Towards a Critical Theory of Social Movements: An Introduction

Introduction

The global economic crisis that began in the US and spread quickly across the globe in 2008 has significantly affected the living conditions of people in many countries. This crisis can be defined a ‘critical juncture’ (Roberts, 2014), a crucial event capable of modifying social processes, relations, structures and views in an irreversible way. Analogously, this event has also been a decisive turning point in social movement studies, as scholars of this field have started to critically rethink some of their main research hypotheses, discussing their validity and refining their concepts and theoretical frameworks. In critically revising their research traditions, these scholars have independently come to a similar diagnosis of the several epistemological and thematic ‘silences’ affecting their disciplines over the past three decades. These silences have been associated with the scarce attention devoted to capitalist transformations as causes or outcomes of social change (della Porta, 2015; Streeck, 2012). In this introductory essay, we first argue that social movement studies have not paid enough attention to the dynamics of capitalist transformations. Second, we identify the epistemological biases of the discipline. Third, we propose some solutions to fill this gap, namely exploring the relations between the dynamics of the accumulation process and the social movement formation processes. For us, where there is a process of social movement formation, a form of capitalist transformation always takes place. The ambition is to trigger a cross-disciplinary debate both on the reasons for these silences and on the importance of capitalism (and its criticism) as a key analytical framework in contemporary social sciences.

The silences mentioned above have not been a peculiarity of social movement studies. Few studies of mainstream political sociology, for instance, have considered the transformations of the mode of production and the organization of labour as determinants of the changes taking place in the material and symbolic structure of political and social institutions (Silver and Karatasli, 2015). Similarly, recent comparative political economy studies have mostly neglected the analysis of macro socio-economic structures, focusing rather on meso and micro analytical units, such as companies and sole traders, considered in these models as the crucial actors in the capitalist economy (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Finally, mainstream political theory has recently followed a similar trend, to the extent that it has favoured theorizing the forms and variations characterizing the current political institutions and regimes in a static way rather than searching for the long-term socio-structural determinants at the basis of their historical transformation (Hardt and Negri, 2009).

Although embedded in a variety of disciplinary approaches, we think that the absence and loss of analytical (and political) relevance of the concept of capitalism as a key framework has been the main cause of the epistemological and thematic silences described above (Carrier and Kalb, 2015; Hetland and Goodwin, 2013). As Streeck (2012: 2) recently noted: ‘capitalism denotes both an economy and a society, and studying it requires a conceptual framework that does not separate the one from the other’. In practice, dropping capitalism from social analysis means dismissing research designs that investigate current society and its dynamics of transformation through its laws of motion (Burawoy, 2015). In short, capitalism, as a research subject, has been silenced if not denied by mainstream social sciences and humanities since the early 1980s.

Silences and voices in social movement literature: Centring the analysis on capitalism

Our contention is that capitalism always needs to be taken into account, whether in times of instability or in times of crisis. However, it is precisely in times of instability that its absence becomes more visible. Along with other social movement scholars (della Porta, 2015; Hetland and Goodwin, 2013), we maintain that the non-adoption of capitalism as a key framework of analysis has prevented this field from fully grasping the dynamics of the political and economic crises in which contemporary society is caught up. We claim that the influence of socio-economic structures played an influential role in the emergence, pace and downturn of the mobilizations that took place after 2008 in the US and in Europe. In short, the analysis of capitalism and its transformations seems crucial to explaining the way in which these protests have developed and varied across time and space. If we are right on this point, then the ‘strange disappearance’ ¹ (Hetland and Goodwin, 2013) of capitalism from mainstream social movement studies becomes truly puzzling. ²

Here, we illustrate some hypotheses as to the causes of such a gap between mainstream social movement research and (critical) analysis of capitalism. In presenting these hypotheses, we aim to offer an ‘epistemological account’ of this silence, that is, an explanation focused on the forms and developments of sociology conceived as a ‘field of knowledge’ (Diani and Cisar, 2014; Rucht, 1991). ³ In short, here we analyse and discuss the epistemological foundations of social movement research. We believe that social movement studies, particularly their more formalized developments in subsequent years, were grounded on the rejection of Marxist and capitalist explanations of societal transformations, which were relatively popular and relevant in the 1960s and 1970s. The institutionalization of the field of social movement research has been founded on a sort of ‘epistemological bias’ vis-à-vis capitalist (and Marxist) analysis. To prove such a contention, we start by distinguishing between two types of epistemological factors, which we believe to be at the roots of this silence on capitalism. On the one hand, there are broader factors, which can be placed outside the epistemological domain of social movement research and, for this reason, can be defined as exogenous to its field institutionalization process. On the other hand, there are factors that are internal to its dynamics of institutionalization and can therefore be defined as endogenous.

