of the middle class. While the welfare state under Fordism had brought about a decommodification of some goods, subtracted to free market and defined as public services, neoliberalism brought about the privatization and (re)commodification of once‐public goods together with a deregulation of the labor market that weakened workers’ power. The evolution of the last 30 years or so has deeply transformed the social structures. Fordism is said to have created a two‐thirds society, with new social movements emerging from the pacification of class conflict, and even the embourgeoisement of the working class, with the crisis of the 1970s producing a short but radical wave of protest by the excluded one third. The mobilizations of 2011 seem instead to reflect the pauperization of the lower classes as well as the proletarianization of the middle classes, with the growth of the excluded in some countries to about two thirds of the population (della Porta 2015a). As protest spread worldwide, its target was especially social inequality that neoliberalism had produced.
Different from the previous wave of protests against neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium, especially the Global Justice Movement, the anti‐austerity protests developed mainly at domestic level, following the different timing, intensity and dynamics of the financial crisis. In fact, anti‐austerity protests had very different strength and forms in the different countries with varying capacity to mobilize the heterogeneous social groups that had been hit from neoliberalism and its crisis. In particular, while protest was initially limited in the countries in which the financial crisis – and consequent Great Recession – had hit relatively less, it later spread also to countries that had looked more protected from the worst consequences of the Great Recession. Also in the latter countries, discontent emerged in different forms, in some cases through electoral earthquakes, with the breakdown of center‐left and center‐right parties and the growth of right‐wing populism, in others taking the streets and even ending up in the development of strong electoral challenges on the Left. The constellation of protests varied in particular, between more traditional mobilization through trade unions and new forms of Occupy‐type protests (della Porta 2017a). These protests have been seen as part of anti‐austerity movements, mobilizing in a context of the crisis of neoliberalism. Protestors react not only to economic crisis (with high unemployment and precarious work) but also to a political situation in which institutions are (and are perceived to be) particularly closed toward citizens’ demands, at the same time unwilling and incapable of addressing them in an inclusive way.
As it is often the case, this new wave of protest has revitalized social movement studies, giving new relevance to contentious politics, but also brought about some challenges for interpreting protests that did not neatly fit within existing theoretical models. In particular, it focused attention on the impact of social transformation on social movements. Strangely, in social movement studies concerns for the social bases of protest had declined, as socioeconomic claims raised through protest remained stable or even increased, with scholars talking of a strange disappearance of capitalism from the analysis (Hetland and Goodwin 2013). Similarly, in political sociology the focus on the process of mobilization has, since the 1980s, diverted attention from the relations between social structures and political participation, as well as collective identities (Walder 2009). Recently, some scholars have looked at Marxist approaches to social movements (Barker, Cox, Krinsky, and Nilsen 2013), or called to bring political economy back into the analysis of recent mobilizations against austerity (Tejerina et al. 2013). Research on the 2011 protests pointed at the grievances neoliberalism and its crisis had spread in the Arab countries as well as in Southern Europe (della Porta 2014), given cuts in public spending, deterioration of public services and related growth in inequality and poverty as sources for grievances, and therefore protests. In all of these mobilizations, a new class – the precariat: young, unemployed or only part‐time employed, with no protection, and often well educated – has been defined as a main actor within broader coalitions. In order to analyze recent protests, it is indeed all the more relevant to bring attention to capitalist dynamics back into social movement research.
The short account of the anti‐austerity protests stresses some of the main dimensions that have structured the debate on the interaction between societal characteristics and social movements. First of all, it indicates that movements usually refer to a base that, in various ways, is defined by some social features. Although in American social movement research, criticism of breakdown theory (see Chapter 1) has for long time (and with few exceptions, among which Piven and Cloward 1992) diverted attention from structural grievances (Buechler 2004), there is no denying that the socioeconomic structure of a society influences the type of conflicts that develop in it. Since the 1970s, indeed, European social movement scholars especially have focused on new conflicts in Western democracy: the ecological movement or the women’s movement were the typical objects of this stream of research. Social movements have been considered indeed as the bearers of postmaterialistic values, while the class cleavage on which the labor movements had mobilized seemed to be pacified. Anti‐austerity protests bring attention back to the relationship between changes in the social structure and collective action.
Social change may affect the characteristics of social conflict and collective action in different ways. It may facilitate the emergence of social groups with a specific structural location and potential specific interests, and/or reduce the importance of existing ones, as the shift from agriculture to industry and then to the service sector suggests. As the anti‐austerity protests indicate, however, structural tensions do not directly translate into mobilization: misery can deter protest, more than facilitating it. Class conflict is considered as a central factor in determining revolutionary situations and outcomes. Together with an acute suffering, with a dramatic deterioration in living standards, with disruptions of people’s daily routines, is seen as encouraging defiance of authority. In fact,
Economic crises, wars, and even natural disasters often provoke such dislocations. In these scenarios, ordinary people suffer the impact of the loss of work or income and of being sent into bloody and often unpopular wars. Significantly, the breakdown or even collapse of institutions upon which daily survival depends—work, commerce, transportation, and other services such as health and education—has the potential to thrust normally quiescent people into militant protest. In sum, one precondition for dual power consists of deep dislocations that break down routinized systems of social stability and control.
(Goodwin and Rojas 2015, p. 797)
Societal conditions also have important influences on the distribution of resources that are conducive to participation in collective action, such as education, and/or facilitate the articulation of interests. Globalization and deindustrialization have been seen as triggering a decline of the working class, at least in the global North (e.g. Tilly 1994; Zolberg 1995).
Keeping in mind these kinds of effects, we shall focus on three types of transformation that have interested, in different historical moments, not only Western societies since the Second World War: in the economy, in the role of the state, and in the cultural sphere. Without attempting to cover the innumerable processes which make up what is usually regarded as the transition to postindustrial (or postmodern, disorganized, post‐Fordist, and so on) society, we shall limit ourselves to mention those processes of change that have been explicitly cited in the social movement literature as affecting social movements. In the next section we shall indeed focus on changes in the social structure and their reflection in political cleavages (2.1); then on the social impacts of changes in the political sphere (2.2), and on the effects of cultural changes on social movements (2.3). We shall conclude by discussing the hypothesis of social movements as actors of new class conflicts (2.4).
2.1 SOCIAL STRUCTURE, POLITICAL CLEAVAGES, AND COLLECTIVE ACTION
Linking capitalist transformations to citizens’ agency is a main theoretical challenge for social movement studies. In the social sciences, the effects of socioeconomic characteristics upon social and political conflicts have often been addressed by looking at political cleavages; that is, at the main politicized conflict lines (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Political cleavages have traditionally been associated with a model of collective action in which actors: (1)