165: Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein's Antisystemic Movements

From my notes from December 13, 2011 (!)

Author: Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins & Immanuel Wallerstein

Title (Year): Antisystemic Movements (1989)

Abstract:

The five essays that make up Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein’s Antisystemic Movements, all of which were presented between 1982 and 1988 at the International Colloquia on the World Economy, progressively theorize and explicate the new world-system and the antisystemic movements that shape and are shaped by it.  Although system and resistance are dialectically related, all resistence is directly shaped by the structures and processes of the world-system; the purpose of this volume is to reexamine patterns and successes of antisystemic movements thus far.  To theorize the world-system, AH&W expand on Weber’s distinction between class-based (economic) and status-based (prestige) political communities, which, in turn, is based on Marx’ base and superstructure.  They articulate status-based communities to autonomous nation-states and class-based communities to the increasingly global world economy, where economic and political competition are increasingly being replaced by giant transnational corporations managing vast circulations of capital.  States become striated into three rings of power: the core states, which conveniently include the US, USSR, Japan, China, and Western Europe; the semi-peripheral states, which are mostly communist, and the peripheral states which are going through various iterations of radical nationalism.  As capitalism goes global, power becomes centralized in the core, but capital becomes decentralized as it goes further and further in search of Third World countries that can’t resist its exploitation.  However, while increased globalization of capitalism leads to increased oppression of the world’s peoples, this process also leads to greater opportunities for transnational resistance, because capitalism’s “integrating tendencies” lend structure and organization to the resistence that is always-already fomenting just beneath the surface.  When oppression becomes too acute, antisystemic activity responds.  The dilemma of antisystemic activism, however, is that historically it has been aimed at overturning the state, but in the era of global capitalism it should really be aiming to overturn the capitalist system, because capitalism, not states, is where the power lies now.

I have to admit, I find a lot to like in world-systems theory, partly because it is clearly and succinctly theorized and partly because its global perspective helps explain processes that might be invisible or less logical at a smaller scale.  Although the authors touch on a mere two dozen sources in their bibliography, they spend pages explaining each element of their theory and how they used Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Emile Durkheim to derive it, a process which, while keeping their work solidly within the Enlightenment canon, clearly anchors their ideas in the history of Western thought.  Thus, they are able to derive a political model from the familiar base-and-superstructure, explain that class is by definition a class in itself but nationalism is a class for itself (because it involves mutual recognition of non-economic similarities), and show that at a global scale, class and status become fused at the level of the state and therefore at the level of the (dialectically necessary) antisystemic movement.  Likewise, they can show that while social movements generally occur in direct action against the state, the new global capitalism – and the resulting fusion between base and superstructure at the state level – make it possible for revolution to occur at the global scale, both because the theory works out neatly and because all of the states are thoroughly and irrevocably interconnected.  The combination of theory and global scale makes world processes and world revolution visible and legible.  It also has an eerie ability to make sense of the relationships between, say, the Arab Spring, the teetering Euro, and the Occupy Wall Street movement: increased interconnectivity both renders economics more important than statehood and helps protesters mobilize class- and status-based identities and rhetorics to protest the New World Order.

Despite my infatuation with neat theoretical explanations, however, AH&W’s world-systems version of social movement theory is not without its problems.  Beyond the obvious lack of empirical evidence, world-systems theory, as Tilly reiterates in Big Structures, operates at such a large scale that only sweeping generalizations are possible; this leads to an erasure of the very differences between peoples and movements that can help explain their development, rise, and fall.  Further, characterizing social movements as merely the dialectical partner of global capitalism assigns all agency to the capitalist system and leaves nothing but structurally pre-ordained crumbs for antisystemic activists – or for any social actors, for that matter.  And far from being dynamic, the picture of the world that world-systems theory creates is resolutely static, with its three concentric rings of power, continually-suffering oppressed peoples, and linear trajectory from 1848 to 1968, which the authors call the “great rehearsal.”  The great rehearsal for the glorious revolution?  In spite of their insistence on a dialectical structure, the authors come off as rather heavy-handed Marxists, moulding world history into some slow but steady progress toward the final liberatory revolution.

