PROKLA - Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft
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Das Januarerwachen in Nigeria
Get PDFIn January 2012 popular struggles against an unheralded petrol price hike sparked all over Nigeria and gained unprecedented momentum within a few days. From the perspective of an activist engaged in the movement, this article explores the various forms of protest and organization that emerged during this period of social resistance, but also the strategies of the ruling class attempting to curb the unrest. In so doing, the article develops an overall picture of the social forces and the course of events which shaped this new wave of social struggles. While a particular focus of the article lies on the evaluation of the general strike and the developments that led to its suspension, the article concludes with a critical discussion of the prospects of future protests in Nigeria and the possibilities of reviving the dynamic that was unleashed during the ‘January Awakening’
Bürgerprotest in der Mitmachfalle: Wie aus Partizipation eine Herrschaftsmethode gemacht wird
Get PDFPrivate Companies as well as public administration offer more and more possibilities to citizens to participate in the planning and execution process of big projects. Often this is a form to neutralize protest and to implement new forms of domination
Tuareg-Rebellion, Islamismus und Staatskrise in Mali
Get PDFThe root causes of the ongoing crisis in Northern Mali lie in the region’s underdevelopment, exacerbated by longstanding, if recently decreasing, neglect of the central government; the complex social relationship between the largest minority, the Tuareg, and the majority population, which has worsened since a largely unresolved crisis in the 1990s; and the growing interest of a small but growing number of actors involved in the drug trade and other criminal activities in the absence of the state. Among the latter have been a growing number of Jihadists, at first mostly from Algeria, who have been taking Western citizens hostage and therefore caused the US and France to pressure the Malian government to re-establish a presence of the state in the North. The clash was all but inevitable when several thousand heavily armed Tuareg fighters came to Mali after the defeat of Gaddafi in Libya. A new element of the crisis is the growing number of jihadists among the Tuareg rebels and other Malians, but neither Tuareg irredentism nor Islamic fundamentalism has more than minority support in Mali, Northern Mali, or among the Tuareg. The coup d’état against the president, while most likely a spontaneous reaction to the inability of the government to fight the rebellion, uncovered a structural crisis of Malian democracy and society. The disintegration of Mali’s long-praised formal democratic institutions after the coup showed fundamental problems. However, political supporters of the coup who assumed that the population’s tacit support of the coup could be turned into a movement for fundamental social change, had to find that it was largely an opportunistic and diffuse expression of general discontent
Homo-Ehe oder Solidaritätsvertrag?
Get PDFWith the opening of marriage for same-sex couples, respectively the institution of ‘gay marriage’ as a special law, attracting all media attention, the alternative family models debated in the 1990’s have disappeared from view – even though these debates were intense, and it was not at all clear that ‘gay marriage’ would gain acceptance. As even in recent scientific literature the alternative family models are hardly considered, they will be brought into focus here. The following article centers on the model of a ‘family of choice’ and the French PACS as alternatives to same-sex marriage
Keine Zeit mehr: Das Ende des sozialdemokratischen Projekts
Get PDFHis recently published book on the economic crisis Wolfgang Streeck, one of the advisors of the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, is a harsh critique of the trajectory of economic policies parties in Germany followed since the late sixties. The article discusses the arguments and proves the contradictions in Streecks approach. Streecks argues that mass support of the welfare state capitalism in the early seventies eroded. Capital withdrew its trust in democratic capitalism as the compromise between social classes. Thus an unexpected crisis of legitimation began. The state under the leading role of social democratic parties started with measures to ensure the loyalty of the working class but failed in a specific way. Crisis management led to crises on a higher level. Streecks approach claims to be critical. But nevertheless it doesn’t draw the necessary consequences, i.e. a critique of the social democracy that finally turns out to fail as a project: crisis management leads to the recent crisis of the EU and the monetary union. His recommendations: to go back to the ruins of the welfare state are not convincing. The book shows that social democracy confronted with the results of its own policies is perplexed
Was ist mit dem versprochenen Land passiert? Post-Apartheid Südafrika aus der Perspektive Frantz Fanons
