Social Movements (History)

Chapter 15: Offering our stories: resistance narratives and the marketing of justice

This chapter works from the vantage points of Indigenous and traditional storytelling to critique the common story-based practices used by social justice activists to develop campaigns, record and remember social movement history, and narrate their struggles. The chapter uses examples from the Zapatistas, the movement by families of the disappeared in Latin America, and Indigenous story-telling and research justice methods to provide a nuanced analysis of story-based and narrative strategies as well as providing suggestions on how to use stories in ways that build dignity and power instead of cheapening or silencing experiences or maintaining unjust power relations between victims of injustice and oppressors who hold state or social power. The article examines in depth the cinematic impacts of and tensions between Latin American Third Cinema's neorealist journalistic approaches and new consumer market driven campaign advertising used by activists through a critique of the film No about the Chilean plebiscite to end the Pinochet dictatorship. Key terms discussed in this chapter include piegogia, an alternative epistemological approach and critique of western concepts of pedagogy that are rooted in Gramscian or leftist theory, as well as expansion on the term research justice, the focus of this collection, and it's application to the fields and practices of history, literature, activist organizing, and story-telling perspective.

Moments of mass mobilization astound us. As a sea of protesters fills the streets, observers scramble to understand this extraordinary political act by 'ordinary' citizens. This study presents a paired comparison of two 'moments' of mass mobilization, in Ukraine and Argentina. The two cases are compared and analyzed on a cross-temporal and an inter- regional basis, thereby offering two critical cases in response to assumptions that the processes and patterns of mobilization, and democratization politics more broadly, are region specific. This study challenges political science's focus on elites and structural factors in the study of political participation during democratization.

The conclusion applies the model of mass-mobilization developed from the two cases to the Arab Spring (Egypt) and EuroZone Sovereign Debt Crisis (Greece) protests. The epilogue assesses the EuroMaidan Revolution in Ukraine in comparative context.

Contents:

PART I

1. Introduction: The Shock and Awe of Moments of Mass Mobilization

2. Theoretical Framework for Comparative Analysis of Mass Mobilization


PART II

3. Mapping Moments and Movements in Ukraine and Eastern Europe 1920-2004

4. Mapping Moments and Movements in Argentina and Latin America 1920-2001

PART III

5. Setting Precedents: Medium-term Structural Factors in the Mobilization Process

6. Context is Only Part of the Puzzle: Short-term Structural Factors in the Mass Mobilization Process

PART IV

7. The Activist and Elite Interaction and Information Exchange Game

8. The Duty to Protest: Participation of 'Ordinary' People in Mass Mobilization

9. Conclusions: Understanding Revolutionary Moments and Movements

Epilogue: It Happened Again: The 2014 EuroMaidan Mass Mobilization in Ukraine

Loadenthal, Michael. “‘Eco-Terrorism’: An Incident-Driven History of Attack (1973-2010).” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 11, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1–106.

Abstract:
The animal and earth liberation movements (i.e. “eco-terrorists”), are characterized by autonomous cells of activists utilizing a diverse tactical array to cause financial disruption and damage to businesses, governments and individuals seen to be contributing to animal exploitation and ecological degradation. Though the movement has produced an extremely limited amount of “violence,” and despite its strong tendency to target property, authoritative labeling has termed such actions terrorism. This study adds to the discourse concerning the political violence of “eco-terrorism” by examining the movement’s historical timeline through a statistical analysis of more than 27,000 events drawn from nearly three hundred sources including movement ephemera, government reports, academic articles and books, media accounts, and security briefings produced by besieged industries. This historical analysis demonstrates the atypicality of violent attacks qualifying as terrorism, and establishes that “eco-terrorism” is far more frequently a defamatory political label applied to small-scale criminal acts targeting property that present no risk to human life. This incident-based historical analysis, attempts to correct methodological flaws grounded in incomplete datasets which serve to skew findings through an over representation of attacks involving arson and explosives.

