Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back Into Protest Analysis

Donatella della Porta

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745688626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent years have seen an enormous increase in protests across the world in which citizens have challenged what they see as a deterioration of democratic institutions and the very civil, political and social rights that form the basis of democratic life. Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then forcefully in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Portugal, or more recently in Peru, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Ukraine, people have taken to the streets against what they perceive as a rampant and dangerous corruption of democracy, with a distinct focus on inequality and suffering. This timely new book addresses the anti-austerity social movements of which these protests form part, mobilizing in the context of a crisis of neoliberalism. Donatella della Porta shows that, in order to understand their main facets in terms of social basis, strategy, and identity and organizational structures, we should look at the specific characteristics of the socioeconomic, cultural and political context in which they developed. The result is an important and insightful contribution to understanding a key issue of our times, which will be of interest to students and scholars of political and economic sociology, political science and social movement studies, as well as political activists.

1
The Re-emergence of a Class Cleavage? Social Movements in Times of Austerity

On 25 January 2011, four meeting points for protesters are set in four areas of Cairo, including working-class neighbourhoods. Before moving towards the city centres, the marchers travel through narrow residential streets, gathering participants on their way. Marches thus create physical occasions to join, then carry participants to their destination. As a protester puts it, ‘You're taken to Tahrir by the demonstration itself as the head of the march guides it there’ (El Chazli 2012). Spontaneous demonstrations follow in the next two days, including confrontations with police. On 28 January, a Friday of Rage is called for, with various demonstrations starting from mosques and churches. While the police assail the protesters with substantial use of teargas, the protesters attack police headquarters as well as the headquarters of the regime party. After that, the camps set up by protesters in Tahrir Square attract more and more people.

On 15 May 2011, indignant citizens (whom the media called Indignados) start a permanent occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid, building a tent city for hundreds of protesters, but also other infrastructures for thousands of visitors. The mobilization quickly spreads to hundreds of Spanish cities all around the country. In fact, ‘the encampments rapidly evolve into “cities within cities” ’, governed through popular assemblies and committees. The committees are created around practical needs such as cooking, cleaning, communicating and carrying out actions. Decisions are made both by majority rule and consensus. The structure is horizontal, with rotating spokespersons in lieu of leaders. Tens of thousands of citizens are thus experimenting with participatory, direct and inclusive forms of democracy at odds with the dominant logic of political representation. Displaying a thorough mixture of utopianism and pragmatism, the new movement draws up a list of concrete demands, including the removal of corrupt politicians from electoral lists, while pursuing revolutionary goals such as giving ‘All power to the People’ (Postill 2012). A space is named after Tahir Square.

In the spring and summer of 2011, on the Spanish example, mobilization against austerity grows in Greece. Beginning on 25 May, the Syntagma Square in Athens becomes a central point for protest: for three days in a row, tens of thousands of people protest in front of the Parliament, following a call circulated on Facebook. The people's assembly asserts that ‘any corrupt politician should either be sent home or to jail’, and ‘their democracy guarantees neither justice nor equality’. On 28 May, the first tents are set up on the Square, while the movement quickly spreads throughout the country. Highly choreographed protests are organized every day at 6pm, but there are also daily assemblies: those who want to speak are given a number, then there is a lottery, and those in possession of the drawn numbers are allowed to speak. The protest peaks with two general strikes on 28 and 29 June, with a convergence of the March in front of the Parliament, where new austerity measures are discussed; in the police charges that follow, 800 protesters are injured (Sergi and Vogiatzoglou 2013).

