Abstract
Social movement scholars have rarely paid attention to the transformations of capitalism as factors of social movement formation processes. This paper makes two different but complementary contributions. First, we provide a macro-social theory that connects the emergence of social movements to the capital circuit in order to embed social movement formation processes into the structural dynamics of capitalism. Exploring such dynamics is helpful to the understanding of social movements if one only looks at them by highlighting their socio-political—and not only merely economic—nature. Secondly, we show how and to what extent some institutional transformations involving the politics of advanced capitalist societies have been affected by the capital circuit and vice versa. More notably, we argue that these transformations have given rise to a political field centered on the ambivalence between two poles, namely, a regressive-oligarchic and a participative-mobilizing one, which is the domain of populist politics today.
Introduction
The sociology of social movements has established itself as an institutionalized field of study over the last three decades (Diani and Cisar, 2014). Three theoretical perspectives—the “resource mobilization theory,” the “political process theory,” and the study of social networks and social capital as a premise for collective mobilization (della Porta and Diani, 2006)—have merged to form a shared theoretical paradigm of social movements, which McAdam (2005) has called “structural factors of mobilization.” This paradigm emerged in the 1980s, to address the theoretical problems that the former Marxist and structural-functionalist perspectives left unresolved, especially regarding the ability to explain the transition from “objective” and macro-causes to conflict and collective action, that is, from structure to agency. In the last three decades, research has been consequently focused on the side of agency, that is, on the structure of political opportunities perceived by movement actors, on the resources that protest entrepreneurs are able to mobilize, as well as the kind of capital (political, cultural, social, symbolic) on which these resources are based. Each of the constituent elements of the “structural factors of mobilization” paradigm has been criticized (della Porta, 2015; Goodwin and Jasper, 2004; McAdam et al., 2001). Paradoxically, the main line of criticism has been identified with the alleged “hyper-structuralism” of the paradigm (Goodwin and Jasper, 2004), which would underrate the specific cultures, identities, contexts, and political traditions from, and by, which protest cycles emerge.
However, the “structure” to which the paradigm of structural factors of mobilization refers only concerns the resources and opportunities available to social movements (considered as a “structure” on which the possibilities for movements’ emergence rely), and not the macro-social dynamics and the main vectors of social change. Therefore, paradoxically, criticisms to the paradigm—by questioning its excessive “structuralism”—even radicalized the scarce consideration for macro-social dynamics in social movement studies. Little attention has been paid to how the transformation processes of social structures have shaped the opening (or closure) of political structures, the societal resonance of movement frames, the expansion (or compression) of networks and mobilization resources, and the role of protest entrepreneurs. In this field of studies, any reference to the term “social structure” is often labeled as reductionism or determinism.
The time seems ripe to contrast this accusation of reductionism. In the paper, we argue that bringing a macro-social perspective in the study of social movements and political conflicts is a necessary step to take. To do so, we show how and to what extent the dynamism of social and economic structures plays a fundamental role in the social movement formation processes. More notably, we assert that the process of capital circulation is key to explaining the rise and development of the present and past forms of mobilization. Thus, the first part of the paper (i.e. the following two sections) will focus on the relationship between the motion of the capital circuit and the processes of social movement formation. However, our contribution is not limited to delve deeper into the relationship between macroeconomic dynamics and the emergence of social movements. Indeed, capitalism does not coincide with the economic sphere. Capitalism is the social formation itself, that is, the ever-changing social subsystems and the relationships among them taken as a whole. In the second part of this article, our aim is to delve deeper into this perspective, that we consider complementary to the first part. “Bringing back capitalism” into social movement studies does not only mean considering the class composition of social movements and their causal correlations with economic policies and cycles (which is the approach leading the most recent attempts to reintroduce capitalism into social movement studies), but, more broadly, analyzing which processes, which rhetoric and organizational forms the economic, political, and media system share with each other. In short, we are looking for social isomorphisms that condition the emergence and the forms of movements and political organizations. Therefore, the second part of the paper (sections “The current dual form of power” and “From structure to collective action”) will deal with the complex and ambivalent relationships between economic, political, and media dimension occurring in advanced capitalism, as well as the way in which these relationships contribute to the emergence of a political field where new forms of collective action and political organization take form.
On the Main Hypotheses of Social Movement Research
As Flacks (2004) has noted, contemporary work in social movement studies has established only few connections between macroeconomic conditions and political opportunity. This literature has tended to cut out any concern for political economy as a key part of the picture of mobilizations (Buechler, 2000). According to Hetland and Goodwin (2013), the result of such a lack of interest in political economy has prevented the development of causal mechanisms linked to the dynamics of capitalism. The fact that one of the most significant and exhaustive contributions of the field in depicting the causal mechanisms for movement mobilizations, Dynamics of Contention, does not include the presence of mechanisms related to capitalism and its dynamics of transformation is no coincidence (McAdam et al., 2001).
Contrasting such a trend, this paper constitutes one of the first attempts to shed light on the role that the structural transformations of capitalism play in the emergence of social movements. This is the direction toward which a recent and important bulk of studies of social movement is also moving (Barker et al., 2013, Cini et al., 2017; della Porta, 2015, Hetland and Goodwin, 2013, Peterson et al., 2015). There is a certain agreement among these scholars on the fact that the recent wave of mobilizations has questioned the “structural factors of mobilization” paradigm (della Porta, 2015). Some of its analytical and conceptual tools no longer seem effective in accounting for the factors triggering current mobilizations. More specifically, we argue that the traditional hypotheses on the political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes of social movements do not explain the rise and development of the mobilizations of the “Great Recession.” Firstly, social movement studies have put forward the proposition that protest increases when political opportunities are more open, especially when allies emerge in the political context. Nevertheless, in 2011, as European governments adopted austerity policies to address the financial crisis, strong mobilizations challenged closed national and local opportunity structures. Political opportunities for these protests were inauspicious, with traditional allies such as mainstream leftist parties often turning into opponents; rather, protest itself triggered electoral turbulence and turmoil in party systems.
