Everyday Resistance: French Activism in the 21st Century [Hardcover]

This book studies those who, in various domains of life, are resisting the increasingly harsh day-to-day pressures of late capitalism, centering mainly on French examples. Far from the global euphoria of the sixties and seventies, everyday people are trying to loosen the grip of injustice in very concrete ways: people experiencing homelessness try to occupy and live in empty buildings; collectives of small farmers and consumers avoid long (and costly) commercial supply chains to defend their common interests; students and teachers organize to prevent the expulsion of undocumented migrants; and activists in the free software movement fight for the common ownership of software and of the Internet. Through civil disobedience in the midst of daily life, people are trying to resist, work against, and change laws that protect the interests of firms and corporations considered socially or ecologically unfair.

1. Introduction: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom?.- 2. Undocumented Families and Political Communities: Parents Fighting Deportations.- 3. From Indicting the Law to Conquering Rights: A Case Study of Gay Movements in Switzerland, Spain and Belgium.- 4. Fighting for Poor Peoples Rights in the French Welfare State.- 5. The Plural Logics of Anti-Capitalist Economic Movements.- 6. The Free Software Community: A Contemporary Space for Reconfiguring Struggles?.- 7. Associations for the Preservation of Small-Scale Farming and Related Organisations.- 8. Ordinary Resistance to Masculine Domination in a Civil Disobedience Movement.- 9. A Zone to Defend: The Utopian Territorial Experiment of Notre Dame des Landes.- 10. Politics Without Politics: Affordances and Limitations of the Solidarity Economys Libertarian Socialist Grammar.- 11. Is The New Activism Really New?.- 12. Conclusion.

Everyday Resistance makes it an especially innovative, interesting, and ultimately useful read for scholars whlƒ(