Social movements have been struggling against repressive states advancing the interests of dominant classes for many centuries. Over time, millions of people have organized and become empowered to bring about social change and transformations in numerous societies across the globe. This opening introductory chapter provides an analysis of the conditions that lead to the emergence and development of social movements struggling to bring about transformation of society. It examines the origins, nature, dynamics, and mobilization of social movements as they struggle to transform the prevailing dominant social, economic, and political order. After a brief historical background and an examination of objective and subjective conditions leading to the development of social movements, the chapter explores the dynamics of movement organization and mobilization with reference to concrete cases of social movements that have succeeded in rising up and transforming societies across the globe in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.1
Recent mobilization, protests, and political responses by various social movements around the world are leading to protracted struggles that threaten entrenched dominant class interests that have held on to power for decades. The significance of the success of the Arab Spring of 2011 is more for its inspirational value to social movements across the globe than simply replacing authoritarian regimes to secure civilian multi-party rule. It is for this reason that the rebellions across North Africa and the Middle East have had a ripple effect in triggering similar uprisings in other countries when millions across the globe have shed their fears and found their way to express their will through collective political action.
Historical Background
Many diverse social movements have emerged and developed in different societies throughout history. Some of these movements have developed spontaneously and without any prior preparation in terms of organization, strategy, and tactics, such as slave rebellions in Ancient Rome and peasant revolts in medieval Germany. Uprisings have occurred in oppressive systems such as old despotic empires, just as they have under slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, where states ruled by despots, slave masters, landlords, and capitalists have often repressed attempts to alter the existing order to prevent the people from coming to power. But they have not always succeeded in keeping the people down. There have been instances when the oppressed have risen and put up a determined fight and won, through a series of rebellions and revolutions that have brought about social transformations across the globe.2
In the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere, a variety of social movements have come to challenge existing states and have transformed them to serve the interests of the victorious classes that have succeeded in taking state power. Among these we find the great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, when the nascent national bourgeoisies of Europe rose up in arms to smash the old (feudal) system to rule society under the banner of āfreedomā across the continent for āfree trade,ā investment, and economic activity that later facilitated the accumulation of private capital through the exploitation of wage-labor. This victory assured the domination of capital that came to assume state power to advance its own interests against that of the landlords. Thus, the rule of the capitalists over the state was established in Europe, and later in North America, where slavery and the rule of the slave-owners were replaced by that of capitalists after the victory of the latter in the Civil War that brought them to power in the United States in the late nineteenth century.3
The domination of society by the new ruling classes in Europe and North America, which facilitated the development of capitalism in these regions of the world, thus led to the development of a labor movement through the formation of trade unions that came to organize workers to wage a determined struggle against the new oppressive system.4
Many of the benefits that organized labor has secured for itself over the past century have been the result of such struggles. While the balance of class forces under capitalism in Europe and the United States came close to (but did not quite result in) workers taking state power to transform society during the Great Depression in the early twentieth century, social movements in other parts of the world did succeed to effect change that led to the construction of new societies across the globe.5
Some of these movements succeeded in taking state power despite the unrelenting onslaught by the dominant forces to crush them, while others failed, facing the counterrevolutionary machinations of foreign and domestic subversion. Ironically, a few decades later, a number of these failed movements were able to regroup and retake state power and survive attempts to derail their efforts to rebuild their societies (as in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, and El Salvador). Others, such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and several other Latin American countries, as well as Brazil, led by grassroots peopleās movements, have taken a critical path and turned to the left, adopting policies that are against neoliberalism and in favor of the interests of the great majority of the people in these countries. We will have more to say about some of these movements later in this chapter, but first we must examine the factors contributing to the formation and success of social movements in transforming contemporary capitalist society.
Factors Leading to the Emergence of Social Movements
Social movements have emerged throughout history for a variety of reasons, including racial and gender oppression, religious persecution, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, war, and other societal conditions that have affected populations in detrimental ways. But the central reasons that large number of masses have historically come together to express their outrage against the dominant classes and powers have been exploitation and oppression. These include the exploitation and oppression of slaves under the slave system, of serfs and the peasantry under the feudal system, and of wage-labor under capitalism.
The slave rebellions in Africa, the Caribbean, and the US South, the peasant uprisings in Medieval Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, and proletarian uprisings and revolutions across Europe and the less developed periphery of the global capitalist system are a testament to the resilience of oppressed and exploited people that have rebelled to overthrow established regimes and systems of oppression that live off the exploitation of the masses across the globe.
Whereas social movements have arisen in response to a multitude of oppressive conditions in society, none have been as potent and widespread as the exploitation and oppression of labor in modern times. Cutting across racial and gender lines, the toxic effects of laborās predicament under capitalist production have affected billions of working people across the globe who live under oppressive conditions. The brutality of the global capitalist system has unfolded by perpetrating the exploitation of labor in its industrial base at home and in various production sites that it has developed in distant lands abroad, where workers have taken the lead to become a powerful force to confront capital and its repressive force, the capitalist state. Thus, it is in response to such conditions that working people have been subjected to that give rise to the formation of social movements.
The conditions leading to the rise of social movements that challenge the established order are both objective and subjective. The objective conditions include the prevailing class structure of society (the prevalence of dominant and oppressed classes), the political structure and the nature of the state, and existing social and economic conditions. The subjective conditions include the level of class consciousness among the oppressed classes; the emergence of leading figures, organizations, and political parties of the oppressed; the response of the government and the dominant classes; and the balance of class forces and mass mobilization. In considering the opposing classes engaged in struggle, it is important to know the nature and composition of the dominant class, including its various fractions, who (i.e., which fraction of the dominant class) the state represents, who the oppressed classes are that want to replace the established order, and what the class alliances are in t...