Secondly, as for the mobilizing structures, the hypothesis advanced in the relevant literature was that contentious politics needs dense networks of relations to support massive recruitment (McAdam, 1982). In partial contrast to these expectations, movements that developed since 2011 did not use many of the resources previously available to social movements, as these had been targeted and partially destroyed by the development of neoliberalism. During recent years, unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social movement organizations, and civil society have been weakened. Material resources and symbolic recognition have been lost in the retrenchment of the welfare state that accompanied economic neoliberalism. As della Porta (2015) noted, recent movements have been triggered more by the logic of aggregating individuals than by organizational networking. Consequently, research should address the ways in which socioeconomic transformations affect novel organizational dynamics and the central understanding of emerging forms of popular politics. Thirdly, social movement research has traditionally argued that the elaboration of framings is an important task in order to develop collective identities and solidarities, as it helps to involve a larger number of people in the mobilization process (Snow, 2004). Nonetheless, with the advent of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2007), solidarity framings and identification processes have been weakened. To a large extent, people who mobilized in Puerta del Sol, Syntagma Square or Gezi Park, or in widespread campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, were from social groups endowed with few resources for building collective identities: not only were they heterogeneous, but they were perceived—and perceived themselves—as the losers of the neoliberal globalization.
Since the above propositions do not seem able to make sense of the mobilizations during the Great Recession, assumptions about the role of political opportunities, resource mobilization, and framing processes require an in-depth rethinking. In our view, it is no longer possible to look at these processes without anchoring them on the structural transformations shaping capitalism. More notably, one cannot point out the relations between social movements and structural change in a social organization based upon capitalist production without studying the internal mechanisms of motion of capitalism itself.
Mobilization Cycles and Movement Types: A Counter-narration
The scarce scholarly attention devoted to the connections between the capitalist transformations of social structures and the formation processes of social movements is one of the main reasons behind the limited capacity of social movement research to fully understand the recent waves of protest. For us, this omission is the result of the very narrow definition of capitalism that mainstream scholars of social movements have adopted in their studies. For several of these scholars, capitalism was mostly identified with Fordism, an organization of capitalist production where the conflict between the industrial working class and its employers was central. In such interpretations, capitalism was associated with industrial society (see, for instance, Melucci, 1996; Touraine, 1988). With the crisis of such society, a decline of research interest in capitalism and the class struggle characterizing it (i.e. industrial capital vs. labor) thus appeared to be the logical outcome. Once this wave of struggles declined in terms of protest events and of unions’ power, the scholarly interest in these movements and processes and thus in capitalism also declined.
We claim that the industrialist understanding of capitalism has prevented social movement scholars from recognizing the dynamics of evolution internal to capitalism after the crisis of industrial society. This understanding has limited the capacity to see the strictly non-labor movements of the 1970s and 1980s as being embedded into the dynamics of capitalist transformation. Research on social movements flourished in the 1980s with studies on the mobilizations of students, black people, women, and on community and ethnic conflicts, which were understood as “new” or “post-materialist” in the sense of being different from the struggles of the “old” labor movement focused on “bread-and-butter” issues, and thus as being explainable outside capitalism. These scholars identified capitalism with the economic sphere and the struggles carried out by the labor movement.
However, capitalism is not only the sphere of production, but it is a broader “historical system” (Wallerstein, 1998), which needs to be grasped globally and in all its transformations (Streeck, 2012). In other words, capitalism is a dynamic social system whose mechanisms of motion shape all society, co-determining its evolution (Harvey, 2017). Wallerstein (2006) and Harvey (2017), for instance, noted how the structural crisis of Fordism in the early 1970s, which led thereafter to its ultimate collapse, gave rise to a new capitalist system, based on a different regime of accumulation, which soon informed all the manifold spheres of society. 1 Relying on these intuitions, we see the structural transformations occurring to contemporary society as the result of the endless motion of capitalist development based on capital accumulation (Cini et al., 2017). Furthermore, and this represents the main theoretical contribution of the paper, such a motion also molds the emergence and development of social movements.
More notably, resorting to the vision of the capital cycle first sketched out by Marx in the Introduction of the Grundrisse (1973 [1857]), we argue that in order to make sense of social movement formation processes, we need to link them to the dynamics of capital circulation. In the Grundrisse, Marx illustrates his “holistic approach” to social reality through which he aims at exploring the rise of capitalism. By holistic approach, Marx means the adoption of a conception of reality understood “as a totality composed of internally related parts” (Ollman, 2003), whose constant interaction and development determine the transformation of the whole itself (i.e. capitalism). More specifically, such related parts form the “fundamental processes within the overall circulation process of capital” (Harvey, 2017: 20). Adopting the holistic notion of capital circulation, Marx explains the transformations internal to the capitalist mode of production as the result of the motion and transformation of capital through the various parts (or phases) of the capitalist process, namely production (or valorization), distribution, exchange (or realization), and consumption. In his words:
Production creates the objects which correspond to the given needs; distribution determines the relation in which products fall to individuals (the amount); exchange determines the production in which the individual demands the portion allotted to him by distribution; and finally, in consumption, the product steps outside this social movement and becomes a direct object of individual need (Marx, 1973: 89).
In the valorization process, capital is produced in the form of commodities (and services); in realization, it is transformed back into the money form through the market exchange of commodities; in distribution, capital is distributed among various claimants; and finally, in consumption, most of the commodities and services are consumed, while some of them are converted back into money capital from whence a new process of valorization starts over. These four processes all together depict what we can define as the Marxian holistic approach to the capitalist cycle.
