Impossible organisations: anarchism and organisational praxis

Organisational scholarship tends to focus its attention mainly on conventional work organisations and so neglects the organisational practices and principles of other sites of organising. The paper considers the implications of this limited focus even within more critical scholarship through a close reading of a recent paper calling for a greater engagement with social movements. Specifically, I consider problems of understanding a phenomenon in terms of what it is not and evaluating alternative sites of organisation using conventional categories of analysis. I then go on to outline the potential contribution of anarchist theory and its enactment by recent anti-capitalist movements. These radically different approaches to organisation are evaluated and I argue that they present a profound challenge to mainstream assumptions. The paper concludes that critical organisational theory has much to learn from an engagement with such alternative sites of organisation but only if a determined attempt is made to move beyond the usual theoretical frameworks and that anarchist theory may help us do this

Constructing 'the anti-globalisation movement'

This article interrogates the claim that a transnational anti-globalisation social movement has emerged. I draw on constructivist social movement theory, globalisation studies, feminist praxis and activist websites to make two main arguments, mapping on to the two parts of the article. First, a movement has indeed emerged, albeit in a highly contested and complex form with activists, opponents and commentators constructing competing movement identities. This article is itself complicit in such a process – and seeks to further a particular construction of the movement as a site of radical-democratic politics. Second, the movement is not anti-globalisation in any straightforward sense. Focusing their opposition on globalised neoliberalism and corporate power, activists represent their movement either as anti-capitalist or as constructing alternative kinds of globalised relationships. Threading through both my arguments is a normative plea to confront the diverse relations of power involved in both globalisation and movement construction in order that globalised solidarities be truly democratic. This is to challenge hierarchical visions of how best to construct ‘the anti-globalisation movement’

Open education: common(s), commonism and the new common wealth

Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important aspect of this movement is a reinvigoration of the concept of ‘the commons’. The paper examines this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education and the underlying notion of ‘the commons’ to the test of critical political economy. The paper acknowledges the radical possibility of the idea of ‘the commons’, but argues that its radical potentiality can be undermined by a preoccupation with ‘the freedom of things rather than with the freedom of labour’. The paper presents an interpretation of ‘the commons’ based on the concept of ‘living knowledge’ and ‘autonomous institutionality’ (Roggero, 2011), and offers the Social Science Centre in the UK, as an example of an ‘institution of the common’1. The paper concludes by arguing the most radical revision of the concept of ‘the common’ involves a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes social or common wealth

Rethinking globalised resistance : feminist activism and critical theorising in international relations

This article argues that a feminist approach to the 'politics of resistance' offers a number of important empirical insights which, in turn, open up lines of theoretical inquiry which critical theorists in IR would do well to explore. Concretely, we draw on our ongoing research into feminist 'anti-globalisation' activism to rethink the nature of the subject of the politics of resistance, the conditions under which resistance emerges and how resistance is enacted and expressed. We begin by discussing the relationship of feminism to critical IR theory as a way of situating and explaining the focus and approach of our research project. We then summarise our key empirical arguments regarding the emergence, structure, beliefs, identities and practices of feminist 'anti-globalisation' activism before exploring the implications of these for a renewed critical theoretical agenda in IR

Equity trend prediction with neural networks

This paper presents results of neural network based trend prediction for equity markets. Raw equity exchange data is pre-processed before being fed into a series of neural networks. The use of Self Organising Maps (SOM) is investigated as a data classification method to limit neural network inputs and training data requirements. The resulting primary simulation is a neural network that can prediction whether the next trading period will be, on average, higher or lower than the current. Combinations of pre-processing and feature extracting SOM’s are investigated to determine the more optimal system configuration

Alain de Benoist’s anti-political philosophy beyond Left and Right: non-emancipatory responses to globalisation and crisis

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and critique non-emancipatory and anti-political forms of opposition to globalisation and to the current Eurozone management of the global financial crisis. It will question, amongst other themes, critiques of globalisation that present themselves as mere critiques of capitalist excess or capital’s ‘transnational’ form. This opens up the problem of the national/global antinomy as well as of responses that contain a nationalist or traditionalist element. The paper draws primarily on a critical discussion of the work of ‘European New Right’ philosopher Alain de Benoist. In de Benoist’s writings it detects an anti-political rejection of the political divide between left and right, which aligns it with contemporary neo-fascist opposition to the Eurozone crisis. The paper will reflect upon this alignment through a discussion of Marxist critical theory, putting forward the argument that capitalist processes must be understood as non-personal domination rather than as a system of individual greed or wilful exploitation. This should also open up the possibility to re-evaluate some of the recent progressive, yet largely populist, movement mobilisations directed at the crisis

Feminist studies of globalisation : beyond gender, beyond economism?

This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the 'new wave' of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a key factor. It also identifies a parallel feminist tendency to neglect non-feminist efforts to develop non-economistic analyses of globalisation. Part III seeks to pinpoint the originality of the contribution of feminism. Although the most obvious starting point for such an evaluation is an emphasis upon gender, the feminist contribution is not reducible to this. Feminists have integrated gender analyses into accounts of multiple, intersecting relations of global power. They also offer distinctive analyses of the relation between the local and the global and the character of agency and resistance. The article indicates that the feminist response to economism still remains incomplete. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that feminist insights pose a significant challenge to non-feminist accounts of globalisation and to those organising within and against global power relations

Analysing development to shape the future

This article links theory and politics in a systematic way by proposing Is-Shall-Do as a didactical model for analysing a concrete conjuncture, relating it to the desired future in the form of a concrete utopia. Aware of structural limits and potential space of manoeuvre for political agency adequate practical steps to implement the concrete utopia are elaborated. The paper is divided in a first section which exposes three interwoven aspects of development: the the idea of a good life, the complexity and multi-dimensionality of development and the relationship of knowledge and power. Section two exposes the model of Is-Shall-Do abstractly, while section 3 exemplifies it by exposing the challenges for the European left. The analysis of conjuncture as a concrete analysis of a concrete situation is centred in Europe today on the topic of inequality produced by finance-based accumulation. As the concrete utopia of a good life , the authors propose the values of the French revolution, freedom, equality and solidarity which are unfulfilled promises of European development. The paper ends with a plea for organising democratic and egalitarian alternatives. (...) (authors' abstract)Series: SRE - Discussion Paper