First, we see as one exogenous and ‘trans-disciplinary’ factor the over-specialization of social sciences (Abbott, 2001), and especially of sociology (Gallino, 2007), which is today a field of knowledge subdivided into a long list of formally specialized fields and subfields, all with their own formalized epistemological status and narrow research subjects (della Porta and Keating, 2008). Recalling the Marxist idea of capitalism as totality (Krinsky, 2013; Ollman, 2003), i.e., that capitalist society cannot be understood by artificially separating its different moments into the social, the economic, the political and the cultural, because all these elements are defined by their internal relations to the whole (namely, capitalism), we claim that a fictitious division of sociology leads to the incapacity to grasp the dynamics of change taking place in contemporary society. We propose that the adoption of a more holistic and trans-disciplinary approach can help sociology to better account for the current societal transformations.

This macro and trans-disciplinary trend has influenced the ways in which social movement research has developed and has been carried out over the last three decades. Three specific epistemological aspects of this field (‘endogenous factors’) are strictly connected with the above trend. The first two factors are related to the ideal-typical research design associated with this discipline, while the third factor has more to do with the definition of capitalism that this discipline has generated.

Movement scholars have built research designs by mainly focusing upon the micro- and meso-level analyses of social movements (Hetland and Goodwin, 2013). They have carried out studies exploring, in particular, the cognitive frames, social networks and mobilization resources characterizing the different types of social movements. ‘Political opportunity structure’ theory has also contributed to identifying the institutional factors—such as the presence (or absence) of political party allies, the openness (or otherwise) of the system, etc.—which play roles in the emergence and growth of protest. More recently, other micro-level studies linking emotions and social movements have emerged, and they have highlighted important mechanisms for increasing participation and mobilization (Goodwin et al., 2001), especially from a gender perspective. An analysis of women’s awareness-raising groups showed that feminists challenged individualized understandings of what many women were experiencing as depression and, pointing to the social origins of that feeling, renamed it anger (Taylor, 1995). These micro-level theories have served as an important corrective to past perspectives in social movement studies, which were dominated by the above-mentioned institutionally based narratives. Thanks to the ‘emotional turn’, for instance, we now know that political opportunities might be tightly closed, but indignation and desperation might combine to encourage mobilization. However, this strand of research largely overlooked the social and economic contexts in which feelings prompting protest had emerged.

Overall, despite their significant advancement in the understanding of social movements, all the prevailing theories we outlined above have paid little attention to how the transformation processes of social and economic structures have shaped the opening (or closure) of political opportunities, the societal resonance of movement frames, the expansion (or compression) of networks and mobilization resources. As Flacks (2004: 139) noted with respect to the paradigm of political opportunity structures, ‘contemporary work in social movement studies makes only weak and relatively unsystematic connection between macroeconomic conditions and political opportunity’. In doing so, this literature has tended to crowd out a concern with political economy as a key part of the picture of mobilizations (see Buechler, 2000). For Hetland and Goodwin (2013), this lack of interest in political economy has impeded the development of causal mechanisms linked to the dynamics of capitalism. It is no coincidence that one of the most significant contributions to depicting the causal mechanisms accounting for movement mobilizations, Dynamics of Contention, does not include the presence of mechanisms related to capitalism and its dynamics of transformation: the possibility of these mechanisms was completely omitted by the authors (McAdam et al., 2001).

The time seems ripe to broaden the scope of the analysis of movement studies to the macro-structural perspectives of (critical) political economy. The scarce scholarly attention devoted to the connection between the economic structures of society and the political conditions (un)favourable to the emergence of mobilizations has diminished the capacity of mainstream social movement research to fully understand the recent wave of protests (see both della Porta and Casalini in this issue). We propose to examine aspects of political economy to appreciate the variety and timing of the protests that opposed the recent crisis of neoliberal capitalism in different global regions with distinct ‘temporalities’ (della Porta, 2015).

Connected to the absence of macro-structural analyses in research designs of social movements is the issue of ‘time’, namely, the duration of timeframe that the sociology of social movements has generally adopted. Most studies on the dynamics of mobilization have encompassed relatively short timeframes, normally not more than 5 years. ⁴ In our view, the adoption of short periods of analysis represents an impediment to grasping the structural changes in society, which can be either causes or outcomes of social movement action. On the other hand, broadening the temporal scope of analysis would allow one to capture the relation between long-term dynamics of societal transformation and the rise of protests.

Movements cannot be detached from the socio-historical reality in which they are born and grow. In this respect, the understanding of the US civil rights movement provided by most movement scholars can be considered a paradigmatic case. If this movement is viewed only from the lunch counter sit-ins to the Voting Rights Act, it seems an extraordinary and very rapid success story. Yet, reading into such a short timespan fails to account for the prehistory of this movement and its relations to the socio-economic context of emergence. In this regard, we share the reflections put forward by Fominaya and Cox (2013) in the introduction to their volume Understanding European Movements: New Social Movements, Global Justice Struggles, Anti-Austerity Protest, where they argue that social movements cannot be seen as a single phenomenon isolated from the reality and history of the previous mobilizations to which they necessarily belong. Their proposal for diachronic investigation of social movements seems to fit with an analysis—such as that proposed in this article—aimed at exploring how and to what extent the long-term dynamics of capitalism influence the emergence and decline of mobilizations, and vice versa.

