How Shareholder Profits Conquered Capitalism: And How Workers Can Win Back its Benefits for Themselves

by Louis Brennan, Trinity College Dublin, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/how-shareholder-profits-conquered-capitalism-and-how-workers-can-win-back-its-benefits-for-themselves-103781

Wolves on Wall Street, but perhaps the time of shareholders’ rule is drawing to an end. robert cicchetti/Shutterstock

In the early days of industrial capitalism there were no protections for workers, and industrialists took their profits with little heed to anyone else. 

Following the growth of the labour movement, the establishment of trade unions and the founding of the welfare state in the first half of the 20th century, corporations in decades after World War II embraced a more open, stakeholder capitalism, where profits were shared between employees, managers and shareholders. This led to a flourishing middle class as workers and communities benefited from the success of the corporations of which they were part.

But since the 1970s the pendulum has swung back towards a system where profits are shared less widely, causing major upheavals in society and the fortunes of labour and the middle classes.

In the US, labour’s share of income had been close to 70% until the 1970s, but had shrunk by the beginning of the 1980s even as profits increased. In the 21st century this accelerated: in 2000, labour’s share of income in the US accounted for some 66%, whereas corporate profits accounted for a little over 8%. 

Today, labour’s share has fallen to 62% while profits have risen to 12%. The same trend is repeated in the UK, where labour’s share of income has reduced from almost 70% in the 1970s to around 55% percent today.

Where has the money gone? For decades, real incomes for workers have largely stagnated while those of top executives have skyrocketed. In 2017, the top executives of America’s largest companies enjoyed an average pay increase of 17.6%, while workers’ pay in those companies rose barely 0.3%. In 1965, the chief executives of the top 350 US companies earned salaries 20 times that of their workers. By 1989 that had risen to 58 times, and in 2017 the ratio was 312 times that of workers.

Not surprisingly, compared to the middle-class prosperity that followed 1945, recent decades have seen widening inequality in society. The status quo overturned, capitalism has been hijacked by a profiteering elite. The question is whether society can find an alternative approach that shares the wealth more widely.

Shareholders uber alles

This trend coincided with the emergence of shareholder value as the overwhelming corporate ethos, as the interests of shareholders take primacy over those of other stakeholders in the business. With executives incentivised to maximise profits, meet quarterly share price targets and ensure profits are returned to shareholders, they have been able to game the system to ensure they receive excessive remuneration, while at the same time cutting costs and squeezing wage growth in search of higher profits. British housebuilder Persimmon this year paid its chief executive a £110m bonus, decried by critics as “corporate looting”.

Outsourcing and offshoring have been examples of such cost-cutting, profit-driving initiatives: outsourcing low-skilled work is thought to account for one-third of the increase in wage inequality since the 1980s in the US. The percentage of US workers associated with temporary help agencies, on-call workers, or contractors increased from 10.7% in 2005 to 15.8% by 2015.

Pressure to maintain share prices and ensure profits return to shareholders have shrunk the share of company profits received by labour. Alf Ribeiro/Shutterstock

Economists have been puzzled by stagnant wages and increased inequality. But as I highlighted as far back as 2007 and repeatedly since, the emphasis on shareholder value has contributed enormously. Management and leadership consultant and writer Steve Denning wrote this year that “shareholder value is the root cause of workers’ stagnant salaries”, with a corrosive effect on societal cohesion and stability – he believes the current rise of populism is one example of the fallout.

Demands for greater profits continue, as companies are pressured by share portfolio managers and activist investors to increase their profitability and share price. Private equity firms, which invest in companies in order to maximise returns, have expanded into many sectors of the economy. Most recently, this has seen the doctrine of maximising profits enter the residential property and home mortgages market.

The pendulum swings back?

Despite the stranglehold of shareholder value on corporate thinking, events suggest the pendulum may once more swing back to favour workers and other stakeholders.

In the US, the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment warned that in its attempt to take over telecoms giant Qualcomm, Broadcomm’s private equity approach could compromise its target’s technological leading position in pursuit of value for Broadcomm shareholders.

In the UK, there was opposition to the takeover of engineering conglomerate GKN by turnaround firm Melrose. Airbus, one of GKN’s major customers, argued that Melrose’s focus on shareholder value and short-term returns meant it might not be committed to long-term investment.

