Resistance to globalization

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Topic 7 Resistance to globalization
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
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• Questions
• What is resistance to globalization?
• 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

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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".

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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.

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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

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Four features of neo-liberal economic
globalization as a hegemonic project

1. creation of a new "market ideology" which
   overshadows other social and communal values
2. construing "economic subject" to replace all kind
   of subjectivities and identities.

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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

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Teleology of Globalization

• Technological change is presented as the driving
  force of globalization
• Globalization is framed in the essentialistic
• There is strong emphasis on the notion of
  convergence, i.e., societies become increasingly
  alike
• 4. Globalization is presented instrumentally.

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Teleology of Globalization

• 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.

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Teleology of Globalization

• 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.

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Teleology of Globalization

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

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Manifesto of Social Rights

• According to Barry Gills, a "manifesto of social
  rights" against globalization should be
  suggesting
• The right of individuals, families and
  communities to employment, welfare, social
  stability and social justice
• The right of the poor, dispossessed and
  marginalized, wherever they exist, to resist the
  imposition of poverty and the intensification of
  social polarization

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Manifesto of Social Rights

1. the right of the people to reclaim and deploy
   government in their own self- defense, at all
   levels from local, national, regional and global
2. the right of all people to establish social
   solidarities and autonomous forms of social
   organization outside the state and the market
   and finally
3. the right to imagine "post-globalization" and
   realize alternative modes of human development.

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Manifesto of Social Rights

• 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.

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Direction of resistance against globalization
What is the direction?

• breaking down the myth that state is helpless in
  the face of globalization
• highlights the links between global restructuring
  and social discontents, such as unemployment,
  environmental degradation, community dislocation
  and other social problems.

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Direction of resistance against globalization
What is the direction?

• re-invent state-society relationship
• building a global civil society in the long run.

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Forms of Resistance

• Different forms and dimensions of resistance to
  hegemony are witnessed
• Collectivity is assumed in the notion movement
  based on collective action and solidarity.
• Infrapolitics everyday forms of resistance
  conducted singularly and/or collectively, but
  without openly declared confrontation

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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Agents of Resistance

• 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.

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Agents of Resistance

• 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.

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Agents of Resistance

• 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.

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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.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• Cooperation with business is often more difficult
  to conceive.
• Muto's suggestion "taking back the economy"
  through people's accumulation at grassroots
  level.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• 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.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• 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.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• 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.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• 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.

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Civil Society and Social Market

• 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.

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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."

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Bottom-up Perspectives

• 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.

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Bottom-up Perspectives

• Stakeholding agenda
• 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.

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Bottom-up Perspectives

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

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Bottom-up Perspectives

• 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.

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Bottom-up Perspectives

1. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.