We assert that the adoption of this approach can help us to better grasp the socioeconomic roots of the social movement formation processes. These processes are connected to the four processes of the capitalist cycle (namely, production, distribution, realization, and consumption). Yet, building on the work of various Marxist-Feminists (especially, Federici, 2004), we added up a fifth process to the capital cycle, which we consider as important as the other four for the reproduction of capitalism itself and another important source for social struggles, which is the “social reproduction” process. Broadly speaking, by social reproduction, we mean the process of reproduction of the workforce; in other words the reproduction of the socio-cultural and affective conditions needed for the sustenance of the workers’ lives and of their families.
In our view, the five processes forming the capitalist cycle constitute the structuring conditions for the potential emergence of a specific type of social movement. We provide a visualization of these connections in Table 1. The table provides a conceptual map on how the five processes of the capitalist cycle potentially give rise to several and distinct issues of social struggle, from which different movement actors emerge. 2
Social Movement Formation Processes Within Capitalist Society.
Historically, labor movements have occurred and developed as the result of a tension between buyers (i.e. employers) and sellers (i.e. workers) of labor power at the point of production (i.e. workplace). Workers have traditionally mobilized to oppose the managerial control and firms' work organization and to gain better professional conditions (i.e. higher wages, legal protection, social insurances and benefits, pensions, and so on). The workers’ struggles, supported and organized by trade unions, against the Fordist organization of labor and production during the “glory days” of industrial society are considered a key example of these movements (Crouch, 2004). The fact that these mobilizations were related to the economic sphere of the working conditions made them easily identifiable with the capitalist dynamics of transformation. It was mostly for this reason that workers’ movements were considered a capitalist-related phenomenon par excellence. It is not a coincidence that these movements have been the most empirically and theoretically explored by sociological literature over the past century.
Struggles arising at the point of realization focus on the potentially conflicting relations between various types of buyers and sellers (i.e. of labor power, assets, commodities and services), whose explicit manifestation often trigger fights against predatory practices and accumulation by dispossession in the market place (Harvey, 2017). Dispossession means the permanent inclination of capitalism to expand itself through the conquest and/or creation of external terrains, both natural and social, which are to be subjected to marketization. As stated in The Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005: 2): “If markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, healthcare, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created.” This means placing the process of dispossession at the center of the dynamics of capitalist transformation. By incorporating dispossession into the theory of capital circulation, one then can conceptualize colonialism and imperialism as constitutive elements of the development of capitalism (Pradella, 2017). Yet, the expansion and intensification of market relations and conditions in social life trigger, in turn, processes of social resistance. The emergence of these processes in various (social and natural) terrains lays the foundation of specific struggles. Among which, one can mention: the mobilizations against the gentrification of neighborhoods; the environmental movements; the anticolonial and peasant movements (Chakrabarty, 2000). Although they have recently drawn an increased scholarly attention, these mobilizations have not been exhaustively theorized yet.
Struggles over distribution address the issue of redistribution of the social and economic wealth produced by the capitalist organization of society among the various types of producers (and non-producers). Historically, these struggles have emerged and revolved around the creation and development of political institutions, which in modern society have been in charge of the promotion of economic development and social distribution (Evans et al., 1985). More specifically, the study of these struggles requires analyzing the formation processes of the political and institutional settings associated with the rise and development of capitalism (Tilly, 1978). The rise and development of political movements and parties, which promoted campaigns and mobilizations involving the rights to public pensions, healthcare, and education systems after World War II and which led to the establishment of the welfare state (Arrighi et al., 1989), can be considered as a representative example of these struggles. Unlike workers’ mobilizations, struggles over redistribution have not been well theorized from a critical perspective and have only attracted relatively little scholarly attention.
Insofar, as market relations colonize and subsume an increasing number of aspects of social life to their profit-led logic, various struggles and practices for the decommodification of goods, services, and even social relations emerge. Mobilizations triggered by the consumption process arise whenever the expansion and intensification of consumerist relations take place in social life. This seems to be the case of the global wave of student protests that have recently arisen against the process of privatization of higher education. Student protests, which took place in several countries across the world, ranging from South Korea and India in Asia, Chile and Mexico in South America, Canada and the USA in North America, to South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and Italy, UK, and Germany in Europe (Brooks, 2016), questioned the commodification of social relations and services in the field of higher education (della Porta et al., 2020). The creation and proliferation of alternative channels of consumption—such as the political practices of fair trade between countries of the Global North and South or those of commodity boycotts of transnational firms—represent another example of this type of struggles. Although these mobilizations have been relatively sporadic and normally involved low numbers of people, they have gained a symbolically high political significance over the last two decades. Nonetheless, a limited number of theoretical and empirical studies have been produced on them.
Finally, concerning the process of social reproduction, the struggles over the reproduction of the socio-cultural and affective conditions needed for the sustenance of the workers’ lives and of their families have played an important role in the overall motion of capital circulation. More notably, the sphere of social reproduction has been, par excellence, the political site of different waves of feminist and women’s struggles in the second half of the past century. The mobilizations against free labor and for the recognition of domestic labor as well as for a stronger political role of women in society in the early-1970s have been key in questioning and superseding the process of reproduction of the Fordist system (Casalini, 2017). Over the last two decades, mobilizations over issues of reproduction have apparently taken on a less materialistic inclination with their focus on issues of social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, and family by shifting the political focus from aspects related to the labor process to those related to the quality of social and cultural life. Whereas the scholarly and political literature on these struggles is now very broad, it has produced a vast array of controversial theorizations and perspectives.