This article presents the attitudes of Warsaw workers between 1955 and 1957 and the functioning of party organizations in the industry during crisis time. The subject of research was the behavior and opinions of workers and the functioning of basic party cells and their evolution in the wake of
the most important political events. In particular, the article focuses on the genesis and course of the crisis of the Stalinist apparatus of power closely related to growing social pressure, especially workers’ revindications, which, after the revolt of Poznań in June 1956, led to the brink of explosion. The
text presents the main stages of this process, the adaptation mechanisms of apparatchiks and activists, the workers’ demands and their evolution, especially after Poznań and during the Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), together with the
main types of attitudes of members of basic party cells (radically revisionist, moderately revisionist, and authoritarian). The bottom-up perspective has offered a unique look behind the scenes of the factional fight inside the PZPR, especially the activities of Stefan Staszewski and the Warsaw
Committee of the PZPR in 1956. The article supplements the knowledge about the post-October ‘normalisation’, the restoration of control over the party structures by the apparatus and the restoration of the influence of party cells in factories. The chosen perspective has also made it possible to
present a fuller picture of the circumstances accompanying the liquidation of the weekly Po Prostu and the brutal pacification of student demonstrations in October 1957.
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Artykuł jest próbą przedstawienia postaw warszawskich robotników w latach 1955-1957 oraz funkcjonowania organizacji partyjnych w przemyśle w momencie kryzysu. Podstawę źródłową badań, oprócz literatury przedmiotu, stanowiły materiały archiwalne PZPR różnych szczebli od zakładowego po wojewódzki, głównie dziesięciu dużych warszawskich przedsiębiorstw (są przechowywane w Archiwum Państwowym w Warszawie, ekspozytura w Milanówku). Przedmiotem badań były zachowania i opinie robotników oraz funkcjonowanie podstawowych organizacji partyjnych i ich ewolucja w rytm wyznaczany przez najważniejsze wydarzenia polityczne. Przedmiotem analizy były także czynniki kształtujące sytuację w warszawskich fabrykach, najważniejsze etapy kryzysu i popaździernikowej "normalizacji" zakładowych organizacji partyjnych, główne modele postaw ich członków. Oddolna perspektywa pozwoliła też na sformułowanie wniosków co do źródeł kryzysu wewnątrz PZPR, przebiegu walk frakcyjnych i polityki popaździernikowego kierownictwa PZPR.

"""How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe?

Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece’s long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world—including those on the ground in Greece—analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund.

In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome.

Contributors include Vaso Makrygianni, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Christos Filippidis, Christos Giovanopoulos, TPTG, Metropolitan Sirens, Yannis Kallianos, Hara Kouki, Kirilov, Some of Us, Soula M., Christos Lynteris, Yiannis Kaplanis, David Graeber, Christos Boukalas, Alex Trocchi, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and the Occupied London Collective. Art and design by Leandros, Klara Jaya Brekke and Tim Simons. Edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou of Occupied London.

Occupied London is an anarchist collective writing on all things urban. Since 2007, the collective has worked together to publish an irregular journal, offering a platform for discussion within the global social antagonist movement, and featuring contributions by writers and collectives from around the globe, including Nasser Abourahme, Zygmunt Bauman, Franco Berardi, Klara Jaya Brekke, Manuel Castells, Mike Davis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis, David Graeber, Richard Pithouse, Marina Sitrin, Antonis Vradis, and many, many more. Since 2008, the collective has maintained a wildly popular blog, “From the Greek Streets,” providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the urban revolt of December 2008 in Greece, and examining the impact and legacies of the revolt and the crisis that followed. http://www.occupiedlondon.org | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog)

AK Press is a worker-run, democratically-managed publisher of anarchist and radical literature. Founded in 1990, AK Press is a ten-person collective of committed anarchists, spread between Oakland, Baltimore, and Edinburgh, working hard to publish more than twenty new titles each year, and distributing thousands of other titles from like-minded publishers around the globe. (http://www.akpress.org | http://revolutionbythebook.akpress.org)"""

