Building on Polanyi's concept of the “double-movement” through which society defends itself against domination by the self-regulating market, this article sets out some key organizational and ideological hurdles that the contemporary “movement of movements” must surmount to challenge the hegemony of neo-liberal globalization. After outlining neo-liberalism's failures, it makes an argument for the possibility of “counter-hegemonic globalization,” defined as a globally organized project of transformation aimed at replacing the dominant (hegemonic) global regime with one that maximizes democratic political control and makes the equitable development of human capabilities and environmental stewardship its priorities.
Steve Lerner , "Global Unions: A Solution to Labor's Worldwide Decline," New Labor Forum16, no. 1 (2007): 23-37. See also Steve Lerner, "Global Corporations, Global Unions," Contexts6, no. 3 (2007): 16-22.
2.
Lerner, "Global Unions: A Solution to Labor's Worldwide Decline," 17.
3.
The literature on transnational social movements that might be considered contributors to counter-hegemonic globalization is now broad and well-developed. Prominent examples would include Kate Bronfenbrenner, Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-Border Campaigns ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Christopher Chase-Dunn et al., " The Contours of Solidarity and Division among Global Movements," International Journal of Peace Studies (Forthcoming); Donatella della Porta et al., Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); William Fisher and Thomas Ponniah, eds., Another World Is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum (London: Zed, 2003); Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sanjeev Khagram et al., eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Tom Mertes, A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? ( London: Verso , 2004); Jackie Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Jackie Smith et al., eds., Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics: Solidarity Beyond the State ( Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997); and Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). My own efforts to add to this literature include, among others, Peter Evans, "Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization," Contemporary Sociology29, no. 1 ( 2000): 230-41; Evans, "Development as Institutional Change: The Pitfalls of Monocropping and the Potentials of Deliberation," Studies in Comparative International Development38, no. 4 (2004): 30-52; and Evans, "Counterhegemonic Globalization: Transnational Social Movements in the Contemporary Global Political Economy," in Handbook of Political Sociology, ed. T. Janoski , et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
4.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001 [1944]).
5.
Ibid. For discussion of Polanyi's approach, see among others Fred Block, "Karl Polanyi and the Writing of the Great Transformation," Theory and Society32, no. 3 (2003): 275-306; Fred Block and Margaret Somers, "Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi," in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. T. Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Michael Burawoy, "For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi ," Politics & Society31, no. 2 (2003): 193-261.
6.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation , 138.
7.
Ibid., 163. In a rant that sounds much like contemporary diatribes against neoliberalism, Polanyi sums up these ravages as entailing "the destruction of family life, the devastation of neighborhoods, the denudation of forests, the pollution of rivers . . . and the general degradation of existence including housing and the arts, as well as the innumerable forms of private and public life that do not affect profits." See Polanyi, The Great Transformation , 139.
8.
John Ruggie , "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," International Organization36, no. 2 (1982): 379-415.
9.
John Ruggie , "At Home Abroad, Abroad at Home: International Stability in the New World Economy," Millennium: Journal of International Studies24, no. 3 (1994): 507-26.
10.
Articulating this view most fluently is Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York : Anchor Books, 2000).
11.
The best elaborated version of an approach, which starts from envisaging alternative institutional structures and then moves to the analysis of processes of change, is Erik Olin Wright's "Envisaging Real Utopians" project. See http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/ERU.htm, and also Erik Olin Wright, "Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternative ," New Left Review41 (2006): 93-124.
12.
See, for example, George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge , 2004); and Ritzer , The Globalization of Nothing ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2007).
13.
Examples are Walden Bello, Deglobalization: New Ideas for Running the World Economy (London: Zed, 2002); Bello, "Globalization in Retreat: Capitalist Overstretch, Civil Society and the Crisis of the Globalist Project," Berkeley Journal of Sociology 51 (2007): 209-20; Martin Khor, "Globalization and the South: Some Critical Issues" (paper presented at the UNCTAD "South Summit,"Havana, 2000); and Khor, "The WTO's Doha Negotiations and Impasse: A Development Perspective ," Third World Network Online at http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/par/The.WTOs.Doha.Negotiations.doc (2006).
14.
For example, Giovanni Arrighi et al., Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Arrighi et al., " Industrial Convergence and the Persistence of the North-South Divide," Studies in Comparative International Development38, no. 1 (2003): 3-31; and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
15.
John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism ( London : Granta, 1998).
16.
George Soros , "The Capitalist Threat," Atlantic Monthly279 (1997): 2.
