The Global Social Justice Movement and its subterranean afterlife in Europe

Abstract

This chapter argues that the anti-austerity protests in Europe are part of a larger epoch of contention based on particular rhizomatic movement logic. This logic is keyed to the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and novel information and communication technologies, and its beginnings stretch back to connections between movement actors and groups in Latin America and Europe in the 1980s. It provides some illustrations of how the rhizomatic logic impacted the constitutive actors, its internal organizing logic and its movement-building capacity. Anti-austerity protest in Europe can be understood not as a novel movement formation but rather as the subterranean afterlife of the earlier Global Justice Cycle of the 2000s as key characteristics and movement logics are re-appropriated, re-enacted and adapted. In Europe, neoliberal dynamics gained momentum with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in the United Kingdom in 1979 and her defeat of the long miner strike in 1985 as well as her iconic mantra: TINA.