993Epstein , 2002Lakey 1973;Martin 1984), or use of strong cultural symbols, cultural replacement, or renewal (Sörensen and Vinthagen 2012). ...
... Normative regulation is about the reconstruction of the normative structure of society, which happens informally through socialization, social institutions, and cultural discourse. Elements within the existing and hegemonic version that underpins violence are challenged and transformed into more nonviolent ones through institutional reforms and developments, training, the setting of moral examples or role models (see, e.g., Epstein 1993Epstein , 2002Lakey 1973;Martin 1984), or use of strong cultural symbols, cultural replacement, or renewal (Sörensen and Vinthagen 2012). ...
... Radical feminists endorsed a similar view of radical politics when they insisted the personal is political too -and, hence, that immediate social change should not only be established on the work floor, but also in the household and the bedroom (Rowbotham 1979). In the 1960s and 1970s, New Left and student movements experimented with decentralized forms of organization and sought to establish more horizontal power relations within their own movement (Breines 1989;Epstein 1991;Kaufman 2017). The so-called 'alterglobalists' around the turn of this century employed prefigurative forms of consensus-oriented decisionmaking on a large scale (Maeckelbergh 2009). ...
In the course of the past decade, radical political theory has seen an increased interest in ‘prefiguration’. Stemming from anarchist and feminist traditions, this idea prescribes a high measure of consistency between the means and ends of revolutionary practice. But what is the place of violence in a prefigurative politics? Does it imply nonviolence as a moral or strategic principle? Or should its practitioners at least be prepared to engage in self-defence? After reconstructing various positions on this matter, this paper seeks to offer an alternative perspective. Rather than to see violence as a means or instrument that one willingly employs in a revolutionary situation, it should instead be understood as a social given: something that is often already implied in such a context. The question, then, is not whether or how prefiguration and violence are compatible, but rather how violence could be dealt with in a prefigurative way.
... Encontramos que esta percepción de liderazgo es parte de la identidad de las OMS. Rechazar posiciones de liderazgo fijas crea desafíos como el surgimiento de jerarquías informales y tensiones entre la eficiencia y la participación amplia, que también encuentran otros autores (Haug, 2013;Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2015;Epstein, 1991). Los principales medios para superar estas tensiones en la práctica son la reflexión colectiva y las normas. ...
This article analyzes how leadership is practiced in social movement organizations (OMS). Drawing on Critical Leadership Studies, and based on qualitative empirical research conducted in the organizations of the Spanish 15M protest movement, we analyze leadership perceptions, tensions and practices in dealing with these challenges. Our findings indicate that leadership practices in the investigated OMSs are autonomous, reflective and rule-based. Emphasizing collective reflection and rules highlights two aspects of leadership in OMSs that have been largely ignored in the discourses. Nevertheless, they turn out to be important means to address the challenges of autonomous leadership.
... Although direct lines are difficult to draw, Food Not Bombs was part of this political lineage, which linked redistribution of free goods in public space to challenges to capitalism, urban exclusion, and environmental destruction (Heynen, 2010;Spataro, 2016). The group started in 1981 as an off-shoot of movements that used non-violent civil disobedience to protest nuclear power (see Epstein, 1991). ...
Recent movements against food waste, seen as an issue in and of itself, build on a much longer tradition of movements around food waste, which use unsellable but still edible food—which we call “ex-commodities”—both as a material resource for activist projects and a symbol to denounce other social and ecological ills. In this chapter, we examine three movements—Food Not Bombs, freeganism, and Disco Soupe—that publicly reclaim and redistribute ex-commodified food. Despite this superficially similar activity, they attach different meanings to that food that show the shifting politicisation of food waste over the last decades. We reveal that as movements have narrowed their framings and targeted food waste specifically as a problem, they have also narrowed the horizons of what impacts tackling food waste could actually have. Yet, it is partly through de-politicising the use of food waste that movements have gained access to policy-making and changed markets, in a context where governments, businesses, and charities have all endorsed the fight against food waste.
... While it is varied, social movement literature has consistently highlighted the importance of positive projects that both galvanise support for their cause and create the kinds of social relations and institutions that participants would like to see an ideal future society embody. 106 This kind of resistance is called 'prefigurative politics' because it is designed to create the conditions necessary to conceptualise different futures and acquire the skills needed to bring them about. ...
As with other professions, the declining rates of recruitment and retention of lawyers in rural and regional Australia is of significant concern. Whilst the causes of this vary between communities, common depictions of the rural and regional lawyer’s role indicate that employment as a lawyer in such areas is characterised by unique personal and professional challenges. Nonetheless, employment as a rural and regional lawyer also offers practitioners rewarding opportunities and lifestyle benefits. Research from other disciplines indicates that the challenges inherent in rural and regional professional practice may be alleviated, and benefits more easily harnessed, via place conscious discipline-specific curriculum that sensitises tertiary students to, and prepares them for, the rural and regional career context. Largely oriented towards substantive content to satisfy external accrediting bodies, undergraduate legal education does not typically acknowledge the ‘places’ in which graduates will practice as professionals. This article argues however that there is scope to incorporate place within legal education, and documents an innovative curriculum development project which embeds place consciousness to better prepare law students for employment in rural and regional legal practice. Drawing upon methods from other disciplines, the project team designed a curriculum package which aims to sensitise students to the rural and regional legal practice context, and equip them with the skills to overcome challenges and take advantage of the opportunities available in a rural or regional professional career.
