Dear all,
sorry for cross-posting and for not having time to translate this into
other languages, including Italian. Below is a call for papers for
issue 3 of "Interface: a journal for and about social movements".
Issue 2 is currently in production and will be out later this month.
Please, spread the news and, if interested, consider submitting your
contribution (it's a multi-lingual journal and different types of
contributions are possible, see below and check the website).
Alice
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Interface – A Journal For and About Social Movements
Call for papers – Issue 3:
CRISES, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS
Interface is a new journal produced twice yearly by activists and
academics around the world in response to the development and
increased visibility of social movements in the last few years – and
the immense amount of knowledge generated in this process. This
knowledge is created across the globe, and in many contexts and a
variety of ways, and it constitutes an incredibly valuable resource
for the further development of social movements. Interface responds to
this need, as a tool to help our movements learn from each other’s
struggles, by developing analyses and knowledge that allow lessons to
be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and
translated into a form useful for other movements.
We welcome contributions by movement participants and academics who
are developing movement-relevant theory and research. Our goal is to
include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements – in
terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form. We are
seeking work in a range of different formats, such as conventional
articles, review essays, facilitated discussions and interviews,
action notes, teaching notes, key documents and analysis, book reviews
– and beyond. Both activist and academic peers review research
contributions, and other material is sympathetically edited by peers.
The editorial process generally will be geared towards assisting
authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all
can be heard across geographical, social and political distances.
Our third issue, to be published in May 2010, will have space for
general articles on all aspects of understanding social movements, as
well as a special themed section on crises, social movements and
revolutionary transformations.
CRISES, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS
“In every country the process is different, although the content is
the same. And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s
hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in
some major political undertaking, for which it has requested, or
forcibly extracted, the consent of broad masses … or because huge
masses … have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a
certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit
not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of
authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or
general crisis of the state”
So wrote the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci from behind the
walls of Mussolini’s prison, in his famous notes on “State and Civil
Society”. His words aptly describe the trajectory of crises in modern
history these are periods when the wheels of economic growth and
expansion grind to a halt, when traditional political loyalties melt
away, and, crucially, when ruling classes find themselves confronted
with popular movements that no longer accept the terms of their rule,
and that seek to create alternative social orders. The clashes between
elite projects and popular movements that are at the heart of any
“crisis of hegemony” generate thoroughgoing processes of economic,
social and political change – these may be reforms that bear the
imprint of popular demands, and they may also be changes that reflect
the implementation of elite designs. Most importantly, however, crises
are typically also those moments when social movements and subaltern
groups are able to push the limits of what they previously thought it
was possible to achieve in terms of effecting progressive change – it
is this dynamic which lies at the heart of revolutionary
transformations.
Gramsci himself witnessed, organised within and wrote during the
breakdown of liberal capitalism and bourgeois democracy in the 1910s
through to the 1930s. This was a conjuncture when tendencies towards
stagnation in capitalist accumulation generated the horrors of the
First World War and the Great Depression. Movements of workers and
colonized peoples threatened the rule of capital and empires, old and
new, and elites turned to repressive strategies like fascism in an
attempt to secure the continuation of their dominance.
Today social movements are once again having to do their organizing
and mobilizing work in the context of economic crisis, one that is
arguably of similar proportions to that witnessed by Gramsci, and a
political crisis that runs just as deep. The current crisis emerged
from the collapse of the US housing market, revealing an intricate web
of unsustainable debt and “toxic assets” whose tentacles reached every
corner of the global economy. More than just a destruction of
“fictitious capital”, the crisis has propelled a breakdown of world
industrial production and trade, driving millions of working families
to the brink and beyond. And, far from being a one-off, this crisis is
the latest and worst in a series of collapses starting with the stock
market crash of 1987, the chronic stagnation of the once all-powerful
Japanese economy, the Asian financial meltdown of 1997 and the
bursting of the dot.com bubble.