Popular education (Folkbildning), a distinctive Swedish tradition of lifelong learning, has always concerned itself with the relationship between learning, power and democracy in society rather than having a purely individualistic and instrumental approach to learning for employability, which has dominated policy and practice. Through the themes of power and democracy this book examines popular education's contribution to enhancing people's lives in communities, reflecting on wider significance, and explores its impact on the political culture of the state and the cultural politics of society within and outside Sweden, including the USA, Japan, Canada and Tanzania.

This book analyses the aesthetic and utopian dimensions of various activist social movements in Western Europe since 1989. Through a series of case studies, it demonstrates how dreams of a better society have manifested themselves in contexts of political confrontation, and how artistic forms have provided a language to express the collective desire for social change.
The study begins with the 1993 occupation of Claremont Road in east London, an attempt to prevent the demolition of homes to make room for a new motorway. In a squatted row of houses, all available space was transformed and filled with elements that were both aesthetic and defensive – so when the authorities arrived to evict the protestors, sculptures were turned into barricades. At the end of the decade, this kind of performative celebration merged with the practices of the antiglobalisation movement, where activists staged spectacular parallel events alongside the global elite’s international meetings. As this book shows, social movements try to erase the distance that separates reality and political desire, turning ordinary people into creators of utopias. Squatted houses, carnivalesque street parties, counter-summits, and camps in central squares, all create a physical place of these utopian visions

The author of the article presents the impact of the Yugoslavian-Soviet normalisation as well as normalisation between Belgrade and Warsaw on Poland’s internal situation in 1956. In particular, the article is a study of the political significance of the press and the impact of journalists on the events during the Thaw period, that is the spread in Poland of the ideas of workers’ self-governance modelled on the workers’ self-governing councils in Yugoslavia. The author argues that the press played a key role here in the period between the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the political breakthrough of October 1956. Authors of the most important articles — Irena Rybczyńska, Eligiusz Lasota, Artur Hajnicz and Tomasz Atkins — described the Yugoslavian decentralisation, decollectivisation and — especially — workers’ self-government. After the Poznań protests of June 1956 Poland’s communist government came under social pressure to introduce changes. Press articles put pressure on the leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party, created accomplished facts, described the Yugoslavian workers’ self-government and spread information about initiatives setting up workers’ councils in order to democratise relations in factories. In October 1956 the biggest contribution in this respect was made by Express Wieczorny, which published extensive reports from Yugoslavia by Tomasz Atkins and then launched a campaign to combine isolated workers’ self-government initiatives into one movement. The power elites were interested in the Yugoslavian reports, but did not formulate a concrete programme, limiting themselves to vague announcements of “democratisation” and to an initiative to strengthen the discredited works councils. In mid-September 1956 the authorities, responding to the pressure, gave cautious approval to workers’ self-government. Transplanted to Poland, the Yugoslavian idea found in expression in the draft, prepared at the Żerań Car Factory, of the statute of the first workers’ council independent of the government, a document that served as a model for other enterprises.

This thesis falls into two parts. The first (chapters one to three) states the problematic of the research, develops a critique of the dominant “social movements” literature as unhelpful for understanding the counter culture and argues that the latter can more effectively be theorised in terms of the implicit theory of social movement found within agency-oriented Western Marxism and socialist feminism. This latter theory is developed as an understanding of movement as direction, developing from the local rationalities of everyday life through articulated but partial campaigns to a “movement project” which attempts to deploy such local rationalities to restructure the social whole. Within these terms, it argues for an understanding of counter culture as a movement project from below within disorganised capitalism. This mode of analysis is seen as that of a historical sociology geared to the production of open concepts which can be used by participants to theorise the context of their own choices.