... While anarchism and syndicalism do not completely or simply overlap, anarcho-syndicalism is more accurately traced to anarchist than other socialist sectors (McKay 2012). Eventually suppressed and largely dismantled by state and private forces, especially during the period leading up to and through World War I, 1 See Epstein (1993), Cornell (2016) for studies referencing anarchist influence on US social movements. 2 For historical references, see: Graham (2005Graham ( , 2009Graham ( , 2012, , Schmidt (2013), Marshall (2010), Cappelletti (2018), Maxwell and Craib (2015), Porter (2011), Zaragoza Rovira (1996, Ramos, Rodrigues, and Samis (2003), CILEP (2011), Páez (1986), Hart (1978), , Shaffer (2000Shaffer ( , 2013, Quail (2019), Berry (2009), Pernicone (1993, de Góes (2017), Voline (2019), Mbah and Igariwey (2001), van der Walt (2011van der Walt ( , 2016, Dirlik (1991), Hwang (2017), Crump (1993), Cornell (2016 Ultimately, it is the ideas ('theories') developed through these struggles that have shaped and continue to shape social life and political change. ...
... The aspiration to prefiguration was first expressed by late nineteenth-century anarchists (Franks, 2008;Romanos, 2013). It was revived by some US leftists in the 1970s and embraced by (at least parts of) the US women's movement, the antinuclear movements in the US and Europe in the 1970s, movements in solidarity with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, and the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century From these movements it spread to the occupations of 2011 (Boggs, 1977;Epstein, 1991 andFlesher Fominaya, 2007;Hammond, 2012: 224-29;Maeckelbergh, 2012;Sitrin, 2006: 3-5;Polletta, 2002;Sitrin, 2006). ...
The relation to space is an important aspect of some social movements. Several dimensions of that relation were salient to Occupy Wall Street: it occupied a space that, by virtue of being at the heart of the US financial system, symbolized the corporate financial control that was the target of the movement's grievances; by occupying a space continuously, day and night, it made itself visible to all who wished to see it and offered a pole of attraction to those who identified with it; it provided a territory in which occupiers could attempt to construct a community based on principles of horizontality (complete openness of participation and no formal leadership) and prefiguration (attempting to forge in the present the non-alienated social relations to which they looked forward in a future, transformed society); and it engaged in confrontation over the occupation of space with the forces of order, both the police and the New York City administration. All these were fundamental aspects of the movement and contributed to its visibility. When the occupation was evicted, though the movement continued to inspire a great deal of activity, it lost its momentum and the attention of the public. Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for emphasizing the possession of space over its programmatic goals; but if there had been no occupation, there would have been no movement.
... Yet, instead of addressing a collective class identity, they appealed to the individual subjectivity of citizens. In order to destabilize the dominant norms of society and sway the public opinion on a range of newly politicized issues through direct actions, the new social movements relied on radically different meanings and practices that they developed, tested and circulated in the 'cultural laboratories' of activist everyday life (Melucci 1989, 60;Breines 1989;Epstein 1993). ...
Currently proliferating alternative action organizations, such as
food cooperatives, solidary agriculture, repair cafés, or DIY
initiatives, pursue social transformation at a deliberate distance
from party politics. Instead, they concentrate on changing society
directly by altering everyday routines and thereby prefiguring an
alternative society. Local and experimental movements promise
to pioneer social alternatives, which traditional organizations
appear to be unable to accomplish. This indicates a remarkable
shift, since in the past, social mobilizations often pursued direct
social action and party politics simultaneously. The current
literature conceptualizes movements and parties primarily as
cross-fertilizing allies or even potential hybrids (movement
parties) yet struggles to explain why alternative action
organizations in countries that have not experienced post-crisis
austerity measures have largely abandoned the parliamentary
arena. Addressing this gap, we compare contemporary
understandings of direct social action in Germany with past
understandings: that of the 1920s labour movement and the
1970s new social movements. Applying sociological theories of
modernization, we demonstrate that processes of
individualization and flexibilization have increased the demand
for immediate experiences of social change and decreased the
attractiveness of formal organization. Since this makes strategic
alliances between movements and political parties increasingly
unlikely, societies’ capacity to organize long-term social struggles
might be impaired.
... Long before the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the 1999 uprising in Seattle, there were rumblings of anarchism's eventual resurgence as early as the 1960s. Many of the tactics and practices of the GJM are directly attributable to the participation of anarchists and anti-authoritarian socialists in the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s, including non-violent direct action, tactical use of disruptive theatrics, consensus decision-making, horizontally-networked affinity groups, mass convergences, and a general commitment to "prefigurative" politics (Epstein 1991). ...
... As the dramatic political, economic, and cultural shifts began to transform the parameters of social change by the mid-1 970s, the cultural resonance of the social unionist and social justice critique of the new wave of environmentalism lost ground. A social justice environmentalism was removed from the core of the movement, only to resurface in an anti-toxics movement from below, becoming publicly salient with the Love Canal mobilization (Epstein 1991;Gibbs 1982;Gottlieb 1993). The labor movement also recoiled amid a deepening economic crisis and employer assault on unions (Goldfield 1 987). ...
