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

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.

Problematizing the Diversity Debit Hypothesis

“…Liberal democracies increasingly rely on governance models that keep elites immune from popular claims, collective mobilization, and governance continues to shift to outside the setting of democratic competition. Special sector authorities that claim to be politically neutral play a crucial role in governance processes through the "technicization of political decisions" (Caruso & Cini, 2020). What sets apart recent history from previous eras is a marked lack of resistance to an ever-changing configuration of capitalistic order.…”

“…In fact, twentieth century history has shown us that when markets do not have room to exist or have run the course of their exploitative cycle, then they must be recreated anew. This is why scholars have equated colonialism and imperialism with the expansion of capitalist markets (Pradella, 2017;Caruso & Cini, 2020). This does not merely mean that capitalism or unequal outcomes are completely identical across space and time.…”

Dissent within the global political economy: four frustrations, and some alternatives

“…Existing accounts, especially within social movement studies, have tended to distance themselves from the study of capitalism as a central condition that shapes the way in which social movements develop. Yet, as Caruso and Cini (2020) highlight, 'it is no longer possible to look at these processes [of social movement development] without anchoring them on the structural transformations shaping capitalism', and this itself requires 'studying the internal mechanisms of motion of capitalism itself ' (2020: 1007-08). Conversely, studies of the global political economy have tended to spotlight the constraints generated by the global political economy, but in a way which risks obscuring the capacity for, and actuality of, instances of agency, contingency, dissent and socio-economic alternatives.…”

Contesting neoliberalism: Mapping the terrain of social conflict

“…Engelhardt and Moore (2017) also conceptualised social movements as collective action which is internally related to a historically and spatially specific capitalist context, and which includes class relations, the state, different (hegemonic and counter-hegemonic) ideas and broader processes of social reproduction. Caruso and Cini (2020) develop a similar approach, showing how the processes of social movement formation 'are connected to the four processes of the capitalist cycle (namely, production, distribution, realization, and consumption) ' (p. 5).…”