The second part (chapters four to eight) theorises the issues involved in researching social movements within this perspective, entailing the need to engage with tacit knowledge, to thematise conflicts and collusion between researcher and participants. The findings chapters use qualitative interviews from a Dublin movement milieu to develop an analysis, grounded in participation, of the local rationalities of the counter culture. In this section the key findings are a rationality of autonomy as self-development, which is shown to underlie processes of distancing and problems of commitment, and a rationality of radicalised reflexivity, which resolves the problem of institutionalisation through the deployment of a wide range of “techniques of the self”. The analysis attempts to locate this reading within the life-histories of participants but also within the historical development of the counter culture, examplifying the ability of the concepts developed in this thesis to engage with the problems facing participants.

For more than half a century, the African-based Rastafarian movement has existed and thrived. Since the early 1930s, Rastafari has developed, changed and gained enough supporters to be considered “one of the most popular Afro-Caribbean religions of the late twentieth century. According to a survey conducted in 1997, there are over one million practicing Rastafarians worldwide as well as over two million sympathizers. Rastafarians are concentrated in the Caribbean, though members of this diverse movement have settled in significant numbers all throughout the world. At present, there are large Rastafarian communities in New York, Miami, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, Huston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New Haven as well as many large cities in Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. While Rastafari has maintained much of its original flavour, migration, globalization and a reinterpretation of philosophical dogma has created a space for white people to join this typically black movement.

Qual è la ragione, e quale l’attualità, di raccontare la storia di un anarchico che partito dalla Toscana visse in Brasile, Argentina e Uruguay nella prima metà del secolo XX per poi passare, tra carceri e persecuzioni, nella Spagna travolta dalla Guerra civile del 1936 e finire poi fucilato per rappresaglia, insieme ad altri quattro antifascisti, alle Cascine di Firenze nei primi giorni del dicembre 1943?
Vivere una vita libera, ribelle e solidale è un tratto caratteristico, partecipativo e cosmopolita che pare essere la stella polare di questi "vecchi" anarchici. L'azione diretta e indipendente, l’aspirazione a non delegare ad altri la soluzione dei propri problemi, la speranza in un mondo migliore libero e egualitario sono i sentimenti che muovono i "vecchi" libertari come Ristori ma che sono anche la fonte d'ispirazione dei nuovi attivisti di strada del XXI secolo. Niente di più moderno, addirittura ultramoderno: la volontà di essere padroni del proprio destino. Questo libro è un racconto biografico costruito attraverso una rigorosa ricerca negli archivi italiani e brasiliani. In queste pagine si mostra come un uomo di origini povere e quasi senza istruzione, autodidatta, divenne, attraverso la cultura libertaria, uno dei principali protagonisti del movimento a cavallo dei secoli XIX e XX.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity.

Αποτιμώντας το βάρος των κοινωνικών δομών και ρόλων εκτιμάται ότι κατά την περίοδο κορύφωσης των αγροτικών κινητοποιήσεων την άνοιξη του 1910 έδρασε με την πλήρη κάλυψη και σύμφωνα με τις οδηγίες της κυβέρνησης. Ο τρόπος με τον οποίο αντιμετώπισε τους αγρότες δεν πρέπει να ήταν ιδιαίτερα συνδεδεμένος με την απειρία αλλά και τον ενθουσιασμό που επεδείκνυε για να εκτελέσει με τον δυναμικότερο τρόπο τα καθήκοντά του αλλά και σύμφωνα με τις οδηγίες που λάμβανε. Στα γεγονότα του 1910 εκφράζεται η στάση της τότε κυβέρνησης συνολικά και διαφαίνεται ο δυσχερής δρόμος που είχε να διανύσει οποιαδήποτε ρύθμιση προσπαθούσε να αποταθεί για επίλυση στην κεντρική πολιτική σκηνή. Η κυριαρχούσα, τάση στη κεντρική πολιτική σκηνή και η ισχυρή παρουσία των τσιφλικάδων τόσο στο κοινοβούλιο όσο και στην κοσμοπολίτικη ζωή της βασιλικής αυλής καθιστούσε σχεδόν αδύνατη την επίλυση του προβλήματος της μεγάλης γαιοκτησίας.

