Towards a Critical Theory of Social Movements: An Introduction

Why have social movement studies mostly ignored the concept of capitalism as an important factor explaining the rise, the decline, and even the absence of social mobilizations? Our thesis is that the silence of social movement research on capitalism is anything but strange. We contend that social movement studies have arisen and come out from the rejection of Marxist and capitalist explanations of societal transformations, which were relatively popular and relevant in the 1960s and 1970s. The institutionalization of the field of social movement research has been founded on a sort of “epistemological bias” vis-à-vis capitalist (and Marxist) analysis. The time seems ripe to broaden the scope of the analysis of movement studies to the macro-structural perspectives of (critical) political economy. The scarce scholarly attention devoted to the connection between the economic structures of society and the political conditions affecting the emergence of mobilizations has caused the diminished capacity of mainstream social movement research to fully understand the recent wave of protests. For us, the reception of some aspects of political economy may be helpful to grasp the variety and timing of the recent wave of protests, arisen in distinct regions of the world with different temporalities in opposition to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. How can we interpret and translate these important intuitions for the study of capitalism into social movement research? The main lesson that we can derive from them is that it is not possible to come out with an explanation of the rise, development, and decline of social movements without taking seriously into consideration the dynamics of transformation implied in the never-ending process of capital accumulation.