This thesis deploys world-systems theory to analyze two series of mid-twentieth century wildcat strikes in the Appalachian coalfields: the Eastern Kentucky-based Roving Picket Movement of 1962-1963 and a separate set of unauthorized strikes throughout the region that lasted from 1974-1978, with a particular focus on the Gas Strike of 1974, the strikes surrounding the 1974 Kanawha Country book boycott, and the 1977-1978 contract strike. More specifically, I will examine the New Communist Movement's (NCM) role in these strikes, with special emphasis on the Maoist-inspired Progressive Labor (PL)'s participation in the 1962-1963 strikes and the role of the Miner's Right to Strike Committee (MRSC), a project of the Revolutionary Union/Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s wildcats. I argue that PL and the MRSC's divergent experiences demonstrate the shift from the first to the second anti-systemic movement. PL's experience working with the strikers was more typical of the first anti-systemic movement; the MRSC's experience was more typical of the second anti-systemic movement. The two sets of NCM organizers' varying levels of success, different approaches to the New Social Movements, and different interactions with structural forces at play in the world-system all point to the shift in anti-systemic movements. / Master of Arts

This thesis aims to analyze the social reactions against neoliberalism by using the Polanyian concept of double movement. The goal is to first to understand the nature of alternative globalization movement and provide a better framework of analysis for theorizing these social reactions. The criticisms of the alternative globalization movement against the World Trade Organization will be analyzed in order to provide a specific case example for the concerns and goals of the movement regarding the global political economy. It has been found out that the alternative globalization movement, which signalled a growing concern over the implications of the efforts to form a global free market on the state-society-market relations since the 1980s, forms the second counter-movement that resists the expansion of contemporary self-regulating market.