Secular arabic traditions have emphasized the potential of dreams to foretell the future.  Sometimes the prediction is seen as obvious and on other occasions elaborate systems of symbolic translations were consulted such as the tenth century Oneirocriticon of Achmet.
    In Islam, many of the foundations of the Koran were revealed to Muhammad in dreams. Muhammad ordered the practice of adhanthe daily call to prayer from the minarets and a central ritual of Islam to this day after one of his followers dreamed of it. The split of Islam into the conflicting factions of Sunni and Shi'ite was based partly on a dream of Mohammed, which the Sunnis used to justify their rights as his successors.
    The autobiographies of Muslim rulers often contain extensive dream diaries and examples of decisions obstensibly based on dreams.  When the Shah of Iran was deciding whether to seek a loan from Russia, he dreamed that a famous theological figure dressed in primitive Muslim garb approached the Shah and threw at his feet a sack containing gold and silver.  The interpretation of this dream was that the Shah shouldn't make any new loans with unbelievers but should trust that fellow servants of the faith would restore his finances. Sadam Hussein reported dreaming that Allah told him to enter and take back Kuwait just before the first Gulf War. Before the second Gulf War, he reported a dream that a snake came upon his path but he chopped off it’s head with a sword which he interpreted to mean western invaders would be vanquished.
    Because of this emphasis on dreams as foretelling the future rather than arising from the past, Arabs who are having PTSD nightmares of an event occurring each night--such as Kuwiati survivors of the Iraqi invasion or Iraqi survivors of the American invasion--experience even more anxiety over whether this will indeed occur again than dreamers in other cultures.
    The positive side to this emphasis on dreams foretelling the future happens when oppressed people dream of positive outcomes.  These are a source of much inspiration in arab society, while in western traditions they would be dismissed as "wish fulfillment" without the beneficial impact.
    We  collected dreams associated with events of the Arab Spring and discuss how they inspired and guided those taking part, and what dreams right now may have to offer the reshaping of the Arab world.

The Earth Liberation Front is a radical environmental movement that developed from the ideological factionalization of the British Earth First! movement of the 1990s. Its ideological underpinnings are based in deep ecology, anti-authoritarian leftism highlighting its critique of capitalism, a commitment to non-violence, a collective defense of the Earth, and a warranted feeling of persecution by State forces. In its current form, the Earth Liberation Front is a transnational, decentralized network of clandestine, autonomous, cells that utilize illegal methods of protest by sabotaging and vandalizing property. The small unit cells are self-contained entities that can operate without the support of external entities such as financiers or weapons procurers. Tactical and operational knowledge is developed and shared through commercially available books written by the broader environmental movement throughout the last four decades, as well as inter-movement publications produced by the cells and distributed through numerous sympathetic websites. Membership in the Front can be understood as occurring on two levels, the covert cell level and the public support level, both of which operate in tandem to produce and publicize acts of property destruction. At the cell level, individuals conduct pre-operational reconnaissance and surveillance, develop and construct weapons systems, carry out orchestrated attacks, and announce their actions to support groups and media while maintaining internal security and anonymity. At the aboveground level, support entities help to publicize attacks carried out by cells, respond to media inquiries and other public engagements, identify and coordinate aid to imprisoned cell members, and develop and distribute sympathetic propaganda produced by, and in support of affiliated individuals. This case study uses the history of the Earth Liberation Front‟s United States attacks as its unit of analysis, and seeks to outline the ideology, structure, context and membership factors that constitute the movement.

