Lauren Langman

From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements*

From the early 1990s when the EZLN (the Zapatistas), led by Subcommandte Marcos, first made use of the Internet to the late 1990s with the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Trade and Investment and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, it became evident that new, qualitatively different kinds of social protest movements were emergent. These new movements seemed diffuse and unstructured, yet at the same time, they forged unlikely coalitions of labor, environmentalists, feminists, peace, and global social justice activists collectively critical of the adversities of neoliberal globalization and its associated militarism. Moreover, the rapid emergence and worldwide proliferation of these movements, organized and coordinated through the Internet, raised a number of questions that require rethinking social movement theory. Specifically, the electronic networks that made contemporary globalization possible also led to the emergence of “virtual public spheres” and, in turn, “Internetworked Social Movements.” Social movement theory has typically focused on local structures, leadership, recruitment, political opportunities, and strategies from framing issues to orchestrating protests. While this tradition still offers valuable insights, we need to examine unique aspects of globalization that prompt such mobilizations, as well as their democratic methods of participatory organization and clever use of electronic media. Moreover, their emancipatory interests become obscured by the “objective” methods of social science whose “neutrality” belies a tacit assent to the status quo. It will be argued that the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory offers a multi-level, multi-disciplinary approach that considers the role of literacy and media in fostering modernist bourgeois movements as well as anti-modernist fascist movements. This theoretical tradition offers a contemporary framework in which legitimacy crises are discussed and participants arrive at consensual truth claims; in this process, new forms of empowered, activist identities are fostered and negotiated that impel cyberactivism.

From indignation to occupation: A new wave of global mobilization

The present monograph issue focuses on the 2011–2012 global wave of protests that began in Tunisia in 2011. This introductory article notes that two streams of mobilization can be distinguished in terms of the specific grievances they express, and the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they have emerged. The article argues, however, that despite these differences both threads find their antecedents in the increasing and widespread social and economic levels of inequality, which requires social movements theories to ‘bring political economy back’ in the analysis of mobilization. It is further argued that the various occupy movements that have emerged since 2011 constitute diverse manifestations of a new international cycle of contention. With its innovative and distinctive traits in terms of diffusion, coordination, action repertoires, frames, and types of activism, this new cycle seeks to both transform the economic system to provide greater equality, opportunities, and personal fulfillment and, simultaneously, to democratize power in more participatory ways.

From the streets and squares to social movement studies: What have we learned?

In the editors’ introduction they noted how the various mobilizations starting in 2011 raised important questions for social movement scholars. The various articles in this issue have explored the emergence, dynamics, and significance of the social mobilizations, contestations, and confrontations that started with the Arab Spring mobilizations and continue to this day. This concluding article is focused on three main aspects that emerge from the editors’ dialogue with the different contributions. The first is the context, beginning with a political-economic account of neoliberalism, the various crises of legitimacy that it has fostered over the last three decades, and the role of new media (ICTs) in engendering these mobilizations, their coordination, and globalization. The second aspect focuses on some of the characteristics of this cycle of contention, mostly the actors and their networks, identities and the new practices of occupying public space. The third and last part represents an attempt to evaluate the general trajectory of these mobilizations over the last two years.

Occupy: A new new social movement:

The recent mobilizations in the Middle East, Southern Europe, and United States were both inevitable given the implosion of global capital, and at the same time unexpected and unpredictable. How are we to understand these mobilizations? This article suggests that NSM, New Social Movement theory, with its concerns for identity, culture, and meaning, in which the transformation of identity becomes the basis of subsequent social transformation remains a useful starting point. But given the contradictions of global capital, as well as developments in social movement theory, there is a need to further consider the importance of the legitimation crises of the political economy migrating to the subjective realms of identity and emotion that impel mobilizations that are informed by morality and visions that may be utopian. The Occupy movements illustrate these relationships.

The effects of affects: The place of emotions in the mobilizations of 2011

We have recently seen the proliferation of a variety of progressive, democratic social movements across the globe. In the wake of various contradictions and implosions of capitalism, from the meltdown of the US banks to the euro crisis, vast numbers of people have challenged neoliberal globalization. In this article the authors offer a theoretical frame for the analysis of the most recent challenges posed to neoliberal social and economic policies as they were shaped in late capitalism. The authors first note Habermas’s thesis that legitimation crises take place at both the macro and micro levels, and that they foster various understandings as well as emotional reactions. The authors focus on the emotional aspects that are vital to social mobilizations. To do this they draw on theoretical frames from social movement and the sociology of emotion perspectives. More particularly they see the process of ‘emotional liberation’ coined by Flam, as the equivalent of McAdam’s ‘cognitive liberation’ and both as part of the process of subjectivation as put forward by Touraine. These formulations lead to considerations of the emotions that tie people to authorities and/or withdraw legitimacy from authorities, in order to understand which emotions need be mobilized in order to liberate people from their loyalty to authorities. The authors found a constellation of incongruent emotions such as distrust and disrespect for authorities/elites or their perceived agents, indignation and righteous anger, humiliation, and in turn hope for an alternative future. The value of the authors’ proposed structure of argument lies in the powerful combination of macro and micro processes and the combination of cognition and emotions.

Cycles of Contention: The Rise and Fall of the Tea Party

Right wing populism has typically consisted of anti-statist/elitist mobilizations by the ‘common people’ opposed to government policies and/or various out-groups. Such cycles of contention, typically prompted by various social changes and/or crises, have long been an essential feature of American society. The Tea Party (Parties) appeared in 2009 as a response to economic stagnation and crisis, secular challenges to traditional religious identities and the election of an African American president. The Tea Partiers were generally highly conservative, highly religious, rural/suburban, lower middle class Republicans. Such movements might be best understood as reactionary ‘resistance movements’ that attempt to defend and retain traditional identities and statuses based on race, patriarchy and hetero-normativity that have been under assault by late modern ‘network’ society. Such movements, prompted by anger, rage and ressentiment may garner attention and even wider support, but if/when they gain power, they foster ‘buyer’s remorse’ and eventually wane.

