[DOWNLOAD] "Affected with Joy: Evaluating the Mass Actions of the Anti-Globalisation Movement (Essay)" by Borderlands # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Affected with Joy: Evaluating the Mass Actions of the Anti-Globalisation Movement (Essay)
- Author : Borderlands
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 103 KB
Description
In a book that remains something of a staple for anti-globalisation activists, Paul Kingsnorth (2003) enjoins the movement and the public at large to be bold in their imaginings of an alternate future and dogged in their attempts to realise it. What is needed, Kingsnorth (2003: 331) insists, 'is vision, bravery, political will, a willingness to confront those who benefit from injustice.' In this paradigmatic formulation of the task of political action it is consciousness and will that are placed at the fore. The problem (injustice) calls for a consciousness of what is and a plucky imagining of what could be, combined with a collective discipline of the will. Such idealism is also a moralism, as a sense of what ought to be the case determines how we ought to act. Moralism at the level of ideas has as its correlate a moral view of the body, and in the heady days of post-Seattle activism, the bodily discipline required for successful activism was very much at the fore. It was the presence of thousands of bodies on the streets that indicated the strength of activists' convictions, their preparedness to put their bodies on the line, standing firm at police lines, or surging forward in order to 'reclaim the commons' (Klein, 2004). With a decade stretching between the present moment and the spectacular protests of Seattle, it seems timely to evaluate the meaning and significance of the mass actions that remain, for the general public at least, the signature gestures of the 'anti-globalisation movement.' [1] While much has been made of the differences between the anti-globalisation movement and the earlier generation of social movements, evaluations of its success continue to rest on conventional criteria. Did the movement achieve its aims? Did its actions change anything? Or is neo-liberal ideology too resilient for such episodic gestures of resistance?