The adoption of this holistic approach in the study of social movements helps theorize and better observe the connections between the various transformations of the capitalist structures and the different patterns of social movement making. In other words, such an approach teaches to look at and explain the different types of social movements as emerging from and identified with the various processes of the capital cycle. When a tension on a specific issue embedded in/derived from the motion of the capital cycle arises, a social movement formation process may take place and its unfolding can also result in a process of political institutionalization of the social conflict. 3
The main lesson that one can derive from this is that social movements exhibit different goals and demands, adopt different action repertoires and frames, and follow different political trajectories, based on the specific process of capital circulation in which they are embedded. The main political corollary of this lesson is that the various types of social movements call for different types of alliances and strategies if they are to be politically successful. For instance, workers have historically organized themselves in trade unions to exert social power by adopting the strike as the main political strategy within the labor process. By contrast, women have built more flexible and horizontal organizations in their various struggles by displaying a diverse array of strategies (from the most conventional to the most disruptive ones) to exert influence on the cultural and political life of their society. We affirm that to make sense of this variety of movements, analyzing their different processes of formation is necessary given that each movement making implies a specific mechanism of explanation (Harvey, 2017).
The Current Dual Form of Power: The Regressive-Oligarchic and the Participative-Mobilizing Pole
Although we consider the introduction of the capital circulation approach as key to embed protest politics into the transformations of the capitalist structures, we believe that such introduction is insufficient to understand their rise, trajectory, and decline without falling into an economistic trap (see also Cini et al., 2017). By highlighting the relation between the phases of the capital cycle and the social movement formation processes, we did not mean that the former necessarily determines the latter, as the capitalist circuit per se does not set mobilizations in motion. The capital cycle shapes the conditions within which mobilization processes emerge, although the latter are always mediated by other contextual factors that can inhibit and/or prevent the emergence of mobilizations. Therefore, exploring the structural transformations of capitalist society is only a helpful task in studying contemporary mobilizations if we broaden our understanding of such structures by showing their complex social nature. They are not only the result of economic processes but also of political and social dynamics at large. Accordingly, to grasp the emergence of social movements today, we need to look at the nexus between the dynamics of the capital circuit and the political-cultural structures of contemporary society. Consistently with this integrated approach, we will address the following questions: In what ways today are the economic, political, and media institutions connected to each other? How and to what extent do such connections contribute to determine “structural contexts of opportunities” for social movement action? Firstly, we will analyze some fundamental processes occurring in the political sphere, and secondly, in the worlds of economy and media.
Oligarchy, Mobilization, and Participation in Contemporary Politics
Building on the dialectical interpretation of capitalism (Ollman, 2003), we claim that the political structure of today’s power consists of two different and complementary poles. By political structure we mean the processes, discourses, and rhetoric through which power is exerted by public and private institutions (Foucault, 1982). We identify the first pole as regressive-oligarchic, while the second one as participative-mobilizing. Both constitute the essential elements of the contemporary structure of political power, in forms and through reciprocal relationships that we will clarify.
The “regressive-oligarchic pole” is identified with specific processes that, according to a vast amount of literature (Crouch, 2004; Hutter et al., 2018; Kriesi et al., 2008), have transformed the power structures of Western democracies in the last 30 years. These processes and transformations include: the increased role of supranational institutions and economic actors on national governments; the leading role of governments and executive powers vis-à-vis parliaments and legislative assemblies; the process of separation between decision-making and participation, whereby the governing sphere endeavors to keep itself immune from popular claims, collective mobilization, and social conflicts; the shifting of government outside the setting of democratic competition, namely sector “authorities” purported to be politically neutral, creating forms of “technicization of political decisions”; a consequent growing divide between the rulers and the ruled.
The whole of these processes and rhetoric contributes to redefine the institutions holding the Schmittian “monopoly of political decision” as characterized by monistic forms of authority, denial of conflict, and technicization. Politics and polities have become more vertical, hierarchical, and oligarchic. The capacity of political parties to act as mediators between society and politics is largely reduced. Main parties tend to align with the unwinding of government activities and with their role within the public apparatuses—which is consistent with some of the main definitions given to contemporary parties by political science, such as those of the cartel party and party-in-the-office—and they relinquish the capacity to create or support the collective mobilization of social groups (De Nardis, 2018, Fawcett and Marsh, 2014).
The second pole of contemporary political structures, that is the participatory-mobilizing one, is apparently antagonist to the first one. It comprises a pervasive rhetoric of participation, horizontality, post-bureaucratism, post-hierarchism, and dis-intermediation (Rotschild, 2015). It is a type of rhetoric, but also a series of top-down institutional practices: arenas of deliberation, governance, consensus-based decision-making, community development (Mastropaolo, 2012). Within this rhetoric, governance has been described as empowerment of social actors, a set of participatory tools, and a form of community horizontalism and peer cooperation opposed to bureaucratic verticalism and the hierarchical nature of modern politics (Cini and Felicetti, 2018). Civil society has been exalted against parties and parties turned outward, searching to substantiate their legitimacy outside themselves and the political domain (in the market, the media, civil society, and even social movements). Parties compete by representing themselves as movements rather than parties (della Porta et al., 2017). They also apply participative tools to their internal decision-making processes. Since the 1990s, a significant number of European parties have provided more weight to their members, granting them decision-making powers in selecting party leaders, candidates, and even some policies through the use of platforms (Ignazi, 2004).
What connections are there between these two poles, the regressive-oligarchic and the participative-mobilizing ones? On the one hand, there is complementarity. The regressive-oligarchic rebuilding of politics needs participative and mobilizing rhetoric and practices to pursue two main goals. The first goal is legitimacy. In a historical phase in which the lower and lower-middle classes are underrepresented, it is necessary to portray “the people” as being actively involved in democracy. Secondly, the rhetoric of dis-intermediated, egalitarian, and horizontal participation of social actors in politics is functionally mobilized also to weaken institutional mediations and the role of legislative assemblies, while politics is intended as negotiation between social interests and the idea of partisanship itself. The rhetoric of dis-intermediation is also a means to tear apart the structure of firmly-organized forms of social and political action, as well as to substitute visible and formalized mediation structures and actors with less visible, less formalized, private, and market-driven forms of mediation, such as online platforms, private firms, and media outlets (Mudge and Chen, 2014).