In this comparative analysis of labor-environmental alliances, it is argued that various forms of unionism and environmentalism help or hinder efforts to transcend narrow sectoral interests. Movement organizations that parallel, and sometimes emulate, grassroots organization, tactics, and discursive practices are better equipped to engage inter-movement, oppositional alliances. This is evident in each of the periods where inter-movement solidarity persisted. First, the efforts to build alliances between the two movements during the early 1970scan be located in the strategies of a handful of social unions and an even smaller group of environmental groups with concerns for social justice and full employment. Secondly, active grassroots mobilizations during the late 1970s and 1980s in both movements transformed the character of several leading social movement organizations. Finally, the broad alliance that challenged NAFTA makes evident that key sources of intermovement solidarity stem from the way in which larger movement organizations responded to, or were redefined by these movements from below, i.e. social movement unionism and environmental justice, respectively.
... Although direct lines are difficult to draw, Food Not Bombs was part of this political lineage, which linked redistribution of free goods in public space to challenges to capitalism, urban exclusion, and environmental destruction (Heynen, 2010;Spataro, 2016). The group started in 1981 as an off-shoot of movements that used non-violent civil disobedience to protest nuclear power (see Epstein, 1991). ...
Recent movements against food waste, seen as an issue in and of itself, build on a much longer tradition of movements around food waste, which use unsellable but still edible food—which we call “ex-commodities”—both as a material resource for activist projects and a symbol to denounce other social and ecological ills. In this chapter, we examine three movements—Food Not Bombs, freeganism, and Disco Soupe—that publicly reclaim and redistribute ex-commodified food. Despite this superficially similar activity, they attach different meanings to that food that show the shifting politicisation of food waste over the last decades. We reveal that as movements have narrowed their framings and targeted food waste specifically as a problem, they have also narrowed the horizons of what impacts tackling food waste could actually have. Yet, it is partly through de-politicising the use of food waste that movements have gained access to policy-making and changed markets, in a context where governments, businesses, and charities have all endorsed the fight against food waste.
... However, this is only one part of the story. We must take into account several questions that connect us to alternative socialization paths: new forms of education and family-building; the rejection of corporations, business chains and multinationals (Crossley 2015;Haenfler 2004Haenfler , 2014Haenfler , 2012Heartfield 2003;Moore 2004;Ruggero 2009); the emphasis on alternative media and information channels (Dahlgren 2007;Downing 2001;Duncombe 1997;Coopman 2003;McKay 1996); the relationship with direct action strategies (Epstein 1993); the production of an alternative living system (squats, cooperatives) (Hemphill and Leskowitz 2013); the practices of emancipatory DIY culture in learning with computers and new technologies (Kafai and Peppler 2011); a defence of life based on ecological principles, including gardening, reparations and recycling, music and preservation of food (Kuhn 2010;McKay 1996); and the education of adults (Hemphill and Leskowitz 2013;Downes 2007). With this same range, we see the representations of DIY ways of life of Portuguese interviewees as being widely diverse. ...
This article explores the modalities of involvement of young people in underground punk music scenes, as they forge do-it-yourself (DIY) careers through applying skills in production, promotion, composition and performance, acquired through long-term immersion in these scenes. In each such career, we can see an illustration of how youth culture can be seen as a platform through which young people acquire practical skills and competence in an era of risk, uncertainty and precarious living. Working with a corpus of over 200 interviews, we propose an analysis of the representations of Portuguese punk scene members with regard to the DIY experience, demonstrating and specifying scene knowledge, networks and skills, which are crucial to the location of these subcultural entrepreneurs in the larger labour market. We will also attempt to demonstrate the importance of DIY ethics, aesthetics and praxis in the constitution and dynamics of the Portuguese punk scene from the late 1970s until today, highlighting its role in the lives of the participants. Moreover, we will look at DIY as an expression of the symbolic capital of punk, enabling careers, pathways, trajectories and roles, as well as functioning as a specific (sub-)cultural capital present in most underground musical events, and with particular intensity in the case of punk. Finally, the feud between the mainstream and the underground is a key issue in the discussion of the DIY ethos, taking us into the core of the question of authenticity.
... Many scholars argue that the organizations of the new social movements show features of anarchist organizational concepts (Gibson, 2013, Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2011, Epstein, 1991, Graeber, 2011, Bratich, 2007, Imas et al., 2012. Anarchist approaches (Reedy, 2014, Graeber, 2002 argue for the necessity of a theoretical re-framing of organizations. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze how activists of the Spanish protest movement 15M conceptualize organizational practices in relation to the movement’s goals.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to theoretically understand social movement organizations (SMO), the concept of partial organization is placed within the context of the politics of prefiguration. Empirically, the paper is based on field research conducted in Spain in three consecutive years (2014-2016) that included 82 qualitative interviews and participant observation.
Findings
Activists consider the organizational practices as crucial means to achieve social change. They conceptualize SMO in a meaningful and systematic way as partial organizations, specifically, by aiming at open membership and non-hierarchical structures. As they do this to enact the movement’s goals prefiguratively in their daily organizational practices, the limits and restrictions of the practices of self-organization are widely accepted.
Research limitations/implications
The research focused on studying the relatively young and often very successful organizations of the Spanish movement. It remains open to what extent the prefigurative practices will survive organizational life-cycles.
Practical implications
By contributing to a deeper understanding of the underlying philosophy of SMO, this paper is useful for social movement activists and scholars.
Originality/value
This is one of the first papers, which analyzes the organizations of the Spanish protest movement with respect to both empirical and theoretical aspects.
