Towards a Critical Theory of Social Movements: An Introduction

Rethinking the Link Between Structure and Collective Action. Capitalism, Politics, and the Theory of Social Movements

“…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).…”

“…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.…”

Disrupting the neoliberal university in South Africa: The #FeesMustFall movement in 2015

“…Although the above model is valid, it needs to be tailored to meet the particularities of the 2015 South African context. Mobilizations that occur in relatively new democratic regimes cannot be explained and assessed with the theories elaborated for mobilizations that occur in the established democracies of the global North (Cini et al, 2017; Kapstein and Converse, 2008). The variety of effects produced by the global wave of mobilizations that has arisen since 2011 seems to suggest that a reversal of the trend is needed (della Porta, 2015).…”

Marx @ 200: Debating Capitalism & Perspectives for the Future of Radical Theory (combined PDF of all articles)

“…Instead, voluntarism, spontaneity, and grassroots consensus-based decision-making and prefigurative politics have been embraced. Important for our purposes here is that while organisers and activist of the dispossessed ordinarily do not rely on a deep critique of capitalism as it pertains to their struggles, we argue that the often-claimed post-material character of these struggles is misleading (see also Cini et al 2017). Rather than understanding them as uncon- cerned with capitalism, they are "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" (Cini et al 2017, 441).…”