17.
Allan Meltzer, Report of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission (Washington, DC: United States Congress , 2000); Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997); and Joseph E. Stiglitz , Globalization and Its Discontents ( New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
18.
See Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement-and How You Can Fight Back (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
19.
Amy Chua , World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
20.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation , 3.
21.
Fred Block , "Swimming against the Current: The Partial Construction of a U.S. Developmental State," Politics & Society (this issue).
22.
James Boyle , "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain," Law and Contemporary Problems66, no. 1-2 (2003): 33-74.
23.
The idea that granting a long-term monopoly is the best way to promote innovation is hard to justify using "free market" theories. For an interesting historical discussion of the politics required for the international imposition of the idea, see Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem Press, 2002). Traditional arguments that current schemes for granting monopoly rights are in the service of accelerating innovation find remarkably little support in analyses of sectors like pharmaceuticals; see Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (New York: Random House , 2004). Conversely, arguments for the benefits of non-exclusionary property rights over productive knowledge have been able to find compelling support in the evolution of open-source software; see Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Evans, " Development as Institutional Change."
24.
Heinz Klug , "Law, Politics, and Access to Essential Medicines in Developing Countries," Politics & Society (this issue).
25.
McNeil summarized the evolution of costs from 2000 to 2007 as follows: "Triple therapy cost $12,000 a year per patient. Cipla Ltd., the Indian generic-drug maker, had not yet offered to supply the drugs for $350, which set prices tumbling; they are now $150." (Donald McNeil , "A Time to Rethink Aids's Grip," New York Times, November 25, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekinreview/25mcneil.html).
26.
Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
27.
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
28.
William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford, UK: Blackwell , 2001).
29.
See Jan Kregel, "Yes, `It' Did Happen Again-a Minsky Crisis Happened in Asia," Levy Economics Institute Working Paper (1998 ).
30.
Al Qaeda and its allies have become the empirical archetype of "regressive movements for social protection" in the popular imagination; see Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). But there is a wide range of contemporary examples; cf. Peter Waldmann, "Ethnic and Sociorevolutionary Terrorism: A Comparison of Structures ," in Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organisations , ed. D. della Porta ( Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1992). For a useful discussion of "fundamentalisms" in the Middle East and the United States, see also Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Second ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
31.
See the discussion of "multilevel contestation" below.
32.
See Robert Keohane , After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
33.
For the radical antithesis of this position, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 2000). For them, the nation state has become contemptibly anachronistic.
34.
Bello, "Globalization in Retreat," 209.
35.
Bello, Deglobalization .
36.
See Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism; Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Sklair , The Transnational Capitalist Class; and Sklair, Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives ( New York : Oxford University Press, 2002). The idea of a politically hegemonic, globally integrated transnational capitalist class stands in opposition to the full range of state-centric analyses. If state-centric views tend to ignore the degree to which private economic interests are organized to transcend national boundaries, the "transnational capitalist class" perspective underestimates the continuing importance of national politics both as an ideological vector and as a vehicle for the particular interests.
37.
Transposing this view to the North and assuming that neo-liberal policies in the North are primarily due to the restrictions imposed by global governance institutions is an even harder position to defend, at least in the case of major powers like the United States. To caricature only slightly, U.S. corporations write the rules, which are then imposed by the U.S. government on global institutions, and then negative welfare outcomes of neoliberalism within the United States are conveniently blamed on the global "other."
38.
Even when the state apparatus achieves exceptional "relative autonomy" as currently epitomized by the oil-based exceptionalism of Chávez's Venezuela, individual nation states can be effective instruments for promoting counter-hegemonic globalization only insofar as they can become effectively connected to broader transnational strategies (as Chávez himself appears to recognize).
39.
See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); and Arrighi et al., Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. The biggest danger in this perspective is that U.S. resistance to the shift of hegemony might unleash a catastrophic military confrontation.
40.
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
41.
One can imagine China trying to dislodge the current monopoly of Northern corporations over global intangible assets, but it is more plausible to project continuation of recent efforts at the construction of strategic alliances between Chinese capital and currently dominant transnational corporations.
42.
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith inBeijing: The Lineages of the 21st Century (London : Verso, 2007), 369.
43.
In Castells's terminology, these are "reactive movements" aimed at defensive reconstruction, rather than "proactive movements" with a transformative project aimed at constructing a new system of social relations (Castells, The Power of Identity, 2.)
44.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation , 160.
45.