Get PDFThis paper reviews post-apartheid South Africa through Fanon’s critical analysis of decolonization. Since, for Fanon, apartheid represented the purest form of the Manichean politics of space that characterizes colonialism, a Fanonian perspective on South Africa asks to what extent has the geographical layout of apartheid been remapped? Addressing this question necessitates shifting the “geography of reason” from technical discourses of policy-makers to the lived reality of the “damned of the earth”. From this perspective, Fanon’s critique becomes relevant in two ways, first as a prism to understand the rise of xenophobic violence as a symptom of the degeneration of the idea of South Africa’s “promised land” and second as a way to listen to a new grassroots shack dweller movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, that is challenging both neoliberal and progressive assumptions by advocating a quite different geographic layout for a “truly democratic” society
Neue Tendenzen in den Sozialstrukturen Lateinamerikas
Get PDFThe first part describes changes at the bottom of Latin American societies, especially the reduction of the poverty rate, the moderate decline of social inequality as well as the decrease of informal modes of labour. These changes are examined against the background of a strong economic expansion during the last decade. In the second part the recent growth of middle class-sectors in various countries is analyzed. In the last chapter the focus is on the ruling classes, who have come up with new forms of active internationalization. A brief discussion of the political implications of these tendencies concludes the article
Der Juni-Aufstand in der Türkei
Get PDFThe article discusses the June Uprising in Turkey in the specific context of neoliberal authoritarianism and Islamic conservatism. It is argued that the occupation of the Gezi-Park and the spontaneous formation of the “Gezi Commune” revealed a communitarian and libertarian political practice in resistance to the accelerated accumulation by dispossession and in opposition to the Kulturkampf tradition fostered by the ruling party
Kritische Gesellschaftstheorie: Analyse der Kräfteverhältnisse oder Zeitdiagnose – mit einem Seitenblick auf die Beiträge von Slavoj Žižek
Get PDFThe article approaches Slavoj Žižeks recent works on the condition of late capitalism in three steps: in the first chapter the approach of Adorno’s cultural critique is presents, in the second chapter Gramsci’s and Poulantzas’ ways of analyzing the relations of class forces. It is argued that both approaches contribute essential and complementary concepts and it would be worth to integrate them in one overall approach. In the third chapter Slavoj Žižek’s work is examined to find out if and in which way it contributes to such an integration
Intersektionalität und marxistische Gesellschaftstheorie: Gesellschaftliche Totalität und die Pluralität gesellschaftlicher Widersprüche
Get PDFIn the last years the concept of ‘intersectionality’ has enjoyed ever greater popularitiy as a way to grasp the interrelations between these multiple forms of oppression and to problematize reductionist accounts of the social that privilege specific contradictions and social struggles over others. Yet intersectional analyses themselves have been critizised by Marxists and Feminists for establishing the connections between different mechanisms of discrimination merely in an empiricist way: Focussing on the microlevel of specific identities and social contexts, intersectional analyses forfeit an understanding of the social as a comprehensive totality. Against this background, the article examines how Marx, Adorno and Althusser conceptualized the notion of totality as part of their social theorizing. Drawing from the works of Himani Bannerji, Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, Ursula Beer and Silvia Federici, this article argues that although Marxist social theorizing has tended to connect the dominance of the economic base with prioritizing the antagonism between capital and labour, it bears the potential to understand multiple forms of oppression as integral parts of the underlying structures of capitalist societies, thereby transcending merely empiricist accounts of the interrelations between multiple forms of domination.In the last years the concept of ‘intersectionality’ has enjoyed ever greater popularitiy as a way to grasp the interrelations between these multiple forms of oppression and to problematize reductionist accounts of the social that privilege specific contradictions and social struggles over others. Yet intersectional analyses themselves have been critizised by Marxists and Feminists for establishing the connections between different mechanisms of discrimination merely in an empiricist way: Focussing on the microlevel of specific identities and social contexts, intersectional analyses forfeit an understanding of the social as a comprehensive totality. Against this background, the article examines how Marx, Adorno and Althusser conceptualized the notion of totality as part of their social theorizing. Drawing from the works of Himani Bannerji, Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, Ursula Beer and Silvia Federici, this article argues that although Marxist social theorizing has tended to connect the dominance of the economic base with prioritizing the antagonism between capital and labour, it bears the potential to understand multiple forms of oppression as integral parts of the underlying structures of capitalist societies, thereby transcending merely empiricist accounts of the interrelations between multiple forms of domination