Emotions in context: Revolutionary accelerators,hope, moral outrage,and other emotions in the making of Nicaragua's revolution

Building on the social movement/revolutions and recent social movement emotions literature and using interviews and oral history from revolutionary Nicaragua, I make a case for recognizing the significance of emotions when studying revolutions. The essay aims for a contextual understanding of the role of emotions in the making of revolution during the insurrectionary period in Nicaragua. These are examined from the vantage point of revolutionary accelerators the conflictual event-contexts from which revolutionary actors emerge. Through the historical analysis of testimonies associated with a number of politically significant events that changed the course of political dynamics in 1970s Nicaragua, the piece illustrates: (1) how events function as generators of revolutionary action and (2) how event-related emotions such as anger and fear, but primarily moral outrage and hope, contribute to a transformation in consciousness that leads potential participants to define their circumstances as needing their revolutionary involvement. It also attempts to demonstrate how the latter two emotions—moral outrage and hope—are dominant under different event-contexts. Lastly, the relationships between these emotions and how these are connected to revolutionary accelerators are similarly explored.     

Diversity and equality: Race and class in America

Discussions of diversity, multiculturalism, and democracy often neglect the historical and structural economic and political inequalities embedded in these racial/ethnic/cultural differences among peoples in America. In this article we present a historical materialist analysis of African Americans and other oppressed peoples within the context of capitalist development. The current period of the electronic revolution and the labor displacing technology of the postindustrial era is creating the conditions for the erosion of the reform based social contract, and for heightened degrees of economic and political polarization, often expressed as racial polarization. At the same time, the abundance created by the high technology revolution contains the possibility of realizing equality and democracy for African Americans and for all of the American peoples.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.     

Rooted in relative privilege: US ‘expats’ in Granada,Nicaragua

This article investigates how US citizens living in Granada, Nicaragua, negotiate transnational belonging. Best known for a revolution and covert US intervention, Nicaragua, and in particular, the colonial town of Granada, has become a popular site for settlers from the Global North. Similar to other cases of ‘lifestyle migration’, these migrants enjoy spacious homes, maids, and upscale restaurants in a country ranked second poorest in Latin America, and governed by none other than El Comandante Ortega himself. They do not sever ties with their homeland, and form strong attachments in their new land. Fieldwork conducted in 2016 reveals that despite their international mobility, cosmopolitanism does not characterize how these migrants belong in the world. Instead, they practice privileged transnationalism in which their economic, political, and cultural power relative to that of their hosts facilitates both their mobility and their comfortable sense of rootedness in their sites of origin and settlement.     

The Gavilleros of the East: Social Banditry as Political Practice in the Dominican Sugar Region, 1900–1924

Abstract This essay explores 'social banditry' as a form of political practice in relation to distinct regimes of power; regional, national, and imperialist. The eastern region of the Dominican Republic experienced a rapid rise of land values and conversion of peasant smallholdings into sugar cane lields at the start of the twentieth century. Roving bands of 'outlaws' called 'gavilleros' appeared almost immediately, and came under increasing, and different, scrutiny during the years 1916–1924, when United States Marines occupied the Republic. This essay considers the political and social dimensions of gavillero conduct as it was transformed-and transformed itself-during the first quarter of the twentieth century.     

Between Pachakuti and Passive Revolution: The Search for Post-colonial Sovereignty in Bolivia

From the period 2000 to 2005, Bolivia experienced a profound political convulsion as social movements rose-up to contest the neoliberal model of development. This was most markedly inspired by contestation over the control of natural resources, namely water and gas. The period of mobilisation brought down two successive governments and propelled the MAS, led by Evo Morales, to power in 2006. This period also helped to revalorise indigenous culture and held out hope for a reimagining of power, politics and political economy. The transformation that would result from this uprising, effectively re-founded Bolivia as a “pluri-national state,” recognising 36 separate national groups with their own languages and cultures. This was, furthermore, a process based on the convergence of national-popular and indigenous struggles. However, following his disputed election for a fourth successive term in office, Evo Morales and other key leaders of the MAS have gone into exile, while right-wing, revanchist social forces are increasingly prominent. How do we begin to make sense of this turn of events, which include the swirling combinations of reactionary capitalist interests but also left-indigenous critiques of development from marginalised sectors? In this article, I argue that we need to situate Bolivia's indigenous social movements in the struggle between Pachakuti (an Andean term referring to the desire to turn the world upside down and forge a new time and space) and passive revolution (a state-led process of modernisation that seeks to expand capitalist social relations whilst incorporating limited demands from below, ultimately diffusing their radical potential).     