... Siguiendo las propuestas de Wini Breines (1989), Dieter Rucht (1988), Barbara Epstein (1991) o Benjamin Franks (2003, entre otros, la organización y la práctica del movimiento anarcopunk alcanzan a anticipar o representar un "mundo alternativo" en el presente, como si ya existiera. Como se ha destacado en investigaciones de otros con-tinentes (Day, 2005;Della Porta et al., 2006;Graeber, 2009), la política prefigurativa tiende a involucrar toda una serie de prácticas alternativas y/o adicionales a las actividades que se desarrollan en los grupos, como la organización horizontal y antijerárquica, la toma de decisiones por consenso, la acción directa, la práctica del hazlo tú mismo, es decir, el Do It Yourself (diy), 2 proyectos autoorganizados y autosustentables, etcétera. ...
This article analyzes the anarcho-punk movement that emerged in Mexico in the past three decades (1984-2014). Based on sociological studies on social protest and movements, this text begins by showing how and why young people became involved in this group. It then shows how their collective identity emerged and ends with a description of the practices and values that characterize them. The study is based on ethnographic work and in-depth interviews conducted with members of different generations in two of the main scenarios of the Mexican anarcho-punk movement: Guadalajara and Mexico City.
... According to the means used by direct action activists for attaining aims, direct action can be considered as being on a gradient from violent to non-violent. Many direct actions, more or less violent, are referred to as radical in the academic and public discourses for their misfit with conventional practices of contestation. 1 Conventional and direct forms of contestation have developed concomitantly and reciprocally in the Western societies over the past six decades (Epstein 1991, Drengson et al. 2010. ...
... The campaigns in India led by Gandhi stimulated theoretical contributions by numerous figures, including Richard Gregg, Joan Bondurant, and Arne Naess (Weber 2004). The U.S. civil rights movement stimulated the spread of nonviolent action training, taking ideas about nonviolence to various movements, such as the movement against nuclear power (Epstein 1991). ...
Nonviolent action, despite its widespread use and successes, has received relatively little scholarly attention and financial support compared to military research and studies of conventional politics. Understanding the direction and content of knowledge about nonviolence is a project in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge that can help explain why the study of nonviolence has been marginalized, why misconceptions about it persist, why so much research in the area has been oriented to challenging regimes, and how nonviolence researchers are connected to nonviolence practice. This investigation leads to some suggestions for social movement scholars, in particular the value of studying agency and strategy, and the possibility of gaining insight by being involved in the movements being studied.
... Siguiendo las propuestas de Wini Breines (1989), Dieter Rucht (1988), Barbara Epstein (1991) o Benjamin Franks (2003, entre otros, la organización y la práctica del movimiento anarcopunk alcanzan a anticipar o representar un "mundo alternativo" en el presente, como si ya existiera. Como se ha destacado en investigaciones de otros con-tinentes (Day, 2005;Della Porta et al., 2006;Graeber, 2009), la política prefigurativa tiende a involucrar toda una serie de prácticas alternativas y/o adicionales a las actividades que se desarrollan en los grupos, como la organización horizontal y antijerárquica, la toma de decisiones por consenso, la acción directa, la práctica del hazlo tú mismo, es decir, el Do It Yourself (diy), 2 proyectos autoorganizados y autosustentables, etcétera. ...
Palabras clave: México, movimiento anarcopunk, política prefigurativa, autogestión, acción colectiva. L a difusión del punk en México se vinculó desde sus inicios, a me-diados de los años ochenta, a valores y prácticas antiautoritarias que sumaron, en la década de los noventa, prácticas que se insti-Resumen: El presente artículo analiza el mo-vimiento anarcopunk que emergió en México en las últimas tres décadas (1984-2014). Con apoyo en estudios sociológicos acerca de la protesta y los movimientos sociales, este texto indica, primero, cómo y por qué los jóvenes se involucraron en este grupo; segundo, cómo emergió su identidad colectiva; por último, las prácticas y los valores que los caracterizan. El estudio se fundamenta en el trabajo etnográfico y en las entrevistas en profundidad realizadas a integrantes de distintas generaciones en dos de los principales escenarios del movimiento anar-copunk mexicano: la ciudad de Guadalajara y la Ciudad de México. Abstract: This article analyzes the anarcho-punk movement that emerged in Mexico in the past three decades (1984-2014). Based on sociological studies on social protest and movements , this text begins by showing how and why young people became involved in this group. It then shows how their collective identity emerged and ends with a description of the practices and values that characterize them. The study is based on ethnographic work and in-depth interviews conducted with members of different generations in two of the main scenarios of the Mexican anarcho-punk movement: Guadala-jara and Mexico City.
... According to the means used by direct action activists for attaining aims, direct action can be considered as being on a gradient from violent to non-violent. Many direct actions, more or less violent, are referred to as radical in the academic and public discourses for their misfit with conventional practices of contestation. 1 Conventional and direct forms of contestation have developed concomitantly and reciprocally in the Western societies over the past six decades (Epstein 1991, Drengson et al. 2010. ...
