{"id":16612,"date":"2014-03-30T20:58:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T00:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=16612"},"modified":"2014-03-30T21:01:32","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T01:01:32","slug":"mmt-and-social-movements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2014\/03\/30\/mmt-and-social-movements\/","title":{"rendered":"MMT and Social Movements"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Economic Perspectives<\/em> has the article MMT and Social Movements<\/a>.\u00a0 If you can get through the following excerpt, I ought to give you a bronze medal.\u00a0 If you actually read the article, you get silver.\u00a0 If you read the discussion in the comments, you get gold.\u00a0 If you come away from this with the hint of an understanding of what this conversation is all about, you get platinum.\u00a0 These rewards are all virtual and you are on the honor system in specifying the level of award you claim.<\/p>\n

The Nature of Social Movements<\/p>\n

Since relying upon the historicist political ideology is a core source of oppression, pausing to examine the actual dynamics of progressive social movements is worth their description. When I researched this process, for historical examples, for theoretical statements which seem to satisfy adequacy, applicability, validity, and reliability relative to my direct experience doing community organizing, the best summation I found was in \u201cBeyond Revolution,\u201d by Daniel A. Foss and Ralph Larkin (1986). The core statement they made was in a somewhat dense paragraph, found on page 143:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe difference between a social movement and episodic dissidence is that it builds upon itself in a process of intensification, wherein the hegemonic (dominating) ideology (world view) is rendered problematic (challenged) by dissidents. This \u201creinterpretation of reality\u201d provides the subjective basis for further- and more drastic- action. As social reality is reinterpreted in the struggle, movement participants attempt to reclaim those aspects of human subjectivity that have been alienated from themselves as part of their socialization to positions of social subordination. So long as these three aspects of a social movement are a mutually reinforcing totality \u2013 intensification of a conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, and the redefinition of the self and its capacities \u2013 a social movement is ongoing. Their fragmentation signals the point of the incipient decline has been reached, Such phenomena must be viewed as a whole, since there are often temporary defeats and retreats within the process of intensification of a social movement, as well as phases of overt conflict alternating with cultural (or subjective) intensification\u201d from Foss and Larkin, Beyond Revolution (1986).<\/p>\n

The most effective social movement of the 20th century at least in the US was the US Civil Rights movement. It is also offered as a historical model worth emulating, though its interpretation most often focuses upon the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. The actual back-story closely fits Foss and Larkin\u2019s description in \u201cBeyond Revolution\u201d of a social movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was himself a participant in training for community organizers that was offered by the Highlander Folk School, later known as the Highlander Research Center. The training offered there was led by Myles Horton and Septima Clark. Prior to the establishing of the national significance of the US Civil Rights movement the Highlander Folk school \u201ctrained\u201d some 40,000 people who were distributed mostly across the southern states.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I claim at least gold and perhaps a tad of platinum for myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Economic Perspectives has the article MMT and Social Movements.\u00a0 If you can get through the following excerpt, I ought to give you a bronze medal.\u00a0 If you actually read the article, you get silver.\u00a0 If you read the discussion in the comments, you get gold.\u00a0 If you come away from this with the hint […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16612"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16615,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16612\/revisions\/16615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}