However, between the two poles there is also ambivalence. Participative-mobilizing rhetoric and practices may constitute a field of opportunity for protest, collective action, and political mobilization. They provide a structure of symbolic opportunities and a set of tools, habits, routines, and skills that can be translated into contentious politics. The rhetoric and dynamics of the participative-mobilizing pole constantly raise unfulfilled expectations. Collective action can grow on the mechanism of the unfulfilled promise. The interaction between the regressive-oligarchic and the participatory-mobilizing poles produces a verticalization of command while simulating horizontality in the relations between decision-making centers and the social body. It nevertheless opens a dialectical field where the representation of a sort of isomorphism between institutions and society can contribute to give life to bottom-up forms of activism. Even the anti-political and anti-partisan rhetoric by the media can be partially taken on by movements. The non-partisan and anti-party rhetoric spread by “media populism” is overturned by current social movements and translated into a “We the people”—where “people” are represented as a homogeneous entity, constituted of single individuals more than social groups—which is a major source of self-identification for contemporary movements (Accornero and Ramos Pinto, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2017; Langman, 2013). The ambivalent relationship between the two poles in the political domain generates opportunities for movements and contentious politics.
Oligarchy, Mobilization, and Participation in the Economic and Media Sphere
An analogous set of ambivalences is observable in the economic sphere. The reproduction of dominant groups as closed castes, the economic pre-eminence of major financial actors, the generalized obstruction, by firms and governments, of union organization and unions’ bargaining power, especially in the ICT sector (Fuchs, 2012), the increasing concentration of capital and power in few great players (Reich, 2015) are all processes—widely discussed in literature (Franzini and Pianta, 2015)—which constitute the regressive-oligarchic pole of the current economic system.
The second pole, in the political dimension as well, is seemingly the opposite of the first. Rhetoric pervades peer cooperation, sharing economy, horizontal organization, post-bureaucratism, post-hierarchism, and dis-intermediation (Tapscott and Williams, 2006). On these phenomena, as well as in the political filed, populist rhetoric spreads. According to Tapscott and Williams (2006), digital capitalism is a revolution centered on the growing participation of social groups and individuals in the value chain. In this rhetoric, the information technology needed to cooperate, create value, and compete on the market is available to all. This context would enable the continuous formation of new collaboration projects among peers featuring autonomous organizational arrangements, whereby these collaborative projects produce goods and services that can compete with large firms.
Yet, research and evidence gathered about current production models in digital capitalism (Fuchs, 2012; Yeow, 2014) highlight a set of systemic ambivalences that appear isomorphic to the political ones:
(a) Socialization of the production process/individualization of the employment relationship. The individualization of the employment relationship, together with job insecurity and the pressure for horizontal competition among workers exerted by firms, comprise a tendency to socialize production processes and to diffuse ownership of the means of production.
(b) Cooperative exchange/market exchange. The social contents of work—relational activity, diffused knowledge, logical skills—are constantly injected into the production-consumption cycle. What workers and consumers may perceive as cooperative exchange within the firm and its external environment is re-shaped by firms as a market relationship. The contradictory link between “free cooperation” and formal value of the market is a driving force of productivity.
(c) Collective participation in the decision-making/verticalization of decision-making processes. Workers, consumers, and users are induced to participate in formally horizontal decision-making processes. However, horizontality is confined to decisions concerning the most immediate work processes, whereas on strategic choices the hierarchy and the verticality of structures are strengthened. Nevertheless, the rhetorical call for active participation is essential for firms on both the work and consumption sides, becoming a “competitive asset.”
(d) Autonomy of labor/digital Taylorism. Work based on knowledge, science, and partial cooperation among peers raises problems for capital from the perspective of the complete objectification of work, the measurability of work performance, and the governance of cooperative exchange. Yet, such problems seem currently resolved through the rigidification of immaterial ownership and the Taylorization of a significant part of knowledge production.
These dynamics of production and consumption give rise to a new set of tensions in the relationship between economy and society. It becomes a relationship marked by a dialectic motion where the former—in order to incorporate mechanisms for potential valorization that form within the latter —must embrace actors, practices, and cultural elements that are in some ways external to typical trade. The current organization of production seeks to valorize and subsume under the logic of capital qualities, inclinations, emotions, and forms of cooperation that social actors develop in various spheres. The dialectic between economy and society is characterized by this dynamic of extroversion and mimesis, where individual qualities and spontaneous social cooperation are encouraged and at the same time are continually appropriated for the creation of exchange value. Thus, one witnesses a reduction (organizational, normative, cultural) of the barriers between firms and society, a mutual “precipitation” of one into the other.
This is where the current “participationist” rhetoric and practices fit in: There is now a need among firms to actively include (directly or indirectly) an increasing number of individuals, social networks and external processes. Aspects of traditionally radical discourses such as bridging the gap between the governors and the governed (in the case of businesses, between producers and consumers) can be incorporated into commercial and communication formats, in line with what Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) have defined as the new spirit of capitalism.
