Social Movements, Local Places and Globalized Spaces: Implications for ‘Globalization from Below’

Abstract

The condition of globality — simultaneously level, process, epoch and episteme — provides an increasingly central terrain for social movements. This flies in the face of much social-movement experience and not a little social-movement theory. These suggest that locality is the privileged site for movements, and that what flows upwards or outwards from here is ‘resistance’ and/or ‘reform’. Theoretically-critical and socially-committed understandings of globalization suggest that the local and the global are increasingly and inextricably interpenetrated. That the global provides an increasingly central space for social movements does not mean that it is unproblematic or uncontested. The global/ization process implies for popular forces and social movements threats, promises — and seductions. Success here requires not only a new worldview (in both senses of this potent term), but a new understanding of global citizenship, of global solidarity, and of global communication/culture. Out of new political experiences and theoretical understandings flow the beginnings of an alternative global civilizational project. This requires recognition that what we have so far witnessed, in answer to globalization from above, is ‘globalization from the middle’ and that the articulation of this with ‘globalization from below’ has to be continually worked for.

[T]he capacity of most social movements to command place better than space puts a strong emphasis upon the potential connection between place and social identity. This is manifest in political actionchrw … The consequent dilemmas of social or working-class movements in the face of a universalising capitalism are shared by other oppositional groups — racial minorities, colonized peoples, women, etc. — who are relatively empowered to organise in place but disempowered when it comes to organizing over space. In clinging, often of necessity, to a place-bound identity, however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon. ‘Think globally and act locally’ was the revolutionary slogan of the 1960s. It bears repeating.²