Book Description
On New Year's Day 1994 a small group of Mayan peasants, led by a charismatic former University Professor, grabbed the attention of the world by taking over San Cristobel, the capitol of Chiapas, Mexico and proclaiming "Basta!" to the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberal capitalism that was destroying the infrastructure of the peasant economy. Their cry was heard across the world and in the next decade the Zapatisas became a beacon of hope and a model to hundreds of thousands of activists across the world fighting globalization.
John Ross was there from the beginning, following the Zapatistas on their journey, to the extent that he has been nicknamed "the Willy Loman of the Zapastistas." His first book, Rebellion from the Roots was praised by Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of the Books.
This book chronicles the last six years of the rebellion — a phase where the Zapatistas have been below the media radar in many respects, and a period where Ross argues that the Zapatistas have been "Changing the World Without Taking Power."
Part John Reed, part magic realist poet, Ross reveals the extraordinary events in Chiapas and explores the unique political experiment the Zapastistas have pioneered.
Customer Reviews:
Other reviewer didn't mention "Zapatistas".......2007-03-11
Sometimes I review books I'm not familiar with, including those that I believe make a positive contribution to a worthwhile cause, or those that I feel are serving militarists and/or corporatists.
John Ross' "Zapatistas" certainly falls in the former category. I have read his book "The Annexation of Mexico" and that gave me a much deeper understanding of Mexican history, and interventions by the US and other nations. I also heard Ross speak at a bookstore regarding his earlier book on the Zapatistas, "The War Against Oblivion."
I found him to be well-informed, and a very pleasant person. Not "filled with bile" and so forth as another reviewer suggests. It seems some become filled with bile when the aggression of the Israeli government is criticized. The violence does go both ways between Isrealis and Palestinians, just as it went both ways between Apartheid rulers and black South Africans. Ross' sympathies lie squarely with the Palestinians who are currently experiencing an Apartheid-style oppression. Ross is also clearly (and understandably) sympathetic toward the Zapatistas and other grassroots movements against the economic warfare and cultural colonization of neoliberal economics and state militarism.
He has my support and appreciation for his many important works, including his most recent writings, the subject of which (suffering people of southern Mexico) deserves a much more considerate review than a one-star dismissal.
So disappointed in Ross.......2007-03-05
As respectful and even adoring as he is about the Zapatistas, that's how
hateful he is when speaking of the Israelis. They have done every wrong!
His total bias against Israel and his lack of fairness in not speaking of any wrongs perpetrated against them by the Palestinians - yes it does goes both ways! - makes me wonder about his reporting in general. There is no fairness here and his bile against the Jews made me ill.
Book Description
This book explores the tensions between markets, democracy, neoliberalism, state restructuring and citizenship. In this regard, the balance of citizen rights has been shifted away from providing citizens with social rights to privileging the property rights of private, mostly transnational, firms. Bolivian Stalemate throws light on the reasons and processes behind the rising opposition in country after country in Latin America to the currently fashionable, internationally prescribed economic development strategy of neoliberalism.
Customer Reviews:
Terrific.......2007-09-29
This is an excellent, comprehensive account of the forces that lead to the ascencion of Evo Morales. Morales himself is not the focus, instead the authors examine the history of liberalism (as a social order) and neoliberalism (as an economic order) in Bolivia. They aptly relate the effects of liberalism to the clamour for change.
Book Description
Best-selling author and cultural critic Jerry Mander has challenged dominant cultural mind-sets in books such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred. In Paradigm Wars, he and coeditor Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a leader of the global indigenous peoples movement and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have gathered an impressive international roster of contributors to document the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth's surviving indigenous peoples.
Many of the planet's dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities. Those resources are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. The World Trade Organization and other global structures of trade and finance have written the rules of trade to make life easier for these corporate resource-hunters--accelerating the loss of native lands, autonomy, and rights and creating millions of refugees.
Paradigm Wars is the first major work to comprehensively illuminate this shameful scenario. In firsthand reports by twenty-five indigenous and nonindigenous writers, the book details the devastating impacts of extractive industries and bioprospecting, the degrading of cultural artifacts and languages, even the damage done by some well-meaning conservation groups. The book also highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting this onslaught, often with amazing success. Anyone concerned with environmental or social justice will find inspiration in their resistance.
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The Other Davos: The Globalization of Resistance to the World Economic System
Manufacturer: Zed Books
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ASIN: 185649988X |
Book Description
Each year, the Swiss mountain resort Davos is host to the meetings of the World Economic Forum. To this informal gathering of the most powerful business and financial magnates in the capitalist world are invited political leaders, cultural and religious organizations and even some trade unionists. The aim is to define global economic strategies.
