The article offers a study of housing movements in Budapest and Bucharest, with the main focus on the developments since the financial crisis of 2008, stressing the role that both structural and contingent factors play in shaping the dynamics of this ''field of contention.'' It is argued that a structural view is enlightening for understanding the factors that form the interactive field between activists, such as differences in social positionality as well as ideological conflicts. Moreover, conceiving of a structurally produced field of contention can help explain the differences in housing contention in the two cities. The analysis situates housing movements and their allied, parallel, or opposing actors within the long-term processes of urbanization and global dynamics of commodification, including housing financialization. It demonstrates that to understand how structural and political factors interact in a complex field of contention, attention to processes beyond short-term local movements is necessary.
The article follows changes in the paradigms and institutional context of Hungarian sociology of social structure, as formed by Hungary’s double dependence on Soviet and Western cores throughout the second part of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that as a result of those changes, the concept of class has been absent from the sociology of social structure from the early 1970s on. Thinking towards a possible reconstruction of twentieth-century Hungarian social formation in a class-sensitive perspective embedded in the dynamics of the capitalist world system, we point at a typical effect of global hierarchies on the description of local social structure: the tendency to identify a “double structure” in local society. This gesture places various characteristics of local society on two different ontological levels—for example, Western versus Eastern, future versus past. We argue that in order to conceive of local social formation as part of an integrated global history, this internalized effect of global hierarchies needs to be transcended.
1The paper claims that through its genealogy, Social Movement Studies (SMS) as a discipline incorporated a time-space bias on postwar Western affluent societies which defined the way it conceived of movements and their socio-institutional contexts. Two interrelated effects of that bias were the assumption that material claims belong to the past, and a focus on short-term contextual factors in movement dynamics. As a new wave of movements after 2008 raise material claims in Western contexts again, earlier frameworks of SMS are being transformed so as to capture the relationship of movements to long-term structural processes. However, a newly forming consensus that links new movements to the "crisis of democratic capitalism" seems to maintain the bias on Western experience. East Central European (ECE) countries, where austerity and democratization came hand in hand after 1990, hardly fit that picture. The paper asks whether new transformations within SMS, and an increased attention toward ECE movements due to their new proliferation provides a possibility for comparative perspectives beyond the time-space bias. It identifies a tendency in SMS of post-socialism to translate the timespace bias of SMS frameworks into a normative framework of development toward Western models (or lack thereof), which worked to obscure the long-term history of movements in ECE, as well as forms of popular politics and state-society relations different from Western models. The paper proposes a world-systems approach to the task of comparative understanding of movements in different contexts, and illustrates its possible gains through the conceptualization of new middle class movements in ECE.
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