Emma Dowling

Keir Milburn

David Harvie

Paolo Gerbaudo

Nicola Montagna

Gareth Brown

Dimitris Dalakoglou 

Sue Mew 

Universidad Nomada

Nicola Montagna and Sue Mew, eds. This issue of Social Justice investigates some of the most significant cycles of protest that have occurred across the globe since the current financial, economic, and political crisis started in 2007. It covers four Eurozone countries, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the UK, and one Mediterranean country involved in the Arab Spring, Egypt. The financial crisis has resulted in economic collapse (Greece, Spain, and Italy, to mention a few), a crisis of political legitimacy (Egypt and Italy, for example), and has been used as an excuse for further neoliberal restructuring of the welfare system (e.g., in the UK, Greece, and Italy). Contributors offer a historical framework for these events, which are unfolding daily, and discuss the liberatory and social justice strategies of political movements–from Occupy to the Indignados and Egyptian soccer Ultras. Also discussed are changing police tactics in the face of mounting mass protest. - See more at: http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/?product=conflicts-within-the-crisis-vol-391-2011#sthash.iZzRrDaE.dpufThis issue of Social Justice investigates some of the most significant cycles of protest that have occurred across the globe since the current financial, economic, and political crisis started in 2007. It covers four Eurozone countries, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the UK, and one Mediterranean country involved in the Arab Spring, Egypt. The financial crisis has resulted in economic collapse (Greece, Spain, and Italy, to mention a few), a crisis of political legitimacy (Egypt and Italy, for example), and has been used as an excuse for further neoliberal restructuring of the welfare system (e.g., in the UK, Greece, and Italy). Contributors offer a historical framework for these events, which are unfolding daily, and discuss the liberatory and social justice strategies of political movements–from Occupy to the Indignados and Egyptian soccer Ultras. Also discussed are changing police tactics in the face of mounting mass protest.

Social Justice Vol. 39:1

Conflicts within the Crisis

From the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, from Occupy Wall Street in New York to Nuit Debout in Paris, contemporary protest bears the mark of citizenism, a libertarian and participatory brand of populism which appeals to ordinary citizens outraged at the arrogance of political and financial elites in the wake of the Great Recession. This book draws on 140 interviews with activists and participants in occupations and demonstrations to explore the new politics nurtured by the 'movement of the squares' of 2011-16 and its reflection of an exceptional phase of crisis and social transformation. Gerbaudo demonstrates how, in waging a unifying struggle against a perceived Oligarchy, today's movements combine the neo-anarchist ethos of horizontality and leaderlessness inherited from the anti-globalisation movement, and a resurgent populist demand for full popular sovereignty and the reclamation of citizenship rights. He analyses the manifestation of this ideology through the signature tactics of these upheavals, including protest camps in public squares, popular assemblies and social media activism. And he charts its political ramifications from Podemos in Spain to Bernie Sanders in the US, revealing how the central square occupations have been foundational to current movements for radical democracy worldwide.

Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest

The Mask and the Flag

From the Five Star Movement to Podemos, from the Pirate Parties to La France Insoumise, from the movements behind Bernie Sanders to those backing Jeremy Corbyn, the last decade has witnessed the rise of a new blueprint for political organisation: the digital party.Paolo Gerbaudo addresses the organisational revolution that is transforming political parties in the time of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Cambridge Analytica. Drawing on interviews with political leaders and organisers, Gerbaudo demonstrates that besides rapidly growing in votes, these formations have also revitalised party democracy, involving hundreds of thousands in discussions carried out on online decision-making platforms. Participatory, yet plebiscitarian, open and democratic, yet dominated by charismatic 'hyperleaders', digital parties display both great potentials and risks for the development of new forms of mass participation in an era of growing inequality. All political parties will have to reckon with the lessons of the digital party.

Political Organisation and Online Democracy

The Digital Party

Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the "indignados" protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a "cyberspace" detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around "occupied" places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park. An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.

Social Media and Contemporary Activism

Tweets and the Streets

What comes after neoliberalism? In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity. Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right’s authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left’s social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.

Paolo Gerbaudo

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