Don Kalb, Massimiliano Mollona, eds, <em>Worldwide mobilizations: Class struggles and urban commoning</em>, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 256
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3937
Recensione di Don Kalb, Massimiliano Mollona, eds, Worldwide mobilizations: Class struggles and urban commoning, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 256.
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Don Kalb, Massimiliano Mollona, eds, <em>Worldwide mobilizations: Class struggles and urban commoning</em>, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 256
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Zaira Tiziana Lofranco
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Don Kalb, Massimiliano Mollona, eds, <em>Worldwide mobilizations: Class struggles and urban commoning</em>, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 256
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                                      2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 301-304




                                                                        RECENSIONI
D o n KALB, Massimiliano MOLLONA (eds) | Worldwide mobilizations: Class
struggles and urban commoning, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp.
256.


   The contemporary rise of anti-globalist and populist right-wing
movements and parties has led scholars to formulate retrospective analyses
in order to understand when and where the Left failed to oppose the global
capital and its socio-economic impact. The volume edited by Kalb and
Mollona seeks to answer this question by combining theoretical insights
with ethnographic studies of worldwide mobilizations which took place in
urban contexts shortly before and after 2011. Drawing on the editors’ long
lasting reflection on anthropological political economy issues, the
introduction to the volume suggests that it is useful today to zoom in this
“moment of universalist counter-politics” not only for its significant popular
participation, but also for its short life and inability to gain power.
Understanding its failure might help shedding light on the derailment of
popular insurgency towards “particularistic quasi-counter-politics” of
“deserving majorities” (p. 5).
   The methodological approach of the book capitalizes on this short-lived
Left resurgence for the return of anthropology and neighboring disciplines to
the analytical concept of class. This intellectual positioning is framed by the
editors in a materialist-realist approach as opposed to an idealist one. While
idealists are interested in networks of activists organized in horizontalist
forms of spontaneous gatherings (occupying, assembly), realists tend to
focus more explicitly on workers or peasants, considering the vertical
relations and potential horizontal solidarity in which these subjects are
enmeshed within the “really existing capitalism”. Inspired by Marx’s
relational concept of class and in line with Kalb’s constant attention for
diachronic and systemic analysis, the realists are committed to framing mass


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Zaira Tiziana Lofranco
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 301-304.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3937
302                         DON KALB, MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA (EDS) | WORLDWIDE MOBILIZATIONS


confrontations with the state and capital within historical and large-scale
analysis (p. 10). This peculiar approach is used across the book to unpack
populist arguments (often illustrated with reference to Chantal Mouffe’s and
Ernesto Laclau’s theories) mainly in two ways: challenging the post-
ideological positioning (“neither Left, nor Right”) and filling empty signifiers
like “the people” or “the politicians”.
   Regarding the first point, Sian Lazar questions the middle-class and
national label of Argentina’s mass protests against the corrupted and
financially inefficient Kirchner government, inscribing them in the more
indeterminate socio-economic structure and ideological orientations of the
protesters. The real demarcation line she draws is between traditional
protests by workers’ organizations and current “spontaneous” rebellions,
which lack the capacity to politically articulate social and material demands
in order to gain long-lasting impact. Loperfido’s contribution, focused on
the Italian political scene, similarly reflects on the value attached to
“spontaneity” in the rise of a “Third Way Politics”. He traces back to the
1970s the emergence of anti-systemic movements such as the Spontaneista
one, whose socio-economic roots are to be found in the slow economic
decline of the 1950s and the consequent ascent of a privileged class born
from the alliance between the parties’ establishment and the industrial
capital. This reorganization led to questioning the Left/Right horizontal
political spectrum and to reshuffling loyalties according to a new vertical
axis of internal opposition between “grassroots” and “established” political
actors. Steur’s chapter explores new movements in India denouncing the
moral corruption of the political elite and praising the moral integrity and
transparency of the “Common man”. As in case of the Spontaneista
movement, in the Am Aami (common man) Party’s rhetoric the Right-Left
dichotomy has been replaced by the right-wrong one. However, the Author
points out how the transformation of the movement into a ruling party was
accompanied by contamination and contradictions, including its ideological
shift towards anti-democratic attitude, the intra-party controversy over the
need to prioritize anti-corruption as opposed to anti-accumulation
strategies, and the way political participation in the Party reaffirms class
differences among its members. Hoffman’s contribution focuses on the
Kamaiya, a Western Nepal movement of ex-bonded laborers who received
support from the Maoist party after bonded labor was abolished in 2000.
Therefore, the Kamaiya grassroots movement became a powerful
organization called Freed Kamaiya Society, which, despite its limited
success, deployed “rituals of confrontation with the State” aimed at gaining