These factors (i.e. the overspecialization, the meso- and micro-level perspectives of analysis and the short timeframes) associated with the institutionalization of social movement studies constitute the basis of the general omission of analysis and comprehension of capitalism in this discipline. The vast majority of social movements scholars have, indeed, adopted either no definition at all of capitalism or a misleading one. Regarding the latter, we think that social movement research has adopted an economistic and, therefore, reductive definition. It has tended to identify capitalism with the economic sphere and with the struggles carried out by the industrial labour movement (Hetland and Goodwin, 2013), finally falling into the same economistic and reductionist trap they were rejecting. One of the main arguments adduced by scholars of the ‘new social movement theory’ to dismiss the analysis of capitalism from a Marxist perspective was, in fact, the accusation of economism that the adoption of such a perspective would entail (see Melucci, 1985).

Moreover, their definition of capitalism also appeared narrow from a historical perspective. The scholars seemed to identify capitalism only with its industrial manifestation, in which society was centred on the conflict between the industrial working class and its employers (Melucci, 1985, 1996; Touraine, 1988). With the crisis of industrial society, a decline of research interest in capitalism and in the class struggle characterizing it (i.e. industrial capital versus labour) appeared a logical outcome. Once this wave of struggles in the Western world had declined in terms of protest events and the political capacity of unions and parties, scholarly interest in these movements and processes, and, consequently, in capitalism, declined as well. The adoption of this approach limited the understanding of the strictly non-labour movements of the 1970s and 1980s, seen as completely separate mobilizations from the dynamics of capitalist transformation.

What is more, the post-industrial claims of this strand of literature largely ignored the displacement of industry to other regions of the world, where the struggles of industrial workers continued (McNally, 2013). Equally, by focusing on the emergence of mostly urban-based social actors, this literature ignored the impact of globalization and liberalization on the life of peasant and small farmers’ communities and the rural poor (Desmarais, 2002; Veltmeyer and Petras, 2002). In so doing, these authors overlooked perhaps the largest and most dynamic movements of opposition to neoliberal capitalism: the peasant struggles and the transnational agrarian movements (TAMs). The concerns with capitalism were already present in the transnational peasant and small farmers’ movement that arose in reaction to economic liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s, and more apparent in the agrarian movement component (known as Via Campesina). Nevertheless, despite the dynamism and high profile of the TAMs in developing countries, Western scholars have paid them only limited attention, with a few exceptions that include Edelman (2005, 2008) and Harvey (1998). It is worth noting that these (new) TAMs build directly on previous cycles of struggle starting well before the neoliberal onslaught of the early 1980s (Edelman, 2003, 2008). Political economic analysis was central to the burgeoning field of studies analysing rural movements (Bernstein, 2010; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2011), underscoring that the challenge to capitalism as a dominant order comes not only from urban areas with students and women rebelling, but also from the rural areas, where indigenous and poor populations were resisting the simultaneous processes of globalization and privatization which significantly altered the dynamics of rural society (Borras et al., 2008).

In this respect, it is important to note that when social movement theory migrated outside the Western world, it never fell into the same classless state. Where movement studies appeared as classless theory, this was due to an identification of class struggles only with industrial labour. Owing to their Eurocentric perspective, Western scholars have often ignored the findings of studies of the global South, where the concept of class (and class struggle) entertained a broader meaning, encompassing all the lower social strata and the urban poor. In rejecting the Eurocentric perspective, we think that the theory from the global South provides insights important to understanding social change in the global North. Indeed, the scholars who have analysed social uprisings in other world areas since the 1980s stressed that they were rooted in a context of capitalist transformation: Whereas in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, domestic elites and middle classes could repress a highly mobilized working class by supporting military coups, in the two decades that followed, most governments reduced public spending, weakened union protections and benefits, and opened national economies to foreign investments in new sectors. Not only some social movement scholars showed how these neoliberal transformations exacerbated social inequalities and triggered the emergence of new class-based social movements (comprising industrial, rural and precarious workers and the unemployed) and new forms of political organizations (Almeida, 2008; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012).

Oblivious to these insights, Melucci (1985) and Touraine (1988) stressed the end of labour struggles and movements characterizing the industrial society of the 1960s, arguing that the novelty of the post-industrial society of the 1980s consisted precisely in the emergence of ‘new’ social movements, whose grievances were mostly driven by cultural and pro-identity elements rather than by class and material issues. These studies failed to address fundamental structural issues related to mobilizations triggered by the socio-economic changes of capitalism. Such an absence has prevented this field from analysing and explaining movements as embedded in the power relations of capitalist political economy (Flacks, 2004). Social movement studies developed in the 1980s carried out research on mobilizations involving students, black people, women, civil rights, community and ethnic conflicts, which were seen as ‘new’, different from the struggles of the ‘old’ labour and peasant movements and, thus, as explainable outside the dynamics of capitalism.