A chorus of voices has emerged advocating alternatives to the short-termist and shareholder-focused model of capitalism. The chief executives of investment and asset managers Blackrock (the world’s largest) and Vanguard, global engineering firm Siemens, and consumer goods giant Unilever have pursued a more stakeholder-centric model of capitalism. 

For example, Unilever by measuring its progress against environmental and social as well as financial targets, and Blackrock by investing in businesses that favour long-term investment over short-term profits. Organisations such as the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, have emerged, seeking to ensure that all stakeholders in the business and their interests are included.

Prominent US senator Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act to Congress. This would require company directors to consider the interests of all major corporate stakeholders, not just shareholders, in company decisions. It requires that workers are given a stronger voice in decision-making at large companies, such as electing 40% of company directors. As a way of addressing self-serving incentives, executives would have to retain company shares for at least five years after receiving them, or three years in the case of stock buybacks.

Finally, we cannot ignore that business schools played a critical role in how shareholder value emerged as the overwhelming corporate ethos – and they continue to indoctrinate new generations of students with the dogma of shareholder value today. Business school deans and faculty members should urgently revisit their curricula to ensure graduates understand the damaging impact of shareholder value on society and to emphasise alternative approaches.

Almost ten years ago, Jack Welch, who for many years championed shareholder value while at the helm of General Electric, pronounced that:

Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy … your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

It is past the time that business schools should smarten up, jettison this “dumb” shareholder dogma, and start teaching a version of capitalism less damaging to the interests of society.

Louis Brennan, Professor of Business Studies, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Creative City, Smart City ... Whose City Is It?

When the smart city looks inhuman: a robot police officer from Dubai greets guests at last November’s Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. Ramon Costa/AAP

Justin O'Connor, Monash University and Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College

In 2007 US creative cities “guru” Richard Florida was flown up to Noosa to tell the local city council how they, too, could become a creative city.

Noosa was one of a long line of cities across the globe queuing up to pay big bucks to the US-based academic-entrepreneur. “Being creative” had become an almost universal aspiration. Who would not want to be a creative city?

And so Creative [insert name of city here] signs sprang up in the most unlikely places, along with stock shots of creative young things hunched over laptops in cafes.

Ten years later, different gurus are being flown around and the signs have been replaced by Smart [insert name of city here]. The stock shots are much the same, but now the young things are being innovative, disruptive and above all “smart”. That’s the trouble with fast policy: here today, gone tomorrow.

Below the surface more tectonic shifts can be felt. In its first outing in the mid-1990s the “creative city”, associated with thinkers such as Charles Landry, was an energising vision of a new role for cultural creativity in our cities.

Now expanded in democratic fashion beyond the world of “high art” to embrace popular, everyday creativity, culture would be a key resource for the 21st-century city.

Culture could re-activate the decayed industrial zones of the inner city, breathing new life into the dead infrastructures of factories and power stations, dockyards and tram depots, schools, barracks and banks. Culture could renew stale urban identities, catalyse new aspirations and stamp a different global brand on long-dormant cities.

And with the creative industries – culture plus all things design and digital – all that was needed were some creative people and a bit of entrepreneurial flair. Then we would have one of the industries of the future.

Creativity broke cities away from the old bureaucratic top-down planning silos of the industrial city and let them approach the future holistically. Culture would be what cities do best, earning a living and enjoying it at the same time.

By the time Florida had left Noosa the discontent was growing. Big investments in photogenic CBD developments seemed more intended for the creative class than local citizens, generating massive real estate profits while the suburbs languished unloved.

Creative industries turned out not to be so inclusive after all. They failed to soak up all those unemployed dirty industry workers and were reliant on educated workers willing to work their way up on low pay and high debt.

The turn of the smart city

Since the global financial crisis the energising vision has been around social justice, citizenship and the right to the city, with a return of community and activist-focused arts activities. Creatives are now less Californian start-ups and more counter-cultural “post-capitalists”.

Enter the Smart City, creativity without all those messy cultural bits. The tech start-ups were just as cool, the fab labs and hacker spaces just as disruptive, but now slotted onto a very different agenda.

This too promised a re-invention of the city, not now a cultural re-imagining but a complete re-tooling of the social and governmental infrastructure of the city. Courtesy of some very big global tech companies, a new digital infrastructure could be rolled out, applying sensors, data-capture devices and large-scale computing power to urban life.

