Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Social Movements Confront Globalization

About the Book

A new movement of 'anti-globalists', in Time Magazine's words (24 April 2000), now 'oppose corporate dominion over the planet's poor and disfranchised'. Naming the Enemy is the first systematic documentation of this international resistance to transnational corporations and globalization which has so recently burst into the public gaze with the street protests in Seattle, Washington, London and Prague.

A wide and heterogeneous range of social movements now oppose the very fundamentals of market capitalism. Their challenge is beginning, Amory Starr shows, to amount to a sweeping critique of its purposes and practice. She explains how these movements understand their enemies and what sort of future they envision. There are, she suggests, three basic types:

Movements trying to constrain corporate power through democratic institutions and direct action;

Movements attempting a completely different kind of 'globalization from below' in which corporations will be reshaped in the service of new international democratic structures that will be populist, participatory and just;

Movements seeking to delink their localities and communities from the global economy and rebuild instead small-scale socieites in which large corporations have no role at all.

This new phenomenon has received scant media or scholarly attention. But it is likely to become much more important politically as the globalized economy dominated by giant corporations and institutions like the World Bank and IMF fails to deliver on jobs, social justice, Third World development and the environment. The course of this new kind of political struggle will have huge implications for human welfare and civil liberties.

This unique and important book is relevant to activists as well as students and scholars of globalization, new social movements and political economy.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. Structure and Anti-Structure in the Face of Globalization
2. Contestation and Reform
3. Globalization from Below
4. Delinking, Relocalization and Sovereignty
5. PopCulture versus AgriCulture & Other Reflections on the Anti-Corporate Movement
A Partial List of Organizations
Sources
Index

About the Author :
Amory Starr is a Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she studied public art and then did a Master of City Planning, she completed her doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998. Her diverse interests and activities include permaculture and involvement in various community initiatives including co-founding a community currency system and building one of the teaching assistant unions at the University of California. She is the author of several journal articles on development and on urban communities of colour in the United States. She also participates regularly in debate over economic development in local newspaper and public forums. Amory Starr is a Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she studied public art and then did a Master of City Planning, she completed her doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998. Her diverse interests and activities include permaculture and involvement in various community initiatives including co-founding a community currency system and building one of the teaching assistant unions at the University of California. She is the author of several journal articles on development and on urban communities of colour in the United States. She also participates regularly in debate over economic development in local newspaper and public forums.

Review :
A bold, encyclopaedic survey and analysis of international anti-corporate movements... Written succinctly and with flair.