In the media, there is an analogous ambivalence. The media, both traditional and digital, are one of the most concentrated industrial sectors. Competition is very limited, and a few major actors occupy almost the totality of the market. These actors create and disseminate very similar structure of political discourses and communication across the globe (Mazzoleni, 2008). Processes such as the mediatization of the public sphere and the popularization of political communication tend to lower public discourse to the level of the praxis and language of daily life: they “move towards,” collapse onto this to excite identification. A participatory turning point has occurred in this field since the early 1990s. Everyday life and “ordinary people” have been firmly placed in the communication flow. Newspapers, websites, and television programs are constantly requiring the viewer/reader to intervene with votes, comments, remarks, and likes. Social media are celebrated as the places of the peer-to-peer interaction and creation of online communities. Participation and (individual or collective) mobilization are rhetorical processes that fully concern these communication devices. In this field too, we face complementarity and ambivalence between an oligarchic and a participative-mobilizing pole.
Today’s political, economic, and media structures build new forms of oligarchy and, at the same time, mobilize society through participatory tools, devices, and practices. These three institutional settings show an isomorphic set of ambivalences: oligarchy/participation; autonomy/heteronomy; empowering the top tier/exalting horizontal relations; anti-partisanship/mobilization; cooperation/competition; communitarism/hierarchy; sharing/individualization. Within this set of dialectic pairs, the opposing terms complement each other, although the first plays an essential role in the progression of the second. The inclusion of these contradictory elements allows—in both the economic, media, and political spheres—for the “natural” limits of a market, an audience, or a political strategy to be superseded.
This is the shape that advanced capitalist societies take today: a system of isomorphic ambivalences in which political, economic, and media structures are determined by the complementary and ambivalent relationships between the regressive-oligarchic and the participative-mobilizing pole. Now we will try to understand in which way these structures affect collective action and political organizations.
From Structure to Collective Action
The previously mentioned structures have consequences for both the constitution of the political field in advanced capitalism and the social movement formation processes.
Social Movements, the Populist Field, and the “Electoralization” of Protest
Let us first consider the consequences that the two poles we identified have on the constitution of the political field.
First, the convergence between the political and the economic forms of exclusion caused by the effects of the regressive-oligarchic forms of power strongly contribute to delineate the field of contemporary politics as based on the cleavage between the ruled and rulers—“the people” and the elites—thus constituting a populist political field. People versus elites becomes the master frame within which political disputes are interpreted and performed, by both social movements and new outsider political parties that try to represent the socio-political demands to which this cleavage is connected (Gerbaudo, 2017; Vidal, 2017). Movement and new party actors interpret and act the people/elite cleavage also through dichotomies that assimilate or even replace the traditional left/right axis: below/above, new/old, civil society/professional politics, spontaneity/bureaucratic organization, horizontal/vertical organization, democracy/oligarchy, producers/parasites (della Porta et al., 2017).
These dyads are mobilized in different forms by contemporary social movements, new outsider, and “populist’ parties and to a certain extent even by mainstream parties. They have recently been central in the Indignados and Occupy movements (Halvorsen, 2012), student and youth movements (Cini and Guzmán-Concha, 2017), movements for the defense of common and public goods such as the Italian public water movement and the Spanish Mareas, which mobilized to defend public healthcare and education in the first 2010s, environmental movements (Wahlström et al., 2019), the French gilet jaunes, and recent protest movements against neo-liberalism such as the ones in Chile and Colombia in 2019. What do all these movements share? First, the citizen (and in some cases, more extensively, the human being) is the figure most frequently evoked. The emergence of a discourse of citizenship was at the heart of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe since the explosion of the financial crisis in 2008 (della Porta, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2017). Protesters mainly refer to themselves as “citizens” and appeal to the totality of the citizenry to mobilize against political and economic elites, calling for more grassroots control on political institutions, through various forms of state-based direct democracy. Protesters have seen in citizenship a central demand unifying all the disparate demands raised by participants in this protest wave. As it is said by a Spanish 15-M activist, “It was a citizen’s call that had no one behind. It wanted to be completely non-partisan and non-union, and just like something coming out of the citizenry itself” (Quote form Gerbaudo, 2017: 8). Traditional parties and long-time political professionals currently play the same symbolic function that in 1760–1848 was represented by the Crown, the Court, nobility, and clergy. Political symbols, values, and “myths’” such as the Nation, the People, and the General will re-emerge. Class discourses and the left/right cleavage have not disappeared. The Indignados, Occupy, and anti-austerity movements have promoted materialistic claims. The same is true for the French gilet jaunes. They contrast “common workers” with “the privileged and the powerful.” Specific social movement organizations and left-wing radical unions, parties, and networks have been promoting anti-austerity mobilizations through class-driven discourses and claims (Peterson et al., 2015). Nevertheless, in their public discourse, the left/right cleavage is strongly subordinated to the elite/people one, and for this reason they have been labeled as populist. Even in environmentalist movements—both in global protests against climate change (Fridays for Future) and in local movements against large infrastructures—the left/right divide does not play a central role. The collective actor in this case is identified once again with “the citizens” and common people, or even more generally with humankind (Wahlström et al., 2019). Moreover, since the eighties, both peace and environmental movements have tended to doubt even their belonging to the field of the left. The centrality of such all-encompassing forms of self-definition (“the citizens,” ordinary or common people, mankind) also leads to the use of all-encompassing and apparently non-partisan symbols likewise. In movements such as the Indignados or the current wave of mass protests in Chile, similarly to what occurred in the Arab Springs, the national flag is the most widespread symbol in demonstrations.
The elite/people cleavage and its sub-dichotomies are also central in the political discourses of new left-wing outsider parties and leaders such as Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, France’s France Insoumise, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, the Portuguese Bloco de Esquerda in Europe, and Bernie Sanders’s campaign in the USA—which have tried to give a left-wing electoral expression to Occupy, the Indignados, and anti-austerity protests (Kriesi, 2014; Ramiro and Gomez, 2016)—and even of right-wing “populist” parties across Europe (Mudde, 2007; Pirro, 2016) and of outsider parties aiming to overcome the left/right dichotomy, such as the Italian Five Star Movement (Caruso, 2018). Left-wing social movements and parties and right-wing parties do not inflect the “populist cleavage” in the same way. They do not single out the same rivals and do not advance similar claims. Nonetheless, to a certain extent, they all indicate and highlight contrasts in the same processes, regarding popular and political sovereignty, the relationship between the people and the elite and that between politics and economy. These parties are opposite in many aspects, but they act in the same field.