"In mid-December 2008, a teacher from Athens narrated the following incident: a few days before, her nine-year-old son had come home from school and asked her if she knew how to make a Molotov cocktail. The woman was surprised, but wanted to tease him so she asked him if he knew how. The boy replied that he did and started describing the process with confidence:

“You take a bottle of beer,” the boy explained.

“Why not a bottle for orange juice?” his mother asked.

“No, no! It must be a bottle of beer; you drink the beer first
and then fill the bottle with petrol, you put a piece of cloth on the top and you light up the cloth and throw it."

The neo-insurrectionist network known as Bash Back! has contributed to the queering of the animal liberation discourse through the publication of their 2010 communiqué entitled, “Bash Back!ers in Support of Autonomous Animal Action Call For Trans-Species Solidarity With Tillikum.” The politic developed by the larger movement of neo-insurrectionist Queers, as exemplified by Bash Back!, has served to disrupt anthropocentric notions of human-liberator, animal-captive that form the centerpiece of the animal liberation discourse. Through their appropriation of an attack wherein an orca whale killed its trainer at SeaWorld, Bash Back! problematizes not only the normalized domestication of non-human animals for entertainment, but also the discourse used to critique such enslavement. Through satirical posturing and a liberatory framework, Bash Back! attempts to draw intersectional connection between the systems of domination that enslave both non-human animals and non-heterosexual Queers. Through a queering of this understanding of liberation, Bash Back! serves to shift the animal liberation discourse away from the human centric “total liberation” framework, and towards an anti-speciest framework proposed herein, termed “total solidarity.”

""Buddhism and Ireland explores the long encounter between Ireland and Buddhism, overturning many common assumptions. Over the past 14 centuries, Buddhism has meant many different things to Irish people: travellers’ tales, information for traders and civil servants, an alternative to Christianity, a form of anti-colonial solidarity, “going native” in Asia or immigration from Buddhist countries - as well as movies, museum pieces, newspaper stories and meditation retreats.

This study uses a world-systems approach to explore the real complexities of the transmission of world religions in a country which (like most) is neither homogenous nor neatly bounded but shaped by colonialism, contested borders, enormous diasporas, competing ethno-religious cultures and widespread immigration and where simple stories of a monolithic past do not hold water. Part I traces how knowledge of Buddhist Asia reached the western end of Europe between the seventh and the nineteenth centuries. Part II explores Buddhism and Theosophy as alternatives to the mainstream ethno-religious allegiances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. Part III discusses Buddhism’s recent growth from counter-culture via immigration to Ireland’s third-largest religion.

Buddhism and Ireland combines a critical analysis of the politics of religion in Ireland, a detailed exploration of the lives of remarkable and courageous people and an eye for unexpected connections. The only published history of Buddhism in Ireland, it will be widely read by students of Buddhism in the west as well as by those interested in the changing role of religion in Irish society."

See attached flyer for special offer ($22.46 / £14.99 pbk for 320pp plus illustrations)"