This study explores the ‘irrationalities’ of deep ecology activism in the context of radical environmentalism by using the empirical example of ecoporn. Fuck For Forest is an environmental Non-Governmental Organisation which undertakes fund-raising for re-forestation and forest protection by means of pornography. Following twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study presents first research results on a radical environmental project which does not promote democratic and established procedures for protecting Nature but, instead, promotes the naked human body and human sexuality. Similar to other deep ecologist projects, Fuck For Forest aims at socio-ecological change by non-violent means. But, distinct from most deep ecologist projects, Fuck For Forest focuses on sexuality as a universal force of life and promotes Nature protection in connection with human body liberation from contemporary forms of sexual and body commercialism. While critics of deep ecology blame the mismatch between aims and means in radical environmentalism in general, and in deep ecology in particular, this study shows how deviations from conventional forms of protest produce unforeseen political pathways for attaining environmental protection.
... In the late 1960s, the term 'prefigurative politics' reflected aspirations for alternatives to the authoritarianism of traditional left political parties (Boggs, 1977;Epstein, 1991). The desire for self-determination expanded the meaning to include domination via not only production but also social relations and control within movements and in everyday life (Boggs, 1977;Breines, 1989). ...
Prefigurative politics are typically understood as experiments in living, laboring or provisioning that are alternatives to ‘what is’ and prefigure ‘what could be.’ This paper rethinks prefigurative politics, which scholars have often approached by emphasizing their economic and political structures, not the transformation of social relationships and power in these experiments. Despite this scholarly trend, many collectivities organizing around a politics of survival engage in prefigurative practices. In fact, in the process of resisting domination, they are re-imagining social relationships and power. In this paper, we draw on women of color feminist theory to explore the tensions of practicing principled politics and social justice in the deeply compromised spaces of struggle for those groups that act in the radical in-between of prefigurative politics and the politics of survival. By analyzing a reproductive justice organizing project called ‘We are BRAVE’ as a case study, we re-imagine prefigurative politics through three central elements: relationality, self-determination, and intersectionality.
... W Ameryce w połowie lat 60-ych koncepcja grupy pokrewieństwa stała się popularna w lewicowych środowiskach dzięki pracom Murray Bookchin, która zapożyczyła ją z tekstów hiszpańskich anarchistów. Barbara Epstein (1991) podaje przykłady opartych na grupach pokrewieństwa koalicji, których działania składały się na kolejne fale ruchu antynuklearnego i ekologicznego w Ameryce w latach 70-ych i 80-ych. ...
Celem tej pracy jest analiza zjawisk związanych z demonstracjami w Seattle w listopadzie 1999 roku. Jej głównym bohaterem jest międzynarodowa kampania, w ramach której przygotowano i przeprowadzono tygodniowy szczyt i manifestacje.
Ramy teoretyczne pracy wyznacza z jednej strony teoria ruchów społecznych, a z drugiej instytucjonalna teoria organizacji. Stosując obie teorie chcę pokazać wyjątkowość kampanii N30. Po pierwsze, była to kampania globalna, rozgrywająca się jednocześnie na politycznej arenie lokalnej, narodowej, międzynarodowej i globalnej. Przez to, jeśli rozumieć ją jako ruch społeczny, to różnił się on znacząco od dotychczasowych ruchów. Mobilizacja i manifestacje w Seattle są przykładem globalnego ruchu społecznego, którego istnienie podważa podstawową dla teorii ruchów społecznych tezę o dominacji areny narodowej jako kontekstu działań ruchu.
Po drugie, uczestniczące organizacje stworzyły strukturę sieciową, która jest coraz częściej spotykaną formą organizacji różniącą się zarówno od hierarchicznego, jak i rynkowego modelu organizacji. Staram się pokazać, że sieciowa struktura przyczyniła się do sukcesu kampanii N30, umożliwiając współdziałanie wielu grup o różnorodnych celach i ideologiach.
... Most commonly, the focus has been on implementing more participatory forms of self-governance, be they workers' councils, collectives, and cooperatives in the economic realm (Boggs 1977;Rothschild and Whitt 1986), or sociopolitical structures such as soviets, communes, affinity groups, spokescouncils, direct action networks, and people's assemblies. In whatever sphere of social life, and whether they are conceptualized as prefiguring nonviolence (Lakey 1968;Epstein 1991), gender equality (Harris & King 1989), participatory democracy (Breines 1982;Polletta 2002), or autonomy (Katsiaficas 1997;Leach 2009), these forms all share a decentralized, directly democratic, and often consensus-based authority structure. Some movements have created dense networks of such organizations, forming "temporary autonomous zones" (Bey 1991) or more permanent social movement "scenes" (Leach & Haunss 2009) to undergird the movement and prefigure a more egalitarian way of life. ...
The term “prefigurative politics” refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or “prefigure” the kind of society they want to bring about. On one level, this commitment to means–ends consistency reflects what Weber called a “value‐rational” logic of action, in which action is guided by values rather than instrumental efficiency. But a prefigurative orientation is motivated by more than a commitment to moral action in its own right; it has been pursued as an alternative to both vanguardist and structural‐reformist strategies for social change. Rather than looking to a revolutionary vanguard to seize existing power structures and implement revolutionary change on behalf of the masses or to trade unions or political parties to leverage reforms within the existing system, a prefigurative approach seeks to create the new society “in the shell of the old” by developing counterhegemonic institutions and modes of interaction that embody the desired transformation. In this sense, a prefigurative strategy is based on the principle of direct action, of directly implementing the changes one seeks, rather than asking others to make the changes on one's behalf.