The current conjuncture throws into question the fundamentals of the
neoliberal project that has been pursued by global elites and
transnational institutions over the past three decades. Taking aim at
reversing the victories won by popular movements in the aftermath of
the Second World War, neoliberalism transferred wealth from popular
classes to global elites on a grand scale. The neoliberal project of
privatizing the public sector and commodifying public goods, rolling
back the welfare states, promoting tax cuts for the rich, manipulating
economic crises in the global South and deregulating the world’s
financial markets continued unabated through the 1980s and 1990s.
As presaged by Gramsci, neoliberal policies have whittled away the
material concessions that underpinned social consensus. Ours is a
conjuncture in which global political elites have failed in an
undertaking for which they sought popular consent, and as a
consequence, popular masses have passed from political passivity to a
certain activity.
Since the middle of the 1990s, we have seen the development of
large-scale popular movements in several parts of the globe, along
with a series of revolutionary situations or transformations in
various countries, as well as unprecedented levels of international
coordination and alliance-building between movements and direct
challenges not only to national but to global power structures. The
first stirrings of this activity were in the rise of the Zapatistas in
Mexico, the water wars in Bolivia, and the protests on the streets of
Seattle. On a global scale we saw dissent explode in the form of
opposition to the wars waged by the US on Afghanistan and Iraq. In
terms of sheer numbers, the mobilisation of against the latter
invasion was the largest political protest ever undertaken, leading
the New York Times to call the anti-war movement the world’s “second
superpower”.
Each country has had its own movements, and a particular character to
how they have moved against the neoliberal project. And for some time
many have observed that these campaigns, initiatives and movements are
not isolated occurrences, but part of a wider global movement for
justice in the face of the neoliberal project. An explosion of
analysis looking at these events and movements has occurred in the
academic world, matched only by extensive argument and debate within
the movements themselves.
In this issue of Interface, we encourage submissions that explore the
relationship between crises, social movements and revolutionary
transformations in general and the character of the current crisis and
how social movements across different regions have related and
responded to it in particular. Some of the questions we want to
explore are as follows:
· What are the characteristics of the current economic and
political crisis, what roles do social movements – from above and
below – play in its dynamics, and how does it compare to the political
economy of previous cycles of crises and struggle?
· What has been the role played by social movements in
moments of crisis in modern history, and what lessons can contemporary
popular movements learn from these experiences?
· What kinds of qualitative/quantitative shift in popular
mobilisation we might expect to see in a "revolutionary wave"?
· Are crises – and in particular our current crisis –
characterized by substantial competitions between different kinds of
movements from
below? How does such a dynamic affect the capacity to effect radical change?
· What goals do social movements set themselves in context
of crisis and what kinds of movement are theoretically or historically
capable of bringing about a transformed society?
· What are the criteria of success that activists operate
with in terms of the forms of change social movements can achieve in
the current conjuncture?
· Is revolutionary transformation a feasible option at
present? Is revolution a goal among contemporary social movements?
· What are the characteristic features of elite deployment
of coercive strategies when their hegemony is unravelling?
· How have global elites responded to the current crisis in
terms of resort to coercion and consent? Have neoliberal elites been
successful in trying to re-establish their legitimacy and
delegitimizing opponents?
· Are we witnessing any bids for hegemony from elite groups
outside the domain of Atlantic neoliberalism?
· How is coercion in its various forms impacting on
contemporary social movements and the politics of global justice?
The deadline for contributions for the third issue is January 1, 2010.
Please contact the appropriate editor if you are thinking of
submitting an article. You can access the journal and get further
details at
http://www.interfacejournal.net/.
Interface is programmatically multilingual: at present we can accept
and review submissions in Afrikaans, Catalan, Croatian, Danish,
English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and
Zulu. We are also willing to try and find suitable referees for
submissions in other languages, but cannot guarantee that at this
point.
We are also very much looking for activists or academics interested in
becoming part of Interface, particularly with the African, South
Asian, Spanish-speaking Latin American, East and Central European,
Arab world, Oceanian and North American groups.
--
Alice Mattoni
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute
Badia Fiesolana
Via dei Roccettini 9
I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI)
Mobile: +39 349 5609048
E-mail: alice.mattoni@???