Il testo, che introduce una raccolta di saggi curata dall’autore sui movimenti del 1968 in Italia ed in Europa, intende fornire un quadro generale interpretativo entro cui collocare l’“anno dei movimenti”, partendo dalla questione: come mai “scoppia” il ’68 in occidente, proprio nel corso di un periodo di crescita economica e di diffusione del benessere senza precedenti? Dopo una ricognizione delle principali interpretazioni sul 1968, il saggio, prendendo in considerazione i principali Paesi del mondo a capitalismo avanzato (Stati Uniti, Germania, Francia, Gran Bretagna, Italia), intende mostrare come il ’68 sia stato caratterizzato da una forte una dimensione operaia, spesso misconosciuta, altrettanto importante di quella studentesca e forse più significativa per quanto riguarda gli esiti. La conflittualità nelle relazioni industriali, dopo aver conosciuto in alcuni Paesi un’impennata all’inizio degli anni Sessanta ed essere ritornata a bassi livelli subito dopo, ricominciò a crescere nella seconda metà del decennio (in questo senso la mobilitazione operaia precedette quella studentesca) ed esplose più o meno, con differenze tra i diversi casi nazionali, in contemporanea con quella studentesca. In questa prospettiva il ’68 segna il momento in cui vengono prepotentemente alla ribalta le contraddizioni e i limiti di quella che è stata definita “età dell’oro” del capitalismo occidentale. L’ondata di conflittualità che attraversò i luoghi di lavoro tra la fine degli anni Sessanta e l’inizio dei Settanta rappresentò il tentativo di riequilibrare i rapporti capitale-lavoro in un contesto che vedeva sgretolarsi i termini del patto sociale postbellico e nel quale era diventato difficile accettare le limitazioni e i sacrifici imposti dalle esigenze della ricostruzione e della crescita, quando questa crescita sembrava assumere le sembianze di una prospettiva incerta e comunque non premiante per i lavoratori. Movimento studentesco e movimento operaio non procedettero separati. Il tratto che li accomunò, e che rappresentò la radice più profonda delle proteste sessantottesche, fu la contestazione dell’autoritarismo, nelle università, nelle scuole e nelle fabbriche. In definitiva il tema dell’antiautoritarismo fornisce una chiave di lettura unitaria per rivolte studentesche e proteste operaie e per questa via consente di collocare il ’68 entro coordinate storiche definite, la crisi dell’età dell’oro. In questo senso si può dire che il ’68, le cui lotte sociali accelerarono, senza volerlo, un processo di “migrazione” dell’industria verso la semi-periferia del sistema economico mondiale e di spostamento di ingenti masse di denaro verso impieghi speculativi, fu il catalizzatore della fine del fordismo-taylorismo (che in realtà, più che scomparire, si spostò fuori dalle sue aree di origine) e della nascita di quella che oggi si definisce globalizzazione.

This introductory paper seeks to stimulate discussion on entanglements between protest campaigns, social movements and academic processes of generating knowledge in the USA and Western Europe since the 1960s. It examines how protagonists from social movements and counterculture have contributed to understandings of academic knowledge formation and its relationship to the public sphere, the role of the scientist, and the practical processes involved in generating and acquiring knowledge. Focusing on drafts of both 'alternative' and 'conventional' science and their impact on each other, the paper in particular suggests enquiring into the creative and experimental aspects of alternative scientific projects and the media in which they took form. In pursuit of this goal, it proposes to transcend the existing compartmentalisation of research in social movements and the formation of knowledge into numerous specialities, and to further broaden the dialogue between the history of social movements and the history of science and of knowledge.

Incarcerated people in Washington have published a variety of periodicals, ranging from general prison news to radical newspapers that debated ideologies like communism, anarchism, and Black nationalism. This article examines radical periodicals published in and concerning prisons to better understand struggles over the prisoners’ press in Washington. First, it contextualizes this history with a discussion of militant prisoner support movements in the 1970s. These movements included the Sunfighter, an underground newspaper; and the George Jackson Brigade, a guerrilla group, whose members were involved with both the Sunfighter and subsequent prison newspapers. This article then analyzes the politics, inside-outside relationships, and censorship of two radical prisoner quarterlies: the Marxist-Leninist Red Dragon and the Anarchist Black Dragon. Influenced by their prison environment, these newspapers provided space for networks and writings that sought to address interconnected problems such as mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racism. Ultimately, these newspapers demonstrate how prisoners’ politics are worthy of closer consideration by historians, as their ideas and actions shaped news, public discourse, and movements on both sides of the prison walls.