Smart cities are data cities, promising efficient management of transport and utilities, security, and customised commerce. If the early Creative City embraced the messiness of city life, viewing it not as chaos but creative fecundity, the Smart City give us a clean utopian picture of the perfectly transparent city.

It’s messy on the surface, but with a big data back-room providing bespoke information for almost any aspect of urban living your care to ask for. What’s not to like?

A corporate taming of creativity

That the brains of the Smart City – as envisioned by its corporate promoters – are increasingly embedded in its walls rather than its inhabitants reveals much about the trajectory of the digital economy so closely tied to Florida’s conception of the Creative City and its industries.

Internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain has described the rise of “app” culture as a betrayal of the creative potential unleashed by the mainstreaming of the internet. If the open internet was messy and chaotic, Zittrain argues that it was correspondingly “generative”, promoting experimentation and creativity.

By contrast, the “app” represents the pacification and domestication of the internet: its transformation from a productive medium to an infrastructure for consumption and marketing. Apps sort our music and photos for us, tell us where to eat, how to get there, and what to watch afterwards. The price of the newfound convenience that renders smart phones so addictive is a shift in the balance of control away from the end user.

For Zittrain, the “applified” world is, “one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control” – which is not a bad description of the corporate blueprint for the Smart City.

As urbanist Adam Greenfield has observed, the corporate world has taken the lead in both envisioning and promoting its version of the “informated” city. It looks suspiciously like the commercial internet projected out into physical space.

The promise is one of efficiency, convenience and security: smart streets that adjust traffic flow in real time, walls that change images to suit our tastes (which have become indistinguishable from market preferences), even floors that cushion us when we fall.

For all the talk of disruption, the paradoxical promise of the smart city is one of data-driven efficiency and predictability. The promotional materials feature the same smart young things, freed up from the impositions of daily life (traffic, shopping, routine decision-making, even driving), to do … what?

Whose city is it?

There are surely possibilities here, but the version of smart city as automated city looks inhuman. It promises to serve people by rendering them increasingly efficient, perhaps to the point of their own redundancy.

To subject the future of the city to the corporate imaginary is to concede too much to the galloping privatisation of our cultural and informational infrastructure.

What if the right to the city were also a right to participate in shaping its information infrastructures and their implementation? Can we envision an alternative to centralised corporate control of the city’s data? And how might public priorities be redefined in ways that distinguish them from the private imperatives of the ruling tech giants?

These are the guiding questions for our June 15 symposium in Melbourne, which explores the possibility of another kind of urban culture beyond the tightly controlled formats of the Smart City/Creative City.

Justin O'Connor, Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy, Monash University and Mark Andrejevic, Guest Lecturer, Monash University; Professor and Chair, Department of Media Studies, Pomona College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Hawaii to Norway to Scotland: Divestment Movement Racks Up Wins: Leaders Cite Destructive Nature of Coal and Oil Industries in Decision to Divest from Fossil Fuels

Fossil Fuel Free Rally (Friends of the Earth Scotland/flickr/cc)

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/28/hawaii-norway-scotland-divestment-movement-racks-wins 

 

Rack up some more wins for divestment: the University of Hawaii System, the University of Edinburgh, and the Norwegian wealth fund have all within the last week answered the growing global call for institutions to cut ties with the fossil fuel industry.

Norway's parliamentary parties announced on Thursday that the government would divest its $900 billion sovereign wealth fund from coal, citing the industry's impact on climate change. According to the Associated Press, environmentalists estimate that about $11 billion of that fund - the largest endowment in the world and often referred to as the oil fund - is currently invested in coal.

Greenpeace Norway activist Truls Gulowsen told the AP, "We expect that billions of euros will be withdrawn from the coal industry, when this happens... This is a huge win for the divestment movement and a real sign of hope that investment patterns can be changed."

The rule is expected to be formally approved on June 5 with the full support of both the government and opposition parties. Norway's decision comes just days after the University of Edinburgh announced its plan to divest from three of the world's largest fossil fuel producers within six months.

Organizers with the Edinburgh People & Planet student group campaigned for three years to convince the university to divest its $455 million endowment fund from fossil fuels. Following a 10-day student occupation of its finance department, University of Edinburgh officials said on Tuesday that the school would pull funds from coal and tar sands, although they would grant the targeted companies four weeks to respond.