In this context, what appears fruitful to us is not to label one or another political actor or political discourse as populist, or to measure their degree of populism (Mudde and Kaltawasser, 2013). France’s Front National, Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, the UK’s UKIP, the Italian Lega, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Beppe Grillo, and the Indignados and Occupy movements have all been lumped together in the global populist family, and essentially equated. What appears more significant to us is to note that the general processes we are discussing—and even the sweeping use of the populist label—mark what “populist” is in the current political field as a whole, which is characterized by the mobilization of the antagonism between the “people” and the “corrupt elite” and by the claim for popular sovereignty. Only few political actors currently gain legitimacy and consent by acting outside this field. The emergence of this cleavage is provoked by the political and economic exclusionary effects of the regressive-oligarchic pole.
A further connection between the regressive-oligarchic pole and new forms of collective action is that the electoral dimension regains a strategic role. The current societal change and its converging crises (the crisis of political authority and the socio-economic crisis) are mainly represented by the media as a divide between society and politics (while the media rarely target entrepreneurs as responsible for the economic crisis). If the main problems that society faces are politicians and parties, it is a priority to replace them. Moreover, with collective mobilization becoming largely ineffective in influencing public agency and governments, and with traditional political parties largely de-legitimized, movement actors have begun to consider entering the institutional system directly and participating in the electoral process. The electoral dimension is the only one where contemporary movements have gained influence. While the Indignados, Occupy, and anti-austerity movements have not conditioned the political agenda or government decision-making at all, they have had—in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and the USA a deferred, postponed indirect electoral effect. Syriza’s electoral victory would be difficult to understand without the Greek anti-Troika mobilizations, as would Podemos’ success without the Indignados and the Mareas, and the Portuguese left-wing government without the anti-austerity mobilization cycle in that country (Accornero and Ramos Pinto, 2015). In the USA, Bernie Sanders’s success cannot be interpreted without considering the Occupy movement and the successive campaigns in the country. 4
Therefore, on the one hand, the centrality that the elite/people cleavage and its dichotomies have gained is to be attributed to the effects of the regressive-oligarchic pole in the political and economic dimension. On the other hand, the centrality of this cleavage in the constitution of the political filed can also be attributed to the effects of the participative-mobilizing pole.
Several elements that constitute the media, economic, and institutional mobilization of participative rhetoric and processes are comparable with elements that form the populist cleavage and the discourses of political actors acting in the populist field. The rulers/ruled and low/high divides also evoke the discourses, the rhetoric, and the practices of private and public institutions linked to the participative-mobilizing pole. A populist rhetoric spreads because it is also diffused by the elites through participative-mobilizing mechanisms: companies, media, and political parties try to communicate that everyone, by mobilizing, can “write their destiny” by becoming a “prosumer,” a citizen journalist, an entrepreneur, an independent worker, or can influence institutional decision-making and party leadership from below, or become a politician replacing “old politics.” A great rhetoric on dis-intermediation is promoted by economic, political, and media organizations: politically, as an opposition to organized forms of representation of social and collective interests; in the media, as a call to become a protagonist of the (traditional and digital) media show as common people, without any political or social tutelage; economically, through the rhetoric that everyone can challenge the big players from below, just counting on their talent, ideas, courage, and initiative.
Movements, new outsider parties, and new political leaders are not extraneous to this rhetoric that the elites have been spreading for 30 years. The populist-participative turn in managing political, economic, and media power affects their discourses, rhetoric, and organizational practices. As a matter of fact, a feature shared by several contemporary social movements is that political parties and the most traditional movement organizations are unlikely to play a major role within them. Although strictly spontaneous movements and mobilizations do not exist, participation on an individual basis, not mediated by traditional organizations, often is the main form used by individuals to approach these mobilizations and movements. The anti-party and anti-organizational attitudes common among many contemporary movement actors and their distrust toward political and social organizations which often include unions (Gerbaudo, 2017), as well as their rhetoric exalting the mobilization of the people (the 99%) against the elites could not be understood without referring to the rhetoric on dis-intermediation and the generalized continuous (individual) mobilization that media, political institutions, and economic actors have pursued, that is, without considering the “populist zeitgeist” spread by the elites themselves over the last 30 years, in order to contrast the traditional forms in which popular politics was organized (namely progressive parties and unions).
Movement Parties as a Dual Form of Organization
Movement parties are the main political form in which political organization tends to be re-shaped today (della Porta et al., 2017). Movement parties may be defined as forms of political organization in which a vertical axis (a structured party organization) and a horizontal one (participatory forms related to social movement repertoires) overlap, hybridizing the party-form with the movement-form. A key example is the Spanish party Podemos. In Spain, the founders of Podemos as well as a good portion of its ranks and managers participated in the Indignados movements. Podemos connects the vertical axis of party leadership (involving strong personal leadership by Pablo Iglesias and firm party governance by its core group of leaders) with a horizontal and participative axis, constituted by digital tools that enable its members’ direct participation, local sections (círculos), and its dense network of relationships with social movements and civic organizations.
The Greek Syriza has often been defined as a movement party as well. After becoming the governing party in 2014, it is a political ecosystem in which a horizontal and a vertical axis are connected. The horizontal axis is a wide range of social organizations linked to Syriza that support on-the-ground work on the social effects of the economic crisis. This social work and solidarity network-building—aiming to concretely help people who have not access to basic goods and services—is one of the premises behind Syriza’s electoral victory. The vertical axis is that of a traditional bureaucratic organization, a central leadership, and Alexis Tsipras’s firm personal leadership (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014).
