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This chapter describes seven distinct peaks of consumer activism in the U.S. that coincide with key moments of political action: The American Revolution, the Free Produce Movement, the era of Chinese exclusion, the Progressive Movement, the New Deal period, the Civil Rights and Consumer Movements, and the Global Justice Movement. Consumer activism is an American tradition that has strengthened democracy at key points in U.S. history, with the exception of its infrequent use to suppress the rights of ethnic and racial minorities.

This concluding chapter reexamines the Cyber Left against the backdrop of informational capitalism and history. Through this lens, it discusses indymedia as a precursor to Occupy Wall Street and many of the emergent social movements that have developed since the economic crisis of 2008. It also explains how the core logic and strategy of the Cyber Left played a significant role in the inability of the Global Social Justice Movement to build long-term power. It identifies four interrelated, core problems: (1) a retreat from class and capitalism as analytic and political categories; (2) a tendency toward technological determinism; (3) an anti-institutional bias; and (4) no emphasis on political education and leadership development.

Chapter 2 describes the background of the GJM and the World Social Forum process. A brief overview is given of the organizational aspects and how the concept of network has been used in social movement studies to situate this study in relation to scholars writing on the GJM and the Occupy Movement. Criticism from the outside against the GJM is explored, but also coming from inside the movement. Ethical similarities and organizational differences between the GJM and the Occupy Movement are outlined and explore how activists in these two movements belong within the same broader discourse, focussing on a global economic élite. The chapter ends by relating activists in South Asia and Japan to the GJM and the Occupy Movement and demonstrates how activists in these regions have been marginalized in the movements and largely ignored in the scholarly writings.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to describe and analyze the logic that drives left-based social movements. The book maps the underlying logic of a new figure of resistance—a new sociopolitical formation—as it has materialized across the world. It undertakes this mapping exercise through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the Global Social Justice Movement from 1994 to 2006, with a particular focus on the indymedia movement. It argues that historical and sociocultural patterns connect different periods of political protest. Specifically, it argues that the patterns of struggle in a particular period are best understood as developing, in an ideal sense, through a multilateral dialogue between social-movement actors and both the past and present. The chapter then introduces the term Cyber Left, suggesting that that we are on the cusp of a new stage in left-based social movements. This is followed by an overview of the two parts of the book.

Chapter 6 discusses theories about transnational feminism in South Asia generally, but more specifically it gives an overview of the history of Dalit feminism in India. The central importance of the Mumbai World Social Forum in 2004 is dealt with at length to highlight how Dalit feminists put feminism more generally at the core of the World Social Forum process. This is the chapter where the main ethnography about the local day-to-day work in between World Social Forums among activists and (I)NGO workers is to be found. It takes as its focal point the broader transnational network International Movement against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) and presents three local ethnographies from within this network: first, ethnography from the Feminist Dalit Organization (FEDO) in Kathmandu, Nepal; second, from the office of IMADR–Asia Committee, in Colombo, Sri Lanka; and third, from among Burakumin networks in Osaka, Japan.