Rural democratisation in Mexico's deep south: grassroots right-to-know campaigns in Guerrero

In Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, rural social and civic movements are increasingly claiming their right to information as a tool to hold the state publicly accountable, as part of their ongoing issue-specific social, economic, and civic struggles. This study reviews the historical, social and political landscape that grounds campaigns for rural democratisation in Guerrero, including Mexico's recent information access reforms and then compares two different regional social movements that have claimed the ‘right to know’. For some movements, the demand for information rights is part of a sustained strategy, for others it is a tactic, but the claim bridges both more resistance-oriented and more negotiation-oriented social and civic movements.     

State marionettes,phantom organisations or genuine movements? The paradoxical emergence of rural social movements in post-socialist Russia

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are. Our research shows that many rural movements, agricultural associations, farm unions and rural political parties lack constituency, support the status quo and/or are actually counterfeits (what we call ‘phantom movement organisations’). With this analysis, we aim to explain the nature of social movements in the post-Soviet countryside and offer an original contribution to the theory on and practice of rural social movements.     

Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenth-century england

Abstract

Late nineteenth-century England saw the development of a number of campaigns and social movements which were connected by both a hostility towards the medical profession and by the use of discourses of purity and sanitary reform. This article explores the involvement of women within these movements, analysing their activism as an aspect of social purity feminism. It argues that many of these movements drew on widespread female anxiety regarding male violence – both physical and sexual – towards women. The anti-medical feminists claimed that some pieces of ‘sanitary’ legislation represented a state-sanctioned violation of the bodies of women and children. Finally, this article analyses the use made, by some of these activists, of the discourses of sanitary reform to challenge the gender ordering associated with the reason/nature dualism in Victorian society.     

Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST's cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization

Dominant conceptions of social movements consider their constitutive feature the disruption of order, not practices around building it. In this paper, I challenge this notion by analyzing the Landless Workers' Movement (MST)'s relatively successful efforts to institutionalize the practices of agricultural production developed by its members in cooperatives and agroecology. Through this analysis, I show that the movement's administration of a democratically managed form of agricultural production exemplifies a unique form of social movement resistance – namely, what I call self-governmental resistance. Rather than reformist or revolutionary contention, self-governmental resistance – performed by movements like the MST – redevelops state policies by vying for and often taking control over the design and implementation of agricultural production.     

The agro-industrial state: early agrarian influence on US state building

This contribution shows the influence of early agrarian movements on state institutional capacity building in the US, revealing how the two forces of state intervention and social movement pressure converged to produce a dynamic relationship between the transition to agrarian capitalism and industrialization or agro-industrialization. It will be shown how this protracted agro-industrial development fueled both social movements and state building responses that furthered capitalist development. By highlighting four specific categories of state building– land policy, infrastructure development, agricultural technology and agro-industrial development – this research reveals how the agro-industrial project developed out of rural class struggle spurred economic development and created unique capacities as the US state sought to quell and integrate this rural class struggle into capitalist development.     

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left*

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.     

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT

During the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.     

Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.     

“God bless our American institutions”: The labor history of John R. Commons

Workers of all stripes and colors comprise a large and often forgotten segment of cinema history. This essay historicizes several key films and genres associated with early cinema, with an emphasis on pre-Great War French and American cinemas. Simultaneously, this essay formulates several critical responses to labor practices as globally understood and thus anchors this recovery of cinematized working classes, still an ongoing but marginal project in film studies today. Taken together, cinema can refract real-life occupational complexities, class dynamics, and workplace alienation – manifestations that are crucial to, primarily, view class as a social concept and to help us to think through the tensions workers faced under monopoly capitalism. Against this backdrop we must see film's ability to both trivialize class archetypes and capture the complexities as a type of tribute, as the latter becomes a central focus in this essay.     

Linking the old world with the new: recent studies of labor migration,race, and political protest in America and the British empire

Labor historians of the Anglophone world can enrich their field by extending the idea of ‘Atlantic community’ to include Britain's former colonies in Canada, Africa, and Australasia. Only in this way can they fully understand the world's first large-scale migration of labor, both voluntary and involuntary, and the cross-fertilization that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between social movements such as labor republicanism, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and women's labor struggles which may have originated in the UK or the US but which are misperceived if viewed solely in the context of the nation state.     