On 17 September 2011, about a thousand protesters march on Wall Street in New York City, settling in a camp in Zuccotti Park. Also there, ‘from these scattered nodes in a small emergent network, a thunderous protest network grew in a matter of weeks, aided by webs of communication technologies deployed by activists and supporters who seized the political opportunities surrounding a severe economic crisis. Soon the city encampments had spread around the United States’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 180). The Occupy Movement uses various platforms to promote the protest: from city or group websites (at least 251), to techno-development sites (about fifty open source and developers' sites), Twitter (almost 900 accounts for a total of more than 11 million followers), Facebook (with almost 500 pages), Livestream (with 244 feeds), meetups (in 2,649 cities), Tumblr (30 accounts), as well as hubs intersecting platforms (Bennett and Segerberg 2013, 182).

On 15 October 2011, a global day of action called for by the Spanish indignados, a hundred thousand protesters converge on Rome for a national march. One of the largest, the Roman event was, however, one of the most problematic, as it was disrupted by violent protests and the lack of will or capacity by the police to protect the peaceful demonstrators. The memories are of the brutal policing of the protest against the G8 summits in Genoa in 2001. An important role in anti-austerity protests had been taken in the previous three years by the student movement. In 2011, however, no broad movement had emerged in Italy, in direct imitation of the 15M in Spain: the self-proclaimed ‘Italian indignados’ camping in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome remain few in number. The organization of the Italian mobilization of 15 October became a contentious issue among Italian social movements, with different political groups trying to gain symbolic strength and visibility as the organizers of the protest.

This book focuses on these major episodes of protests, which will be analysed as an illustration of opposition to austerity measures in the global North, but also of a crisis of political responsibility of the so-called advanced democracies. In recent years, several movements, including those mentioned above, have in fact protested against what they saw as a deterioration of democratic institutions. Lo llaman democracia y no lo es – ‘They call it democracy, but it is not’ – one could read on the poster carried by a member of the Spanish indignados, one of the social movements that have recently denounced the corruption of institutional politics, calling for ‘Democracia Real Ya’. Beginning with Iceland in 2008, and then forcefully in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece and Portugal, outrage was raised by the corruption of the political class, with protesters condemning bribes in a concrete sense, as well as the privileges granted to lobbies and the collusion of interests between public institutions and economic (often financial) powers. It was to this corruption – that is, the corruption of democracy – that much of the responsibility for the economic crisis, and the inability to manage it, was attributed. In the years to follow, most recently in Venezuela, Brazil, Russia, Bulgaria and Turkey, citizens took to the streets against what they perceived as a rampant and dangerous degeneration of the state governments, defined as a source of inequality and people's suffering.

These protests have been seen as part of anti-austerity movements, mobilizing in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism. In analysing them, I build on the assumption that, in order to understand their main characteristics in terms of social basis, identity and organizational structures and strategies, we should look at the specific characteristics of the socioeconomic, cultural and political context in which these protests developed. While this does not mean to deny that specific national contexts do play a very relevant role in influencing the timing and forms of the protest, I am interested in what follows to single out (some) similarities and to link them to some shifts in neoliberal capitalism and its effects on the society. From the theoretical point of view, the main challenge is to locate protests inside the linkages between the market and the state, capitalism and democracy.

In this introduction, I will first discuss the ‘strange disappearance’ of debates on capitalism from social movement studies, then bridge social movement studies with cleavage theory. I will close the chapter by presenting the research on which the volume is based, as well as its structure.

Bringing capitalism back into protest analysis?

Social movement studies have recently been criticized for having paid too little attention to long-term structural transformations. Strangely, some valuable exceptions notwithstanding, concerns for the social bases of protest even declined, as socioeconomic claims raised through protest remained stable or even increased. Forcefully, Gabriel Hetland and Jeff Goodwin (2013) have called attention to the strange disappearance of capitalism from social movement studies, pointing at how little note (especially US) scholars have taken of the sources of grievances and, in more general, of the influence of socioeconomic structural development over social movements.

