Fomenting the Radical Imagination with Movements From the authors: Our book, The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (Zed Books, 2014), is a set of reflections on an experiment. Our experiment began, as most do, with questions. What if researchers studying social movements understood their role as less about gathering reliable data to share with other scholars and more about catalyzing and convoking the radical imagination? What if, instead of distanced observers, researchers understood themselves to be integral, generative and critical parts of how movements reproduced themselves? What if researchers — and here we don’t just mean gainfully employed academics but something far broader — were committed to enlivening and empowering those most important forces for social transformation: the social movements which, though sidelined and belittled in mainstream history, are and have always been the motors of historical change? What if we saw ourselves and our work as borrowed from a future that we must, in turn, help usher into being? We began The Radical Imagination Project in 2010 with two key theoretical assumptions. The first is that social movements are, at their hearts, animated by the radical imagination. The radical imagination is not a thing one can possess, no matter how “outside the box” one’s own personal thinking is or how many clever books one has read (or written). The radical imagination is a collective process, it’s something we do together. It is a shared landscape of political refusal, a mutually reinforcing agreement to question the social order and the roots of exploitation, inequality and oppression. It is a constant, always unfinished process and while it may occasionally crystallize into a particularly inspiring idea, or a particularly acute theory, or a particularly compelling text, these are the products of (and, in turn, help reproduce) a subterranean flow of ideas, arguments, relationships, organizational forms and shared memories. A double crisis of social movement reproduction The second assumption is that today social movements are caught in what we characterize as a “double crisis” of social reproduction. For Marxist-feminist philosophers like Silvia Federici, a critical understanding of contemporary capitalism needs to be based on an analysis not only of the forces of production (labor, capital, machines, globalization, economics, etc.), but also the way these depend on and are interwoven with the forces of social reproduction — that labor that produces social beings and social life itself. Beyond merely the bearing and raising of children (the next generation of workers who will produce surplus value for capital), reproduction also speaks to that much broader field of social norms, institutions, practices and relationships that make human life possible. In this sense, capitalism has always fundamentally relied on and enabled patriarchy to harness and exploit women’s reproductive labors in the home, though recently we have seen the expansive commodification of reproductive labor in the still largely feminized (and, hence, devalued) service sector. At the same time, we have seen the current crisis-ridden form of neoliberal capitalism enclose or extinguish many forms of common life-support (the privatization of services, the eviction of people from land, environmental destruction, the attack on unions and wages, etc.), which has led to a widespread crisis of reproduction in society at large. Simply put, in this age of austerity, the reckless reproduction and acceleration of capitalism comes at the expense of the reproduction of our lives, with untold millions being made to pay the costs of capitalist-driven climate change, or of the austerity policies aimed at stabilizing the capitalist economy in the wake of the financial crisis. (more at link) popularresistance.org/fomenting-the-radical-imagination-with-movements/
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 17:16:16 +0000
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