I claim that the greatest challenge OWS faced was money. Here I am influenced by INCITE!, a collective of women of color who critique the non-profit industrial complex. I argue that although the movement wanted money out of politics, in every way conceivable, resources influenced the politics of the movement. I analyze how the term affinity group was appropriated by actors such as the Movement Resource Group and The Office to shield themselves from democratic process and accountability. Power was consolidated among multiple informal elites, who already had power in society. I claim that their power, thankfully, was not total, but challenged by me and others in OWS, who held community dialogues around power, privilege, and access to resources. I describe in detail how these reflections from within the movement went, and the collective solutions proposed.
I point to a number of challenges in this chapter. I claim that with growth and attention came interest from the institutional left, as well as more heterogeneity and internal conflict. Caucuses around race and gender emerged, but they lacked a clear structural role in decision-making. As a solution to these challenges, the Structure Working Group formed and proposed the Operational Spokes Council inspired by councils from the Global Justice Movement and Anti-Nuke Movement. I detail the campaign to create the council, and the conflicts that arose throughout. I argue that there were mechanisms in place to formally deal with disruption, and people were removed. However, the behavior was triggering and led to mistrust. It was the social and cultural impact of disruption that prevented the spokes council from being fully implemented.
Developing countries need sufficient, reliable, and affordable energy for economic development; yet, the source of this energy remains contested. In the Philippines, coal-based electricity supplies most of the country's energy requirement. Until the moratorium on new coal-fired power plant development in 2020, the Philippine government aggressively pursued the development of the coal sector, labelling coal projects as nationally significant. With this policy direction, many local governments, including provinces and cities, rallied around coal. Dissent against this fuel, nonetheless, was also prominent, with civil society often leading these mobilizations. This paper discusses one of these movements: a civil society-business-and-ecclesial-led dissent on the proposed coal-based energy system for Bohol province. Using primary data from interviews, supplemented by social media and secondary data analysis, this paper describes the modes, strategies, and tactics of this local coal dissent. Led by a trifecta of actors, including private citizens, businesspeople, and the clergy, the movement employed nonviolent approaches through network-building, letter-writing, and social media-campaigning. As a result of this movement, the provincial government banned future coal-based development in Bohol.
The medieval carnival, according to Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, was a public festivity of excess in which people were free to violate social norms and subvert prevailing authority. Recent analysts have applied Bakhtin’s concept of carnival to contemporary political protests that incorporate a playful, culture-defying element. But the term has been used in multiple and contradictory ways. For Bakhtin, carnival is an expressive pattern pervasive in a culture and has no instrumental purpose (what I call “communal carnival”), while carnivalesque protest consists of specific practices with an explicit political agenda (“intentional carnival”). The Occupy Wall Street movement can be analyzed as both communal and intentional carnival. Protest movements use humor to subvert received doctrines; humorous performances are addressed to participants, the public, and repressive forces. Some critics regard carnivalesque performances as frivolous and demeaning of serious political causes. I conclude by discussing the effect of carnival on the Occupy movement.
The Swedish alternative movement’s place-making activities in the seventies have been understood as an attempt to escape the political sphere. In this thesis, I investigate the ideas and practices of societal transformation seen in rural intentional communities and, to a lesser degree, urban sites. Challenging the idea that such intentional communities were solely concerned with the creation of ‘perfect places’, I study the tensions between community and society, lifestyle and the political sphere, and how the present relates to the future.
Drawing on the field of utopian studies and the conflict inherent in the concept of utopia between the ‘no place’ and the ‘good place’, combined with relational perspectives on social movements and places, I analyse specific places and general place-making processes and their connection with the wider world. Using interviews from the late 1970s and a broad variety of written sources, both internal records such as bulletins and correspondence and published material such as newspapers, the four empirical chapters address, in order, prefigurative politics; the question of estrangement; relationships between the individual and the societal sphere; and the broader networks envisioned and enacted in Sweden’s alternative milieus.
My findings show that the form of transformation produced at alternative sites largely concerned the question of setting a good example—a tactic that demanded visibility and hands-on engagement in their local community. Yet this was matched by an apparent lack of interest in national politics that stemmed from their idea of a translocalized struggle designed to create more such communities. I argue that the conceptualization of alternative places as estranged entities is only partly valid. In light of my results a more apt description would be that they were engaged in a political strategy that broke with a tradition of addressing their demands to the state, and instead pursued a human-rights inspired tactic of enabling other ‘ways of life’. The conclusion is that the alternative milieus bridged the social movement practices seen in Sweden in the late sixties and in the early eighties
This chapter examines the relationship between positivism and public intellectualism in the American disciplinary context and asks to what extent is positivism the problem in this relationship. It argues that the successive waves of disciplinary discontent revolving around positivism are intimately entwined with the desire for relevance so that more is at play here than epistemological preferences. Relevance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, which suggests that for what or to whom American political scientists and IR scholars wish to be relevant is just as important for understanding their discontent with positivism as its own attributes. Examining this desire for relevance reveals substantive end-goals intimately connected to the American power project. It therefore raises important ethical questions about our relationship to the American national context, our role as public intellectuals in reifying American power, and the impact our reification has on global affairs. This chapter considers these issues and concludes with a discussion of the dangers posed by our desire to be useful to a particular, relatively powerful, national context. It suggests that while the desire for relevance is in keeping with that context, it is also an ethically questionable position.