Lost in Transitions? Feudalism,Colonialism, and Egypt's Blocked Road to Capitalism (1800–1920)

We revisit the transition debate to capitalism through the historical case of nineteenth century Egypt and the theoretical lens of uneven and combined development. We argue that the twin concepts of formal and real subsumption of labor under capital offer a necessary methodological device to study capitalist transitions. We conclude that nineteenth century Egypt was not a society experiencing an ‘indigenous’ transition to capitalism that was blocked by colonial intervention. Instead, colonialism warped the ongoing formation of a commercial-absolutist state, which led to a combination of feudal and capitalist social forms that lingered well into the middle of the twentieth century. Through a long-term historical analysis of the Egyptian social formation as a complex ensemble of political power relations and ongoing cycles of articulations of multiple mode of productions we problematize the dominant ‘modernization’ thesis. The modernization paradigm presupposes that economic growth will take place due to globalized markets, transforming, in turn, existing social and political practices and institutions along modern lines. This idea has been reiterated by neoclassical and neo-institutionalist economists who understand economic backwardness as a simple lack of market-efficient behavior of local economic agents. As such, we also emphasize that the gradual integration of the Egyptian social formation into the capitalist world market did not automatically lead to the establishment of a dominant capitalist mode of production within this formation.     

Talking Yiddish at the boundaries

This essay uses the contemporary urban consumption practice of speciality coffee as a means to explore the complex ways in which global brands seek to enhance the promotional currency of their products through the mobilizing of local ‘commodity biographies’. It begins by outlining the place-specific strategies of promotion employed by speciality coffee retailers such as Starbucks and the Seattle Coffee Company, examining the range of ways in which Seattle as centre of US ‘coffee culture’ was deployed as the locus of ‘origin’ in order to create lucrative distinctions between speciality coffee and homogenized, mass-market coffee products. It then places this symbolic geography of coffee within the long history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the recent emergence of speciality coffee as a ‘niche’ product, and situating it in the context of restructuring urban economies geared towards service-sector, consumption-oriented activities. The essay then moves on to consider the difficulties encountered by Starbucks, the market leader in speciality coffee, in monitoring and manipulating the symbolic geographies of its coffee commodities as they migrated from the coffee shop and into other realms of representation. In particular it explores the issue of Starbucks’ product placement in the a number of motion pictures in the 1990s, arguing that such placements were embraced by the company as an opportunity to defuse criticism of the company's activities that amplified as the decade evolved. Finally, the essay looks at the high profile targeting of Starbucks coffee shops by protestors at the anti-globalization protests that accompanied the hosting of the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference Meeting in Seattle, arguing that this moment can be seen to capture much of the complexity of mobilizing circumscribed place-specific ‘commodity biographies’ for a global product in an era characterized by increased scrutiny of the international division of labour.     

Political Elites and the Culture of Social Movements

While sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to how political elites matter for the emergence and development of social movements, they have focused less explicitly on how political elites matter for the culture of social movements. This essay reviews work that directly and indirectly addresses this relationship, showing how political elites matter for various aspects of movement culture, like collective identity and framing. It also reviews literature that suggests how movement culture comes to impact political elites. The essay concludes by drawing from very recent scholarship to argue that to best understand political elites and the culture of social movements, we need to think about culture and structure as intertwined and to understand how relations matters in the construction of meaning.     

Work,Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India

This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the “strong discourse” of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity‐based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.     

Enchanted: Harry Potter and magical capitalism in urban China

“Pottermania”, or the crazed transnational consumption of the most popular children's fantasy fiction series in publishing history, has swept across urban China. It took place along with the rapid emergence of the country's middle‐class culture since the 1990s, marked primarily by a robust consumer revolution constructed as both reality and global dream. Even before China's official membership in the World Trade Organization began, Harry Potter (translated into Chinese) had been widely popular in affluent urban centers, bringing a foreign cultural impact that accompanies the economic tidal waves promised by the accession to the WTO. This essay explores the relationships between local consumption of a transnational cultural text/intertext and the formation of an emerging social imaginary about the urban Chinese middle class. It suggests that the Potter series promotes an alternating valorization and critique of capitalist consumption, which provides young Chinese readers, growing up in the midst of a consumer revolution, with a dialectic of enchantment. It is argued that this enchantment presents a productive tension with which to theorize the current moment of Chinese consumerist capitalism.     

