antisystemic-movements

Movements that challenge and seek alternatives to the prevailing global capitalist order and its embedded inequities.

2 chapters across 1 book

Social Movements and World-System Transformation (2013)Jackie Smith, Michael Goodhart, Patrick Manning, John Markoff

Preamble

The preamble introduces the volume as a timely scholarly effort to rethink social movements and global transformation through a world-historical lens. It emphasizes how contemporary social movements transcend political and epistemological borders, building on past emancipatory struggles while addressing intersectional issues such as gender equity, cultural diversity, and class. The volume foregrounds feminist and indigenous contributions to envisioning a more just, equitable, and sustainable global order.

Part I of the book begins by interrogating conventional categories that help shape mainstream academic and public discourses about the world and the politics of social change. The chapters here help us to historicize the modern state and to reflect on the ways the capitalist world-system has shaped fundamental assumptions and identities. In Part II, contributors examine emancipatory struggles of the past and in the current moment to identify possible lessons from history that can inform today’s movements. The authors demonstrate how states and their policies affect movement strategies and practices but also reveal limits to states’ abilities to fully contain the conflicts expressed by social movements. Part III demonstrates the inevitable challenges faced by movements seeking greater equity and voice in a system that is fundamentally oriented towards inequality and exclusion. The cases show how, over time, movements have learned from their internal conflicts, even as those conflicts persist. Finally, the chapters in Part IV explore the emergence of movements and strategic analyses that suggest other pathways toward system transformation. Engaging with these subaltern emancipatory projects and discourses provides insight into possible alternatives to the modern world-system, while raising profound questions about how we conceive of emancipatory social transformation, suggesting new avenues of research that might prove fruitful in this regard.

The chapter outlines the structure of the book, which interrogates mainstream categories of social change, historicizes the modern state, and examines emancipatory struggles and social movements within the capitalist world-system. Immanuel Wallerstein's contribution traces the evolution of antisystemic movements from the 16th century to the 19th century, focusing on the ideological responses to social upheaval, the emergence of conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, and the debates within movements about the role of the state and the prioritization of struggles such as class, nationalism, and feminism. The chapter highlights persistent tensions between movements over strategy, identity, and the pursuit of systemic transformation.