Despite this heavy-handedness – and in some cases because of it – AH&W’s world-systems take on social movements is connected to many writers working on similar problems at the same time and has had a profound impact on the study of social movements.  The authors cite Marx, Smith, Weber, and Durkheim as their primary influences, and these are all very visible in the text, but Foucault and Althusser are also quite present, particularly in their conception of politics as a closed system and power as inescapable.  Although he disagrees with their choice of scale, Charles Tilly’s Big Structures shows that he was strongly influenced by their nation-state/world-economy tension as well as by the dialectical relationship between social movements and the structures they are moving against.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement belies a similar understanding of these tensions, though he (and Tilly) insist that the large-scale theory be paired with empirical evidence of historically contingent social movements.  Finally, and more recently, geographer David Harvey has adapted world-systems theory for the present day and has used it to advocate for revolution from within the system.  Thus, despite its faults, world-systems theory has been incredibly useful for scholars of social movements, and I imagine it will continue to do so.

112: David Harvey's From Space to Place

In "From Space to Place and Back Again," David Harvey theorizes the relationship between space and place as they relate to capital and globalization since 1970.  Coming out of the Marxist tradition, Harvey argues that capitalism since 1970 has become global, and places are both nodes in the network of capital flows that are set up to catch and keep capital for as long as possible AND potential sites of resistance.  These dual purposes of places are reflected in their material forms, representations of them, and symbolic landscapes within them, because places are constructed via struggle between residents and capital.  Places thus exist somewhere between the universal and the particular in a global network of historical-geographical difference.  Space, on the other hand, is abstract and wholly constructed by capital.

Harvey jumps through a lot of theoretical hoops to make this argument.  The one that I least expected from him is also the most interesting: that Heidegger and Marx can be reconciled into a definition of place within global capitalism.  Here, Marx's argument that repression, misconception, and exploitation are the result of a "purely place-based politics in a spatially dynamic capitalist world," combined with Heidegger's emphasis on place-based dwelling as an escape from modern capitalism, creates a definition of place as the site of both global capitalist exploitation AND place-based resistance, a site mutually constituted by the struggle between the global and the local.

My only question in all of this has to do with the nature of space.  If place is the point of struggle between local dwelling and global capital flows, what is space?  Where in the world is there no resistance to outside domination?  I imagine even Monsanto cornfields in Kansas and the office buildings on Wall Street contain seeds of dissent somewhere.

108: Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

In All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman cautions against jumping on the PoMo bandwagon to make sense of the world.  Against Postmodernism, which he sees as a dead-end way of interpreting the world that only leads to the I, death, and fragmented searches for authenticity in depthless space, he argues that Modernism, and the larger Enlightenment project of which it is a part, have room for human agency, collectivity, and social change.  Further, instead of being the way out of global capitalism, Postmodernism is just a phase in the modernist dialectic, one of those moments when Marxism and modernism collide.

Berman accepts that Modernism in the mid-20th century became the top-down, monolithic grand narrative that Postmodern theorists reject, but for his definition of Modernism he points instead to the 19th century, when Modernism was a way of making sense of a chaotic new "modern" world and asserting human agency in the face of totalizing industrial development.  Modernism is a dialectic between top-down and bottom-up culture, and the Enlightenment project of Progress proceeds not in a

104: Don Mitchell's Cultural Geography

Don Mitchell's Cultural Geography: An Introduction is a critical introduction to cultural geography intended for graduate (or advanced undergraduate) students.  By "critical," Mitchell means a) he takes a normative position (here, informed by Marxism and materialism) and makes an argument, and b) he invites his readers to question, argue, and struggle with both the points he makes and the arguments behind them, because this kind of intellectual engagement will help us learn.  by "introduction to cultural geography," he means that the book explores the "struggles" that make "culture," both "to show how they get worked out in particular spaces and places - in particular landscapes - and to show how struggles over 'culture' are a key determinant, day in and day out, in the ways that we live our lives - and in what therefore constitutes significant cultural difference."  Culture, in Mitchell's formulation, is a relational process and is always political; the production of cultural space is thus the production of particular geometries of power that give shape and meaning to our lives.

101: David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity

David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity both updates and spatializes classical Marxist theory and situates studies of place within the context of post-1973 global capitalism.  He argues that postmodernity is a historical-geographical condition that is an aesthetic response to the crisis of overaccumulation.  Throughout, he emphasizes the continuity from modernity to postmodernity, the connection between new cultural and economic practices, the post-1973 development of flexible capital accumulation on a global scale, and new ways of thinking about time-space compression.  Some of his main points:

• modernity was at once transient, fleeting, contingent AND eternal and immutable; the project of Modernism was effectively the last hurrah of the Enlightenment project: to create a scientific narrative of chaos that could both rationalize internal social fragmentation within a narrative of Progress AND break from the past
• Postmodernism, on the other hand, celebrates difference, fragmentation, and the vernacular; it is spatial and pragmatic rather than temporal and abstract, and it revels in chaos and complexity.  As opposed to the Modernist city, the PoMo city is not divided into functional zones but instead develops by its own logic into something apolitically beautiful in its chaos.
• Both Modernism and Postmodernism are dialectically related to their particular "regime of accumulation," the particular configuration of capitalists, workers, state employees, financiers, and other political-economic agents that stabilizes the net product between consumption and accumulation.  In the first half of the 20th century, Fordism kept the regime of accumulation stable by slowly shaping global mass-production and mass-consumption into a core/periphery model with the US in the center.  