2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 301-304
DON KALB, MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA (EDS) | WORLDWIDE MOBILIZATIONS                      303


visibility, subverting structural inequalities, and enforcing the implementation
of the formally acknowledged right to land. Kofti’s chapter on Bulgaria
addresses similar issues from a specific political positioning, i.e. the
electoral abstentionism and lack of political activism of the flexible,
precarious and indebted workers of the industrial city of Pernik. Their refusal
to join the anti-corruption protests in Sofia in 2013-2014 is seen as the
political manifestation of disillusionment with the modern teleology of both
communism and capitalism.
   A second set of contributions stand out for their attention to the political
subjects involved in the uprisings. Kyimulu’s chapter focuses on the
spontaneous gatherings at Gezi park in Istanbul, whose survival has been
threatened by the State and construction oligarchies. He ascribes to so-
called “aggressive” or “authoritarian” urbanism both Turkey’s main growth
engine and the unifying front for a “frictional heterogeneity”, that is, a
socially variegated mass of people opposing the police. Jansen’s attempt at
“reconfiguring the people” taking part in the 2014 Sarajevo winter revolts
places the populist register of the protests within the specific political
scenario of postwar, post-socialist and semi-peripheral Bosnia and
Herzegovina. The “people” are thus identified with a wide middle class
affected by problems of social reproduction, who demands a “State in order”
and social justice, far from having any anti-liberal dimension. Mollona’s
account of the June 2013 revolt in Brazil shows how, from that event onward,
the protestors increasingly came to coincide with a mass of people in which
the threshold between middle class and proletariat was fuzzy. The economic
crisis that struck Brazil engendered the failure of the populist plan to
transform the entire country into middle class and was followed by anti-
labor and extractivist policies promoted by the left ruling party. This led to
cross-sectional discontent channeled along anti-corruption and anti-
inflation arguments that broke out especially in reaction to the organization
of world sport events. Looking at the case of New York, another global city
with a long history of progressivism, Susser carries out a diachronic analysis
that relates evolving social movements to shifting regimes of accumulations
in the city. She shows how since the 1970s the passage from Fordism to
flexible accumulation had entailed a restriction of welfare services
(especially housing) at the detriment of the working and middle classes hit
by gentrification, debt and foreclosures. In this scenario, the strong
traditional labor unions have been replaced by composite movements like
Occupy Wall Street, representing a new way to oppose the divisiveness of the
contemporary “selective hegemony”.


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304                         DON KALB, MASSIMILIANO MOLLONA (EDS) | WORLDWIDE MOBILIZATIONS


   The extremely variegated geographical and political contexts taken into
consideration highlight the ambitious project of this book, which applies a
sound common methodological framework to multiple subjects for
anthropological reflection. Understandably these are not developed to the
same degree in each of the contributions. The urban context in particular,
which runs as a red thread throughout the volume, is not given a central role
in all of the chapters. Instead, it figures generally as a background for
political events and only in a few cases (Kyimulu, Mollona, Susser) as a
specific site of capitalist accumulation. The editors seem to take account of
this only in the afterword where, however, the centrality of the urban
context in the analyzed mobilizations is relativized based on the
consideration that the urban/rural divide is increasingly challenged in the
frame of global processes (p. 229). This unequal focus however, must be
linked to the historicizing and contextualizing effort of the whole volume, in
which worldwide mobilizations are not simplistically explained as a global
phenomenon but rather as “one worldwide wave of regionally embedded
cycles”. Thanks to this peculiar approach, the volume constitutes a
fundamental reading to avoid generalizing accounts of what the editors
deem the increasingly contested but still dominant neoliberalism as well as
commonsensical clues about its local political manifestations.



                                                          Zaira Tiziana LOFRANCO
                                                                 Università di Milano
                                                               zaira.lofranco@unimi.it




2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 301-304