This is the interpretation to which Alberto Melucci (1996) seemed to allude in Challenging Code, when discussing the research goal that sociology should pursue in analysing societal production after the end of industrial capitalism. For Melucci, sociological theory should move away from categorizations stressing the identification between societal production and capitalist production: societal production cannot be reduced to capitalist production. The latter is only a subcategory of the former. He contended, in fact, that (Melucci, 1996: 45),

‘A sociological theory of social production as a relationship with objects is therefore required; and every effort should be made to divest it of its historical ties with capitalist industrialization so as to prepare for an adequate account of the production conditions in highly complex societies.’

Although we agree with Melucci and Touraine on the idea that capitalist production should be understood as merely a historically determined subset of the general forms of societal production, we are not completely persuaded by the historical periodization and geographical situation that they seem to offer for the end of (industrial) capitalism. From their analyses, one may conclude that the history of capitalism ends with the collapse of industrial society. The reference to the advent of highly complex societies (or in Touraine’s words, ‘programmed society’) seems to allude to the end of capitalism as a social system. Through this interpretation, one may derive the overlap between post-industrial and post-capitalist societies. Yet, today we all know that capitalism did not end with the end of industrial society, but it has simply undertaken a process of structural transformation. Capitalism—this is our view—cannot be reduced to industrial society and to its economic structure. The specificity of capitalism is given by its logic of social organization, based upon the process of capital accumulation, that is, the ‘constant reinvestment of part of the surplus (or profits) in the production process’ (Hetland and Goodwin, 2013: 84). Building on Marx (1887), we think that this process is the novelty that the emergence and realization of capitalism introduced to the history of society. He fully grasped this novelty, when illustrating that ‘capitalist production produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labour’ (Marx, 1887: 542). In essence, capitalism is a historically determined social formation whose main trait is the dynamic reproduction of class relations as triggered by the process of accumulation.

In light of this, we contend that the very idea of social classes and class conflict has to be deeply rethought—going beyond its economistic understanding—but not dismissed, as mainstream social and political sciences have done over the last four decades. In line with our criticism of the economistic concept of capitalism, we think that, rather than abandoning a class-based analysis of society, we should develop a critique of such a reductionist understanding.

More notably, the growing silences of social movement scholars on class determinations reflected a broader tendency in social sciences to reject the economic determinism that was relatively prevalent in the second half of the last century. The concern for stressing an important set of cultural, political and social determinations that were underestimated in the class analysis of society, although fair, led to an opposite trend to dismiss the whole class relations dimension underlying society and all its conflicts. ⁵ The way in which the so-called ‘new social history’ (including the work of E. P. Thompson) has reformulated the idea of class seems to be key to accomplishing this task. Principally, in his influential book The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson (1963) conceives of the process of emergence of the modern working class by stressing the fundamental significance of the political and cultural factors rather than the technical and industrial ones. The result is a dynamic concept of class, understood not as ‘a thing’, a mere structure created by the industrial revolution, as it was in the traditional Marxist narrative, but as a ‘social relation’, a historical formation with roots deep in political activities and cultural processes. By adopting this multidimensional concept, we can avoid the reductionist approach to class and develop an understanding of it that sees it embedded in the social and cultural processes of capitalist transformation.

Unlike Melucci and scholars following his work, we do not think that economic cleavages ended with the industrial organization of labour, just as capitalism did not end with the collapse of industrial society in the West. We contend that the industrialist understanding of capitalism (i.e. Fordism), which has influenced social movement research, has prevented the scholars of this field from recognizing and understanding the dynamics of structural transformation internal to capitalism after the crisis of industrial society. ‘Capitalism must be studied, not as a static and timeless ideal type of an economic system that exists outside of or apart from society, but as a historical social order that is precisely about the relationship between the social and the economic […]’ (Streeck, 2012: 3). How can we interpret and translate these important intuitions for the study of capitalism into social movement research? The main lesson that we can derive from them is that it is not possible to explain the rise, development and decline of social movements without seriously taking into consideration the dynamics of transformation implied in the never-ending process of capitalist accumulation.

Refocusing the analysis of mobilizations: The process of capital accumulation

Building on Marx (1887) and other authors (Harvey, 2001, 2003; Luxemburg, 1913), we see the process of capital accumulation as the key macro-structural driver of change in capitalist society. This process informs all the dynamics of transformation that take place in such a society. Disentangling such dynamics in light of this process is fundamental to assessing the validity of our thesis on the influence of changing capitalist structures on social movements.

Marx referred to capitalist accumulation as the process of ‘reconversion of surplus-value into capital’ (Marx, 1887: 551). The specificity of the capitalist organization of production consists precisely in exploiting the potential gamut of natural and social resources available at a particular historical moment in a given society to achieve, not only unlimited expansion of socio-economic wealth but, more importantly, the same relation of expropriation on which the organization of capitalist production is based. This is, for Marx, the novelty that the process of capital accumulation brings with it, when he argues that capital acquires a power of expansion, through the exploitation of labour power and land, which permits it to augment the elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude (see, in particular, Marx, 1887: 552–566). Notably, according to Marx, this novelty is, what characterizes the so-called process of ‘primitive accumulation’, namely, the process of capital accumulation that, from a historical point of view, can be considered as the foundational moment of capitalism and of its mode of social organization and production. Marx dated this process to the period of ‘the enclosures of the commons’ in eighteenth-century England. As Marx put it in Chapter XXVI of the first volume of the Capital, entitled “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”: ‘the so-called primitive accumulation is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (Marx, 1887: 668). This act of separation is precisely the ‘secret’ of the process of primitive accumulation, whose realization in society represents the most important novelty in human history, in that it determined the emergence and development of the capitalist mode of organization and production.