The Landless invading the landless: participation,coercion, and agrarian social movements in the cacao lands of southern Bahia,Brazil

This contribution draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of ‘participatory parity’ to analyze the reproduction and contestation of inequalities internal to land reform settlements affiliated with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) located in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil. These inequalities are variously manifest in unequal control over land and legal documents, disparities in status and what Fraser calls ‘voice'. These circumstances help account for quantitative evidence that shows a strong preference among local landless populations for land reform organizations that are more decentralized and less hierarchically organized. These circumstances also motivate direct actions undertaken by grassroots MST settlers seeking to destabilize the conditions that ground these inequalities. This research highlights the importance of attending to local histories and interactions through which participatory disparities are christened and reproduced; indicates potential methodological consequences; and examines the interplay of transgressive action, dialogue and recognition as settlers struggle to bring about ‘participatory parity' – or what they might call genuine ‘friendships' – in their communities.     

Mediated territoriality: rural workers and the efforts to scale out agroecology in Nicaragua

The Spanish word formación can be translated as ‘training’ or ‘education’, but Latin American social movements use it as inspired by Che Guevara’s notion of ‘molding’ the values of the new woman and new man for egalitarian, cooperative social relations in the construction of a ‘new society’. This contribution presents findings on the dialectical linkages between the formación processes led by the Rural Workers’ Association (ATC) and the gradual transformation of the Nicaraguan countryside by peasant families choosing to grow food using agroecological practices. We use Vygotsky’s sociocultural historical theory to explore the developmental processes of formación subjects and the pedagogical mediators of their transformation into movement cadre. The motivations of active learners to develop new senses and collective understandings about their material reality become a counterhegemonic process of internalization and socialization of agroecological knowledges and senses. In this paper, we further explore the formación process by identifying territorial mediators: culturally significant elements within and outside of individuals that facilitate the rooting of agroecological social processes in a given territory where the social movement is active. By placing the territory, rather than the individual, at the center of popular education processes, new synergies are emerging in the construction of socially mobilizing methods for producing and spreading agroecological knowledge.     

Taking agroecology to scale: the Zero Budget Natural Farming peasant movement in Karnataka,India

This paper analyzes how peasant movements scale up agroecology. It specifically examines Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF), a grassroots peasant agroecology movement in Karnataka, India. ZBNF ends reliance on purchased inputs and loans for farming, positioning itself as a solution to extreme indebtedness and suicides among Indian farmers. The ZBNF movement has achieved massive scale not only because of effective farming practices, but because of a social movement dynamic – motivating members through discourse, mobilizing resources from allies, self-organized pedagogical activities, charismatic and local leadership, and generating a spirit of volunteerism among its members. This paper was produced as part of a self-study process in La Via Campesina, the global peasant movement.     

Hukou and land: market reform and rural displacement in China

Scholarship about the Chinese hukou (household registration) system has focused on the advantages and entitlements associated with urban hukou. This paper shifts attention to the key entitlement provided by rural hukou – village land. While early hukou reforms were mainly designed to open up urban labor markets to rural migrants, recent reforms have also begun to open up rural land markets, by replacing hukou-based land rights with market-based rights. These reforms are designed to facilitate land concentration and the transfer of land to outside developers and agribusiness companies, which has been hindered by hukou-based land rights. Underlying the reforms is the government's agenda of promoting large-scale agriculture and urbanization, both of which require the removal of a large portion of the rural population from the land. By focusing on land rights rather than urban benefits, this paper provides a new perspective on the evolution of the hukou system, and highlights the negative implications of recent reforms for livelihood security in the countryside.     

Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’

Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence – increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands – is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now, more than it is being lost. These dramatic shifts suggest quite profound and rapid transformations of agrarian worlds, and imply that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes, and in many ways a new, increasingly globalized economic and policy landscape that emphasizes woodlands.

This paper analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government agencies, governance, institutions, ideologies, markets, migration and ‘neo-liberalization’ of nature. These changes include an expanded, but still constrained, arena for new social movements and civil society. These point to significant structural changes, changes in tropical natures, and require reframing of the ‘peasant question’ and the functions of rurality in the twenty-first century in light of forest dynamics.     

