Organic Intellectuals and Counter-Hegemonic Politics in the Age of Globalisation: The Case of ATTAC.

This paper examines the politics of the social movement ?ATTAC? from a Gramscian perspective. It analyses the origins, organisational structure and political agenda of the movement in France and Germany and goes on to explore its relationship to the broader anti-globalisation movement. ATTAC is revealed as first and foremost a movement of critical, popular education. The paper employs the interrelated concepts of hegemony and ?historic bloc? to further scrutinise ATTAC’s political potential, in terms of both its rapidly expanding and diverse membership and its substantive policy positions. Acknowledging the enormous challenges faced by transnational civic opposition, the authors nonetheless conclude optimistically that ATTAC has a unifying, relatively coherent agenda among its diverse associations and as such may serve as the core movement around which transnational opposition can rally. They caution, however, that the continued success of the movement will ultimately hinge on how well ATTAC embodies Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual, dissolving the distinction between the ‘leaders and the led’, both locally and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]