The foundational moment of ‘primitive accumulation’ has been revisited in the past by Rosa Luxemburg (1913) and recently by key Marxist authors, among whom we mention David Harvey (2003). First noting the dual character of the process of capital accumulation, Rosa Luxemburg (1913) emphasized the complex and not merely economic nature of this process. As she saw it, capital accumulation implies two specific, although ‘organically linked’ phenomena, one more related to the economic process of capital production, the other to the predatory process of capital circulation throughout society. While the former is more specifically associated with the investment of capital in the production process, the latter is identified with the socially appropriative nature of capitalism as a form of organization. This latter aspect of capital accumulation resembles the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation, which, according to Luxemburg, is permanently part of the history of capitalism and of its transformative nature. For her, ‘the historical career of capitalism’ can, in fact, only be appreciated and understood by taking these aspects of capital accumulation together.

Building on Luxemburg’s intuition on the dual character of capital accumulation, Harvey (2003) distinguished between ‘expanded production’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. While the first type of accumulation depicts the motion of economic growth within a specific mode of capitalist production, the second type, which resembles more closely the foundational motion of capital dispossession that Marx covered with the concept of primitive accumulation, describes the socially appropriative character that the process of accumulation always brings with it. More notably, by dispossession Harvey 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 its valorisation, that is, to its appropriative motion of commodification. 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 this kind of accumulation at the centre of the dynamics of capitalist transformation. He sees this process as inherently characterizing the logic of capitalism and not merely as a historically isolated phenomenon at the onset of capitalist society. If this second type of accumulation is central to capitalism and to its entire evolution, the task of a critical analyst of contemporary capitalism becomes looking at and identifying the current forms that such accumulation takes.

Notably, the concept of accumulation by dispossession can help us to grasp the transformative dialectic of capitalism between itself and its outside, that is, between capitalist and non-capitalist assets. In other words, capitalism does require something ‘outside of itself’ to accumulate. Other authors have stressed the centrality of the dialectic between capitalist and non-capitalist forms of organization, as triggered by the process of accumulation, to explain the societal motion of capitalism (della Porta, 2015; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Negri, 2015; Polanyi, 1944; see also Casalini, Gago and Mezzadra, this issue). For instance, Polanyi (1944) already referred to the dialectic between the movement for commodification versus that for social protection; Casalini, Gago and Mezzadra (this issue) make reference to capitalist markets versus the commons; Hardt and Negri (2009) discuss capitalist production versus social production and cooperation. For Harvey (2005), the dialectic between capital and its ‘outside’ is continuously reproduced in capitalist society due to its unlimited expansionary logic.

What is more, we see the dialectic relation between the processes of accumulation in production and that of accumulation by dispossession as determining the rhythm of the macro-structural changes in capitalist society. When the process of accumulation in production is hegemonic, a capitalist society embodies a specific model of production wherein capital investment opportunities are still profitable. One can think of the industrial society of the 1960s, based on the Fordist model of accumulation, i.e., capital-intensive mass production of standardized consumer goods (Hall and Soskice, 2001). By contrast, the process of accumulation by dispossession becomes hegemonic when capital investment opportunities within a given specific model of production are reduced further and further, and capital needs to find new investment opportunities to reproduce and expand itself. From this angle, the process of accumulation by dispossession truly resembles the Marxian process of primitive accumulation. When such a process takes place within a capitalist society, this means that its model of organization of production is in crisis and the time is ripe for a paradigmatic shift in the model of capitalist production and accumulation. The crisis of Fordism and industrial society of the 1970s and the parallel emergence out of this crisis of a new form of capitalist accumulation and organization of production appear as an illustrative case of this situation. Indeed, when the Fordist model of capitalist accumulation, based on factory system assembly line manufacturing, entered a crisis, new processes and forms of dispossession came to light to re-establish profitable capital investment opportunities (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Harvey, 2003, 2005; Silver and Karatasli, 2015).

From the accumulation of capital to the accumulation of struggles

How can the dual character of capital accumulation (i.e., ‘expanded production’ and ‘by dispossession’) help us to understand the dynamics of social mobilization? We contend that the dynamics of capitalist transformations prompted by the process of accumulation affect the meso- and micro-structures of the political and cultural context in which social movements are embedded. These dynamics shape the way in which (a) the organization of labour and production shifts, (b) political institutions and settings evolve, and (c) cultural and ideational formations develop; in turn, all these transformations condition the way in which social mobilizations arise and develop. The never-ending pace of capital accumulation triggers transformations within these spheres, whose dynamics of evolution are all potential sources of processes of grievance-formation associated with the emergence of social movements.

