Abstract
The concerns with social justice have informed most of the world religions as well as philosophical systems since antiquity. Most such concerns have consisted of debates over the definition of social justice and how states, groups, and individuals should act. But there has been little attention paid to the social factors that determine what constitutes justice and how it might be attained. Such concerns with justice, especially claims of subordinate groups for freedom, agency, respect, recognition, and/or dignity, have long been intertwined with the question of human rights especially since the Magna Carta placed limits on royal power to grant other nobles certain rights. For our purposes, part and parcel of the Enlightenment was its claims that human beings, as such, have certain basic rights. For John Locke, “natural law” entitled all men (sic) to freedom and property. To be sure, his claims were embraced by the rising bourgeois classes that promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, egalité, liberté, fraternité. The realization of these values, qua the basis of justice, often required violent revolutions as in the 13 American colonies, or France.
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Notes
- 1.
Marx had already warned in the Critique of the Gotha Program that reformist measures undermined proletariat’s demands for radical transformation.
- 2.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition 2010).
- 3.
Donatella Della Porta (ed.), The Global Justice Movement: Cross-national and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2007).
- 4.
Jurgen Habermas, “New Social Movements,” telos 49 (1981), pp. 33–37; Claus Offe, “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research 52 (1985), pp. 817–868.
- 5.
See also Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981/1991); Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans, “Introduction,” in Bert Klandermans and Conny Roggeband (eds.), Handbook of Social Movements Across Disciplines (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2010), pp. 1–13.
- 6.
Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2008 [original 1933]).
- 7.
See Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press; 1975); Jurgen Habermas, “New social movements,” telos 49 (September 21, 1981), pp. 33–37; and Claus Offe, “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research 52 (1985), pp. 817–868.
- 8.
Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca, “Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-Opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-Liberal Age,” Political Studies, Vol 62, no. 3 (2014), pp. 634–651.
- 9.
James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 2nd ed. (London: Polity, 2015).
- 10.
Jeff Goodwin and James Jasper, The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2015).
- 11.
James Jasper, Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014).
- 12.
France Fox-Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
- 13.
Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001).
- 14.
Matthew S. Williams. Strategizing Against Sweatshops: The Global Economy, Student Activism and Worker Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018).
- 15.
Oxfam, “Just 8 Men on the Same Wealth Is Half the World” (2017). https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world.
- 16.
Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
- 17.
David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register 40 (2004), pp. 63–87; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 18.
Lauren Langman, “Political Economy and the Normative: Marx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity” in Michael Thompson (ed.), Constructing Marxist Ethics (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
- 19.
This is not to ignore historical precursors, not the least of which was the internationalism of the Soviet Union, or even the then global abolition movements of the nineteenth century.
- 20.
See Xotchitl Leyva Soalno, “Geopolitics of Knowledge in the Neo Zapatista Social Movement Networks,” in Jain Sen, The Movement of Movements (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017).
- 21.
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, “Social Movements Research and the ‘Movement of Movements’: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization” Sociology Compass 1 (2) (2007), pp. 424–442.
- 22.
While as we noted the Internet has been essential for disseminating information, organizing actions, and, as will be seen in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, directing movements in real time, we must not forget that successful SMS do require face-to-face interactions and one function of demonstrations, direct actions such as occupations, is to encourage and/or reinforce social connections. See George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage, A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (London, UK: Verso, 2017); L. A. Kaufman, Direct Action (London, UK: Verso, 2017).
- 23.
Lauren Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice: A Critical Theory of Internetworked Social Movements,” Sociological Theory, 23 (1) (2005), pp. 42–74; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015).
- 24.
Tova Benski, Lauren Langman, Ignacia Perugorria, and Benjamin Tejerina, “From the Streets and Squares to Social Movement Studies: What Have We Learned?” Current Sociology 61 (4) (2013), pp. 541–568.
- 25.
Paul Mason has shown the extent to which neoliberalism in general and privatization in particular led to greater poverty and inequality in the Middle East. Then came the global crisis and the capitalist legitimacy, followed by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, that precipitated the expression of indignation, anger, and rage to the government of Ben Ali, followed shortly thereafter by the massive demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak. See Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012).
- 26.
Guy Standing, “The Precariat: Why It Needs Deliberative Democracy” (2012). https://www.opendemocracy.net/guy-standing/precariat-why-it-needs-deliberative-democracy.
- 27.
Lauren Langman, “From Great Refusals to Wars of Position: Marcuse, Gramsci, and Social Mobilization” in Andrew Lamas, Todd Wolfson and Peter Funke (ed.), The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017), pp. 367–388.
- 28.
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).
- 29.
In some cases however, the movements were able to establish political parties, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, although they had a number of seats in their parliaments, they were little label to impact the economic power of the EU and find debt relief that might enable economic growth.
- 30.
Olivier Bégin-Caouette and Glen A. Jones, “Student Organizations in Canada and Quebec’s ‘Maple Spring,’” Studies in Higher Education 39 (3) (2014), pp. 412–423.
- 31.
David McNally, “University of the Diverse: Working-class Formations and Popular Uprisings from Cochabamba to Cairo.” In Colin Barker, Lawrence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (eds.), Marxism and Social Movements (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
- 32.
See Levin Welch, “Neoliberalism, the Global Capitalist Crisis, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” in this volume, Chap. 10.
- 33.
Anarchism like Marxism seeks to establish a free society based on freedom, solidarity and freely consenting participants. But they reject importance of the State insofar as all states ultimately rest on instruments of coercion—especially when there are great degrees of inequality and the police, if not the military, exist as instruments of coercion.
- 34.
It is notable that BLM not only began as a movement from below, but was founded by three radical black women organizers to contest state sanctioned violence—assassinations—of black people by the police.
- 35.
Joe Fegin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013).
- 36.
One of the less told stories of World War II was how American women flew bombers to combat zones while Russian women, the Night Witches, flew in combat missions (2010). https://www.npr.org/2010/03/09/123773525/female-wwii-pilots-the-original-fly-girls.
- 37.
One of the main precipitants of second wave feminism was the relegation of second class status for women in the anti-war and civil rights movements, “the place for women was on their backs.” See Simone De Bevoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1974) and Betty Freidan, The Feminist Mystique (New York: Vintage, 1963).
- 38.
Valentine Moghadam, Globalization and Social Movements: Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movements (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
- 39.
Jasper James, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
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Langman, L., Benski, T. (2019). Global Justice Movements: Past, Present, and Future. In: Berberoglu, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92354-3_13
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