98: Adams, Hoelscher & Till's Textures of Place

Adams, Hoelscher, and Till's Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies originated in a 1998 special session celebrating Tuan's retirement and critiquing and updating his work; the essays include students of Tuan's, later geographers, and people who aren't geographers at all but who appreciate his work.  In their intro, the editors revise and add to humanist geography's subjective conception of place by

• setting up a dialectic between physical places and human experience of/ apprehension of/ construction of places
• rejecting the search for universal understandings of place (a la Tuan) in favor of multiple meanings shaped by both individual subjectivities and social differences, including race, class, gender, and sexuality
• putting places in social, geographical, and historical context

94: Doug Rossinow's Politics of Authenticity

With The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, Doug Rossinow writes a history of the New Left that emphasizes continuity across both time and the broader political field of the 1960s.  Unlike many scholars of the 1960s, Rossinow was not there; this is a much-needed history of the left from the outside.  Instead of drawing on personal connections and personal experience, Rossinow relies on newspapers, TV, radio, and other media sources, as well as interviews, to understand the Left and place it in context.  He argues that the New Left operated by applying an existentialist activism to the left; from this perspective, the New Left developed in response to the Cold War of the 1950s, and it ended partly because the seeds of identity politics within existentialism fragmented the Left after 1968.

76: Piven & Cloward's Poor People's Movements

In Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Piven and Cloward study four American social movements, two from the 1930s and two from the 1960s, to identify patterns in protester behavior, political and social context, and state responses that might inform lower-class political movements in the future.  And they determine that in any social social movement (and all social movements, for their purposes, come from the working classes), "whatever the people won was a response to their turbulence and not to their organized numbers."  In other words, uncontrollable mass insurgency, not SMOs, are what cause changes in society and win more rights for oppressed groups.

The reason SMOs kill a social movement instead of fueling it is that organizational development involves creating a disciplined, orderly membership and on getting resources, usually from elites, to sustain the organization.  Elites are more than happy to help fund these organizations, because they're a way of calming down angry people and bringing them into orderly obedience again - or at least a way of distracting them from their revolutionary goals.  "Organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their revolutionary politics, and therefore SMOs kill social movements.

61: Alexander Saxton's Rise and Fall of the White Republic

In The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, Alexander Saxton investigates a key question for historians of the antebellum era in America: how and why did a nation founded on principles of equality and democracy become so fraught with racial inequality?  To answer this question, he takes an "ideological" approach  to 19th century American history, in which he connects political ideas, economic and social practices, and cultural production and consumption into an emergent American worldview.  And by analyzing a variety of texts, from high political discourse to popular forms like blackface, dime novels, and American folk heroes, he shows that the development of a dominant capitalist ideology in nineteenth-century America was intimately tied to white racism.

Rise and Fall is framed around the rise and fall of different political parties in a three-stage dialectical process: the National Republicans or Whigs, whose emphasis on business-friendly hierarchy and racial hierarchy created a kind of structural "soft" racism; the Jacksonians, who combined active racism with the language of equal opportunity to create white populism; and the "Republican synthesis," which supported both white populism and business-friendly tariffs, infrastructural development, and expansion policies.  Thus, the ideology of white racism developed out of elites' need to vindicate themselves for profiting from the slave trade and slave labor within the new Republic's democratic ideals.

Unlike Roediger, who argues that working class whites created racism as a way to feel better about their reduced economic and political power in early industrialization, Saxton argues that racism has a large top-down component: the populists use it to unite poor and rich whites into a single, popular class that erases white guilt for profiting off slavery.  Sean Wilentz hammers this difference home when he argues that Saxton never quite explains why white workers would act against their own class interests and participate in a Populist ideological project.  However, despite this very valid critique, Saxton's book compliments Roediger's by examining the process of racialization from an upper-class instead of a working-class position, and by showing that racism continued to operate in the US long after the need to justify slavery had been met because it helped solidify the power of various class coalitions.