In the United States took place after the II War World, a period of economic wellness that lead the country towards social stability. Nevertheless, the political events will have made the new generations of American citizens revolt against the establishment, often questioning its validity. In a tumultuous political moment, the young artists would crash the already established cultural scheme, that has been stuck in a loop, in the period known as Counterculture. This would be one of the most prolific artistic and cultural eras when young people were not afraid to confront the moral principles while developing a series of works that would transcend the time barrier. The cinematographic industry would experience a change of paradigm when independent works became hits amongst mass culture, such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.
This study aims to determine the Food Not Bombs (FNB) movement as a movement protesting militaristic actions of the states of the world. Through qualitative research methods with analytical descriptive research types and the frameworkof the concept of social movements and international structures as well as the concept of diflusion, FNB action can be identified and explained in its protest against the militaristic actions of world states. The author found the protest action of the FNB was motivated by world states that were too focused on the military field with the fulfillment of military spending, where states were competing to increase the military expenditure so that other sectors were not maximally fulfilled. This has become an established order and the FNB is trying to change that order revolutionarily with the values of pacifism. So the FNB Movement in the international structure have three forms of interaction with the structure itself, first the state system where the FNB is counter to the militaristic system of the states of the world. Second, an international society in which FNB forms solidarity. Third, the world society where FNB is transforming a new form of social order. In this interaction, the FNB carried out its protest actions against the militaristic actions of the states of the world in the form of direct and indirect diflusion. Direct diflusion namely FNB took to the streets in voicing their protest actions and indirect diflusion namely FNB using mass media.
Collective alternative everyday practices (CAEPs), such as community gardens, clothing swaps or repair cafés, have become a prominent sight in the critical-creative milieus. So far, CAEPs have been mostly conceptualized in terms of prefigurative politics, i.e. as the strategy to change society through an everyday conduct that fully reflects idealized notions of the Self and society. However, there is increasing evidence of practitioners who engage in rather irregular, spontaneous ways and remain bound to an unsustainable consumer lifestyle. Scholars have identified such volatile participation as a problem for mobilization, but have not answered a) how the lack of continuous embodiment can be understood from a social movement perspective, and b) what the political quality of this behaviour might be. In this article, I address these research questions by drawing on theories of the late-modern subject and existing qualitative studies. Late-Modern Subject Theory assumes that individuals increasingly construct themselves through the market and in a multi-faceted way, due to processes such as commer-cialization, flexibilization and acceleration. From that perspective, volatile participants attempt to mobilize an idealized Self but are unable to do so persistently, due to the structural constraints (such as lack of time resources) and personal liberties (such as excess of consumer options) that define everyday life in late-modern society. The result are figurations of utopia that are bound to fail, but repeated ever again. These 'refigurations' maintain a political element through conveying a critique of and an alternative to the status quo, if only for a moment.
This paper uses an examination of prefigurative politics – popularly imagined as ‘being the change you wish to see’ – to reflect on geographies of the future. We argue that prefigurative politics, which has become common since the mid-1990s, typically proceeds through multiple forms of improvisation. Successful prefigurative politics is usually institutionalised within organisations and movements and reshapes practices, discourses, and structures of power. We demonstrate how a focus on prefigurative politics can inform scholarship on the ‘anticipatory politics’ associated with dominant institutions and geographies of the future more broadly by highlighting ways in which people seek to enact visions of the future and illustrating the impact of these oppositional practices of future making. We argue that prefigurative politics could be a springboard for investigating means-ends alignment as a characteristic of political action and the present as a terrain of politics.
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism's relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organization – or ‘anarchistic’ elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of non-elite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.
Food democracy calls for a democratization of the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Researchers and lay citizens are showing a growing interest for initiatives associated with food democracy, yet the specific democratic ideals and involvements that make up food democracy have gained limited attention. Many forms of participation associated with food democracy are market-based, such as buying organic food or joining community-supported agricultural projects. Research shows that market-based logics influence multiple spheres of life and threaten democratic ideals. However, scholars working on political participation have not yet analyzed the influence of market-based logics across forms of participation. This article analyses the action repertoire of food democracy to assess the influence of market-based logics on different forms of food activism. It builds on four critiques of market-based politics to question the relationship between different forms of participation and the market. It addresses three research questions: Which forms of political participation do citizens use to democratize the food regime? Which conceptions of democracy relate to these different forms of food activism? Which critiques of market-based politics apply to different forms of food activism? The article highlights the widespread risk of unequal participation, crowding out, commodification, and state retreat across forms of participation used to democratize food regimes. This study provides insights into the types of democratic renewal being experimented with in the framework of food democracy as well as their limits.
El objetivo del artículo es explorar las prácticas y redes de autonomía alimentaria que están ocurriendo en la Ciudad de México. En primer término, a través de una metodología
principalmente etnográfica dividiré estos proyectos y experiencias sociales en cuatro grandes familias. Posteriormente, utilizando el enfoque de estudio de los movimientos sociales, destacaré cómo estas experiencias se caracterizan por un activismo prefigurativo y cómo estas prácticas están incrustadas dentro de valores y emociones morales. Por último, destacaré la emergencia de un imaginario radical colectivo, el cual permite a dichas experiencias tener el potencial para ser verdaderos laboratorios de innovación y experimentación social.