"Companies involved in coal and tar sands extraction are irrevocably damaging our climate and attempts to engage with them to mitigate their climate impacts have failed," Miriam Wilson, Fossil Free campaign coordinator at People & Planet, said at the time.

"Eighty-percent of coal reserves and all of the Canadian tar sands need to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. We urge the University of Edinburgh to go beyond today's announcement and commit to full divestment within 5 years - nothing short of this is enough."

If nothing short of full divestment is the goal, the University of Hawaii heard that message loud and clear. The school last week announced its plan to end all of its fossil fuel holdings by 2018, which make up 5 to 7 percent of the school's $66 million endowment.

UH officials said they chose to divest for both economic and environmental reasons, but also cited "a moral and leadership rationale" in their final report (pdf) detailing the decision.

"If we need to reduce our footprint to prevent humanity from significant damage, we shouldn't invest in companies that continue to benefit from [carbon dioxide]," UH chair Randolph Moore told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. "We shouldn't bet against ourselves."

The move makes UH the largest higher education institution in the U.S. to divest from fossil fuels. In a press release, Dr. Joe Mobley, a marine biology professor and a faculty representative representative on the task group for divestment and sustainability, said the decision was "the perfect model of climate activism."

"Regents, faculty and students alike came together, shared their concerns over the scope and speed of climate change, particularly as it affects the Hawaiian Islands, then did something about it," Mobley said.

Podemos: The Political Upstart Taking Spain by Force

by Carlos Delclós, ROAR magazine:

http://roarmag.org/2014/12/podemos-the-political-upstart-taking-spain-by-force/

Some frequent questions about the political singularity that now leads the polls in Spain. Just who are Podemos? And could they be a force for change?

In April of 2013, the far-right Spanish television channel Intereconomía invited an unlikely guest to their primetime debate show: a young, Jesus-haired college professor with an unequivocally leftist background named Pablo Iglesias, just like the founder of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. 

Their goal was to corner him and hold him up as an example of an antiquated and defeated leftist past. 

Yet Iglesias responded to their rhetoric in a simultaneously polite but firmly antagonistic tone that appealed to both the younger generations who became politicized through the indignados movement and the older generations who did so during Spain’s transition from dictatorship to constitutional monarchy.

Over the following months, Iglesias and the team of academics and activists behind him were able to use this window of opportunity to catapult the message of the social movements and, most importantly, the people left behind by years of austerity and neoliberalism, into the mainstream media. 

Shortly after gaining access to the media, they formed the political party Podemos (“We Can”), initiating what polls are showing to be an authentic dispute for control of the Spanish government. How they were able to accomplish this in such a short amount of time will be studied in the political and social sciences for years to come.

Because it is a process that I have followed very closely for a number of years, I have often been asked by independent media-makers, academics and activists about how all of this came to be and what the implications are for movement politics. In this piece, I try to address some of the main questions I get from people who are actively engaged in the struggle for a real democracy.

Who are Podemos? Who are its leaders? Is this just another typical leftist party?

Podemos is a new political party that emerged at the beginning of 2014, initially as an alliance between the trotskyist Izquierda Anticapitalista and a group of academic “outsiders” with an activist background who had built a vibrant community through a public access television debate show called La Tuerka (“The Screw”). 

When I refer to this second group as outsiders, it is not to suggest that their academic output is eccentric or of a low quality. 

Rather, they are the types of academics who do not fit the mold favored by the so-called Bologna reforms of higher education in Europe, with its emphasis on highly specialized technical “experts” and empirical research, and its hostility towards a broader, theoretical and more discursive approach. 

These academics are currently the party’s most recognizable faces due to their formidable skills as communicators and their access to the mainstream media.

Recently, Podemos held elections for their Citizens’ Council, which is effectively the party’s leadership. Over 100,000 people participated in those elections through online voting. The team selected by Pablo Iglesias won by an overwhelming majority. It includes an interesting mix of academics, activists and some former politicians. 

For instance, Juan Carlos Monedero worked as an adviser to Hugo Chávez between 2005 and 2010, and he also advised Gaspar Llamazares of the Spanish United Left party.

Íñigo Errejón is a very young and highly promising political scientist who carried out research in Bolivia and Venezuela, though prior to that he was one of the founders of Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth Without a Future), who had a major role in spearheading the indignados movement. 