What are the implications of this contention for social movement studies? We aim to show how the adoption of the concept of capital accumulation proves useful in refocusing the analysis of conflicts, protests and mobilizations during the neoliberal crisis. We illustrate this point by providing an alternative reading of the appearance and proliferation of the so-called ‘new social movements’ (Melucci, 1985, 1996; Touraine, 1988) which emerged from the crisis of the industrial (or Fordist) society. Building on Luxemburg (1913), Harvey (2003), Silver (2003) and Silver and Karatasli (2015), we contend that the organically dialectic motion between the process of accumulation in production and that of accumulation by dispossession shapes the nature and character of mobilizations.

We note a correspondence between the type of accumulation process, which is hegemonic in society at a given historical time, and the type of social movements that can potentially arise from such a process. While the movements against accumulation in production emerge in the various facets of the capital circuit corresponding to a particular capitalist model, those against accumulation by dispossession emerge in the various terrains of spoliation that capital finds or creates to renew its profitable investment opportunities. The former are directly associated with the struggles opposing the various moments of the capital cycle within a specific capitalist model. A key example of these movements are the worker struggles against the Fordist organization of labour and production and in support of better wages and working conditions during the glory days of industrial society. The same holds for the redistributive struggles, promoted by leftist parties, within the spheres of capital circulation and consumption, such as those for the creation of public pension, healthcare and education systems, which constituted the foundation of the welfare state during the ‘glorious thirty years’ (Crouch, 2004; Streeck, 2013). Therefore, these movements can be understood as directly associated with various facets of the capitalist circuit, ranging from the production and labour to the circulation and consumption processes, along with the social institutions involved in such processes (from factories to state apparatuses).

By contrast, the movements against processes of dispossession are mostly relative to struggles against the creation of new capital investment opportunities; struggles that appear during the crisis of an existing model of capital accumulation in transition towards a new model. Their emergence on a terrain that is not yet capitalistically valorised (namely, commodified) is, in our view, the main reason for the difficulty of mainstream social movement studies in seeing these mobilizations as related to the dynamics of capitalist transformation. ⁶ Yet, few authors have noted that these movements emerge in terrains (both social and natural) where capital finds new opportunities for accumulation and valorisation. A key example of these movements are the ‘new’ social movements of the 1970s and 1980s: the feminist movements (see Casalini, this issue; Federici, 2004); the urban and student movements (Castells, 1997; Cini and Guzman-Concha, 2017; Harvey, 2012); the environmental and communitarian movements (O’Connor, 1997); the anticolonial and peasant movements (Chakrabarty, 2000; Guha, 1983; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Contesting the ‘post-materialist’ character of a part of social movement theory, we see these movements, born of the crisis of Fordism, as manifestations opposing various processes of dispossession, which took place globally after the 1970s economic crisis as way to solve the problem of falling capital profitability (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Harvey, 2005; Streeck, 2013).

A similar ‘agentic’ interpretation of the dialectic between social struggles and capital accumulation has been developed by a radical and heretical Marxist tradition, the so-called Italian Workerism (‘operaismo’), since the early 1960s (for a review, see Wright, 2002). Accusing ‘official’ Marxism in the Soviet tradition of being deterministic, these authors conceived of capitalist transformations and the historical law of capital motion as primarily triggered by workers’ struggles within the labour process. More notably, these Marxists conceived of the struggles of living labour, that is, of labour as the only factor capable of generating surplus value in capitalist production (Negri, this issue), as the main vector of transformation and innovation in the accumulation process. For them, class struggle must be seen as the ‘motor of capitalist development’ (Tronti, 1966).

Building on such a ‘subjective’ Marxist understanding of capitalist motion, these thinkers went beyond the economistic comprehension of capital, conceived as ‘a thing’ (money or means of production), to stress its social and relational dimension. In short, they understood capital primarily as a social relation (of exploitation), claiming that ‘the social character of production has widened to such an extent that society as a whole now functions as a moment of [capitalist] production’ (Tronti, 1963: 52). ⁷ If capitalist production subsumes society as a whole, then all its spheres and actors become subjected to the logic of capitalist valorisation (i.e. commodification). In this sense, for these Marxists, society becomes wholly subsumed to the logic of capital, not only in the productive sphere, but also with regard to the spheres of reproduction and circulation. Along with the concept of living labour, the emphasis on the social expansion of the capitalist process of valorisation represented the main theoretical and cultural heritage of these thinkers (Filippini and Tomasello, 2015; Tronti, 2009).