In 1999, a counter-Davos gathering brought together on the same date dissident social movements from across five continents: Brazil’s Landless People’s Movement; the Trade Union Congress of South Korea; the National Peasant Federation of Burkina Faso; the Quebec Women’s Movement and the French Movement of the Unemployed. They met with a number of eminent economists, sociologists, historians and political scientists. The aim was to demonstrate, by means of very different analyses and the putting forward of concrete alternatives, their opposition to the dominant ideology of neo-liberalism and the dictatorship of capitalism over global society. This book is a compilation of these discussions whose impact has already resonated around the world.
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Governance and Resistance in World Politics
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521546990 |
Book Description
The emergence of global governance challenges conventional interpretations of world politics regarding conflicts of interests between sovereign states under conditions of anarchy. At the same time, the new phenomena of anti-globalization demonstrations, transnational social movements, and an emergent global civil society point to important developments in international relations. Leading scholars reflect on the usefulness of thinking about these processes as a dichotomy between the politics of governance and the politics of resistance, and consider its application to international relations.
Book Description
This challenging work develops a radical theory of the new world order to argue that as the globalization of power intensifies, so too do globalized forms of resistance. Stephen Gill explains how the dialectic of power and resistance involves issues of governance, economy, and culture. This struggle is reflected in the questions of American supremacy, the power of capital, market civilization, and surveillance power. Thus new forms of political agency and collective action are emerging to challenge dominant powers.
Book Description
How do a few Third World political movements become global causes célèbres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and "global civil society."
Customer Reviews:
A brilliant book.......2005-08-16
Clifford Bob's The Marketing Rebellion is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the NGO sector operates. The literature on NGOs is not a particularly sophisticated one, heavily populated with self-serving and unenlightening tomes.
Bob examines the nexus between third world insurgencies and international NGOs and comes to some interesting findings.
This book is a must for those interested in the NGO sector, but also international relations as NGOs have emerged as an important players in their own right in recent years.
Book Description
"In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, filmmakers came together to share their experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth of the now-historic World Social Forum. The rallying cry of the WSF is 'Another World is Possible.' It has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates and seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it should be."-Arundhati Roy
The World Social Forum has become a key part of the international global justice movement, attracting activists around the world. Here, Leite lays out the origins, development and challenges of the forum today.
Jose Correa Leite is a member of the Brazilian Organizing Committee for the WSF.
Customer Reviews:
Another World Is Possible.......2007-08-14
In light of the recent U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, this short history of globalization and resistance by Brazilian intellectual Jose Correa Leite proved surprisingly helpful, and at times, inspiring. As a leading organizer of the WSF from the beginning, Correa Leite's analysis is extremely insightful.
Correa Leite begins with the difficult task of summarizing the 20 year era of modern globalization, from 1991 to the present. These are the densest chapters that attempt to describe the economic/political processes which ultimately led to massive rebellions from Seattle to Argentina. From there is the more readable and inspiring history of the global justice movement which produced the World Social Forum--the beautiful "movement of movements".
There Is An Alternative.......2006-11-21
Hands down the best history of the World Social Forum movement. José Correa Leite, one of the WSF founders, discusses differing strategies of resistance to neoliberalism and what kind of movement building a democratic & just global economy would require; to my knowledge, no other book on the WSF does this. The next generation of global justice activists should refer to this work in order to understand what was accomplished, attempted, and learned through struggle in the 90's (before the U.S. left's political unpreparedness for 9-11 largely hamstrung the movement here). I think it's key to collectively develop a correct understanding of the role of the State in order to build successful opposition to the designs of multinational capital. On that note, this book provides basic ammo along with Cochabamba! by Oscar Olivera.
A good summery of the Global Movement.......2005-04-04
A good introduction to the Global Movement. The first chapter "Spirit of Seattle" provides a critical, big picture view of neo-liberalism and late capitalism, which the subsequent chapters dive into the specific historical background of the World Social Forum. The book also offers various nifty explinations of basic global institutions such as the IMF and WTO and includes some of the manefestos produced at the WSF.
A good, easy read.
Book Description
Is the current model for economic globalization good for the poor or the environment? Are there alternatives? Amid rising worldwide protests that corporate elites wield too much influence over global economic governance, this book on Mexico' s experience under the North American Free Trade Agreement offers insights into both questions.
With a focus on labor, agricultural, and environmental issues, Confronting Globalization tells globalization's untold stories: its social and environmental costs and the grassroots search for alternative paths. Indigenous coffee farmers fight for a place in the global market. Sweatshop workers demand safe working conditions and basic labor rights. Corn farmers organize to prevent the flood of imported grain from driving them off the land. The editors carefully set the context and clearly draw the rich lessons from these compelling stories, offering a rare grounding in how trade policies affect vulnerable communities and the environment, and what those communities are doing to defend themselves and promote their own homegrown alternatives.