A good example is the analysis of Latin American movements built around indigenous identities in Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2005). See also Boaventura de Sousa Santos, " The World Social Forum and the Future of the Global Left," Politics & Society (this issue).
46.
Polanyi was sharply critical of the socially destructive effects of colonial rule, but did not envisage the possibility that movements of social protection based in the developed countries might eventually join forces with the movements engendered by struggles against colonial domination.
47.
This is not to say that a Polanyian vision cannot be integrated with a Marxist one. While I have chosen to focus on the contribution of Polanyi here, it is worth noting that others have made good arguments for combining a Polanyian frame with a Gramscian one-e.g., Vicki Birchfield, "Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci's `Good Sense' and Polanyi's `Double Movement,'" Review of International Political Economy6, no. 1 (1999): 27-54; and Burawoy, "For a Sociological Marxism."
48.
Santos, " The World Social Forum and the Future of the Global Left," Footnote5.
49.
Cf. Charles Tilly, "Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights ," International Labor and Working Class History47 (1995): 1-23.
50.
It is important to underline that local organizing is not just an auxiliary to global organizing. The principle of subsidiarity applies to both movements and governments. While addressing some issues is contingent on global scope, other grievances are best addressed locally or regional.
51.
Tilly, " Globalization Threatens Labor's Rights."
52.
See Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders; and Stephen Ropp et al., eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a critical view of the globalization of the human rights movement, see David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
53.
See Peter Newell, Climate for Change: Non-State Actors and the Global Politics of the Greenhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Simone Pulver, "Making Sense of Corporate Environmentalism: An Environmental Contestation Approach to Analyzing the Causes and Consequences of the Climate Change Policy Split in the Oil Industry," Organization & Environment20, no. 1 ( 2007): 44-83; and Paul Wapner, "Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and World Civil Politics," World Politics47, no. 3 (1995): 311-40.
54.
Saturnino Borras, La Vía Campesina: An Evolving Transnational Social Movement (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Transnational Institute, 2004); and José Bové, "A Farmers' International? " New Left Review12 ( 2001): 89-101.
55.
Castells, The Power of Identity.
56.
See also Markus Schulz, "Collective Action across Borders: Opportunity Structures, Network Capacities, and Communicative Praxis in the Age of Advanced Globalization," Sociological Perspectives41, no. 3 (1998): 587-616.
57.
Cf. Mark Anner and Peter Evans, "Building Bridges across a Double Divide: Alliances between U.S. and Latin American Labour and NGOs," Development in Practice14, no. 1-2 (2004): 34-47.
58.
For example, Mark Herkenrath, "Social Movements and the Challenges of Transnational Coalition-Building: A Case Study on the Hemispheric Social Alliance and the Pan-American Campaign against the Ftaa" ( paper presented at the 16th World Congress of the International Sociological Association, Durban, South Africa, 2006 ); and Tamara Kay , "Labor Transnationalism and Global Governance: The Impact of NAFTA on Transnational Labor Relationships in North America ," American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 3 (2005): 715-56.
59.
della Porta et al., Globalization from Below, 241.
60.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 2003), 226.
61.
For an analysis of the limits of this particular fusion, see Gay Seidman, Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation , 2007).
62.
See Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders; and Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Merry, "Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle ," American Anthropologist108, no. 1 (2006): 38-51.
63.
See Oscar Olivera , Cochabamba: Water War in Bolivia ( Boston: South End Press, 2004).
64.
Clawson, among others, makes an analogous case for the "fusion" of the labor movement and community-based social movements in the United States; see Dan Clawson , The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
65.
See Brian Obach, Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). For a description of the current alliance between the Steel Workers and the Sierra Club, also see http://www.bluegreenalliance.org/ and David Foster, "Steel Magnolias: Labor Allies with the Environmental Movement," New Labor Forum16, no. 1 ( 2007): 59-67.
66.
Among the many efforts to capture the diversity of the World Social Forum, one of the best collections is Fisher and Ponniah, eds., Another World Is Possible.
67.
Santos, " The World Social Forum and the Future of the Global Left."
68.
Hardt and Negri, Empire.
69.
Michael Hardt , "Porto Alegre: Today's Bandung?" New Left Review14 (2002): 112-18.
70.
Castells, The Power of Identity.
71.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 299.
72.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari are not easy to parse, but the concrete reference to plants that spread by sending out shoots and roots from nodes in networks of underground stems is an apt description of the way in which many activists believe transnational movements should be organized.
73.