Soy states: resource politics,violent environments and soybean territorialization in Paraguay

Soy production has radically transformed the social, ecological, territorial and political form of Paraguay. This paper traces waves of sojización – soy territorialization – to analyze how soybean resource politics are changing environmental governance and state–society relations in Paraguay. I argue that political, social and ecological ruptures mark each territorialization: agrarian reforms that reconfigured land control, the introduction of genetically modified soy varieties, and most recently a ‘parliamentary coup’ preceded by spectacular acts of violence against campesinos. The violent rejection of post-neoliberal politics espoused by former President Fernando Lugo marked the beginning of a third wave of sojización defined by the increasing influence of the soy industry, campesino and indigenous dispossession, and violent environments. Paraguay reveals unexpected consequences and contradictions of the Left Turn in Latin America. The country’s experiment with post-neoliberal politics created conditions that eventually broadened and deepened neoliberalizations of nature. The term ‘soy states’ indicates three conjunctures of soy production and how they reconfigure state–society relations and conceptions of ‘the state’ in Paraguay vis-à-vis soy production. My arguments draw from extensive qualitative field research and applied work in Paraguay coupled with secondary source analysis, contributing to debates about neoliberalizations of nature, plant territoriality, agrarian political ecology and state formation.     

Beating the bounds: how does ‘open source’ become a seed commons?

In response to ongoing plant genetic enclosures, the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) is creating a ‘protected commons’ for seed. It is a project, I argue, that reflects characteristics of a growing transnational commoning movement. From the Zapatistas to seed wars, such movements draw attention to commons not simply as a resource, but as a dynamic and evolving social activity: commoning. In the US, OSSI includes 38 plant breeders, 48 seed companies and 377 crop varieties. Yet challenges remain for OSSI to gain wider legitimacy for ‘freed seed’, to build trust in a moral pledge, and to establish fair guidelines for which people and which seed can participate in making the commons. Using the metaphor of ‘beating the bounds’ – a feudal practice of contesting enclosures – I ask how OSSI defends the commons in intersecting arenas. The first way is legal, as OSSI negotiates a move from contract law toward moral economy law. Next is epistemic, as an informal breeder network revitalizes farmer knowledge, while proving more structurally able and culturally equipped to lead commoning efforts. Finally, I reflect on the nature of boundary beating itself, aided by Global South movements. Seed sovereignty perspectives suggest room for a pluriverse of commons to grow.     

Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.     

Showdown at Nissan: the 1989 campaign to organize Nissan in Smyrna,Tennessee, and the rise of the transplant sector

In July 1989, workers at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, voted 1622 to 711 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). At the time, many reporters saw the well-publicized Nissan vote – dubbed a ‘showdown’ by the New York Times – as a defining moment in modern labor history. The election deserves further exploration, especially as it played a key role in establishing the non-union ‘transplant’ sector. UAW leaders blamed the Smyrna loss on Nissan’s anti-union tactics, while the company claimed that workers did not need a union because they were already well paid (although this was largely due to the UAW’s presence). This article is the first to provide a detailed analysis that draws on the union’s records of the campaign, as well as many other sources. While the factors cited publicly were important, the article demonstrates that there were additional reasons for the union’s defeat, including internal divisions, unanticipated staffing problems, and the logistical challenge of organizing such a big – and new – facility. Although Nissan workers had many grievances, the company also fostered loyalty by not laying off workers, and by expanding the plant. Finally, it secured a high level of community support, and drew off the conservative political climate of the era.     

Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene

Causal analysis of vulnerability aims to identify root causes of crises so that transformative solutions might be found. Yet root-cause analysis is absent from most climate response assessments. Framings for climate-change risk analysis often locate causality in hazards while attributing some causal weight to proximate social variables such as poverty or lack of capacity. They rarely ask why capacity is lacking, assets are inadequate or social protections are absent or fail. This contribution frames vulnerability and security as matters of access to assets and social protections. Assets and social protections each have their own context-contingent causal chains. A key recursive element in those causal chains is the ability – means and powers – of vulnerable people to influence the political economy that shapes their assets and social protections. Vulnerability is, as Sen rightly observed, linked to the lack of freedom – the freedom to influence the political economy that shapes these entitlements. In the Anthropocene, human causes of climate hazard must also now be accounted for in etiologies of disaster. However, attention to anthropogenic climate change should not occlude social causes of (and responsibility for) vulnerability – vulnerability is still produced in and by society.