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Mare BV's List: Globalization

  • Oct 15, 09

    Prevailing perspectives on power cannot explain why political protests from the bottom of societies sometimes result in reforms that reflect the grievances of the protestors. I propose a new theory of "interdependent power" that provides such an explanation. I argue that, contrary to common views, globalization actually increases the potential for this kind of popular power.I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life. Think of societies as composed of networks of cooperative relations, more or less institutionalized, through which mating and reproduction is organized, or production and distribution, the socialization of the young, or the allocation and enforcement of state authority. Social life is cooperative life, and in principle, all people who make contributions to these systems of cooperation have potential power over others who depend on them. This kind of interdependent power is not concentrated at the top but is potentially widespread. Even people with none of the assets or attributes we usually associate with power do things on which others depend.....institutional life socializes people to conformity, while at the same time, institutions yield the participants in social and cooperative activities the power to act on diverse and conflicting purposes, even in defiance of the rules....Globalization, neoliberal or not, means just this: increased specialization and integration in complex and far-reaching systems of cooperation and interdependence, with the potential that popular power will also become more far-reaching and available to more people. The evidence suggests that popular power's potential has expanded far beyond the specific institutional locations that informed our ideas about democratic power and labor power.

    www.asanet.org/...Feb08ASRFeature.pdf globalization power socialmovements theory

  • Jul 30, 09

    A question repeatedly raised and discussed in the past was the following: What can unite the world? The experimental answer was: An attack from Mars. This terrorism is an attack from an inner Mars. For the length of a historical moment, at least, the quarrelling camps are united against the common enemy.

    www.eurozine.com/...2001-12-05-beck-en.html risk society sociology ulrichbeck

  • Jul 28, 09

    www.newleftreview.org/?view=2705 badiou socialism democracy communism identity philosophy theory

    • Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritarian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s famous maxim, ‘become what you are’. The Moroccan worker does not abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity.
    • In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.
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