Going global: the politics of another planet by David Chandler
According to the radical guidebooks advertised in the Guardian and the New Statesman every week, a new worldwide revolution is in progress - a global movement against globalisation and capitalism and for justice, autonomy and civil society; a movement so large and diverse that it is often simply termed a new 'movement of movements'.
The world is in revolt. Everywhere from the Zapitastas in Chiapas, often alleged to have founded the new global politics when they started their 'postmodern' 12-day rebellion on 1 January 1994, to the radical farmers protesting against GM crops in Latin America, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Africa, to the anti-privatisation struggles in South African shanty towns, to the Narmada Dan protests in India, to the struggles of the landless peasantry in Latin America, a new global revolutionary movement has been widely heralded.
For many commentators, this global revolution is different - its membership is found largely outside the West and much of its politics and its techniques were first developed in the global South. Paul Kingsnorth, in his bestselling One No, Many Yeses, feted as a 'journey to the heart of the global resistance movement', asks: 'Has a movement this big ever existed before? Has such a diversity of forces, uncontrolled, decentralised, egalitarian, ever existed on a global scale? Has a movement led by the poor, the disenfranchised, the South, ever existed at all?' (1)
The key distinction, setting this global revolution apart from the politics of the past is that at its core lies the demand for autonomy, not power (2). Advocates of this global-movement approach suggest that the radical movements, attempting to institute 'globalisation from below', bring politics and morality together by expanding the sphere of moral concern and by developing political strategies that avoid and bypass the constraints of state-based politics.
Richard Falk argues that, 'If there is to be a more benign world order enacting a transformed politics of non-violence and social justice, it will be brought about by struggles mounted from below based on the activities of popular movements and various coalitions' (3). Whereas state-based political action is held to reinforce frameworks and hierarchies of exclusion, new social movements 'from below' are seen to herald new forms of emancipatory political action, which seek to recognise and include diversity and build new forms of global 'counter-hegemonic' politics.
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