Antisystemic Movements

Antisystemic movements (ASMs) may be defined as political groupings that oppose and resist the prevailing productive forces and relations in a given historical era. Thus, antisystemic movements can be said to have existed throughout human history. Antisystemic movements achieved profound economic and political success in the post-1945 period in overthrowing structures of formal colonialism in the global political economy and establishing the acceptance of social democratic norms of limited wealth redistribution and the state provision of social welfare in rich, developed states. However, they simultaneously failed to achieve their principal objective of transforming the unequal relations of exchange among the different zones of the global political economy. Present-day antisystemic movements have their origins in the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s, many of ...