Movement parties strongly relate to the ambivalence between the neo-oligarchic and the participative-mobilizing pole. They connect the vertical dimension of the former with the horizontal dimension of the latter. They resort to tools that are typical of both dimensions. As for the first pole, they make use of strong personal leadership and solid central party structures. The core firmly orients the periphery regarding political strategy and communication. They give strong importance to top-down communication through the media (both traditional and digital) and political discourses that can be successfully translated in media terms. As for the second pole, they try to integrate claims, discourses, activists, and networks from social movements and civic organizations. They resort to participative tools, they widely use social media and digital participative means as organizational tools, and they consult their membership on their candidacies, political strategies, and manifestos (Vidal, 2017). The relationship between the two axes can be conflicting. In Podemos, the horizontal axis is also used to reaffirm and strengthen control over the party by the central leadership. In Syriza, internal dissent due to the government’s action has been resolved by removing the dissenters. These complementary and ambivalent connections between a vertical and horizontal axis are consistent with the dialectical relationship we observed between the regressive-oligarchic and the participative-mobilization pole, confirming the existence of isomorphisms between macro-dynamics of social change and new forms of political organization.
Conclusions
This paper had a twofold aim. On the one hand, we argued that reintroducing capitalist dynamics in the study of social movements was key to embed social movement formation processes into macro socio-economic transformations. We claim that the episodes of social movement formation are associated with a specific dynamic of transformation occurring in one of the five processes of the capitalist cycle. In this sense, adopting such a perspective in the analysis of the recent mobilization processes triggered by the “Great Recession” in our opinion is essential to understand why and where they emerged. Nonetheless, despite helping grasp the socio-economic origins of mobilizations, this approach does not suffice to make sense of their political trajectory and, more broadly, their cultural meanings and objectives. This is where a broader and less economistic understanding of social relations is needed.
This was the aim of the second part of our paper, in which we argued that the current political, economic, and cultural changes are centered on the ambivalence between two poles: a regressive-oligarchic and a participative-mobilizing one. Between these two poles there are both complementarity and dialectical tensions. These tensions constitute an opportunity structure for social movements and for the emergence of new movement parties. They contribute to re-shape the forms of collective actions, the discourses and organizational practices of social movements, the relationship between movements, electoral competition and parties, as well as the national political fields themselves, currently constituted (at least in Europe, the USA, and Latin America) as “populist fields.”
Movements and left-wing movement parties partially absorb, partially question, and partially develop the ambivalence between the two poles. On the one hand, they challenge the first pole and its constitutive elements: oligarchy; inequality; mediatization of politics; anti-partisanship; reduction of social rights; heteronomy; individualization. Nonetheless, they also include some of these elements in their organizational choices and political discourses, such as anti-partisanship (conceived as the mobilization of “the 99%” or “the people”), mediatization (linked to social media activities and the search for media visibility), and “oligarchy” (linked to some oligarchic tendencies in the vertical axis of movement parties). Movements can also have a strong direct or indirect influence on the electoral process. They have been able to restructure the political system in a way that was difficult to imagine only a short time ago. The electoral arena appears today as the privileged ground on which movements today show their political influence. The structural base of this success is the lack of partisanship, representation, and identity provoked by the oligarchic pole.
On the other hand, movements and new parties give value to the participatory-mobilizing pole and its constitutive elements: participation, mobilization, grassroots action, community, autonomy, horizontality, disintermediation. They work on the mechanism of the “unfulfilled promise” that arises from the ambivalence between the two poles, epitomized by the social expectations solicited by the constant recourse to mobilizing rhetoric and practices by corporations, media, and parties. They take advantage of the technologies, rhetoric, symbols, discourses, practices, forms of social interaction, social relationships, and skills that the participative-mobilizing pole evokes, shapes, legitimates, and spreads.
These are the relationships between structure and collective action that we have identified in this article. In doing so, we purposely elaborated a definition of “structure” not solely related to the economic sphere. In stressing the importance of reintroducing the analysis of economic dynamics into the study of political conflicts, we provided a definition of structure that also encompasses politics and the media. Then we argued that such structure is relevant for the analysis of social movements and emerging forms of political organization. On the one hand, the forms of political, economic, and media power that we have grouped in the term “regressive-oligarchic pole” have a direct relation with the emergence of social movements and the new forms of political organization, such as movement parties, which seek to contrast the social and political effects of these forms of power. On the other hand, there is a double relation between social movements, movement-parties and the participatory-mobilizing pole: (a) new forms of collective action are set in motion by the “unfulfilled promise” mechanisms raised by this pole and the ambivalent relationships between the two poles; (b) the participatory-mobilizing forms of governance of economy, politics, and media provide a series of attitudes, skills, habits, representations, and forms of social interaction that are used in the building of collective actions and new political organizations.
We did not argue that the structural dynamics given by the interaction between the two poles determine straightforwardly the emergence of social movements, which must also be understood in relation to their specific socio-cultural contexts. What we argued, however, is that the emergence and nature of movements and new forms of political organization cannot be understood without considering also the structural dynamics and the vectors of social change in which they are involved.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We express our deepest thanks to Prof. Tommaso Vitale, who provided us with valuable feedback to a previous version of this article. His comments helped us to clarify some ideas and to better develop some theoretical intuitions that are fully present in the current form of the article.
Authors’ Note
The article is the result of a joint and equal collaboration between the two authors. Nevertheless, in particular, they wrote jointly the introductory section (1) and the conclusions (6), Lorenzo Cini wrote sections 2 and 3, whereas Loris Caruso sections 4 and 5.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
