Podcast: Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age By Professor Michael Burawoy

Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice 
Annual Lecture 2013-14

Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age
Professor Michael Burawoy

University of California, Berkeley
Thursday 16 January 2014
 
The social movements of the last four years -- ranging from the Arab Uprisings to the Indignados, from the land struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America to student movements against the privatization of higher education, from labor struggles to the Occupy Movement -- call for a new social theory that links social movements to state-sponsored commodification of labour, nature, money and knowledge. Built on the shoulders of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, such a new sociology reconstructs Polanyi’s theory for the new century just as he reconstructed Karl Marx's theory of capitalism for the twentieth century. Do these recent social movements add up to a Polanyian “counter-movement” that might arrest and even reverse third-wave marketisation of today? Or do they signal the intensification of third-wave marketisation and the destruction of our planet, a war declared by markets and states on the human species?

To listen the lecture......