The Dialectic of Unenlightenment: Toward a Critical Theory of Islamic Fundamentalism *

The foundational critique of modernity, (DoE), showed how the quest for domination, rooted in the Greek pursuit of control over nature, articulated in the emancipatory promise of Enlightenment based rationality, indeed led to new forms of totalitarian thought and practice. While the (il)logic of capital and the erosion of meaning disposed WWII and its final solution, contemporary global capitalism has fostered wide spread anti-modernist, reactionary movements throughout the Islamic world. Understanding Islamisms is by aided Critical Theorys Marxian understanding of the role of political economy, mediated through Weberian insights into the “elective affinity” between political economy and religious ideologies, and Freudian psychodynamics. Islam emerged as a traders religion that would enable a vast, flourishing empire to flourish. But a seamless web between Sharia law (kadi justice) and commercial practices would limit the rationalization of commerce, forestall a Reformation, and dispose the relative demise of Islamic hegemony in face of ascendant Christendom. Between indigenous barriers to rationality, and the interventions of capitalist imperialism, globalization has bypassed the Middle East. A powerful ressentiment has taken root among the marginal, disenfranchised and otherwise powerless who are disposed to religious understandings of social problems, with religious based remedial actions to achieve redemption. Fundamentalist doctrines of salvation and renewal preach authoritarian submission, hatred to outsiders (infidels), and demands for death. The fusion of 8th century doctrines and 21st century technologies, portend greater human suffering. The logic of the Frankfurt school remains as relevant as when the world faced its darkest moments.

Fanon speaks to the subaltern

In recent years there has been a veritable explosion in Fanonian studies and this would be a welcome development given the scope and depth of Fanons insights. Unfortunately, Fanons work itself has been “post-alized” in recent years especially in the Western literary academy. This exploration of Fanons work has, for the most part, been in the form of “textual” analyses which tend to obfuscate the radical humanistic underpinnings of Fanons writings. Many postcolonial and postmodern discourses which have appropriated Fanon to buttress their valorization of “difference” and “identity politics” in an era hostile to universalism and humanism have, in effect, excised the critical, normative, and revolutionary humanist vision which informs Fanons oeuvre. As such, these renderings have robbed Fanons work of the critical insights and interpretive frameworks that it offers in confronting some of the pressing issues of our day: questions of identity politics, difference, class, agency, political struggle, etc. The intent of this paper is to argue that Fanon offers a dialetical framework for discerning relationships of identity as ideological constructions which mediate between structurally located hegemonic blocs and the conciousness of empirical subjects, and, which clearly situates identity and difference within broader networks of domination and exploitation by navigating a course between the Structure/ agency; humanism/anti-humanism binaries that have dominated contemporary social thought.

Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear

Although it is often condemned as an imprecise concept, alienation continues to flourish as critique in contemporary philosophy, theology, and psychology, as well as in sociology. Historically originating in Roman law, where it referred to the transfer of land ownership, alienation has since been applied extensively to analyses of labor relations, politics, and culture. In the 19th century, Marx showed that workers’ alienation, their dehumanization and estrangement, was a consequence of the structure of exploitation in capitalist industry. The concern was echoed in Weber’s metaphor of the ‘iron cage’ as an outcome of rationalized structures, as well as in Durkheim’s conceptualization of anomie as a variant of alienation causing socially induced psychological states. Today, while research in the structural tradition does not assume that people necessarily are aware of their condition, researchers who assume that alienation is a conscious experience have invented scales to measure its intensity. Continuing both the structural and the psychosocial traditions, researchers now study alienation in relation to uses of digital technologies and new forms of exploitation in work, as well as in politics and popular culture. Alienation is also studied in families, especially in investigations of parenthood.

Down the Rabid Hole to a Tea Party

Social movements often gain public attention by surprise. They appear to be something new and fresh, a spontaneous critique of established economic or cultural relations. Whether from the left or the right, they seem like contemporary constellations of public discontent that explodes in increasingly creative contrivances of collective outrage against a system that will not otherwise hear their protestations. As the 2008 election heated up, it was soon evident that the ‘typical’ contest for power in US politics was beginning to show some very dark undertones. While name-calling, mudslinging, and character assassination have long been American traditions in electoral politics, the Sarah Palin rallies revealed a wellspring of rabid anger and aggression toward Obama that was not often seen in public. As she insinuated that Obama was a communist, a traitor, who allegedly ‘palled around’ with dangerous ministers from the South Side of Chicago and even more dangerous terrorists from the Weather Underground of the 1960s, her audiences added their own patriotic fervor as they chanted ‘traitor’ and ‘kill him’. While surely the implosion of the real estate and stock market in 2007, and the subsequent government bailout of the big banks had many people anxious, fearful, and angry, it was nonetheless clear that for the conservative Republicans at Palin’s rallies, Obama was not just a left wing liberal intellectual. More importantly, he is African American, and this made his candidacy and eventual election ‘illegitimate’, a victory that upset the ‘rightful’ order of the presidency as a white man’s club, if not prerogative. Within a short time, stoked by right wing media, especially Fox News, fueled by money and organizational power from Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, a new, ‘astroturfed’ movement emerged that called itself the ‘Tea Party’. While the astroturf corporate lobbyists and billionaires hoped to organize popular sentiment against Obama to support an end to all regulation on polluting industries, finance, and even lower taxes for the wealthy, a genuine populist aspect constituted an authentic grassroots side of the Tea Party.