Topic 7 Resistance to globalization French sociologist: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Topic 7Resistance to globalization

French sociologist: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Questions:1. What is resistance to

globalization?2. What are the agents and sites of

resistance?

Themes: • How to conceptualize resistance

to globalization, • The concepts of social capital and

embedded market;• Bottom-up perspectives: stake-

holding agenda and communitarian project

Conceptualizing Resistance

• Globalization is a contested concept, not a received theory.

• It is a serious analytical and political mistake to begin from the assumption "Globalization is".

Conceptualizing Resistance

• Globalization can be construed as a partial, incomplete and contradictory process- an uneasy correlation of economic forces, power relations and social structure.

• Amidst this uneasy correlation, it nurtured the politics of resistance to globalization as a hegemonic project as a neo-liberal capitalism.

Four features of neo-liberal economic globalization as a

hegemonic project:

1. protection of the interests of capital and expansion of the process of capital accumulation on world scale;

2. a tendency towards homogenization of state policies and state so as to privilege the interest of capital;

Four features of neo-liberal economic globalization as a

hegemonic project:

3. creation of a new "market ideology" which overshadows other social and communal values;

4. construing "economic subject" to replace all kind of subjectivities and identities.

Neo-liberal economic globalization as a hegemonic project:

• The economy becomes the master of society and of all within it, and society exists to serve the ends of capital.

• This is teleology of capital, or teleology of globalization.

• Teleology means a doctrine that ends are immanent in nature or a doctrine explaining phenomena by final causes

Teleology of Globalization

1. Technological change is presented as the driving force of globalization;

2. Globalization is framed in the essentialistic;

3. There is strong emphasis on the notion of convergence, i.e., societies become increasingly alike;

4. Globalization is presented instrumentally.


5. Globalization is presented as an automatic process. Social conflict is posited as being confined to the adjustment phase.

• Thus, "globalization is here to stay", our task is "to accept and adjust". It represents the final triumph of capital over society.


• J. K. Galbraith sums up the trends of the past fifteen years as "the Uncertain Miracle" and warns of "the possibility of a depressive equilibrium as regards unemployment."

• The upshot is that neo-liberal globalization may not result in a new global utopia, but rather in a global dystopia.


• Resistance to globalization, thus, is an attempt to offer a counter-hegemony discourse and practice.

Manifesto of Social Rights

• According to Barry Gills, a "manifesto of social rights" against globalization should be suggesting:

1. The right of individuals, families and communities to employment, welfare, social stability and social justice;

2. The right of the poor, dispossessed and marginalized, wherever they exist, to resist the imposition of poverty and the intensification of social polarization;


3. the right of the people to reclaim and deploy government in their own self- defense, at all levels from local, national, regional and global;

4. the right of all people to establish social solidarities and autonomous forms of social organization outside the state and the market; and finally

5. the right to imagine "post-globalization" and realize alternative modes of human development.


• A counter-hegemonic position must concentrate on the question of social reform and the changing relationship between "civil society" and the state or between "social forces" and "state power".

• Civil society is "the sphere in which a dominant group organizes consent and hegemony. It is also the sphere where subordinate social groups may organize their opposition and construct an alternative hegemony.“

Direction of resistance against globalization: What is the direction?

1. breaking down the myth that state is helpless in the face of globalization;

2. highlights the links between global restructuring and social discontents, such as unemployment, environmental degradation, community dislocation and other social problems.

Direction of resistance against globalization: What is the direction?

3. re-invent state-society relationship;

4. building a global civil society in the long run.

Forms of Resistance

• Different forms and dimensions of resistance to hegemony are witnessed:

1. Collectivity is assumed in the notion “movement” based on collective action and solidarity.

2. Infrapolitics: everyday forms of resistance conducted singularly and/or collectively, but without openly declared confrontation

Forms of Resistance

• “Submerged networks” with no clearly defined organizational structure have also formed in an era of globalization.

• Participants in submerged networks live their everyday lives mostly without engaging in openly declared contestations.

Forms of Resistance

• The new politics of social resistance to neo-liberal economic globalization is not confined to the traditional framework of national politics.

• The emerging forms of resistance act in and across different spatial scales, encompassing the local, national, regional, and global

Forms of Resistance

• Movements like Green Peace, People 21, Global Women Health Movement, or the campaign to establish international labor standards, each illustrate how the new politics of resistance seeks to operate across all of these scales.