Other activists from Juventud Sin Futuro include Rita Maestre and Sarah Bienzobas. Rafa Mayoral and Jaume Asens worked as lawyers for the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), the highly successful civil disobedience movement for decent housing. And Raimundo Viejo and Jorge Moruno are prominent intellectuals associated with the autonomist left.

Whether or not Podemos can be considered a typical leftist party will depend on its evolution. What is clear is that they do not adopt the rhetorical and aesthetic baggage of the marginal leftist and green parties that currently decorate European parliaments. 

Also, in contrast to SYRIZA, Podemos did not exist prior to the 2011 wave of protests; they emerged based on a diagnosis of the movements’ discourse and demands. Much of what has made Podemos so effective in the post-2011 political arena has been their ability to listen to the social movements, while the pre-existing Spanish political parties were busy lecturing them. 

Yet, as time progresses and support for the party grows, Podemos is finding itself increasingly tempted to assume the structures that are best adapted to Spain’s formal institutions. Unsurprisingly, these structures are those that currently exist. 

Whether or not this institutional inertia can be overcome depends on the degree to which the party’s constituents are capable of maintaining tension with its leadership structure and guaranteeing their accountability.

Why did Podemos explode onto the scene in the way they did?

Podemos burst onto the political scene because they understood the climate in the aftermath of the 2011 protests better than any other political actor. 

For example, the role of the social networks in connecting those movements was extremely important, but a lot of people and political organizations misinterpreted that fact as support for a techno-political, decentralized peer-to-peer ideology. 

In contrast, I think Podemos saw the social networks as a discursive laboratory through which to build and strengthen a common narrative that they would then take to the public arena in order to maximize its impact. To put it bluntly, they were not content with memes and likes and long comment threads. They wanted to take that discussion to the bars, the cafés and the unemployment lines.

In a sense, the key to Podemos’s emancipatory potential can be summed up in a phrase popularized by Raimundo Viejo and later put into a song by Los Chikos del Maiz, a Marxist rap group that has been very close to the party’s emergence: “El miedo va a cambiar de bando,” which translates to, “Fear is going to change sides.” Currently, they are accompanying that phrase with another, saying that the smiles are also starting to change sides. 

Using this approach, what they have managed to do is take the insecurity and fears produced by precariousness, unemployment or poverty and, in contrast to projecting it on immigrants (which is what Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and, to a lesser extent, Beppe Grillo have done), they project it onto what they call “la casta” (the caste), which is basically the ruling class. And they have done this while, at the same time, “occupying” feelings like hope and joy.

Who supports Podemos? What segment of the population would consider voting for them?

In most of the reports I have seen or read in English, Podemos is described as a sort of outgrowth of the indignados movement, in something of a linear progression. I think this is wrong. 

While their message resonated far beyond their class composition, the indignados movement was largely composed of a relatively young, college-educated precariat. 

Their emphasis on direct action and slow, horizontal deliberation introduced something of a selection mechanism into actual participation in the movement, whereby people who were less versed in the culture of radical politics, had less time to spend in general assemblies, were not entirely comfortable with public speaking, were not particularly interested in learning new internet tools and were not willing to take the risks associated with civil disobedience were filtered out over time.

In contrast, Podemos’s access to television guaranteed contact with an older audience, which is extremely important in a country such as Spain, with its older population structure and decades of low fertility. 

And the types of participation that Podemos enabled (namely, ballot boxes and smart phone apps) have a low learning curve, require less time and involve fewer risks than the more autonomous politics of the indignados. 

Because of this, Podemos attracts a crowd that includes a much larger component of underprivileged, working class and older people, in addition to a very strong, college-educated youth demographic.

The ideological composition of the people who support Podemos is also interesting. While the bulk of the support they draw comes from people who used to vote for the center-left “socialist” party, nearly a third of the people who currently support them had previously abstained from voting, turned in spoiled ballots or even voted for the right-wing Popular Party. 

Furthermore, while Podemos openly rejects the standard “left-right” division that has characterised Western politics for years, surveys are showing that their voters mostly view themselves as leftists, that is, neither center-left nor far left. 

Taken together, this might suggest that Podemos are drawing on something of an untapped leftist imaginary, or that they may very well be redefining what it means for people to consider themselves “leftists” in Spain.

