Abstract
Mass strikes in the wake of the global crisis in the late 2000s came with new forms of popular organisation. An analysis of those emerging rebellions has to engage in a thick description, taking into account the local and regional contexts.
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- 1.
“Thesis 12: ‘We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.’
—Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the ‘Spartacus’ [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working class the role of the saviour of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs” (Benjamin 1974).
- 2.
It is interesting that two contemporary scholars of an explicitly anti-capitalist postcolonial or decolonial position emphasise that theoreticians and scholars should not understand themselves or act as a vanguard, but rather as allies to social movements (De Santos 2014, 44: Chandra 2016, 3). While both authors explain with a different emphasis what such a vanguard role of intellectuals would be or who exactly claims to assume such a position, both accounts differ significantly from my understanding of the vanguard consisting of those engaged in mass struggles. I will come back to the question of the role of researcher vis-à-vis the social actors—whose agency is the object of study in this book—later on in this introduction.
- 3.
In Brazil, these tactics are often referred to as ‘quebra-quebra’ (destroy-destroy) or ‘quebrar e quemar’ (destroy and burn). For construction sites in Brazil, these tactics are not new at all, but their mass occurrence was unprecedented between the years 2011 and 2014.
- 4.
This is inspired by Antonio Gramsci who uses the term ‘corporatist unions’ for those trade unions that focus to improve the wages and conditions of work within the given conditions of society (2000, 92ff).
- 5.
Struggles are inscribed into structures; thus their action is mediated/filtered by this inscription: “To sum up, popular struggles are inscribed in the institutional materiality of the State, even though they are not concluded in it, it is a materiality that carries the traces of these muted and multiform struggles” (Poulantzas 1980, 144). Nonetheless, struggles in general (which includes the struggle of the bourgeoisie) have primacy over structures; thus change and conflict are primary vis-à-vis the status quo and consensus: “In their material basis, struggles always have primacy over the institutions-apparatuses of power (especially the State), even though they are invariably inscribed within their field” (ibid., 149; see also 133, 143).
- 6.
I apply the notion of structures consisting in the inscription of struggles and social relations to the spatial dimension, inspired by Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state: “(…) the State is through and through constituted-divided by class contradictions. (…) Class contradictions are the very stuff of the State: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization; while the State’s policy is the result of their functioning within the State” (1980, 132). These citations make clear that to speak of structuralism is not at all adequate in this case: Structures are understood as aspects of agency, pointing far beyond the endless debates about structure versus agency in bourgeois sociology. It is the merit of Bob Jessop (2007) that he developed this notion of Poulantzas’ theory into the strategic-relational account of social formations.
- 7.
More specifically, Chandra asserts that James Scott (1976) and Guha ascribe in a universalising manner to rural uprisings in Asia that they were of an anti-colonial nature—a claim that Chandra investigates in detail in other works and against which he raises considerable and quite convincing doubts (Chandra 2016).
- 8.
“Pure spontaneity does not exist” (Gramsci 1971b, 196).
- 9.
I will use the terminology of ‘core and non-core countries’ against other alternatives like ‘Global South/North, developing/developed countries’ or ‘centre and periphery’. I think the idea of a core of countries which dominate global capitalism describes the current constellation of global rule most adequate. The distinction between South and North gives ample room for misunderstandings since geography does not exactly match structures of domination. The distinction developing/developed countries originally referred to industrialised versus agrarian countries which does not make much sense today when almost all countries are industrialised to some extent. It also contains a questionable idea of non-core countries being able to ‘catch up’ via industrialisation. Finally, the terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ create some uneasiness with the claim that the majority of the world population lives in the periphery, although this notion does give some impression about the global distribution of power and resources.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks go to all the people I met while doing fieldwork which was a fantastic experience. It is impossible to name everybody who contributed but in order to just name a few people I want to mention in India Fabio Olivieri, Susana Barria, Marco, Kiran, Anshita, Nayan, Shyambir, Sheena Jain, Sher Singh, Carsten Krinn, Sanober Keshwaar, Vaishali Sareen, Vishnu, Sharit Bhowmik, Badam, Nikhil and N. Vasudevan; in Brazil Pedro, Adriano, Junior and Socorro in Fortaleza, David in Caucaia, Fred Melo, Rodrigo Linhares, Ana Paula Melli, Roberto Véras, Andreia Galvão, Cauê Campos, Ze Goutinho, Sergio Corrêa and Luzia. During the production of the book, Alexander Gallas, Toby Carroll, Frido Wenten, Huang Yu, Ralf Ruckus and Andreas Bieler were careful readers. Thanks for transcriptions of interviews go to Taiane Linhares, Hitesh Samdani, Shilpa Dahake, Harshad Subhash and Nupur Kulkarni. Special thanks go to Michael Roberts in helping out with graphic issues, and to Edel Moraes for working on the maps in this book.
Invitations to talks at the Center for the Study of Social and Global Justice and the Institute of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Nottingham ended up in inspiring debates during the process of writing and I want to thank Katharine Adeney and Andreas Bieler to provide opportunities to present my work there. Special thanks go to Andreas Bieler who assisted almost every step of the creation of this book. Another great big thank you goes to the persons who shared their time with me while I wrote the bigger part of this book in Nottingham: Diego Mariano, Kristiyan Peev, Marco Genovesi, Alex Serafimov, Kayhan Valadbaygi, Jon Mansell, Jokubas Salyga, Carol Spary, Katharine Adeney, Tony Burns, Cecilia Goria and Chun-Yi Lee.
I want to thank the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Nottingham for crucial administrative support, primarily Wyn Rees, Ruth Davison, Rosemary McCabe and Graeme Docherty.
The editors of the series Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy—Toby Carroll, Paul Cammack, Kelly Gerard and Darryl Jarvis—had an enormously important role to facilitate the publication of this book.
Many thanks go to the team of Palgrave Macmillan, especially Jemima Warren and Oliver Foster, for their cooperation and careful editing. Oliver Foster did a wonderful job in realising my unorthodox idea for the book cover, and Ekrem Ekici, Toby Carroll and Timm Ebner provided invaluable advice for the cover design.
The most special thanks go to Edel Moraes who accompanied the major part of my writing process while finishing her own academic work. She was and is a wonderful companion and partner and supported me throughout all the ups and downs of writing.
Initial research in India and Brazil was facilitated by a postdoctoral scholarship of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in cooperation with Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and a research scholarship of the International Center Development and Decent Work at University of Kassel, and I am thankful to Christoph Scherrer, Birgit Felmeden and Indira Gartenberg in this context for crucial assistance and support.
Finally, it was due to a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship of the European Commission for the project “Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India” that I was able to undertake the research for this project and to complete this book.
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Nowak, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India. Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05375-8_1
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