Customer Reviews:
Globalization as seen from the bottom in Mexico.......2003-10-08
A Review:
Confronting Globalization:
Economic integration and popular resistance in Mexico
Wise, Timothy A., Salazar, Hilda, Carlsen, Laura eds., 248 pages (paper),
Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT 2003
....)
Globalization and trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have had disastrous effects on Mexican communities Confronting Globalization is about what some of these communities are doing at the grass-roots political level to defend themselves. The setting is contemporary Mexico. This book provokes discussion of the lessons of the social and environmental costs of the NAFTA. The editors have gathered the real stories of real communities and the community members organized to address conflicts. The book ends with thoughtful guidance for us to ponder as corporations and governments sally along with new hemispheric-wide economic agreements. This kind of guidance is very rare these days as most of us hunt for workable paradigms to guide social justice actions in the future.
The basic premise of the book is that increased trade and investment result from reduced barriers, but these should not be an end in themselves. National governments should go further than global economic integration and judiciously use the fruits of free trade as a means toward an end of improving their own society, environment, and economies. This book not only shows how communities and local democracy have been weakened by globalization, but lessons are examined and recommendations are offered as important considerations for future agreements. The promise that globalization can strengthen us all has proved hollow, and here we see how and why it has failed - and we can see what must be different in our immediate tomorrows.
The editors use nine case studies of actual communities that have been impacted by neo-liberal trade policies. The setting of this book is stories of how these communities are defending themselves from the onslaught of corporate power and stories of how laws have weakened the national ability to protect the people of a country. Locally-based alternative policies can be viable alternatives but they must be protected and nurtured by national and international agreements.
With a focus on environmental, labor, and agricultural issues the book documents how the past ten years of free trade have resulted in an exclusive focus on corporate profits. This book shows how, with detailed citations, these agreements result in a weakening of democratic government, deterioration of the environment, and declining labor conditions. For example, the authors document how rural Mexico, heavily dependent on small-scale agriculture, is in crisis. Grain imports from the United States and reduced supports to small farmers have resulted in four-fifths of the rural Mexican population living in poverty, and half of those people live in extreme poverty. Small farmers just can't compete on such unequal terms. Is this free trade? Who benefits? Who loses?
These authors do an excellent job of supporting their thesis with facts that are annotated. For example, the editors of Confronting Globalization document how Mexican per capita growth was 3.4% from 1960 to 1980. Since 1985 Mexican per capita real growth has been just 1%. Job creation in Mexico does not nearly keep up with the increase of the population. New workers are entering the economy faster than jobs are being created. Manufacturing has seen a net loss of jobs since NAFTA took effect. NAFTA critics predicted American jobs would migrate to Mexico. Some did. But the jobs created in Mexico are not good jobs - manufacturing wages are down 12% under NAFTA, and about 60% of the Mexican workers do not receive any of the benefits legally mandated by their government.
How can this increasing impoverishment of our neighbor be good for the United States? Who gains from international trade agreements and who are the real losers? Read this book and you will come away with a solid grounding in the basic lessons of free trade. Talk of globalization usually means talk of economic conditions, but costs to the environment, agriculture, and worker well-being are ignored. States must include these sectors when considering future agreements such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
The student of global trade agreements will be familiar with challenges of national pressures as the regions struggle to integrate. There are many articles and books about trade agreements of the 20th and 21st Centuries but documentation of how these changes have impacted contemporary Mexican civil society, and in turn our society, are not common. Confronting Globalization is important because these stories detail how communities have responded at the grassroots level with a wide diversity of social responses. It should be required reading for the university-level scholar, the politicians who create trade policy, and social activists who seek to ameliorate the harm caused by globalization. The clearly delineated recommendations are essential considerations for future action.
2003-08-15
...
Pondering labor, agricultural, & environmental issues.......2003-09-18
Collaboratively compiled and edited by Timothy A. Wise, Hilda Salazar and Laura Carlsen, Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration And Popular Resistance In Mexico presents informed and informative essays from a variety of expert contributors pondering diverse labor, agricultural, and environmental issues within the context of contemporary globalization. Looking at the social and environmental costs that globalization extracts upon Mexico's land and people; exploring grassroots searches for alternate paths; and ranging from sweatshop workers' struggles for basic labor rights to the efforts of corn farmers to keep the influx imported grain from forcing them off their land, Confronting Globalization is very highly recommended reading for students of international economics, social activists, and governmental trade policy makers.
Book Description
Time for Revolution explores the burning issue of our times: is there still a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism?
Written in prison two decades apart, these two essays reflect Antonio Negri's abiding interest in the philosophy of time and resistance. The first essay traces the fracture lines which force capitalist society into perpetual crisis. The second, written immediately after the global best-seller, Empire, develops the two key concepts of empire and multitude.