What is Podemos’s relationship with the grassroots movements?

Podemos’s relationship with the grassroots movements is a tricky question to tackle. In addition to the establishment parties and the mainstream media, some people who are active in the grassroots and social movements have been quite critical of Podemos. 

There are a lot of reasons for this, and I think it is an issue that requires much more reflection than what I can offer here, which is entirely my opinion at the moment. But at its heart, Podemos is part of a growing exasperation with an institutional “glass ceiling” that the social movements keep bumping up against and have not been able to shatter. 

This exasperation is visible not only in the rise of Podemos but also in the emergence of municipal platforms intended to join outsider parties, community organizations and activists in radically democratic candidacies. 

In this context, people from the social movements are generally split between those who favor that type of participation and those who prefer a radicalization of non-institutional action.

The main criticism I see coming from the second group is that Podemos started “from the top and not from the bottom.” I think this is wrong. 

A comically low-budget local TV show and a Facebook page are not what I would consider “high” in a neoliberal chain of command. What Podemos have done is rise very quickly from there, and as they have done so, they have had to deal with questions related to institutional inertia and the autonomy of their own organization. And that is where I think critical voices coming from the social movements are right to be nervous.

While Podemos initially drew its legitimacy, structure (the Círculos they started in various cities were basically conceived as local, self-managed assemblies) and demands (a citizen-led restructuring of the debt, universal basic income, affordable public housing, an end to austerity policies, etc.) from the social movements, their intention was always to draw people from beyond the social movements. 

They have succeed wildly in doing so, and it turns out that the world outside of the social movements is huge. And despite the fact that they agree with the demands of the social movements, that world appears to be less interested in the social movements’ methodology than the social movements would like. 

This is enormously frustrating, because it confronts us with our own marginality. It is also unsurprising, because if people who are not activists loved our methodology as much as our message, there would probably be a lot more activists.

The main example of this tension is the internal elections. So far, Iglesias’s lists have consistently won with close to 90% support, and many people who have been influential in shaping the discourse of the social movements (and even that of Podemos itself) are increasingly being left out of decision-making because they are not on those lists. 

Once out, they discover how little influence the social networks and the Círculos actually have not only relative to that of the members who appear on TV, but also on the people who are not actively involved in the Círculos, yet still identify with Podemos enough to vote in their elections. 

So far, this has led to some internal accusations of authoritarianism, which I find misguided and think are kind of missing the point. I think the real problem is that we are finding that, in the present climate, people are generally happier to delegate responsibility than we suspected, at least until they can vote on specific issues that affect their daily lives.

At the same time, this propensity to delegate depends a lot on the legitimacy and trust people have in Podemos, which to a large extent was built through their relationship with the streets. 

So I think the influence the social movements have on Podemos is going to depend on their ability to engage in street politics in such a way that they are able to meet dispossessed people’s needs, on the one hand, and shape the public conversation in a way that forces Podemos to position itself. 

An example would be the PAH. Podemos cannot stray too much from their demands for decent housing because everybody knows and agrees with them. If Podemos were to stray too far from their demands, the PAH could mobilize against them or simply put out a harsh press statement, undermining their legitimacy considerably.

Where do you see this going? Could Podemos actually win the elections?

I think this is going to change Spain and Europe as we know them, no matter what. Polls are showing that Podemos have a real shot at being the most voted party in the country. Some show that they are already the most supported, and Pablo Iglesias is by far the most popular politician in Spain. 

If Podemos were to win, in all likelihood the Popular Party and the “socialists” would try to form a national government centered on guaranteeing order, making a few cosmetic changes to the constitution and sabotaging any chance for Podemos to ever beat them. They would also probably try to destroy any chance at something like Podemos rising again. 

As it stands, the establishment is doing everything in its power to discredit them: associating them with terrorist organizations, accusing their spokespeople of misconduct based on nothing, fabricating news stories. Fear really has changed sides, and it is clearly the establishment that is frightened.

In this sense, I think it’s very important for movements, and for Podemos themselves, to think of what is happening as a kind of political singularity. 

This is not Obama putting the Democrats in the White House. It is a group of people who have been actively engaged in the struggle against neoliberalism that have managed to turn a populist moment during a period of economic crisis into a hope for a better democracy and an end to neoliberal austerity. 

