Professors: Igor Filibi and Now Cornago Student: Pablo Ciocchini Course: International Relations, conflict resolution and

democracy Date: 7th January 2008. Review of Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in a Global Field by William K. Carroll The article describes the clash in the international arena of two opposite forces: a hegemonic neoliberal transnational bloc and a counter-hegemonic group of social movements whom shared the vision that contemporary social arrangements are unjust. According to the author, the hegemonic neoliberal bloc is formed by elite policyplanning organizations, transnational corporations, and global-governance organizations, and they main goal is the promotion and maintenance of capitalism with its plain justice vision. However this bloc would have several problems as hegemonic project because its basic mechanisms, including market liberalization, accumulation by dispossession, and densification of capital circuits- do not allow the material concessions that have stabilized class relations during the national-Keynesian era. Therefore it would not be able to success in making feel to its constituent elements that their own interests and aspirations are the reflected in its project. Besides, according to the author, this bloc faces not only the problems of its own contradictions but with the territorial logic of states, expressed in the US imperialism, but regrettably it does not explain in what consists this contradiction. On the other side, the counter-hegemonic force is formed by wide range of subaltern groups opposed to neoliberal capitalism whom claim for social justice. So the author makes four-paired comparisons, each between an organisation of the hegemonic group and one of the counter-hegemonic one. The whole article works with some strong assumptions that at least are controversial. The construction of the world in two separate poles, struggling for imposing their idea seems too much to a recreation of the paradigm of cold war than a real fact. I think that the complexity of world politics and economics do not allow to make this sharp differentiations. The counter-hegemonic bloc includes organizations that are in the opposite extremes, and that even are struggling between them. For example, some of the NGOs human rights fight for imposing a supposedly universal human rights paradigm

regardless the particularities of different cultures. In the other side local and indigenous organizations from non-western societies are fighting to keep and being recognised of their cultural specific identity. A similar case could be found in the matter of child labour. While western children rights NGOs and western trade union organizations demonise as unacceptable in absolute terms child labour, some local organisation of Asian and other under-develop regions strongly oppose to that stigmatisation and denounced that it does not solve the problem looking for an approach that would give to child workers rights. This position of trade unions expressed trough the International Labour Organisation generates suspicious in what is the real goal that they seek in their fight against child labour, whether to improve their lives or to take them out of the market and in that way reducing the offer of labour available. (Liebel, 2007) Another case would be the clash between radical feminist organizations and sexual workers unions. So, is really enough saying that all these organisations are struggling against misdistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation (Carroll, 2007: 36) to justify that they form an emergent counter-hegemonic bloc? Is scientifically useful to reduce all the complexities of the claims of these thousands of organizations in order to conceive this dialectic of hegemonic- counter-hegemonic? Of course we could do the same analyse in the hegemonic bloc. Accepting that the four organizations that the author use for comparing could be identified with the success of a world market economy, would we include in this bloc every organization that do not condemn market economy? If the author accepts that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions fights more for a neo-Keynesian national capitalism, to which extent we could consider it is against this supposedly hegemonic group? How much capitalist should be an organization to consider in one or in the opposite bloc? In my point of view, understanding social-economics dynamics in binary terms is not useful and creates idealised images of the social actors that narrow too much our scope. References Carroll, William K., Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in a Global Field, Studies in Social Justice, Vol. 1, 1, 2007. Liebel, Manfred, The new ILO report on child labour: a success story, or the ILO still at loss?, Opinion, Dialogue, Review, Childhood, Los Angeles, London, SAGE Publications, 2007.