Las formas de confrontación-acción son objeto de varios debates en el llamado «movimiento de justicia global o movimiento altermundialista, un aspecto importante de la ideología del movimiento es la posibilidad otorgada a los huelguistas de llevar a cabo todos los medios de acción que consideren adecuados, siempre y cuando no impliquen violencia contra las personas. Sin embargo, se mostrará que los debates sobre el uso de medios violentos de acción están revestidos por el imaginario de violencia, presente en los movimientos, donde las narrativas en torno a la contra-cumbre de Génova en 2001, desempeñan un papel fundamental. Por lo anterior, examinaremos conclusiones metodológicas de este tipo de enfoque sociológico sobre imaginarios políticos.
Grievances and an urgent awareness of the need for social change are necessary but insufficient catalysts for the formation of powerful and robust social movements. While this realization has led observers of social movements to attend to a wide variety of structural and subjective factors, in the alchemy of radical social change and the grassroots collective action that fuels it one of the most important yet under considered elements is the radical imagination. In this paper, I map the concept of the radical imagination and the methods necessary to study it in action. A collective activity produced through dialogic encounters rather than an individual possession or faculty, the radical imagination is our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise, and it animates successful movements for social change. Since the radical imagination is something people do together it is also a profoundly social phenomenon bearing the marks of the activist culture and political context in which it is enmeshed, and the forms used to mediate and circulate it. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the way activists sustain themselves, organize for social change, and connect with others beyond their ranks. Drawing on research conducted since 2010 with radical activists in Halifax, Canada seeking to ‘convoke’ – collectively summon into being – the radical imagination, I reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination, activist culture and context, and movement building in the age of austerity.
Several recent works in political theory argue that exit, rather than being a coward’s choice, is a potent mode of resistance that is particularly well suited to the current political era. These works reclaim exit, seeing it as a method of political opposition. While innovative and illuminating, these accounts are limited because they tend to treat all exits as resistance, regardless of context or content, and they are inclined to over-saturate exit with oppositional political meaning. I argue that resistant exit should be more narrowly defined. By examining a range of empirical cases, I identify and explore three distinctive characteristics of this particular type of opposition. In addition to clarifying a recently developed idea in current scholarship, this article provides a systematic way for scholars to understand and interpret the intersection between resistance and exit.
Organizational scholars have examined how social movements generate institutional change through contentious politics. However, little attention has been given to the role of prefigurative politics. The latter collapses expressive and strategic politics so as to enact the desired future society in the present and disrupt the reproduction of institutionalized structures that sustain deep-seated inequalities. The paper presents an ethnographic study of Occupy London and protesters’ encounter with people living homeless to examine how prefigurative politics is organized in the face of entrenched inequalities. Findings show how the macro-level inequalities that protesters set out to fight resurfaced in the day-to-day living in the camp itself. Initially, the creation of an exceptional space and communal space helped participants align expressive and strategic politics and imbued them with the emotional energy needed to confront challenges. But over time these deeply entrenched institutional inequalities frustrated participants’ attempts to maintain an exceptional and communal space, triggering a spiral of decline. The dilemma faced by Occupy invites us to reflect on how everyday constraints may be suspended so as to open up imagination for novel and more equal ways of organizing.
Psychological contributions to social movement scholarship have disproportionately concentrated on a "politics of demand", rather than on a "politics of the act", or prefigurative politics. Prefigurative actors, rather than making demands of power-holders, take direct action aimed at creating change in the ‘here and now’ by constructing alternative modes of being and interacting that reflect a given movement’s desired social transformations. Given that the prefigurative process takes place within and between individuals—with aims of changing the macrostructure by altering micro-relations—psychological perspectives are imperative to their understanding. Despite relevant theories and concepts, a psychology of prefiguration has yet to emerge. This theoretical discussion explores several reasons why prefigurative practices have been largely overlooked and at times misunderstood within mainstream social movement scholarship, traces the distinctive dimensions of prefiguration deserving of further (especially psychological) inquiry, and calls for methodological techniques both responsive to the context-driven nature of prefigurative praxis and consistent with the ‘bottom-up’ approach embodied within these unique spaces of resistance. After highlighting important points of disjuncture and possibility within the study of prefiguration, this discussion offers critical questions and methods aimed to envision and invigorate a critical psychology of prefigurative politics.
In this article, we present a case study investigating the socio-psychological aspects of grassroots participation in a Transition Town Movement (TTM) community initiative. We analyzed the first Italian Transition initiative: Monteveglio (Bologna), the central hub of the Italian TTM and a key link with the global Transition Network. A qualitative methodology was used to collect and analyze the data consisting of interviews with key informants and ethnographic notes. The results provide further evidence supporting the role of social representations, shared social identities, and collective efficacy beliefs in promoting, sustaining, and shaping activists’ commitment. The movement seems to have great potential to inspire and engage citizens to tackle climate change at a community level. Grassroots engagement of local communities working together provides the vision and the material starting point for a viable pathway for the changes required. Attempting to ensure their future political relevance, the TTM adherents are striving to disseminate and materially consolidate inherently political and prefigurative movement frames – primarily community resilience and re-localization – within community socio-economic and political frameworks. However, cooperation with politics is perceived by most adherents as a frustrating and dissatisfying experience, and an attempted co-optation of the Transition initiative by institutions. It highlights a tension between the open and non-confrontational approach of the movement towards institutions and their practical experience. Corresponding to this tension, activists have to cope with conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalence of social representations about community action for sustainability, which threaten the sense of collective purpose, group cohesion and ultimately its survival.
The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.
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