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This paper explores the relationship between social movement protest, economic sabotage, state capitalism, the “Green Scare,” and public forms of political repression. Through a quantitative analysis of direct action activism highlighting the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, the discourse surrounding mechanisms of social change and their impact on state power and capitalist accumulation will be examined. The analyses examines the earth and animal liberation movements, utilizing a Marxist-anarchist lens to illustrate how these non-state actors provide powerful critiques of capital and the state. Specifically, the discussion examines how state-sanctioned violence against these movements represents a return to Foucauldian Monarchical power. A quantitative-qualitative history will be used to argue that the movements’ actions fail to qualify as "terrorism", and to examine the performance of power between the radical left and the state. State repression demonstrates not only the capitalist allegiances between government and industry, but also a sense of capital’s desperation hoping to counter a movement that has produced demonstrable victories by the means of bankrupting and isolating corporations. The government is taking such unconstitutional measures as a ‘talk back’ between the revolutionary potential of these movements’ ideology as well as the challenge they present to state capitalism.
This volume of Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change is divided into two parts. Part I presents a series of cases that tie together narratives of being, knowing and contestation surrounding the claiming of identity for the self or the categorization of the other. It does this by exploring narratives to claim identities and assert agency; showing us the dialectic between dominant forces and those who would challenge existing narratives about place, identity or space.
Part II continues RSMCC’s tradition of cutting edge research in social movement formation, conflict and change. These chapters focus on a wide range of social organizations from immigrant movements, to the occupy struggle, to the narratives around the framing and counter-framing of the radical environmental movement. The volume concludes with two chapters focusing on more recent developments in data gathering and analysis to examine changes in how researchers collect and analyze data.
Each of the nine chapters engages with notions of identity, whether in the examination of the subject or in the reference to the researcher him or herself.