At least in Spain, to blow this chance could be a major step backwards for emancipatory politics, towards another long journey through the desert.

Carlos Delclos is a sociologist, researcher and editor for ROAR Magazine. Currently he collaborates with the Health Inequalities Research Group at Pompeu Fabra University and the Barcelona Institute of Metropolitan and Regional Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

BOOK REVIEW: "Social Movements and Globalisation": The Protests, Occupations and Uprisings Changing our World

by Parthena Xanthopoulou-Dimitriadou, ROAR magazine: http://roarmag.org/2014/11/social-movements-and-globalization/

From the Battle of Seattle to Occupy Wall St, a new book revisits the major challenges that grassroots movements face in the pursuit of social change. 

Flesher Fominaya, Cristina, Social Movements and Globalization. How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World. UK: Palgrave Macmillan (2014).

The outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been considered, by many, a turning point in the ways we come to understand our world.

Established worldviews and fixed mindsets are confronted with the rapidly changing interrelations between the social, the political and the economic domain. These developments pose a challenge to our daily social experiences, as well as to academic social analysis, while at the same time giving birth to new opportunities for social change.

In thinking about these developments, the latest book by Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Social Movements and Globalization, comes as a careful dissection of some of the most intriguing concepts relevant to the economic and political processes of the last century and the enduring desire for social transformation.

Flesher Fominaya provides us with a master compilation of all that catches our attention, grasps our interest and urges our understanding.

Why do social movements matter? What is their relevance in a globalized world? How are they shaped by globalization? How do they shape globalizing processes? These are only some of the burning questions that Social Movements and Globalization comes up against.

Neoliberal economic globalization fueling social inequalities, the precarity of labor, and the degradation of the environment have, among other things, created new areas of contestation and resistance that bring about new threats to social movements, but that also provide them with a new arsenal of tactics and strategies.

Associations between local, national and global acts of resistance are progressively built, strengthening movements’ responses to the advancement of neoliberal globalization. Yet the core challenge of overcoming differences between national contexts persists.

Cleavages along gender, class and race lines within movements are placed at the center of the discussion, and the tension between autonomous and institutionalized forms of movement organizing is alive and kicking.

Social Movements and Globalization provides us with an anatomy of the relationships between social movements, globalization and the pathways to social change. 

With or without prior knowledge of the field, the reader can find special interest in the methodical exploration of definitions and conceptual distinctions. Combined with a systematic exposition of protest events, mobilizations and movement cases, Flesher Fominaya smoothly introduces the reader to the direct experiences of contemporary social movements and the way these are reflected in central theoretical debates.

A strong conceptual grounding is progressively built up throughout the book, always in direct reference to notable mobilizations and momentous movements, making the storyline clear and the many aspects of contemporary movement activism comprehensible.

Based on a well documented presentation of movements’ and mobilizations’ organizational and functional characteristics, Social Movements and Globalization revisits all the major issues that those new to social movements want to explore and those familiar with social movement activism and studies want to remember.

More than a comprehensive overview, however, the book is also a brave critique of progressive political automatism and the linear progression of social movements. 

Instead of political actors confined within the limits of overtly political aspects, Flesher Fominaya provides us with an insightful account of social movements as key expressions of enduring struggles for social transformation. 

‘Cultural resistance’ is the key challenge for progressive contemporary movements seeking to resist a system of hegemonic ideologies and to delegitimize oppression and inequality.

If we were to ask for anything more from this remarkable account of contemporary movements, it would be a more comprehensive account of conservative and right-wing movements, which are only very briefly touched upon.

Flesher Fominaya, however, leaves no room for doubt about their relevance; they are “extremely important political actors responding to globalization processes” and merit greater attention. Indeed, the largely understudied regressive movements mobilizing for social and political setback, are unequivocally significant actors vis-à-vis movements that exercise a fundamental (anti-systemic) critique to the globalization of neoliberal capitalism.

The deliberate omission of regressive movements from the analysis, however, leaves no doubts about the importance of Flesher Fominaya’s new endeavor. Social Movements and Globalization is a brave look into the complex associations of social movements, globalization, social theory and the practice of movement activism in the pursuit of social change.

Parthena Xanthopoulou-Dimitriadou is a PhD candidate in Social Movement Studies at the European University Institute.