Similarly, a review of studies in political sociology stressed how the narrowing of the focus on the process of collective mobilization has, since the 1980s, diverted attention from the relations between social structures and political participation, as well as collective identities (Walder 2009). In the same direction, Sidney Tarrow pointed at the need ‘to connect the long-term rhythms of social change from the classical tradition to the shorter-term dynamics of contentious politics’ (Tarrow 2012, 7). These claims did not remain isolated. In fact, recent collections have looked at Marxist approaches to social movements (Barker et al. 2013), or called for bringing capitalism, classes or political economy back into the analysis of recent mobilizations against austerity (Tejerina et al. 2013). Some first research on the 2011 protests points in fact at the grievances neoliberalism and its crisis spread in the Arab countries as well as in Southern Europe (della Porta 2014a). These studies have thus looked at cuts in public spending, as well as 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 social precariat, young, unemployed, or only part-time employed, with no protection, and often well educated – has been singled out as a main actor. Defined as a class-on-the-making, the precariat has been conceptualized by Guy Standing as being composed of people ‘who have minimal trust relations with capitalism or the state, making it quite different from the salariat. And it has none of the social contract relationship of the proletariat, whereby labour securities were provided in exchange for subordination and contingent loyalty, the unwritten deal underpinning welfare state’ (Standing 2011, 9). Precariat is characterized, that is, by a sum of insecurity on the labour market, on the job (as regulations on hiring and dismissals give little protection to workers), on the work (with weak provisions for accident and illness), on income (with very low pay), all these conditions having effects in terms of accumulation of anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation (Standing 2011, 10 ff.). As he noted, precariat ‘is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection…it is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations of those who found themselves as belonging to the industrial proletariat or the salariat had come to expect as their due’ (Standing 2011, 24).

In order to analyse recent protests, it is indeed all the more relevant to bring attention to capitalist dynamics back into social movement research. Social movement studies emerged in fact from a critique of economist attempts to derive mobilization from structures: grievances or interests, they claimed, are always present but only occasionally mobilized. Moreover, rather than studying socioeconomic structure, attention focused on political opportunities, both the contingent availability of potential allies (their dispositions and strength) and more stable channels of access of political institutions (mainly functional and territorial divisions of power) (see della Porta and Diani 2006, ch. 7, for a review). The main assumption has been that the presence of mobilizable resources as well as the opening of political opportunities explains collective mobilization and its forms, as rational activists tend to invest in collective action when their effort seems worthwhile.

Broadly tested in cross-national (e.g. Kriesi et al. 1995; della Porta 1995) and cross-time (e.g. Tarrow 1989) perspectives, the main hypotheses of the political opportunity approach seems to hold: protest is, by and large, more frequent and less radical when stable and/or contingent channels of access to institutions by outsiders are open. In fact, even in the face of economic crises and structural weakness of the lower classes, scholars have cited open political opportunities to explain the emergence of protest and even its success (Tarrow 2011).

From several points of view, the recent anti-austerity mobilizations met some of the expectations of social movement scholars, but challenged others. As we will see, in line with expectations derived from the political opportunity approach, those protests react not only to economic crisis (with high unemployment and high numbers of precarious workers) but also to a political situation in which institutions are (and are perceived to be) particularly closed towards citizens' demands, at the same time unwilling and incapable of addressing them in an inclusive way.

Some of the hypotheses developed within social movement studies have however been criticized as too structuralist, and therefore unable to explain agency, a task which needs instead to move from a deterministic into a more processual approach. A first observation is that it is not political opportunities as exogenous structure, but rather the attribution of opportunities by activists that affects the propensity to mobilize (McAdam et al. 2001). In addition, not only opportunities but also threats can push towards mobili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: The Re-emergence of a Class Cleavage? Social Movements in Times of Austerity
• 2: Social Structure: Old Working Class, New Precariat, or Yet Something Different?
• 3: Identification Processes: Class and Culture
• 4: Lo Llaman Democracia Y No Lo Es: A Crisis of Political Responsibility
• 5: Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport: Changing Conceptions of Democracy in Social Movements
• 6: Bringing Capitalism Back into Protest Analysis? Some Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement