The Cultural Production of Social Movements

The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a theory of cultural practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and movement organizational structures: “ideological contention.” It is a theory of ideology “from below.” The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the decision-making process internal to social movements—produce knowledge and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change the practices that contribute to how social movements are structured and organized. The Cultural Production of Social Movements theorizes the relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the social worlds they hope to inhabit. Analyzing the Black Panther Party, specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the Party, Operaismo (or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organizational strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theorize class struggles, and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina, this book shows how movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations, mobilizations, and futures. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements ideology is neither a static set of principles, nor is an unconscious orientation towards power and governance. Rather, it is the contentious, democratizing, and deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, struggles, defeats, and victories—that makes the relationship between movements, and what they “mean” conscious to its participants. 

“Too often, we understand ideology solely “from above,” as a strategy of power imposed via the state and media onto the masses below. Ideology, in this sense, is a falsehood, a lie told by those in power, and even much classic literature on the left—from Marxism itself to “ideology critique”—reproduces this one-sided view. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements, Robert Carley does something very different. Rather than viewing ideology “from above,” he turns us on our heads to see it “from below,” from the terrain of movement practices that have always held a more complex view: that ideological production is essential to how we all understand the world, that it isn’t strictly a lie but a form of truth, and that what often goes by the name of “ideological work” is an essential element of radical counter-hegemonic practices today. In so doing, Carley brings together the best theoretical approaches to ideology with the best research in what is often termed contentious politics, enriching both through the concept of ideological contention, and crucially reading social movements not only as passive matter but as having thrown forth important concepts in their own right, as the meanings granted culturally to their activism sediment and gain durability.” —Geo Maher, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School, USA 

“The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a masterful counter account to the dominant structural approaches of contentious collective action. Movements are much more than reactions to larger macro-contexts. In these pages, Carley offers a rich understanding into the agency side of activism, including how repertoires, organizational forms, and frames are produced in the actual heat of struggle and behind the scenes in day-to-day deliberations by participants. The empirically rich study draws on cases from North America and other world regions. Engagement with this work enriches students and scholars alike by giving proper credit and recognition to the specific types of knowledge generated by social movements.” 
—Paul Almeida, University of California, Merced, USA

Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Affairs in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is Vice President and President Elect of the Cultural Studies Association and is co-editor of Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. He is the author and editor of eight books, most recently Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, Forthcoming), Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy (Palgrave Macmillan), and Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (State University of New York Press).