The Withering of Civil Society

Hardt, Michael

doi:10.2307/466673

Cited by 292 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…But this is precisely my point: the framework of the insurgency-institutionalization dialectic allows us to see that while there is massive social resistance to commodification, countermovements are a tendency and do not move inexorably or mechanistically toward some pre-determined end: Politics always intervene. In an era in which the withering of civil society is not restricted to authoritarian countries but is in fact a global phenomenon (Hardt 1995), such a framework should prove useful in studying the dynamics and difficulties of counter movements in other countries.…”

Section: Insurgency and Institutionalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

Friedman

2013

Theor Soc

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Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the countermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of "appropriated representation," where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China Federation of Trade Unions. However, in drawing on two case studies of strikes in capital-intensive industries in Guangdong province, I show that the relationship between insurgency and institutionalization shifted between 2007 and 2010. Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics Eli Friedman Cornell UniversityAbstract Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the coutermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Spe cifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of "appropriated representation," where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China In this article, I argue that Karl Polanyi's (1944) theory of the countermovement is useful in understanding labor politics in contemporary China-but only to a point. Polanyi claims that an expansion of the self-regulating market, and in particular commodifiction of land, labor, and money, implies the pursuit of a "stark utopia." If followed to its logical conclusion, this economic program would imply the destruction of society and the biosphere. In this conceptualization of the problem, society's revolt against the self-regulating market is born of necessity, since otherwise the world would be destroyed. And such a theory seems to go a long way in explaining what has happened in China over the past 30 years. As market forces were unleashed, social upheavals resulting from the commodification of labor burst on the political scene. In what appeared to be a striking confirmation of Polanyian theory (Wang 2008), the state began to respond by slowing down market reforms and incre...

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Section: Insurgency and Institutionalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

Friedman

2013

Theor Soc

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“…HUD's role in administering homeless populations today emerges, rather, in relation to a context that writers describe as the end of the welfare state, the withering of civil society, or the launch of neoliberalism (Clough, 2004;Rose, 1999;Hardt, 1995;Deleuze, 1992;Burchell et al, 1991). Within this context, contemporary governance is characterized by a re-configuration of the state, the public sphere, and private industry, such that the ability to distinguish one from the other becomes increasingly difficult (Clough, 2007).…”

Section: Managing the Homeless Managing Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

"Universal Data Elements," or the Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations

Willse

2002

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This article explores the development of the Homeless Management Information Systems program by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Launched in 2001, the program mandates data collection by homeless social service agencies receiving federal funds. The program is examined in terms of broader responses to the "electronic turn" in social work. The generative capacities of database management systems are understood as producing surveillance at a register other than the individual subject often presumed in political theories of social control as well as surveillance studies of information technologies. The article argues that we must move toward an understanding of homeless management as a biopolitical enterprise, rather than only a disciplinary one. A discussion of how the HMIS program produces a homeless population as an object of knowledge and plane of intervention provides an understanding of the significance of HMIS for homelessness in the U.S. as well as for surveillance studies more broadly.

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“…For example, the shift from production to consumption has long been heralded as a hallmark of late-capitalism modernity (among many others, see Bocock 1993;Comaroff and Comaroff 2000;Hardt 1995;Miller 1995;Pun 2003). What is interesting is that some societies that are developing social class stratifi cation, such as the one I am about to turn to, may be bypassing the production stage that the industrialized world has experienced.…”

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confidence: 99%

Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of Middle Classes in Tonga

Besnier¹

2009

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A recurrent issue in our understanding of the transformations experienced by Pacifi c Island societies, and societies of the developing world in general, is the extent to which traditional social arrangements (eg, rank-based systems, inequalities predicated on colonialism, or local forms of egalitarianism) are being displaced by social-class structures. A focus on these historical transformations demands that we address what constitutes a social class-an almost unsolvable problem, but nevertheless one for which we are fortunate to have a distinguished intellectual genealogy. The work of two of the founding fathers of modern-day social science, Karl Marx and Max Weber, can be understood as lifelong projects to understand social inequality in the West in terms of social-class stratifi cation. Yet, as social scientists, we continue to have diffi culties apprehending social class, particularly in contexts that are not traditionally viewed as the locus of class hierarchies. This article seeks to address these diffi culties in the context of one Pacifi c Island society, Tonga.The problem is particularly acute when one deals with the middle classes, as opposed to the working or elite classes-those who are betwixtand-between, caught in a liminal position that, like other forms of liminality, are supposed to go one way or another, while in fact they remain in suspension. This suspension is particularly pertinent to the "middleness" of the middle classes and renders their very nature unstable, in contrast to the solidity that Marx attributed to both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, groups whose self-consciousness is fi rmly ingrained in their identities, and who theoretically have little trouble fi nding a common "enemy"

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The Withering of Civil Society

Cited by 292 publications

References 5 publications

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

"Universal Data Elements," or the Biopolitical Life of Homeless Populations

Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of Middle Classes in Tonga

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