On the rise of "inter-governmental networks" as a response to the weakness of neo-liberal governance at global level, see Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
74.
Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 46-47.
75.
This is the goal of the "boomerang model" of transnational activism (Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders), or "externalization" in the terminology of Tarrow , The New Transnational Activism, 146.
76.
See Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders.
77.
See Merry, " Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism."
78.
See Belén Balanyá et al., eds., Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, Struggles, and Visions from around the World (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory, 2005); David Hall and Emanuele Lobina, "Private and Public Interests in Water and Energy," Natural Resources Forum28, no. 4 (2004): 268-77; and Olivera, Cochabamba.
79.
Jeff Hermanson, "Global Corporations, Global Campaigns: The Struggle for Justice at Kukdong International in Mexico" (Washington, DC: American Center for Labor Solidarity, 2004).
80.
For more general discussions of transnational labor campaigns, see Anner and Evans, "Building Bridges across a Double Divide "; César Rodríguez-Garavito , "Global Governance and Labor Rights: Codes of Conduct and Anti-Sweatshop Struggles in Global Apparel Factories in Mexico and Guatemala," Politics & Society33, no. 2 (2005): 203-333; and Heather Williams, "Mobile Capital and Transborder Labor Rights Mobilization," Politics & Society27, no. 1 (1999): 139-66.
81.
One of the most interesting of these institutionalizing efforts is the "designated suppliers program" currently being promoted by the Worker's Rights Consortium. See http://www.workersrights.org/dsp.asp .
82.
Cases can also, of course, be found in which local militancy in the North has been the beneficiary of global networks in which key leverage is applied in the South. For example, in the recent lockout at Whitby Gerdau Ameristeel plant in Beaumont, Texas, building a network that coordinated pressure by Brazilian metalworkers against the Brazilian parent company was a crucial element in the campaign. See http://www.usw.ca/program/content/3030.php .
83.
Paying attention to Santos's admonishing refrain "no global social justice without global cognitive justice" is an important element in such vigilance.
84.
Clifford Bob , The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
85.
Bob's claims in The Marketing of Rebellion about the nefarious consequences of the Zapatistas' international alliances represents one side of the debate. For a somewhat uncritical counterpoint on the same case, see Thomas Olesen, "Globalising the Zapatistas: From Third World Solidarity to Global Solidarity?" Third World Quarterly25, no. 1 (2004): 255-67. And for a nicely balanced empirical analysis of tensions generated by North-South alliances in the women's movement, see Millie Thayer, "Negotiating the Global: Rural Brazilian Women and Transnational Feminisms ," in Rethinking Feminisms in the Americas, ed. D. Castillo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Thayer, "Traveling Feminisms: From Embodied Women to Gendered Citizenship," in Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, ed. M. Burawoy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); and Thayer, "Transnational Feminism: Reading Joan Scott in the Brazilian Sertão," Ethnography2, no. 2 (2001): 243-71.
86.
For examples of the iconic role of the Zapatistas for certain strands of activists in Europe, see della Porta et al., Globalization from Below , 41, 53.
87.
See http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/ and also Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (London: Verso, 2003).
88.
Starting from the premise that national sovereignty is the "poisoned gift" to the former colonies of the Global South, Hardt and Negri go on to suggest that trying to use the nation-state as a weapon against neo-liberalism is politically counterproductive; Hardt and Negri, Empire , 132. See also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986); Hardt, "Porto Alegre"; and Mertes , A Movement of Movements.
89.
Bello, "Globalization in Retreat"
90.
The recent work of Sikkink on human rights in Latin American makes this argument with great lucidity; Kathryn Sikkink, From State Responsibility to Individual Criminal Accountability: A New Regulatory Model for Core Human Rights Violations (Oxford, UK: Global Governance Project, University College, Oxford University, 2007).
91.
Klug, "Law, Politics, and Access to Essential Medicines in Developing Countries."
92.
Cf. Peter Evans, "The Eclipse of the State?: Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization," World Politics50, no. 1 (1997): 62-87.
93.
The United Nations (UN) system is the exception that proves the rule. For a discussion of contradictory potential of the UN system as a focus for the democratic demands of global social movements, see Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy.
94.
Amartya Sen , Development as Freedom ( New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
95.
On this concept, see Timur Kuran, "Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution," Public Choice61, no. 1 ( 1989): 41-74; and Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, "Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation," Stanford Law Review51 (1999): 683-768. Also see Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink , "International Norm Dynamics and Political Change ," International Organization52, no. 4 ( 1998): 897-917.