This article examines a turning point in the relationship between the black communities in Britain and the British labour movement, focusing upon the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in this relationship. While 1968 saw a great wave of industrial militancy and cultural radicalism, during which the CPGB was quite influential, this upsurge in radical activist politics did not translate into major gains in the struggle against racism in Britain. 1968 saw the tightening of immigration controls and a Labour government intent on the ‘integration’ of black immigrants, coupled with an increase in racist agitation on the right by Enoch Powell and the fledgling National Front, which caused problems for Britain's black population. The CPGB, one of the largest leftist parties and with a history of anti-colonial and anti-fascist activism, had the potential to be an important agent in the anti-racist movement in the late 1960s, but any appeal to black workers was subsumed by the wider industrial struggles of the period—a phenomenon that was replicated throughout the British labour movement. The inability of the trade unions and the British left to effectively address the grievances of black workers led to autonomous black political organisation, inspired by the ideas of black power and the Marxism of the national liberation struggles. This division between the (primarily white) labour movement and black workers was widened by the events of 1968 and would further consolidate throughout the 1970s. The purpose of this article is to portray how the schism between the traditional organisations of the British working class and the black communities developed, significantly demonstrated by the failure of the heightened radicalism of 1968 to produce tangible benefits for black Britons, and how the potential of the CPGB to undertake an important anti-racist role was diminished by its focus on militant labourism.

Micromobilization research constitutes a vital stream within social movement studies. Despite a wealth of empirical research and recent advances in micromobilization theory, research is still hampered by a myriad of issues. This article identifies conceptual, empirical, and methodological weaknesses in the micromobilization literature and offers solutions. First, the author provides a clear definition of micromobilization by synthesizing two distinct, yet interrelated research streams that, on the one hand, emphasize the processes through which social movement organizations attempt to recruit and influence potential supporters and participants and, on the other hand, enumerate various analytically distinct steps that make up micromobilization. Using this as a springboard, the author then evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a longstanding, popular model of micromobilization that he terms the 'affinity-initiated model.' This micromobilization model is extended in significant ways by merging insights from extant social movement, social psychology, and network analysis literatures, pinpointing novel and overlooked ways social ties, in particular, facilitate the differentiation of individuals at analytically distinct steps in the micromobilization process. Finally, the author identifies several avenues for future micromobilization research opened up by the analytic approach developed in this article.

This article explores the meaning of " resistance " and suggests a new path for " resistance studies, " which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field of the social sciences that is still relatively fragmented and heterogeneous. Resistance has often been connected with antisocial attitudes, destructiveness, reactionary or revolutionary ideologies, unusual and sudden explosions of violence, and emotional outbursts. However, we wish to add to this conceptualization by arguing that resistance also has the potential to be productive, plural and fluid, and integrated into everyday social life. The first major part of the article is devoted to discuss existing understandings of resistance with the aim of seeking to capture distinctive features and boundaries of this social phenomenon. Among other things, we will explore resistance in relation to other key concepts and related research fields. We then, in the article's second major part, propose a number of analytical categories and possible entrances aiming at inspire more in-depth studies of resistance.

You are a child growing up in Greece in the nineties. There is a high likelihood that one of your distant relatives, or even your aunt, your uncle, your grandfather, or your mother or father may be haunted by the memory of a few years in their life from whence no bedtime stories will ever arise. “Exile,” “dictatorship,” “civil war”: these strange words ring about, yet remain lost behind the veil of the untold. Silent grandparents with lingering gazes, voters-for-life of a party that would repeatedly betray them over the course of a lifetime too far along to change its course. These were times past, hidden by the thick screen onto which the capitalist spectacle projected itself. By the mid-2000s, the spectacle had grown to Olympic proportions. The Games were here: development fever, a certain euphoria mixed with longing, the longing to become “Western,” to finally “make it.” For a brief moment in time it actually seemed to happen for some.

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I am writing critiques about African American authors and poets as well as a composer, who have written works that have made social change, namely Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Terence Blanchard, as well as Ann Petry and Rita Dove. Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. She was born on April 13, 1891 and died on March 30, 1964. The film Passing, based on the critically acclaimed novel by Nella Larsen, is a story about race and identity.  I also write about Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese American novelist’s novel The Sympathizer.