It is Antonio Negri in particular, with his analysis of new forms of class struggle in the 1970s, who has reformulated Marxist theory and capitalist transformations in an innovative way. In Proletari e stato (Negri, 1976), by observing the increasingly social character of capitalist production, Negri contended that the ‘social’ (i.e., circulation and reproduction) had become a locus of value production. In conceiving the social sphere as totally subject to capitalist valorisation, he aimed to stress the crucial shift in the locus of surplus production that was taking place with the decline of industrial society, a shift away from the factory and towards the wider urban space (Negri, 2015). As a result, new forms of struggle emerged within the larger social sphere. Underlining the decline of workers’ struggles occurring in Fordist factories, Negri understood the proliferation of actors carrying out their struggles in the circulation (urban and youth movements) and reproduction spheres (feminist, environmental movements) as part of the emergence of a new figure of (revolutionary) worker that he called the ‘operaio sociale’ (Tomasello, 2011; Wright, 2002).

By and large, these agentic Marxist perspectives (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Harvey, 2003; Negri, 1976; Silver, 2003), which focus on the dynamic dialectic between the emergence of social struggles and the accumulation process, help us see social movements as transformative agents of capitalist structures. More notably, our interpretation of the concept of accumulation offers the opportunity to incorporate an agentic-oriented comprehension of capitalism, allowing us to analyse how its transformations affect the emergence and pace of social movements and vice versa. The pervasive and permanent motion of capital accumulation can, in fact, activate processes of social movement formation. Observing this motion, one can identify the social groups, subjects, and figures who are subjected to dynamics of dispossession and who can potentially mobilize against them.

By highlighting the relation between capital accumulation and social movement formation processes, we do not contend that the former necessarily determines the latter, because not all accumulation dynamics set protests in motion. We claim however that where there is a process of social movement formation, a form of capitalist transformation takes place. Accumulation dynamics contribute, indeed, to shape the conditions within which mobilization processes emerge, but the latter are always mediated by other contextual factors that can inhibit and/or prevent the emergence of mobilizations. This depends on the configuration of political (i.e., trade unions and allied parties) and cultural factors (i.e., the dominant political discourse and ideology) associated with such dynamics. Where this configuration is favourable to social movement formation processes (i.e., the presence of strong trade unions and leftist parties; the proliferation of alternative political discourses and counter-ideologies), the likelihood of mobilizations is higher than where such a configuration is unfavourable. To a certain extent, implementation of neoliberal policies in Western Europe (think, for instance, of the UK) has resulted in a history of low and weak mobilizations. There, a process of dispossession was associated with a hegemonic configuration of political-cultural factors unfavourable to the rise of mobilizations. ⁸

Seen from this angle, we can provide an even more radical agentic-oriented reading of the ‘organic link’ between processes of accumulation in production and those of dispossession. In line with the ‘anti-structuralist’ Marxist tradition (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Negri, 1976; Thompson, 1963; Tronti, 1966), we see the alternation between phases of accumulation in production and accumulation by dispossession as prompted by social struggles. More over, social struggles, especially those taking place in the spheres of capital production and circulation, undermine the social conditions of capital profitability, which are the basis of the reproduction and further expansion of the accumulation process.

When the massive emergence and proliferation of social and political movements brings a particular model of accumulation (in production) to a definitive crisis point, capital is forced to transform itself by searching for new investment opportunities and renewing its structures of exploitation (accumulation by dispossession) to restart its cycle of accumulation. This agentic-oriented interpretation of the relation between moments of capitalist crisis and those of capitalist transformation/transition is precisely the way in which the above Marxist thinkers explain the passage from Fordism to neoliberal capitalism. For Harvey (2005: 19), for instance, the manifestation of neoliberalism was indeed ‘a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’. In his view, ‘the shift in the 1970s from demand-side policies to monetarist supply-side policies was a political decision to undermine the power of labour unions and movements’ (Harvey, 2005: 22). In other words, social movements and their struggles must be seen as one of the main vectors of capitalist change and of the dialectic between the process of accumulation in production and that of dispossession. If this holds, then this approach could be easily integrated with the recent developments in social movement theory.

By unveiling their materialist formation, we are not trying to deny the cultural, emotional and political dimensions of social movements as well as their differences. We acknowledge, for instance, that feminist movements have also fought for the recognition of their politically autonomous identities. In a similar way, the anti-colonial movements have also put forward important cultural claims, such as the defence of their languages and traditions, in their struggle for political and economic independence. Actually, if we observe these movements from this cultural and identity-based analytical angle, they appear anything but related to capitalism. Similarly, we do not deny the fundamental role of emotions as motivational forces activating processes of mobilization and demobilization. This is the reason why, despite challenging existing social movement approaches, we do not want to dismiss them but rather to expand their vision. Our aim here is to launch a debate on how to bring investigation of the socio-economic structures of capitalism into social movement research.

In line with the aim of this introductory essay, all four articles in the special issue include a critique of the basic assumptions and/or methodology of established social movement studies and move towards the recovery of some elements of Marxist theory for the reading of contemporary social reality and movements. Despite acknowledging the relevance of movement studies for the advancement of the scientific knowledge of collective action and contentious politics, della Porta, Mezzadra and Gago, and Negri reflect on the limits of this strand of sociological research. According to Donatella della Porta, these limits became particularly visible after the eruption of the global economic crisis, when the ‘old toolkit’ of concepts and theories became insufficient to explain the anti-austerity social mobilizations.