Time for Revolution illuminates the course of Negri's thinking from the 1980s to Empire and beyond.
Customer Reviews:
A groundbreaking materialist theory of time........2006-02-04
This book contains two books written by Antonio Negri in a span of 20 years. Negri was involved in the Italian far left Operaismo and Autonomia movements and is deeply inspired by the philosophies of Marx, Deleuze/Guattari and Spinoza.
The first book - 'The Constitution of Time' is written from a Marxist materialist perspective. It starts with the aporias of time in Marx's works, especially 'Capital', 'Grundrisse' and 'Theories of Surplus Value' such as between intensive and extensive labour time, or between the time of historical materialism and subsumed labour time as values in economic circulation. Negri distinguishes three kinds of time in the subsumed time of captialism - collective, productive and constitutive. In each, he distinguishes a concept of time that is oriented to control and another that is oriented to freedom. Finally, he distinguishes positive and negative variants of the 'time for revolution'.
His aim is to lay the foundation for a time of resistance in a world of control. However, his Deleuze/Guattari borrowings and his dogmatic materialism mar his first book. The first book also suffers from an excess of assertoric rather than logico-analytical statements.
The second book - 'Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo' represents a real breakthrough in the philosophy of time. Written 20 years later it represents greater intellectual clarity and helps understand the previous work.
Negri says that time is always the tip of the arrow that has been released. Accordingly, being is always in a state of transformation. Past is a psychological construct and so is future. Neither past or future is experienced time. Time as becoming, as tip of the arrow - is neither past nor future but a time when being transforms itself by inaugurating the new or 'to come'. He also criticizes the focus on being and neglect of time in ontology and launches an attack on spatial metaphors of time which represent time as a sort of plane with past, present and future arranged in a line.
He then goes on to explain other concepts like language, love, multitude, power etc. based on his concept of an ontology grounded in time. This second book is remarkable for the step by step way it builds up its arguments.
Despite his strong anti-Hegelianism and rejection of 'dialectics', he uses a very dialectical method of developing his own arguments , in both books. But, that is one of the strengths of the books and not the soruce of their weaknesses.
His weaknesses lie elsewhere. His materialism and his Deleuze/Guattari heritage, leads him to resort to contortions in order to deal with the question of subject and resistance - because like all materialists he seeks to avoid questions about consciousness and will and like post-structuralists he is uneasy with the question of the 'subject'. However, unlike Deleuze/Guattari he does not bypass the question of the subject by reducing living beings to desiring machines or in any other way, but comes with as good an explanation of the concept of 'subject' as is possible from a strictly materialist perspective.
At the tip of time's arrow.......2005-08-23
A time for revolution contains two volumes from distinct points in Negri's career. The essays written in prison, which form the latter half of the book, are what I have read in depth and are what I would like to discuss.
Kairos, Alma Venus and Multitudo represent concurrent and cumulatively logical essays outlining a materialist ontology, tying together as primary concepts a temporal epistemology, ontology of the common, and conceptual framework for differentiated action. To explain this, jargon free, Negri claims that through most of the history of philosophy and of knowing subjects there has been a false transcendental illusion of knowledge that exists external to time, and that this form of knowledge is privileged and replicated by the interests of the powerful. His project is to restore the belief among subjects that change can be affected and of the possibilities time affords. He wishes to tie in this priviledging of the tempral nature of knowledge to a logically consistent ethical basis of the common and refutation of power.
These essays are prefaced by an insightful and absorbing introduction in which Negri explains his tribulations with the state of Italy, and through his elaborate articulation sets himself within the pantheon of philosophical minds. It is not surprising then, especially considering the aim and extent of this project, that a Time for Revolution often comes off as a quasi-mystical Platonic text, evading specificity, and tending towards the very transcendentalism loathed by Negri. Strangely, however, for this reader this logically inconsistent facet of the text is perhaps one of the greatest draws; to enact hope of change: hearts and not just minds are in need of being won over.
Like Spinoza Negri pushes his philosophical message through with sheer eloquence at times, the very mysticism of what is sometimes being proposed gated into sequenced paragraphs.
This book has been an inspiration to me. The density of the writing is so heavy, you feel that perhaps a whole life's thoughts have been compressed into these essays, meaning that with each reading the writing reveals something new. I am currently working on a film about Savonarola that draws on many of the themes in these essays, if you are interested in discussing Negri's work or my film email me at ncoombs@fastmail.co.uk
Books:
- A Room of One's Own
- A Vision Unfulfilled: Russia & the Soviet Union in the Twentieth Century
- Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA
- Ahead of the Curve: A Commonsense Guide to Forecasting Business and Market Cycles
- Alternatives to Economic Globalization
- An Introduction to Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, 2nd Edition
- An Introduction to High-Frequency Finance
- Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing
- Applied Linear Statistical Models
- Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Books Index
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