Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-14-2015
Abstract
This essay presents a conceptual perspective on the dominant and novel logic informing today’s social movement-based counter-power. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the rhizome, this essay analytically accentuating the nature and workings as well as the challenges and shortcomings of contemporary movement-based counter-power.
This “Rhizomatic Movement Logic” has been emerging in conjunction with shifting dynamics of neoliberal capitalism as well as in conversation with older forms of left movement-based counter power. It thrives on multiplicity and thus lacks a dominant core or main axis and emphasizes radical participatory democracy and horizontal organizational forms, media and communication tools, multi-connectivity and heterogeneity of political struggles, with no central actor, issue, strategy, or ideology beyond opposition to a neoliberal society. Moreover, it displays a reluctance to resilient longer-term organizing and (at least in parts of the global north) to making policy demands on the state.
Rights Information
Citation / Publisher Attribution
This essay was submitted as part of TNI's call for papers for its State of Power 2015 report. The essay was not shortlisted for the final report and therefore TNI does not take responsibility for its contents. However the Editorial Board appreciated the essay and it is posted here as recommended reading.
Link to Full Text
https://www.tni.org/en/briefing/conceptualizing-state-movement-based-counter-power
Scholar Commons Citation
Funke, Peter N., "Conceptualizing the State of Movement-Based Counter-power" (2015). Government and International Affairs Faculty Publications. 123.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gia_facpub/123