Aware of this explanatory deficit, della Porta calls for a research agenda that integrates social movement theory with (critical) political economics to bring renewed attention to capitalism and its transformations. In her view, the mobilizations arising from the recent economic crisis can only be understood by taking into account the long-term, middle-term and short-term transformations of capitalism. Moreover, bringing capitalism back into the analysis of social movements implies for della Porta ‘a new concern for the class bases of protest. The debate on the forms of capitalism is in fact reflected in terms of expectations for a class mobilization of the exploited, which might take on different characteristics in different times and space’. In this sense, she concludes, the current studies of European social movements must engage more with critical and Marxist approaches and be part of a dialogue about the specificities and connections between the current crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the processes of social movement formation in different parts of the world.

Focusing scholarly attention on the social movements emerging in extra-European and North American contexts, as well as their class composition, is one of the main objectives of Sandro Mezzadra and Veronica Gago’s article in this issue. Echoing della Porta’s argument, these authors challenge the conceptual language and taxonomy elaborated by mainstream social movement studies and call for a more complex, critical and class-based notion of ‘social movement’, one that is able to grasp the dynamics of mobilization in Latin America. Distancing themselves from post-materialist interpretations of the European social movements, Mezzadra and Gago show that the popular mobilizations occurring in this world region between the end of the 1980s and the early 2000s represented a ‘plebeian revolt’. This latter included a complex of experiences, languages, and subjectivities (particularly indigenous people, urban poor, the unemployed and women) that were systematically excluded from the field of politics but whose radical politicization was set in motion by the neoliberal processes of privatization and deregulation implemented in those years. In line with our materialist interpretation of social movements, Mezzadra and Gago regard the relational dynamics between popular mobilizations and governments in South America as determined by the reorganization of contemporary capitalism around the centrality of finance and its ‘extractive’ and predatory character. Although the political productivity of the cycle of ‘progressive governments’ which arose from that complex of experiences now appears to be blocked, Mezzadra and Gago foresee that future struggles in Latin America will be associated again with the elements of ‘exceedance’ emerging from the ‘plebeian subjectivities’ that have characterized the contentious politics of this region over the last 30 years.

The need to critically reconsider the notion of social movements, put forward by Mezzadra and Gago, is shared by Antonio Negri, who calls for a historically situated definition of social movement. Criticizing movement studies for having assumed social movements to be a static object of their analysis, Negri recalls the political and intellectual experience of Italian Workerism in the 1960s as a fertile application of the method that conceptualizes social movements in a dynamic and historical way, but also embraces the principle of ‘unrepeatability’ of social movements. For this reason, movements can be defined only in situ, from the point of view of the power relations in which they are located and from which they take shape within a specific historical moment. In line with our argument, Negri theorizes about mutual relations between the concept of social movement and those of class and class struggle, and on the deep intersection that could emerge in particular through a dynamic use of the Marxian concept of living labour. This notion is understood as a possible bridge between a class interpretation of society and the study of social movements, moving toward a new perspective that substitutes the analysis of multiple forms of living immaterial labour for the old theory of post-materialist movements. In this sense, the author suggests an original method of (re)introducing the concepts of class and class struggle into the study of contemporary movements. Negri proposes understanding the idea of social movements as attempts to activate ‘liberation processes’ which nowadays can only be thought of within the conditions of financial capitalism, with cognitive workers as potential subjects for movement.

The problem of the relation between new forms of labour exploitation and parallel class transformation under neoliberalism is addressed from a feminist perspective in Brunella Casalini’s article. Following the feminist reflections on the ‘housewifization’ of work developed by the ‘Bielefeld school’ in the 1980s, she highlights how the neoliberal mode of capitalist accumulation always creates new labour precarity and unemployment, which particularly affect women, ethnic minorities and young people. In this picture, wage labourers and capitalists are no longer the only actors to be considered, but women and other non-traditional actors in the capital–labour conflict are understood as playing important roles in current struggles. More notably, in making sense of the recent women’s mobilizations of ‘Ni una menos’, Casalini adopts Harvey’s notion of dispossession by agreeing with Nancy Fraser’s view of the fact that such accumulation should not be considered as gender-neutral, but it is inherently associated with the history of capitalism and its inclination to exploit women’s non-paid labour as its inner source of valorisation. Her contribution expands and applies our arguments on the dynamics of capitalist dispossession as factors influencing processes of social movement formation in the sphere of social reproduction. In this sense, Casalini makes an explicit call for bringing ‘capitalism back into feminist theory’, that is, for a renovated materialist feminism based on the general epistemic angle of women’s labour, capable of overcoming the traditional shortcomings of Marxist theory in grasping the specific role of women’s work in contemporary capitalism.

By and large, with this introductory essay we have introduced and adopted the concept of capital accumulation in social movement theory. This helpful concept should be employed by social movement scholars who aim to look at, and explain how the macro-structural transformations of capitalist society affect the movement formation processes, and vice versa. This is the research direction that should be explored, at least for so long as we live in a capitalist society, wherein the accumulation process constitutes a macro-historical law of motion.