Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Tables -- 1: Introduction: Confronting the Crisis of Democracy -- The Crisis of Democracy and the Rise of Neoliberalism -- Chapter Content -- Note -- Part I: Situating Contestation -- 2: The Arc of Contention -- From the French Revolution to the First International -- The Paris Commune -- From the Second International to the Exhaustion of the Old Left -- New Social Movements and the New Left -- Contesting Neoliberalism -- Summary -- Note -- 3: Rethinking Social Movements -- North American Social Movement Studies -- European New Social Movement Studies -- The Activist Perspective -- Marxism and the Study of Social Movements -- Summary -- Notes -- 4: The Dynamics of Capital -- Capital's Key Dynamics -- From Keynesianism to the Financial Crisis of 2008 -- Summary -- Note -- 5: Reconceptualising Political Strategy -- Destabilising Marxism -- Multiplicity and Effective Political Action -- Populism and Antagonism -- On the Subjective Dimension of Revolt -- Exodus -- Summary -- Notes -- Part II: Contesting the Twenty-First Century: An Analysis of Occupy -- 6: Occupy, Democracy, and Enduring Change -- Methods -- Occupy's Economic Critique-The Economic Crisis Is also a Crisis of Democracy -- The Quest for Democracy -- General Assemblies -- Horizontalism -- To Make Demands? -- The Problem of Endurance -- Summary -- Notes -- 7: The Subject of Change -- Conceptualising Class -- Occupy and Class -- Tensions in the 99 Percent -- Summary -- Notes -- 8: Locating Effective Resistance -- Cyber-Optimism -- Cyber-Scepticism -- Occupy-Analogue or Digital? -- Occupy's Spatial Dimension -- Summary -- Notes -- Part III: Claiming the Twenty-First Century -- 9: Reconceptualising Effective Action -- Recovering the State -- Movements and Parties -- Moving Beyond Our "1848 Moment"-Communism and the Communist Party -- Summary -- Notes

This book contends that the impasse of the Left today is in part, a result of an anarchist 'common sense' among activists. The author argues that the vital dynamics of anarchism and social movements need to be combined with a reappraisal of the Communist party and state. While cynicism towards capitalism and existing political institutions is plentiful, this book argues that the Left appears mired in a reactive politics of resistance, unable to formulate programmes for substantive social change. Drawing insights from the history of the Left, political economy, contemporary critical theory and an in-depth study of Occupy, the author provides concrete suggestions as to how the Left might 'claim the twenty-first century' and realise a more equitable social order. Social Movements and Democracy in the 21st Century challenges activists and scholars to rethink social movements and political organisation, and to actively work towards enduring social change. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of social movement studies, Left theory, critical theory, political sociology and Marxism, as well as anyone with an interest in 'political change'.

The rising fortunes of the academic 'extremism industry' call for robust social scientific scrutiny. We contend this industry is a significant expression of our current moment of post-hegemonic liberalism. We set out the typical definitional devices found in the literature, which assemble 'extremism' as a syndrome consisting of six major elements: non-normative values, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism, utopianism and a war on the present, totalisation and abstraction, justifications of unlawfulness. The extremism industry can be approached by way of three investigative spaces: modernisation approaches, psychological and culturalist explanations, and security and policing approaches. Within these spaces, we outline five ideal-typical modes of explaining extremism: consensual anti-fascism, civilisational provincialism, folk secularism, psychologistic pathologisation and moral educationism. We maintain that the extremism industry is analytically weak and politically pernicious and suggest that what passes for 'extremism' is better situated and understood at the crossroad of three important vectors: intellectual, geo-political and world-economic.