Agents of Resistance

• People are usually not taken as participants and agents but passive bystanders in globalization.

• What about people as consumers, producers, distributors of transnational commodities and services, as travelers, migrants, participants in transnational communication, international organizations, social movements?


• How can the "weapons of the weak" become tools of transformation? How can local "everyday forms of resistance" be integrated in a politics of emancipation?

• Agents of resistance: ranging from blue collar and while collar workers, to clerics, homemakers, and middle managers, or even teachers, professionals and civil servants.


• More and more individuals in many movements recognize the need for new strategies of resistance which include stronger regional or international alliances and broader social coalitions.

An Alliance of Trade Unions and Labor NGOs in Asia


• Sites of resistance: ranging from formal political space such as square and everyday space to cyberspace.

• One is the step from critique to construction, from opposition to proposition.

• Another is the step from local to wider horizons. Several such bridges are in construction.

Civil Society and Social Market

• Building civil society is a theme that runs through many fields of action, often as a stepping stone to wider links.

• Civil society empowerment come to a point where either it pursues the path of local autonomy, or it cooperates with state or market, though at a price of depoliticisation.


• Cooperation with business is often more difficult to conceive.

• Muto's suggestion: "taking back the economy" through people's accumulation at grassroots level.


• In civil society activism, the social agenda is usually clear: it concerns questions such as equity, participation, empowerment.

• The political agenda is also clear: it is about democratization, decentralization, debureaucratisation, human rights, citizenship rights, pluralism.


• What is usually less clear and less developed is the economic agenda. The social economies- the cooperative sector, people-to-people trade, fair trade, socially responsible business and eco-business are very much under studied.


• Thus, it is not an anti-development thinking, but alternative development program.

• Social capital can be a meeting place of social and corporate interests, the basis for a social market approach.


• Social capital concerns the question of the social and political embeddedness of markets.

• Disembedded markets make societies conform to the logic of commercialization; embedded markets or economies, in contrast, would conform to the needs of societies.


• Further along the road, the human development approach may be opened up and extended in a social capital framework:

– not in the sense of social welfare but in the sense of social development;

– not simply in the sense of tidying up after the market, but in the sense of rethinking what markets are in the first place.

Bottom-up Perspectives

• The alternative is to look for a new relationship between markets and social life.

• Polanyi's concept of economics: "man's dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows… and refers to the interchange with his natural and social environment, insofar as this results in supplying him with the means of material want-satisfaction."


• What are economies for?

Polanyi's book The Great Transformation is dedicated to showing how, the liberal utopia of a harmonious market match of supply and demand across divisions of labor overlooked the possibilities that market systems would form their own logic, laws, and interests separate from the rest of society.


• Stakeholding agenda:

1. The principle of stakeholding agenda is that a firm's activity affects many parties: shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, the local community and the nature environment.


2. The principle of stakeholding agenda is that A program intended to "design institutions, systems and a wider architecture which creates a better economic and social balance, and with it a culture in which common humanity and the instinct to collaborate are allowed to flower."

3. It concerns with well-being of the community of the business enterprise and the community within which it operates.

.


4. The core of the stakeholding agenda turns upon the business enterprise's enhanced sense of responsibility and responsiveness towards those with whom it interacts.

5. The primary responsibilities of the firm are thus expanded beyond the more traditional concern for its share-holders.


6. The well-being of the entire range of stakeholders, thus becomes the active concern of the firm and also becomes the central to the legislative and regulative activities of wider political system.

Communitarianism:• Communitarianism is a frontal challenge

to the individualistic and liberal oriented character of political and philosophical forms.

• The central part of the communitarian project is a critical response to social fragmentation, community disintegration and ethical dissolution.

Communitarianism:• The agenda is devoted to social

reconstruction at the level of the community, often local but sometimes national, regional or transnational.

• A central theme is a re-assertion of individual responsibilities as a counter to the over-emphasis of individual rights.

Communitarianism:

• It is a response to the increasingly losing control over individual and community life, in the aspects of social, economic and political realms.

• The "thick ties" of common identity and relationship are necessary foundations for the communitarian agenda.

Topic 7 Resistance to globalization French sociologist: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Documents

Transcript of Topic 7 Resistance to globalization French sociologist: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)