Naming the Enemy Anti-Corporate Social Movements Confront Globalization

by Starr, Amory

• ISBN13: 9781856497657
• ISBN10: 1856497658
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-01-06
• Publisher: ZED BOOKS

Summary

A new movement of 'anti-globalists', in Time Magazine's words (24 April 2000), now 'oppose corporate dominion over the planet's poor and disfranchised'. Naming the Enemy is the first systematic documentation of this international resistance to transnational corporations and globalization which has so recently burst into the public gaze with the street protests in Seattle, Washington, London and Prague. A wide and heterogeneous range of social movements now oppose the very fundamentals of market capitalism. Their challenge is beginning, Amory Starr shows, to amount to a sweeping critique of its purposes and practice. She explains how these movements understand their enemies and what sort of future they envision. There are, she suggests, three basic types: Movements trying to constrain corporate power through democratic institutions and direct action; Movements attempting a completely different kind of 'globalization from below' in which corporations will be reshaped in the service of new international democratic structures that will be populist, participatory and just; Movements seeking to delink their localities and communities from the global economy and rebuild instead small-scale socieites in which large corporations have no role at all. This new phenomenon has received scant media or scholarly attention. But it is likely to become much more important politically as the globalized economy dominated by giant corporations and institutions like the World Bank and IMF fails to deliver on jobs, social justice, Third World development and the environment. The course of this new kind of political struggle will have huge implications for human welfare and civil liberties. This unique and important book is relevant to activists as well as students and scholars of globalization, new social movements and political economy.

Author Biography

Amory Starr is Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	vi
Introduction	vii
Method	xii
Acknowledgements	xiv
Structure and Anti-Structure in the Face of Globalization	1	(44)
Naming `globalization'	5	(22)
Theorizing agency	27	(18)
Contestation and Reform	45	(38)
Fighting structural adjustment	46	(7)
Peace and human rights	53	(5)
Land reform	58	(7)
The explicit anti-corporate movements	65	(8)
Cyberpunk	73	(5)
Discussion	78	(5)
`Globalization from Below'	83	(28)
Environmentalism	84	(4)
Labour	88	(5)
Socialism	93	(5)
Anti-FTA	98	(5)
Zapatismo	103	(4)
Discussion	107	(4)
Delinking, Relocalization, Sovereignty	111	(37)
Anarchism	112	(4)
Sustainable development	116	(11)
Small business	127	(7)
Sovereignty movements	134	(3)
Religious nationalisms	137	(7)
Discussion	144	(4)
PopCulture v. AgriCulture and Other Reflections on the Anti-Corporate Movement/s	148	(81)
Naming the enemy	150	(8)
The movement	158	(12)
Alternative political economy	170	(21)
Democracy	191	(9)
Nation	200	(23)
`Globalize this!	223	(6)
Select List of Organizations	229	(10)
Bibliography	239	(15)
Index	254