social movements Archives

Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives

In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil.

Through analysis of post-socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the volume moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence.

The final section of the volume poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West. Since the 2008 financial crisis, demands for social change have erupted across the world. Exposing the failure of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom and examining recent social movements in Europe and the United States, the closing chapters identify how elements of past ideas are re-emerging, among them Keynesianism and radical socialism. As those chapters indicate, these ideas might well have potential to mobilise support and challenge the dominance of neoliberalism.

Labour, Nature and Capitalism

Labour, Nature and Capitalism traces how the alliance between labour and capital manifests in the form of conflicts between organised trade unions and a local environmental movement in the context of the much-acclaimed Kerala model of development. It explores the history of the area’s local industrialisation, the presence of varied economic interests and exposes the barriers to forming solidarity networks among the working classes.

Situated in the backdrop of the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt, this book delves deeper into the ways in which capitalism infiltrates and manipulates the social movement landscape in Kerala. It shows how the hegemonic coalition between the state, industries and institutionalised trade unions enable capitalist rationality to mediate and control social movements in postcolonial settings.

Using an ethnographic approach, the book seeks to embark on a journey to understand the tensions between two progressive social movements – a trade union collective and a local environmental movement – foregrounding the experiences of members of the respective groups. The analysis presented here shows how the contestations/conflicts between the movements stem from interpretive as well as ideological differences surrounding economic development and environmental justice.

Sustainable Food Systems

Faced with a global threat to food security, it is perfectly possible that society will respond, not by a dystopian disintegration, but rather by reasserting co-operative traditions. **This book, by a leading expert in urban agriculture, offers a genuine solution to today’s global food crisis. By contributing more to feeding themselves, cities can allow breathing space for the rural sector to convert to more organic sustainable approaches.

Biel’s approach connects with current debates about agroecology and food sovereignty, asks key questions, and proposes lines of future research. He suggests that today’s food insecurity – manifested in a regime of wildly fluctuating prices – reflects not just temporary stresses in the existing mode of production, but more profoundly the troubled process of generating a new one. He argues that the solution cannot be implemented at a merely technical or political level: the force of change can only be driven by the kind of social movements which are now daring to challenge the existing unsustainable order.

Drawing on both his academic research and teaching, and 15 years’ experience as a practicing urban farmer, Biel brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to this key global issue, creating a dialogue between the physical and social sciences.

Rent Strikes

Since the nineteenth century, working-class families have predominantly relied on tenements for housing, with rents often consuming a large portion of their household budgets. There is a long and contested history of tenants taking collective action across time and in many contexts, including their involvement in rent strikes, but international comparisons have been scarce. Rent Strikes: A history of collective tenant actions across the world is a collaborative effort by 16 contributors from diverse countries to identify common patterns and global trajectories in the rich history of tenants’ strikes, spanning a period of almost 120 years from the early twentieth century to the Covid-19 pandemic. It brings together local, national and comparative case studies to illustrate the history of tenant mobilisation for the general public, connecting with existing scholarship and laying the groundwork for future research. Adopting a transnational perspective, it examines episodes of tenant struggles in North and Latin America, Northern and Southern Europe, and Oceania. In doing so, the book explores a range of actions, including petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and legal actions, and has a special focus on the part played by women in these movements. The contributors examine the role of ethnic, national and gender differences between tenants and landlords, while situating their studies within a broader historical context and addressing the larger questions posed in the first chapter.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions

Solar energy is emerging as the world’s largest growing source of power. In recent years, its rollout and growth have produced effects far beyond electricity generation, including a series of cognate challenges and conflicts in diverse geographies of energy transition.

Geographies of Solar Energy Transitions focuses on how solar energy governance (both state-based regulations and more market-driven modes of governance) is evolving to address these conflicts in diverse empirical settings. Chapters and case studies by leading energy scholars explore various issues such as formulating new place-specific solar energy visions and strategies, financing specific deployment scales, expanding or replacing electricity infrastructure, accessing land, resolving conflicts surrounding competing land uses, incorporating charging technologies for transport and storage, adopting flexible energy production/consumption relationships, displacing fossil fuel energy production with renewables, enabling new energy ownership models, and addressing the many environmental and social injustices across the value chain of solar expansion including upstream extractivism and downstream waste.

Scholarship typically frames these challenges as tangential to the governance of solar energy transitions. By placing them front and centre, the book draws necessary attention to the many wider changes in society that are continuously developing due to the worldwide adoption of solar power.