Expanding exotic forestry and the expansion of a competing use for rural land in New Zealand

Significant areas of rural land in New Zealand have been turned over to non-agricultural use in the last 25 years. This study examines an historically specific development, the expansion of exotic plantation forestry (primarily Pinusradiata), through an interpretive framework which uses categories specific to world capitalist production and to the New Zealand experience. The approach followed considers organisations and their potentially contradictory relations in various spheres of society as the means by which the social uses of land, consistent with capitalist relations of production, may be reached. The paper examines ‘organisations’ in theoretical terms as diverse and constrained social agencies and uses this interpretation when analysing the historical development of rural land use goals in New Zealand. The focus then shifts to contemporary structural relationships, especially in agriculture and forestry.     

Social orders

This review discusses the stability of social orders in light of the recent work Violence and Social Orders by Douglass North, John Wallis and Barry Weingast (hereafter NWW). The purpose of this book was to understand the two great transitions that have occurred in human society. The first, the agricultural revolution, resulted in a transition from hunter–gather society to what NWW call limited access society. This first transition occurred at various times and places, but generally about 10,000 years before the present. The second revolution, the social/industrial/technological revolution, from limited access to what NWW call open access, occurred initially in a few societies, particularly Britain and the United States, within a fairly brief period between 1600 and 1860. Currently, all the West European economies, as well the Western offshoots (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and Japan have crossed the economic threshold of $20,000/capita. However, inequality across the set of all political economies is extreme, and likely to increase. The paper attempts to complement the institutional analysis of NWW, deploying some theoretical ideas from social choice theory, game theory, and economics (particularly the role of factors of production, land, capital and labor). Emphasis is placed on the variation of risk preference between autocrats and other factor groups. The discussion also alludes to the notion of structural stability of dynamical social systems, and the possibility of chaos. It is argued that all the limited access societies face a Malthusian constraint, generated by the pressure of population on land. In such societies, particularly in Africa in the present day, this quandary over land is likely to lead to the exercise of power by risk preferring autocrats who will restrain any move to open access democracy.     

The Teachers’ Page

The latter decades of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth century were full or revolutions and births of new nations, particularly in the Americas. The period has been termed the Age of Revolution. In 2010, Mexico celebrated along with several other countries the two hundred–year celebration of their movement toward independence from Spain. Mexico also celebrated the centennial of their 1910 revolution. Revolutions are catastrophic in their altering of existing social institutions such as government, religion, education, media, labor, and land ownership. Revolutions are also costly in terms of human capital: Many people die, typically the leaders of the insurrection. Others flee the path of destruction and harm, while others eke out an existence until normalcy returns, often years into the future. By definition, a revolution radically changes what is and initiates a process of social change that evolves as the formal and official violence between government forces and the revolutionaries subsides. Often, revolutions result in unforeseen and unexpected consequences for the people. The impact of the Spanish conquest and independence on subsequent generations of various peoples to 2010 is also examined. This article examines the various concepts of revolution, social change, and evolution in tracing the political history of two Mexican “birthdays”: 1810 and 1910. Additionally, this article offers social science teachers the opportunity to further explore other concepts such as conquest and colonialism, race and ethnic identity formation, nationalism, diasporas, genocide, demography, and political generations, for example.     

World revolution or socialism,community by community,in the Anthropocene?

ABSTRACT

The idea of a Fifth International has been around for some time and the historical record is not encouraging. We have all been wrestling with the contradictions the Left faces. The transnational capitalist class has taken setbacks in its stride, while the Left flounders almost everywhere. No communist revolution has resulted in the capture of power by the working class. Now we are all confronted by a new, rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, the Anthropocene. I argue that the most effective response is to exit rather than attempt to overthrow capitalism and the hierarchical state by international revolution. Socialists in positions of authority in state institutions and capitalist enterprises can facilitate this process by enacting legislation that helps people to transition to new smaller-scale non-statist social units, such as producer-consumer co-operatives producing their own food and other essential services over time. Mobilizing the ideas of degrowth, anarching, and consumer-producer cooperatives in the digital age, I argue that under Anthropocene conditions democratic socialism is best constructed from the bottom up, community by community, networked in mutually nurturing relationships.     

A fifth generation of revolution theory?

The study of revolution in historical sociology is conventionally divided into four ‘generations’ of scholarship, with the fourth associated with an agency‐focused approach that departed from an immanent critique of the structuralism they saw in the third. However, the resurgence of revolution in the early 21^st century led to the criticism that even the fourth generation had failed sufficiently to overcome its structuralist limitations. This essay identifies a hitherto unacknowledged ‘fifth’ generation, exemplified in the three works under review, and distinguished by its move away from an object of study conceived as violent social transformation towards non‐violent change of political regime. This focus on revolutions with many friends and few enemies entailed a convergence with democratization and social movement theory, and the post‐Cold War dominance of the United States as global context. That liberal moment now having passed, revolutions have again become far more divisive and class‐based affairs even if they do not propose a programme of profound social transformation, as witnessed in the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring.’     

