Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932360026 ISBN 13: 9781932360028

Publisher: Soft Skull Press, 2004

Synopsis

Confronting Capitalism examines the world wide movement against globalization. The uprising against the World Trade Organization in 1999 was the most visible and dramatic protest in the United States since the Vietnam War. Subsequent protests in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Prague, Cancun and many others, have shown that there is a growing movement opposing globalization. The book roots these events globally in an anti-capitalist history that includes the resistance to the IMF and the neo-liberal project in Venezuela, Korea and Chiapas, the mass organizing campaigns of the nuclear-freeze movement in the 1980s and the innovative direct action tactics of environmentalists in the United States.

Confronting Capitalism is an updated and expanded edition of The Battle of Seattle, originally published in spring2002. The new edition offers updated articles, a new piece by Michael Hardt and reports and theory from the global South, including Nigeria and South Africa. The book features contributions from Naomi Klein, Stanley Aronowitz, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eric Drooker, Barbara Epstein, Alexander Cockburn and many more. An important handbook for in the classroom or on the streets, Confronting Capitalism invites readers to join the intensive debates within the anti-globalization movement and to make some history of their own.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Burton-Rose is the author of Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigadeand the Anti-capitalist Underground of the 1970s and the co-editor of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement, and The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry.

Eddie Yuen teaches in the Urban Studies Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, and is on the editorial board of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. He is one of the authors of Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth. Yuen is also the co-editor, with Daniel Burton-Rose, and George Katsiaficas, of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement and The Battle Of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization.

George Katsiaficas is author or editor of eleven books. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Currently, he is based at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, and at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.

Reviews

Anti-globalization forces came of age in Seattle, sweeping like a tsunami through the city during the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings. This evolving "movement of movements" gets fresh treatment in this revised and updated collection of essays, which was first published as The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization (2002). Described by Yuen as a "series of snapshots and critiques from an unfinished history," the book mixes first-person accounts of defining moments in Seattle, Prague and Genoa with chronicles of lesser-known confrontations in the "global South" and potent analyses of current trends in the struggle between activism and capitalism. Aside from its star-studded roster—contributors include Hakim Bey, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Arundhati Roy and Jeffrey St. Clair—the book’s strongest feature is its incorporation of diverse voices and under-documented issues. Katsiaficas, Manuel Callahan, and David Kubrin upend Americans’ "historical amnesia" with appraisals of pre-Seattle protest; Kristine Wong indicts the movement’s marginalization of people of color; Sophie Style identifies a shift toward regional activism and away from mass protests (which can invite violent police reprisals and provoke targeted organizations to retreat to inaccessible locales). The volume concludes with cogent reflections on "theory and practice in the movement." Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti, in particular, decry the movement’s descent into inarticulate protest "carnivals" and appeal to the American activist left to replace antiquated worldviews with frameworks that supply greater ideological coherence. Readers who enjoy wide-ranging arguments, and who can bear with the volume’s loose organization, will find plenty to mull over here.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Soft Skull Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1932360026
• ISBN 13: 9781932360028
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 420
• Editor: Burton-Rose Daniel, Yuen Eddie, Katsiaficas George