Seapower and socioeconomic change

The present essay examines the concepts of path dependence and change of political and economic regimes. Starting from the debate of the influence of the so called military revolution on the emergence of modern states, the neglected aspect of the influence of seapower on socioeconomic change is presented, using a formal model. It is maintained that the choice of seapower by a state leads to a different regime than the choice of land military power, because sustainable seapower necessitates a wide alliance of interests, which brings with it more democratic regimes, develops new more efficient and complex forms of organizations, requires the acquisition and diffusion of new knowledge and expertise, which brings with it institutional change and economic growth. The essay concludes with a short presentation of the United Provinces' (the Dutch Republic) turn to the sea.     

The great trasformismo

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the commonalities and differences between Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci in their assessment of the origins of fascism as located within the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and its structural impasse in the twentieth century. Specifically, the aim is to trace a set of associations between Polanyi and Gramsci on the transformations wrought across the states-system of Europe prior to the crises that engulfed capitalism leading to the rise of fascism in the twentieth century. Focusing on the class structures that emerged out of the expansion of capitalism across Europe in the nineteenth century reveals that there was less a ‘great transformation’ in terms of a rupture with the past through the rise of liberal capitalism. Rather, there was more a slow and protracted process of class restoration known as passive revolution, or a ‘Great Trasformismo’, referring to the molecular absorption of class contradictions marking the consolidation and expansion of capitalist social relations. In sum, it is argued that The Great Transformation is understood better if read through the epoch of passive revolution, or The Great Trasformismo, which entailed the restoration and maintenance of class dominance through state power. This approach therefore opens up questions, rather than forecloses answers, about the historical geographies constituting the spaces and places of the political economy of modern capitalism.     

Social Media and Social Movements

What role does social media play in social movements and political unrest? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google have all been cited as important components in social revolutions, including those in Tunisia, Egypt, Iceland, Spain, and the global Occupy movement. This essay explores social science claims about the relationship between social networking and social movements. It examines research done on the relationship between social networking, the promotion of activism, and the offline participation in the streets. Can the technology of social networking help activists to achieve their goals? If so, is it just one of many tools they may use, or is the technology so powerful that the right use will actually tip the scales in favor of the social movement? This scholarship divides into optimistic, pessimistic, and ambivalent approaches, turning on an oft‐repeated question: will the revolution be tweeted?     

Going All the Way: Politicizing,Polarizing, and Radicalizing Identity Offline and Online

This essay conceptualizes radicalization as a collective process that evolves within the context of global, national, or local intergroup tensions. People do not radicalize on their own, but as part of a group in which a collective identity is developed. Some members of the group may take a radical activist route to promote or prevent social change. Their interactions with their opponents intensify, while their ideas and beliefs sharpen. In this essay, I propose an interpretative framework to analyze radicalizing collective identities. The framework departs from the notion that supranational processes shape and mold the micro level of (radicalizing) citizens' demands, the meso level of social movements and political parties, and the macro level of national political systems. The answer to questions such as who radicalizes, why people radicalize, and the forms radical action takes lies in the interaction of supranational processes, national political processes, and the context of political mobilization. It is argued that radicalizing identities are key in this process, no radicalization without identification!     

The Political Dimension in the Agrarian Question: Strategies of Resilience and Political Entrepreneurship of Agrarian Elite Families in a Philippine Province1

ABSTRACT This paper on the rural political sociology of a Philippine province relates the strategies of political resilience of landed oligarchies to the political dimension of the agrarian question in the Philippines. Bukidnon in Northern Mindanao is used to illustrate how pioneer agrarian families have protected their economic privileges and survived the political challenge posed by migrant politicians. Despite differences in their economic bases and social backgrounds, pioneer families and migrant politicians share strategies of political entrepreneurship and rent-seeking that have maintained oligarchic rule: (1) establishment and maintenance of kinship networks, through intermarriage, and non-kinship, ritual ties; (2) diversification into non-agricultural economic activities; (3) control of political parties and state patronage (primarily electoral) machinery; (4) cooptation or mobilization of political symbols, issues, and movements; (5) use of political power to obstruct progressive legislation, particularly on land reform and taxation; and (6) the strategic management of political violence. Analysis of provincial and national political dynamics, as played out in Bukidnon, shows how the nexus of property, power, and privilege is consolidated, contested, and reconstructed in the ongoing competition among Bukidnon elites. These strategies are integral to the political practices of a landed capitalist class and have serious implications for agrarian transition and industrialization in the Philippines.